Exploring Self Portraits:
As one of our first activities on the course we looked into producing self portraits. In class we looked over a range of self portraits taken by artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Nan Goldin. As a group we explored and deconstructed various self portraits in order to decipher what those particular images revealed to us about the artist.
The image above is a self portrait of Robert Mapplethorpe. Mapplethorpe's career was shrouded in controversy as he became world renowned for his sexually explicit photographs depicting the New York Gay male underground in the 1970's through to the 1980's. During this era Homosexuality was not widely accepted in the U.S. A huge contributing reason for this was the countries deep rooted christian beliefs which depict homosexuality as a sin. This self portrait illustrates Mapplethorpe's audacious attitude against not only popular opinion of himself but also his work and the boundaries it broke. He was not afraid to showcase homosexuality in all its forms and perhaps he chose to incorporate the devil horns within this photograph as an acknowledgement of the opinions many held about his work. It would appear through the look on his face that he is more than willing to continue expressing his beliefs, no matter who opposes them.
After looking at self portraits taken by other photographers we were asked to produce two self portraits of our own; one that we had to be in and one that didn't include us but represented us in some way.
I chose to execute my self portrait in this way for a number of reasons. I think it shows the way in which I like to sit in peace and reflect on as well as observe my environment. Furthermore, i chose to place myself under the tree in this composition to try and illustrate humankind's relationship with nature within an ever-growing, fast paced, capitalist society. This fast paced way of life, which i have attempted to portray through the use of blurred human figures on a busy high street, is rapidly contributing to the destruction of our planet.
I have chosen this image as I feel it represents me and my love for music. I feel that music is one of the most transcendent art forms as it has the potential power to instantly conjure up emotion. In the last couple of years I have immersed myself in rave culture. I taught myself how to mix on vinyl turntables, I enjoy working documenting the rave scene in Manchester through my passion in photography. Within the photograph itself I purposely chose to use a shallow depth of field which highlights the needle as it picks up the information off the grooves of the vinyl. This is the most significant part of the image as it is where the music lies.
Destruction of self portraits:
After producing our own self portraits we looked at a charity project by Rankin in which he had taken portraits of well known celebrity's and asked them to deface the portraits by adding or taking away media.
We were asked to perform this task ourselves and these are my end results:
