Tag: self-portraits

Brooke Didonato – [↑] Temporary view (2016); [←] Still pulling cactus needles out of my ass (2018); [→] Closure (2016); [↙] Self portrait outtake # 9,777 (2018); [+] Title unknown (2017); [↘] sinking in pink (2017); [↓] Title unknown from Quiet Places (2016)

There is something special about Didonato’s images; and it’s less to do with anything tone or style (her closest contemporary corollary is likely Ben Zank, but she’s also seemingly constructing her scenes with similar playfully confrontational absurdity to Yung Cheng Lin, echoes of questions regarding how humans perceive bodies in relationship to the environments they inhabit and how those relationships can provide uncanny fuel for surrealist interpretations (reminiscent of Evelyn Bencicova).

It’s even possible to step back even further and trace a direct lineage from the above group of artists to someone like Josef Koudelka.

I think what makes her work arguably better than any of the folks I’ve compared her to is that Didonato is also disrupting the tradition of which her work is a part. You can’t have looked at much of Stephen Shore’s work without seeing deft homages (Temporary view is almost certainly referencing Shore’s famous South of Klamath Falls, U.S. 97, Oregon, July 21, 1973); the way she prefers to present scenes with a mind toward a wider perspective, while also moving in close in a way that amplifies a sense of location while also preserving context is an insightful response to Uncommon Places and although I can’t point to an indicative example, the way light tangles in Didonato’s pony tail in Still pulling cactus needles out of my ass is both a visual rhyme with Shore’s sensitivity to yellowing light but also an adept encapsulation of Shore’s criminally ignored, irreverent sense of humor.

Roxann Arwen Mills – Self-portrait with blue neon in bathroom from Influences of Blue series (1998-2004)

EDIT: Apologies. I completely fucked this one up. The above images have
been viciously de-saturated by some internet asshat. You can see the
full color originals here. (Thanks as always to @sporeprint​ for the eagle eyed correction.)

One of the things I was told very early on post-buying a 35mm SLR and focusing on shooting B&W stock was that to do B&W right/well I needed to invest in a bunch of color filters.

A yellow filter will famously make blue skies really pop. (If you understand the inter-relationship between the RGB (additive) and CMYK (subtractive) color models, then what filters do what can be easily decoded. If you’re like me and understand the theory inside and out but have a bit more trouble when it comes to practical application: here’s an indisipensible intro.

I knew all this but still one of the only things that’s every truly surprised me as far as how I thought something would would appear photographed and how it actually appeared on the film was a snapshot I took in The Met of Ellsworth Kelly’s Spectrum V. (Rendered in B&W, the panels are indistinguishable from one another.)

My suspicion is that this is one of the things Mills is up to with these images–interrogating the subtle ways that the color subtly shifts the way that a B&W emulsions registers light.