Tag: self-portrait

Little Liza Jane – Title Unknown (201X)

It seems the person who made this image deactivated her Tumblr–I’m pulling it from @wyyoh‘s reblog of it as part of a photoset.

I may not get this entirely right but I think Little Liza Jane was a frequent Coffee Club submitter.

As you can see from the aforementioned photoset her work while definitely a cut above the typical nude submission kind of lacks variation beyond a certain template.

That’s not to diminish the work at all. She does quite a lot within what I consider to be an aggressively restrictive form. However, the above image really does not to be singled out for it’s stunning display of creativity.

To start, I want to draw attention to the peep hole-esque vignetting. But–for now–let’s just note that it serves to render what would’ve otherwise been an ugly dorm or hostel bathroom, into something that appears as if at least some sort of cursory production design preceded the image.

Use of color has always been a feature in LLJ’s images–even if it isn’t always as readily discernible as it is here. Note: the aquamarine tile, the sea form bath curtain and the drab olive towel; the variation between the tungsten vanity light, the soft-white overhead bulb (seen reflected in the interior of the shower), the wooden door and the orange hand towel.

Together these elements coordinate to render a highly stylized but extremely appealing skin tone–something anyone who strives for a degree of photo-realism working with mixed lighting sources knows is a damn accomplishment.

But this is all superficial compared to the brilliance of the pose, the line of the bra and the way it both accentuates her back and draws attention to the one glint of light you can see between her thighs.

This image is composed in a way so as to underline the point of the implicit nudity while refusing to put it on parade.

But back to the peep hole–the pose and everything else suggest a coy awareness of the viewer. However, the audiences’ gaze is only permitted to see what the subject wants them to see.

Source: wyyoh

Laura Kampman – Untitled (2015)

I’d post this just based on the exquisite tonal range and use of the depth of field–the mid-ground is soft while the background (both actual and reflected are sharp).

But really this deserves to be celebrated as a testament to discipline.

Anyone who’s ever tried to take a Traci Matlock-esque mirror self-portrait without looking through the viewfinder, knows it’s nowhere as easy as it looks.

But here Kampman is using a TLR–so she doesn’t even have the benefit of a  straight forward view as I’m reasonably certain that Rolleis mirror left to right in the waist level finder.

And she’s set things up with very thin margins as far as composition, so this is emblematic of a degree of mastery I’ll admit I lack the patience necessary to cultivate.

Source: laurakampman.com

Agnieszka Sosnowska – Nowell, Massachusetts (1991)

If you follow this blog for the artier stuff, then you are probably already familiar with Lens Culture.

They do some rad stuff: serving as the impetus for posts featuring the work of Anna Grzelewska and Kumi Oguro.

Honestly, I was thoroughly underwhelmed by their presentation of Sosnowska. By focusing solely on her work’s ‘coming to terms’ with her families immigration to Iceland, there’s this sort of O Pioneers! vibe to it that registers as coy, sentimental and over-precious.

While I was in Iceland, the boastfully named Ljósmyndasafn Reykjavíkur, or Reykjavík Museum of Photography, had a show up called Traces of Life featuring a smattering of Sosnowska’s work.

I can’t speak to the quality of curation of the show–it seemed to lack an overarching cohesion and although explicitly preoccupied with self-portraiture, a great deal of the work was abstract in a way that beggars the question: how is this self-portraiture? (Not that most of the work on display offered much guidance on how to address such questions.)

Still, I have to qualify it as a success because I walked away with a respect for Sosnowska, I would have otherwise missed. Part of it was realizing that her work is fundamentally rooted in self-portraiture. Second, nothing available online does her images justice. She makes rich, contrasty, 3D baryta prints that are small, make stubborn demands for intimate observation and seethe with the ambiguous intention of a stumbled upon coiled serpent.

Source: sosphotographs.com

Ao Kim Ngân [aka yatender] – Untitled (2014)

A healthy human body can forgo eating for roughly a month and a half.

Dehydration will kill you in under a week–and this assumes a cool ambient temperature and minimal activity.

Hunger can be deferred; thirst commands an immediate response.

That’s the distinction that occurs to me browsing Ngân‘s work.

Her light fall series is obviously homage to Lina Scheynius’ preoccupation with documenting light. While the above is likely prefigured by Traci Matlock‘s mirror self-portraits.

