You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘portrait’ tag.
I started pointing the camera at myself when I was very young. Partly because I was the subject closest at hand, but also because I was exploring identity through image making.
I doubt I would have decided to follow a creative career, had it not been for a course on “sex and sexuality in contemporary art” I took while at uni – and more importantly the support of Rune Gade, who was teaching the course. Until I met Rune, I had kept my self-portraits more or less secret.
In June 2008, when I had just joined artreview.com, critic Laura McLean-Ferris wrote a bit about my work in relation to anonymity in Roundup #10:
“…interestingly, much of the work explores portraiture as a representational trap, and many of her images of women in particular are fragmentary images of body parts, such as legs and stomachs.
The figures here seem caught in a bind, unable to represent themselves through image-making. The viewer, the photographer and the subject are all part of a process of refusal and small resistance.”
I like this in relation to the self portraits, since to some extend the viewer, photographer and the subject are one and the same, and still there is the same process of resistance going on.
I think the self-portrait genre is considered a little embarrassing and improper, there is a certain vulnerability about it, putting yourself out there at the risk of everybody regarding you as a narcissistic exhibitionist. However ourselves and our mortal coil ought to be one of the subjects we know best. I think it is a question of daring to be honest.
The self-portrait above was shortlisted for the BJP International Photography Award, single image category & exhibited at Vision 09.
When I was pregnant I photographed myself and my growing belly every few weeks. The images were uploaded to my Flickr diary. We jokingly called the resulting series The Architecture of Art, making the connection between two different kinds of creation; the construction of a child (Arthur, my son) and the much less wondrous making of an image.
I find the human shape and the changes it goes through very fascinating, after all our minds are bound to it, as is our feelings. If you think about it, that is really very hard to relate to or comprehend. When I photograph I think I’m trying to capture a glimpse of what goes on behind the skin, the combination of feeling and flesh, or somehow translate the bodily experience.
When looking at last years prize winners for the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery in London, I came across this image, by Hendrik Kerstens. I really like how he’s made the plastic bag look like a sculpture. It’s so simple, but a very strong image that kept popping up in my mind since I saw it. The girl in the photographs is Kerstens daughter.
“Hendrik Kerstens was born in 1956 in The Hague, Netherlands. Winner of the 2001 Dutch Panl Award Kerstens is a self-taught photographer who initially turned to a model close at hand, his daughter Paula. Since starting to photograph Paula in 1995 Kersten’s work has been exhibited in over 40 exhibitions across Europe and the United States. In his portraits Paula is always depicted as being austere, serene and illuminated with a characteristic ‘dutch’ light. In September he will open his first solo New York exhibition at the Witzenhausen Gallery. Kersten’s short-listed portrait was conceived in New York when he noticed the excessive amount of plastic bags given away in shops. As a humorous reaction to this environmental problem he photographed the plastic bag in the style of a seventeenth century cap.”
