Self Portraiture, a look back: Photography
April 7, 2015
Selfies and Identity: Who do we think we are?
Spring 2015
Tue/Thurs 3:30-4:40PM
9C Thematic Investigation
What we covered last week:
the impulse to paint others and ourselves
Alice Neel
Mother and Child (Nancy and
Olivia), 1967
Frida Kahlo
Self-Portrait, 1948
Diego Rivera
Portrait of Frida
Kahlo, c 1939
Christopher Isherwood
by Don Bachardy
First self
portrait/selfi
e?
Robert Cornelius
1839
Early American photographer
And lamp manufacturer
Hippolyte Bayard:
Self Portrait as a Drowned
Man (1840)
First published in 1973
“ The most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise
is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our
heads-an anthology of images.”
-Susan Sontag
Hubler’s aim is …
“to photographically document the
existence of everyone alive”
Douglas Hubler, 1971Variable Piece #70 (In Process) Global
“To collect photographs is to collect the world”
Monument postcards from Goddard’s film Les Carabiniers
“Photographic images…are miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire”
Historical events postcards from Goddard’s film Les Carabiniers
“To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.”
Pictures of women postcards from Goddard’s film Les Carabiniers
The photograph took many images in order to
come up with
“…the right look on film
-the precise expression of the subject’s
face that supported their own notions
about poverty, light dignity, texture
exploration and geometry”.
-Susan Sontag
Dorothea Lange
FSA image
Migrant Mother
From
Walker Evans
FSA photograph
Image of sharecropper
“Images that idealize are no less aggressive
than work which makes a virtues out of
plainness…”
-Susan Sontag
“A family’s photograph album is
generally about the extended familyand, often , is all that remains of it.”
-Susan Sontag
“…time consists of interesting events,
events worth photographing.”
-Susan Sontag
“Photographing
is essentially
an act of non-intervention.”
-Susan Sontag