Exercise—Self-absented portraiture

Maria Kapajeva

Born Estonia, lives and works in London
BA in Economics, University of Tartu; BA in Photography at The University for the Creative Arts; MA in Photography at The University of Westminster.
Fellow of HEA, teaches at UCA (Farnham)
Cultural identity and gender issues within historical and contemporary contexts.
Works with stories and histories from collection of vernacular photography. Also works with video, installation and object-based art.

Nigel Shafran

UK, 1964– .
Photographer and artist. Work exhibited at Tate and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Worked as a fashion photographer in 1980s before turning to fine art.
Publications include Ruthbook (1995), Dad’s Office (1999), Edited Photographs 1992-2004 (2004), Flower’s for ___ (2008), Ruth on the phone (2012), Teenage Precinct Shoppers (2013), Visitor Figures (2015), Dark Rooms (2016), and The people on the street (2018).
” In photographing everyday elements and details, Shafran captures something of the fabric of our lives, the background noise that usually goes unnoticed, but which shapes us and our fate” (Everyday beauty, 2018).

Response

Yes, it did surprise me when I saw the image from Washing Up in the course manual that the photographer was a man. There is no reason why a man should not take such a picture, but I think it is fair to say that women photographers have more often taken pictures in the home, especially those connected with domestic tasks or rituals.

I am not entirely sure how to answer whether gender contributes to an image, except that I suppose it must: perhaps not so much in the choice of subject matter or technique, but more in the way that every creation springs from a context (the artist as a gendered creator) and is viewed within another context or narrative (the viewer as a gendered interpreter). I don’t think that this automatically determines the intent or the understanding of a work, but it would be hard to deny the presence or influence of gendered constructs.

The line of questioning in the course manual could serve to underline that viewers of the images may make certain assumptions about the person who created them and the situation within which they were created. Perhaps. What is more interesting to me is how humans are present to us in the things of their lives and in the way they order them. (Is it a clean kitchen? Is it orderly? What kind of food is prepared there? What social standing might be implied by the setting? Are there other clues as to the people who live here?) The setting is the stage of domestic life and it invites speculation about the actors who set the scene and perform there.

So yes, these are interesting still life compositions. I am naturally curious about other people and how they live. What are they telling me? How are they like me? How are they different from me?

References

Everyday beauty with Nigel Shafran (2018) At: https://www.bjp-online.com/2018/05/shafraninterview/ (Accessed 11/11/2019).

FK Artist – Maria Kapajeva (s.d.) At: https://fkmagazine.lv/2016/09/22/fk-artist-maria-kapajeva/ (Accessed 11/11/2019).

Interview with Maria Kapajeva (s.d.) At: https://ostseemag.com/portfolio/interview-maria-kapajeva/ (Accessed 11/11/2019).

Maria Kapajeva (s.d.) At: https://fastforward.photography/people/maria-kapajeva/ (Accessed 11/11/2019).

Maria Kapajeva | (s.d.) At: http://www.mariakapajeva.com/ (Accessed 11/11/2019).

Nigel Shafran (s.d.) At: http://nigelshafran.com/ (Accessed 11/11/2019a).

Nigel Shafran (s.d.) At: https://frieze.com/speaker/nigel-shafran (Accessed 11/11/2019b).

O’Hagan, S. (2018) ‘The photobook about homelessness – without a single rough sleeper’ In: The Guardian 11/12/2018 At: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/dec/11/photobook-homelessness-rough-sleeper-nigel-shafran-people-street (Accessed 11/11/2019).

Watch: BPB16 Nigel Shafran in conversation with Francis Hodgson (2017) At: https://photoworks.org.uk/watch-bpb16-nigel-shafran-conversation-francis-hodgson/ (Accessed 11/11/2019).

Exercise—Childhood memory

I have chosen to recreate a memory of something that happened to me when I would have been about eight years old. I was with some neighbourhood friends and we were rolling down the sides of the drainage ditch that ran behind our houses. It was late fall, so the ditch was dry and full of grasses and weeds.

I decided to go everyone one better and rolled backwards instead of forwards, only to find myself stuck at the bottom with my feet in the air and the zipper of my jacket stuck to the skin of my throat. Any movement pulled on the zip fastener and cause it to bite deeper into my skin. So I lay there until one of my friends was able to get my dad to come and help me out.

