Tag Archives: self-portraits

On Portraiture by Teju Cole

There’s Less to Portraits Than Meets the Eye, and More

By Teju Cole

Portraiture existed long before photography was invented. And for more than a dozen years after photography’s invention, it was practically impossible to make a photographic portrait: the required exposure times were too long. But the two eventually came together, and now their pairing seems so natural that it’s as though photography was invented for making portraits…. read more

Carte de visite of Sojourner Truth, around 1864.CreditFrom the American Antiquarian Society

Meryl Meisler: Vintage 70s Self-Portraits 

Playing dress up and shooting self-portraits at her parents’ house in the suburbs coaxed Meryl Meisler out of the closet and into herself.

Vintage 70s Selfies Show an Artist Discovering Her Sexuality

“Growing up in Long Island during the 1950s and 60s, Meryl Meisler had the typical suburban life: girl Scouts, ballet and tap dance lessons, and prom. But while she loved her family and friends, she didn’t quite fit in. She quickly realized she didn’t want to be a housewife, teacher, nurse, or a secretary—pretty much the only options available to young women at that time…” [read more]

{They should be referred to as self-portraits! http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/whats-the-difference-between-a-selfie-and-a-self-portrait/}

Cindy Sherman: ‘Why am I in these photos?’

Cindy Sherman: ‘Why am I in these photos?’| The Guardian

Photographer Cindy Sherman talks about a difficult childhood, her compulsion to dress up, growing older – and why she now prefers to live alone.

…”A flick through the photographs in her current retrospective exhibition in LA reveals her transformed into 20 kinds of matinee starlet, Hitchcock lead, pneumatic Monroe, terrified centrefold, crime-scene corpse, old master muse, cut-up sex doll, Republican wife, clown; both as determinedly absent and iconically present in her work as Andy Warhol once was in his.” [read entire article]

Cindy Sherman in front of her work at the Broad museum, Los Angeles, where a major retrospective of her work is taking place. Photograph: Dan Tuffs for the Observer

selfiecity

selfiecity.

Selfiecity investigates selfies using a mix of theoretic, artistic and quantitative methods:

  • findings about the demographics of people taking selfies, their poses and expressions.
  • Rich media visualizations (imageplots) assemble thousands of photos to reveal interesting patterns.
  • The interactive selfiexploratory allows you to navigate the whole set of 3200 photos.
  • Finally, theoretical essays discuss selfies in the history of photography, the functions of images in social media, and methods and dataset.

The project is part of Lev Manovich’s Software Studies Initiative  that covers two directions:
1) Study of software and cyberinfrastructure and their deployment in modern societies using approaches from humanities, cultural criticism, and social sciences.
2) Use software-based research methods and next generation cyberinfrastructrure tools and resources for the study of massive sets of visual cultural data, asking theoretical questions which are important for humanities.

I Dream of Selfies – article on project in Hyperallergic

 

This Tumblr User Shows Her Horrific Anonymous Messages In A Powerful Art Project

This Tumblr User Shows Her Horrific Anonymous Messages In A Powerful Art Project.

Bottos, a photography major and gender studies minor, runs a Tumblr page where she often uploads selfies as well as pictures of her work.

Since starting the Tumblr in 2010, she has received hundreds of cruel anonymous messages. Last week, she turned the words of hate into a feminist art project; Bottos screencapped some of the messages and posted them over pictures of herself. [link to project]