Both Scheynius and Matlock are endlessly talented photographers. However, in a sense, in the realm of internet famous image makers, wearing such influences on one’s sleeve is potentially problematic.

That’s where Ngân distinguishes herself from thousands of other upstarts: her photos possess an unusual gravity. To get a feel for it, check out the stuff she’s shot of dancers in Ho Chi Minh City; not the way her single, static frames bristle with a sense of flowing, dynamic momentum.

Her personal work features less emphasis on momentum and more on stillness. In that way, it’s in line with Schneyius; however, unlike Schneyius there is a very profound sense that the stillness is in itself requires taxing concentration, is an exercise in willpower.

And this is where we get back to hunger vs. thirst. The work Ngân emulates is–in its sexual politics–interested in the overlap of representation and identity as a means of not only authorship but also as a relationship between the female gaze and the visualization of something not unlike hunger.

The lines between material and flesh in the image above, the delicate touch of the obscuring flowers here and the light on the knees, the position of hands and the texture of the dress and sheets here.

The subverted eroticism in the work is too intensely rendered, too pervasively interpenetrative to fit the framework of hunger. Even thirst seems entirely too willing to wait for fulfillment. This works walks a razor wire line of hope and frustration stretched between expectation and not fulfillment but forever expanding expectations.

Source: Flickr / xya_yax007

Malinda Wasell – Slowly, my soul awakes (2015)

Out of every 24 hourrs, I spend two–give or take–perusing the work of various photographers and image makers.

Every day, I find work I like. Work I love is harder to come by–perhaps a couple times a month. Then–in an especially good year–a half dozen image makers completely beguile me.

Wasell’s self-portraits are rarer beast. It’s not so much that her images resonate with any great profundity. It’s more their one masterful aesthetic flourish–the knack of employing absolutely fucking impossible light to devastating effect.

I’ve experienced a comparable reaction before. Four and a half years ago, in fact, as a result of of first stumbling upon Lina Scheynius’ work.

On the one hand I grant that it’s not exactly fair to connect a nineteen year-old with a handful of promising images to one of the quintessential badass Internet famous photographers. But look at the way both manage to coax cooperation from insane lighting situations. So the comparison may not be fair but it’s damn accurate.

These two images in particular are wonderful. They’d almost certainly benefit from a more thorough engagement with questions regarding the boundaries separating selfies from self-portraiture as well as concerns over representation vs. identity. Yet, independent of more intensive conceptual framing, there’s both a raw potential and precociousness that is all but absent in photographers twice her age.

Lastly, I would be woefully remiss in my duties were I not to mention Wasell’s Tumblr curation. Yeah, super beyond on point.

Source: awaitingthegreatcollapse

FWIW: the self-portrait I submitted to this weeks ‘art’ themed nymphoninjas submission Sunday was accepted.

(Extra special thanks to sporeprint for not being at all bothered when I asked him about helping me edit less than 24 hours before I needed the finished product and managing to remain effortlessly patient with my damned demanding ass during the editing process.)

nymphoninjas:

Wonderlust Photoworks (Editing courtesy of Alveoli Photography) – Desolate Elements II (2014)

There’s a zen proverb that runs somewhere along the lines of comparing yourself to someone else is like sticking your head in a bucket of glue.

I constantly offer this advice to others; but rarely heed it myself.

The last two years have been very difficult for me. Trauma, loss and angst compounded by unemployment and persistent health problems. During this time, creativity—the only thing in my life that has presented consistent refuge—has been limited to thinking the work I’m trying to make doesn’t matter. I get stuck in this self-defeating-Orson-Welles-made-Citizen-Kane-at-26/Arundathi-Roy-wrote-The-God-of-Small-Things-at-28-what-have-I-done-of-any-consequence loop.

I’m always so focused on how precious little time humans have and as a result I focus on trying to make everything count to the fullest. It’s not a bad way to live so long as you give yourself permission to make mistakes. Mistakes are how you learn + grow emotionally, spiritually and artistically. I forget that so often…

The above is a frame from a video I shot several months ago. I don’t like shooting video—I’m an analog snob—but desperate times, desperate measures. The video itself was a disaster and I haven’t looked at it since I shot it. But when I saw that this weeks theme was ‘art’, I searched desperately for something to submit. Re-watching the awful video, this one frame jumped out at me so with the a little help from Alveoli Photography to clean it up I decided to share it as a reminder to myself and others that showing up is just as if not more important than having a devastating aesthetic sensibility.