Children get into these sorts of scrapes all the time, but what stayed with me was the sense of how time slowed as I waited and gazed up at the sky through my feet. And the mix of feelings: the zip hurt my neck and I was afraid to move, upside-down and disoriented, a bit panicky but calm and observant all at once. I have since felt that unreal mix at other times of crisis: panic and calm, urgent action and slow motion.

I created this image fairly literally, but these are an adult’s legs and feet, not a child’s. And I believe that the image (and the experience behind it) point to the disorientation we can feel on two levels, both physical and emotional: our world has been turned on its head.

I decided to give the image a title because that has often been my experience—in the midst of disruption, help is coming. It is rare to be completely alone, but the hard part is being patient while waiting.

The photograph does resemble my memory in many physical respects, but the most important part for me is the feelings it summons and the upset perspective one has. I think most viewers, even if they had no sense of the story that gave rise to the image, would recognize that all is not well with the figure who belongs to the legs and feet. If anything, the picture could be seen as a capture of someone who is in the middle of falling, with a blank sky and the hint of a roofline above.

Exercise—Masquerade

Nikki S. Lee (Kye-Chang, South Korea; 1970– )

Born and BFA in Photography at Chung-Ang College of the Arts, University of Korea, 1993; moved to NYC for MFA and stayed. New York University, New York, 1997–99; Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, 1994–96.
Works in both photography and film. Interest in notions of identity, particularly identity that is dynamic and negotiated through relationships.
Performance art.
Projects series (1997–2001) on sub-cultures, including yuppies, swing dancers, drag queens, hip hop fans, and senior citizens recorded with a point-and-shoot camera, wielded by a member of the selected group or a passerby.
Parts series (2002–2005), in which she appears in ‘candid’ snapshots with only parts visible of a male from a failed relationship.
Directed 2006 film, “A.K.A. Nikki S. Lee,” in which played two fictional versions of herself.
Lee’s work makes me think of what might happen if Cindy Sherman got out of the studio and interacted with people. There is just as much reliance on costume, but less so on makeup and prosthetics. But Sherman relies on creating an artificial world whose artifice is often obvious, while Lee works to fit in with the an existing group or context and draws on her resemblance to them for effect. If she is interested in confronting the viewer, she goes about it in a much subtler way.

Trish Morrissey (Dublin, Ireland; 1967– )

Combines performance and self-portraiture with photography and film.
Uses archives to explore class, family relationships, body and gesture, gender and role-play, power and control and what it means to be human.
Trish Morrissey: a certain slant of light at Francesca Maffeo Gallery in June 2018. Thirteen photographs and two films of archive material gathered about the last two female residents of Hestercombe House, a stately home and gardens in Somerset, England.
Solo publications: Seven Years (2004) and Front (2009).
Featured in The Photograph as Contemporary Art by Charlotte Cotton; Vitamin Ph, Survey of International Contemporary Photography; Auto Focus: The Self-Portrait in Contemporary Photography, by Susan Bright; Photography and Ireland by Justin Carville, and Making It Up: Photographic Fictions by Marta Weiss.

Tracey Moffatt (Brisbane, Australia; 1960– )

BA in visual communications from the Queensland College of Art, 1982. Honorary doctorate, 2004.
Uses text, collage, and set design to explore childhood trauma, Aboriginal people, and popular Australian culture.
Series Up in the Sky (1997) portrays violence in an outback town. “There is a storyline, but there isn’t a traditional beginning, middle, and end.”
Over 100 solo exhibitions.
Represented Australia in the 2017 Venice Biennale with My Horizon.
Works held in the Tate Gallery in London, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.

Reflection

I don’t know that Lee’s work is necessarily voyeuristic or exploitative. It seems as though she introduces herself as an artist to her new groups and spends quite a bit of time with them. The whole exercise could be read as both a comment on her own identity as well as that of the group: the group has established a set of codes by which they can show belonging and identify one another (a social construction); and Lee, by adopting their identity and being accepted by the group indicates just how malleable her own identity can be (another social construction).

As for Morrissey’s request, it might depend upon my frame of mind at the moment and how she presented herself / her project. I do not usually enjoy having my picture taken, but I might go along with it for a laugh or for the novelty. And given that I take more and more pictures of strangers myself—sometimes with, sometimes without their permission—I feel that I have less and less right to deny them the same access to me. It would be hypocritical of me, so I am gradually agreeing to lower my guard. I also recognize that we live in a surveillance society and the idea that we have a veto over the capture of our image is largely an illusion. We are being imaged all the time, for all sorts of purposes, so a snap for a random photographer or tourist seems relatively benign.

