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Sunday, 19 January 2025

Creative Media: Initial Ideas Photography Project

 For this Photography Project as my portrait shots tend to be self-portraits simply for ease of model! I have been re-reading Susan Bright's Auto Focus.  This book is all about the self portrait in Photography and I thought I would share artists that interested me and have sparked some ideas.

I will begin with Ken O'Hara who in the 1970s became known through his portraits of people which were 'tightly cropped headshots, printed in full bleed, with no explanatory text.' (Bright, 2010:28) the repetition of the shots made this an interesting art piece.  He then did the same with himself through the day for many days, the book was like a concertina and his day unfolded through these shots.





The top images are called extreme portraits, I could not find many references to O'Hara on the internet so these were some of the few images I could find there are more in the book).  I liked the idea here of just photographing every part of the day however this is quite a project to undertake in the short time we have.  Also this would be my real day and I do like to stage my photographs so I looked at further artists.

The next artist I looked at was Sunil Gupta who is an Indian-born, Canadian artist who, in his series 'From Here to Eternity' (1995) began when he was diagnosed with HIV.  The shots he created in this series were a self-portrait shot paired with a London Gay Club.  These images I was really taken with as I like the juxtaposition of  his portraits of himself at medical appointments, at home and then showing places that looked closed down, this is a very personal journey but in the images, there are 'links between religion, salvation, colonization and control' (Bright: 2010:42)



This idea of the personal links between place and portraits I thought could work well for me as my links to places and myself maybe personal or maybe with a message but it could work the same with just title and the two images.  As I have suffered from the effect of a stroke and my day somewhat works on rituals of medication I think I might like to explore this idea.

The last artist I wanted to share here was Florence Paradeis, this French artist also makes films and her photographs; 'seem like exquisitely edited moments from her films' (Bright, 2010:200).  I liked these images as these 'moments' do not necessarily have any wider meaning they just are images that she states ate 'frames from a film that I didn't get round to making' (Bright, 2010:200) and this makes sense as I can always see image that I have never made and this would be an interesting exercise in quite strange scenes in a frame.







In these particular images it is the performance aspect that attracts me to them I believe we all perform to an extent in the photograph.  

I am now torn between an idea similar to Gupta as this would mean five photos of myself matched with five places - this is certainly very simple to do with the right places and the right idea of the message. This would work within the timeframe and https://artfacts.net/artwork/stop/48230I am almost tempted to create colour images to do this.   The Paradeis images are also an attractive idea as I could create images that are just in my mind and these would be a strange compilation of images however these are more complex precisely because they have remained in my mind! I think overall I will attempt a project like Sunil Gupta - it comes from a different place, a different experience and that is why is could make for a really interesting series. 



References

Bright S. (2010) Auto-Focus: The Self Portrait in Contemporary Photography, Thames & Hudson, London. 

Hales Gallery. (2025). Sunil Gupta - Overview. [online] Available at: https://halesgallery.com/artists/91-sunil-gupta/overview/ [Accessed 19 Jan. 2025].

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