Sometimes we have to create many things to get one thing we are happy with, and it this case it seems like you captured hundreds or thousands of frames for your video and found one frame you were happy with. I think in the end it was definitely worth it, and I’m glad you put in the time to find the right moment and thanks for sharing it with us. 

JoLee Kirkikis – Untilted (2014)

Browsing Ms. Kirkikis’ work, I associate it instinctively with Erin Jane Nelson’s early work.

Both capture themselves/friends in wistful moments, awkward spaces between presence and absence. Both tend to use image making as a means of documenting performances related to text or sculptural elements. Both have images featuring finger traps.

It feels to me as if both build out off a similar foundation: a sort of belief that the world is too big to feel small. In Nelson’s case, she led with her angst–as if her creative process were an interrogation room scene, with her playing the good cop, the bad cop and the suspect.

Whereas, Kirkikis is more circumspect; evincing a confidence perhaps not yet in her work but certainly in the searching nature of her nascent process.

It’s interesting to me that it appears Nelson has disavowed her early work. That’s a mixed blessing. Yes, most of her work was disturbingly uneven and much of what worked seemed a fortuitous accident. Still, she made a handful of images which indelibly seared themselves onto my mind’s eye. (I find it interesting the degree to which the work she is making now is aggressively confrontational.)

And while Kirkikis’ work would benefit from culling her extensive output to something learner, more focused… unlike Nelson, I think we’ll probably still see the above image recur as she matures along with her work.

Source: smallgiants

This is a self-portrait made by Zoe, a precocious, articulate and self-possessed sixteen year-old who blogs as Posh-Lost.

I admire her spunk.

Admiration aside, I have misgivings about posting this—not the least of which is the image maker being too young to ‘legally’ browse this site. Also, does displaying her work alongside more explicit content unnecessarily sexualize it?

Laurie Penny uses an ingenious coinage to refer to the well-intentioned worry we shower on the behavior of teenage girls: concern-fapping.

It is patently fucking absurd to think young women are not foundationally aware of the degree and extent to which their bodies are sexualized by society.

Further, anyone looking at this picture should know better. This is not some cell phone bathroom mirror selfie; light shines in through a window visible along the left edge of the frame, a la the Dutch Baroque. Further the staging speaks to an interest not in seeing while being seen but something closer to a preoccupation with the perception of self by another.

The flimsy, semi-sheer camisole is sexy; but whether sexy translates to something libidinous or reciprocally desiring remains pointedly unresolved.

Granted, it is not free of flaws. But it is thoughtful and I find it thoroughly and unironically interesting. But I can’t lie—there is something else to it that gets under my skin.

Long story short: I have never disclosed my gender on this blog. I’ve implied through omission, undertaken some linguistic gymnastics and mostly embraced opportunities to shore up ambiguity.

I have mild-to-medium gender dysphoria. As a child, I wanted to be a girl. When other kids played super heroes—I didn’t give a fuck about the perpetual fight over who got to be Superman because I was Wonder Woman. This was frowned upon. Frowns became stern words escalated to outright threats.

A dear friend suggested that if I was meant to be a woman, nothing would have stopped me. I think that is sage advice.

If you need a hammer but you only have a wrench, it doesn’t really work the best but you can more or less make due. From the standpoint of how my body relates to my sexual identity, this metaphor serves.

I pass as male and straight although I’d never embrace either. This creates a-whole-nother layer of complication. On the one hand, there are social expectations of me with which I find so uncomfortable they are debilitating; on the other, I have privilege in that I can somewhat function under the assumption that I am cisgendered. My ‘problems’ seem charmed compared to the struggles of the rest of the gender dysphoric community.

Additionally, I have a pathological aversion to anything related to medicine. Gender reassignment surgery is not a consideration. It’s that I feel more feminine that masculine. azura09 always says she thinks of me as a really dyke-y Daria Morgendorffer.

And yes if there was a Matrix like scenario where I could take the red pill and wake up female-bodied, I would do it without a second thought. Even if the ante was upped and I would die five years after taking the red pill, my choice would be the same.