References

Museum of Contemporary Photography (s.d.) At: https://www.mocp.org/detail.php?t=objects&type=browse&f=maker&s=Lee%2C+Nikki+S.&record=1 (Accessed 26/10/2019).

Nikki S. Lee (s.d.) At: https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/nikki-s-lee (Accessed 26/10/2019).

Nikki S. Lee | artnet (s.d.) At: http://www.artnet.com/artists/nikki-s-lee/ (Accessed 26/10/2019).

Nikki S. Lee | National Museum of Women in the Arts (s.d.) At: https://nmwa.org/explore/artist-profiles/nikki-s-lee (Accessed 26/10/2019).

Tracey Moffatt (s.d.) At: https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/tracey-moffatt (Accessed 26/10/2019).

Tracey Moffatt | artnet (s.d.) At: http://www.artnet.com/artists/tracey-moffatt/ (Accessed 26/10/2019).

Tracey Moffatt | MCA Australia (s.d.) At: https://www.mca.com.au/artists-works/artists/tracey-moffatt/ (Accessed 26/10/2019).

Tracey Moffatt :: The Collection :: Art Gallery NSW (s.d.) At: https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/artists/moffatt-tracey/ (Accessed 26/10/2019).

Tracey Moffatt – Under the Sign of Scorpio, 2005 – Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery (s.d.) At: https://www.roslynoxley9.com.au/news/releases/2005/07/10/94/ (Accessed 26/10/2019).

Trish Morrissey (s.d.) At: https://www.trishmorrissey.com/ (Accessed 26/10/2019).

Trish Morrissey | LensCulture (s.d.) At: https://www.lensculture.com/trish-morrissey (Accessed 26/10/2019).

Trish Morrissey | photoparley (s.d.) At: https://photoparley.wordpress.com/2016/09/12/trish-morrissey/ (Accessed 26/10/2019).

Trish Morrissey — Francesca Maffeo Gallery (s.d.) At: https://www.francescamaffeogallery.com/trish-morrissey (Accessed 26/10/2019).

Trish Morrissey Photographer | Biography & Information | wotfoto.com (s.d.) At: https://wotfoto.com/photographers/trish-morrissey (Accessed 26/10/2019).

Exercise—autobiographical self-portraiture

Francesca Woodman

American (1958–1981) photographer, largely black-and-white self-portraits.
Produced over 800 untitled prints. Numerous posthumous solo exhibitions, estate managed by parents.
Rhode Island School of Design, moved to New York in 1979 to pursue a career in photography.
Influenced by Surrealism and Conceptual Art, her work often featured recurring symbolic motifs such as birds, mirrors, and skulls. Medium format.

After viewing a lot of the images produced by Francesca Woodman during her brief photographic career, I don’t find much warrant for Susan Bright’s conclusion (2010) that Woodman’s work alluded “to a troubled state of mind.” It could be that Bright has chosen to concentrate on some of the darker images that Woodman produced, particularly those containing masks, those that blur her identity (sometimes by covering her face or by blurring herself through motion), or those containing eels.

Instead, I wonder if Bright is doing a sort of post hoc interpretation or confirmation bias with Woodman’s pictures, starting with the artist’s suicide and reading it back into her work. If one was not aware of how Woodman died it would be possible to see many of her images as the products of a young woman discovering the different sides of her personality, her sexuality and her humour. Not all of the self-portraits are cheery, but nor is anyone, all the time.

At the same time, I imagine that any viewer of a body of work is capable of doing just the same thing: starting with a fixed judgement about its meaning and then (not surprisingly) finding evidence for that fits.

Elina Brotherus

Helsinki, Finland (1972– ). M.S. in analytical chemistry, University of Helsinki in 1997. M.F.A. in photography, University of Art and Design Helsinki.
Member of the Helsinki School. Lives and works in Finland and France.
Work is primarily autobiographical. Documented infertility and “involuntary childlessness” in 2011-2015 series “Carpe Fucking Diem” and 2009-2013 “Annonciation.”

Gillian Wearing

Birmingham, (1963– ). Chelsea School of Art, bachelor of technology degree in art and design, 1987. BFA Goldsmiths, University of London, 1990.
Documents everyday life through photography and video. Individual identity, the private and the public spaces. Distorted identity, role playing, masks.
Work with strangers. Confessional art (Signs). Mock anthropology.