I know this image is Zoe and she seems really amazing and the last thing I have any desire to do is co-opt her experience or her own depiction of her body but—fuck me—this is to a T the way I see myself in my head.

If there were surgical procedures that would make this awful body conform to this image, they couldn’t cut fast enough for me.

Maybe then someone might be able to love me.

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Source: enbasdechezmoi-blog

thebodyasconduit:

‘And in this vision

the present is also revealed as a ruin.’

(Hal Foster)

*

by Traci Lynn Matlock

June 20th & July 9th, 2013

film

More often than not, articulating what’s going on in my head is like trying to fit an iceberg through the eye of a needle.

It’s like I see 300 images compressed into three seconds and I have to recall every bit of it with eidetic specificity. 

With this image what I can remember runs something like: ugh, multiple exposures; and, must Art always be goddamn sexist, there’s what, centuries worth of images featuring featuring women as essentialized, sexual objects but how many images can you think of where a female bodied individual is portrayed as a someone with a vital inner life independent of what a man thinks of her or the audacity to—clutch the pearls—depict menstruation; and, what would Szarkowski’s reductive Mirrors and Windows make of this?

The enormity of seeing the original thought surface, the marvel of its intricate perfection is all but lost.

My recall is sometimes astounding. I live for those moments.

During the remainder of the time, its like guessing at the original picture based on nothing more than a handful of puzzle pieces.

Occasionally, the pieces lead to more pieces. Given enough time, I can confidently point to an approximation of that first notion. Most of the time though, I can’t.

At which point I am left with the choice of giving up or trying to say something that manages to make sense of the pieces I have and hopefully points however glancing toward what I want to say.

Stories, I have learned, are a valuable tool in this process. Telling a story doesn’t always turn up more fragments. But it frequently triggers additional moments of astonishing clarity.

It doesn’t feel like there is a connection but I feel compelled to talk about how I discovered Matlock’s work.

Usually, I attribute my motivation to buy my first 35mm SLR to encountering her work. But that’s personal mythology; not the truth.

At the time, I was in film school studying cinematography. The summer between my junior and senior year was the first time I was not scheduled to shoot anything for anyone else and couldn’t afford to shoot anything of my own. So despite knowing nothing—less than nothing: fuck all—about still photography, I snagged a Nikon 8008s with a 50mm f1.4 lens. The salesman had to help me load the first roll of film.

The first handful of rolls turned out better than I had any right to expect. And after being prodded by my ‘adopted’ sister, I put some of my stuff up on Flickr. (This was back in the days of the simpler, more elegant interface and with it the now long gone pervasive sense of community.)

Part of me relished nominal attention my photos received. I likely would have bored of it, if it hadn’t been for the Explore feature.

After about six months of shooting, I hit my first plateau. The magic was far from gone but the process had begun to feel like work. It was that dead man’s land between Thanksgiving and Xmas and in combination with my frustration with my photographs, extremely loneliness and handful of other mitigating circumstances, created a perfect storm during which I stumbled onto Matlock and Ashley MacLean’s collaborative work under the moniker tetheredtothesun.

I remember distinctly that this was the first image I saw. Seeing it produced a feeling identical to the moment of surfacing, of mental clarity. Only, the three second time limit had been lifted. I could sit and stare; wonder at it all. Dwell there for a time.

I cannot understand how everything in my life since then has hinged on the flipping of that switch. I still don’t completely understand it. But it opened my eyes to the fact that the work I was making ran contrary to what I longed to create. Further, it lacked willingness to be vulnerable to others.

It’s not especially clear but the original thought I wanted to write about here was a bit of an extended metaphor. Something to do with the way parents track their child’s growth with pencil marks on a door frame. So much of my own creative development lines up in my mind with photographs Ms. Matlock has either helped to make or made herself. (I will write a goddamn dissertation of a post if I ever manage to track down her photo of Smashley titled something ‘a well-explored room’,.)

…

I don’t get her multiple exposure work. It doesn’t move me in the same way as her more candid images.

Matlock was recently interviewed by The Photographic Journal. Reading it I was reminded of how influential her work has been in my development as a photographer. It’s simultaneously thrilling and unnerving.

Source: thebodyasconduit