Reflection

My thinking about self-portraiture has changed over the last few years, perhaps as a result of the learning journey I’ve been on with the OCA. I admit that I suspected self-portraits were often a sign of narcissism or self-obsession, but I better appreciate that there can be a number of motives for using oneself as a model: the wish to explore questions of personal or group identity; delving into psychology; using oneself as a proxy for humans as a whole; or practical issues of cost or access to models (I understand that Cindy Sherman often photographs all through the night, making minute change after minute change to makeup, costumes and sets as part of her process—this wouldn’t necessarily lend itself to working with live models). So yes, an element of self-indulgence could be present in self-portraiture, but not necessarily. (Is an element of self-indulgence present in every of art? Why create at all, except for some satisfaction of the self?)

After looking through dozens of images created by Woodman, Brotherus and Wearing, I am intrigued. The three have not created Instagram selfies to sell a product, or sex, or their own ego brand, but are clearly involved in pursuing something more serious. It’s not always clear to me what that something is, but I know that I would like to see more, rather than less. If anything, I admire their vision, drive and imagination, and wonder how I might approach my own self-portrait for A3 (I have an idea already).

I am not entirely sure what the significance of Brotherus’ nakedness is. In some cases, it may connote a vulnerability or honesty in that there is no protective layer between her, the camera and viewer. Given the attention that she pays to clothing and props in many of her self-portraits, I wonder if her deliberate choice of when to be naked has an anonymising function: clothes are often markers of age, status, occupation, etc., so removing them compels the viewer to see Brotherus as a broadly representing woman/women (if sex/gender is what she is trying to convey) or simply as a human. In one interesting series, Brotherus appears clothed beside an older, naked man (identified as her teacher), while she appears naked in two images with people identified as her students—I wondered if the progression from clothed student to naked teacher implied a gradual ‘unveiling’ of the artist within, or if there was some sort of transference from teacher to student… or perhaps both.

References

Bright, S. (2010) Auto Focus: The Self-Portrait in Contemporary Photography. Cited in Boothroyd, S. (2014) Photography 1: Context and Narrative. Open College of the Arts, p.74.

Elina Brotherus (s.d.) At: http://www.elinabrotherus.com (Accessed on 2 October 2019a)

Elina Brotherus (s.d.) At: https://martinasbaek.com/artists/elina-brotherus/ (Accessed on 2 October 2019b)

Francesca Woodman | artnet (s.d.) At: http://www.artnet.com/artists/francesca-woodman/ (Accessed on 26 September 2019)

Francesca Woodman – 97 Artworks, Bio & Shows on Artsy (s.d.) At: https://www.artsy.net/artist/francesca-woodman (Accessed on 26 September 2019)

Francesca Woodman Photography, Bio, Ideas (s.d.) At: https://www.theartstory.org/artist/woodman-francesca/ (Accessed on 26 September 2019)

Gillian Wearing (s.d.) At: https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/Gillian-Wearing (Accessed on 2 October 2019)

Gillian Wearing | artnet (s.d.) At: http://www.artnet.com/artists/gillian-wearing/ (Accessed on 2 October 2019)

Gillian Wearing – 29 Artworks, Bio & Shows on Artsy (s.d.) At: https://www.artsy.net/artist/gillian-wearing (Accessed on 2 October 2019)

Gillian Wearing Art, Bio, Ideas (s.d.) At: https://www.theartstory.org/artist/wearing-gillian/ (Accessed on 2 October 2019)

LensCulture, E.B.| (s.d.) Elina Brotherus. At: https://www.lensculture.com/elina-brotherus (Accessed on 2 October 2019)

Photographs tell as much about the observer as they do about their author.« (s.d.) At: https://www.collectorsagenda.com/en/in-the-studio/elina-brotherus (Accessed on 2 October 2019)

Searching for the Real Francesca Woodman (s.d.) At: https://www.victoria-miro.com/artists/7-francesca-woodman/ (Accessed on 26 September 2019)

Tate (s.d.) Finding Francesca – Look Closer. At: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/francesca-woodman-10512/finding-francesca (Accessed on 26 September 2019)

Tate (s.d.) Gillian Wearing CBE born 1963. At: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/gillian-wearing-cbe-2648 (Accessed on 2 October 2019)