INTO ME
INTRODUCTION Lately I found my self taking many self portraits as I have never done before. I did it with my subconscious and when I have realized it I felt there was something unusual going on in my mind, something that immediately generated a list of questions, obviously addressed to my self: “Why am I doing this? Why are you so narcissist? Why have you become the main subject of your photographs, the photographer and the spectator? I know you love your self but you never acted like that before. What are you trying to communicate? Or maybe discover...What are you looking for? Are you isolating your self from the rest of the world? Why? Or maybe you just need some attentions. It can’t be only narcissism, you are not even feeling great lately.” That’s just the beginning of a series of questions that I asked my self and that led me to start a deeper research about why we take self portraits. What are the psychological aspects of that desire to draw forth and represent the self? It might be a personal exploration for a better understanding of our inner self, an attempt to describe who we are. By creating an objective representation of the subjective us we are going to depict our personality, our self expression and our through, basically we are capturing what is part of our identity as an individual. What do we include in self-portraits? We reveal or hide particular parts of us we like or we don’t like, so that the portrait becomes a source of self-confidence, criticism and consciousness. I think that images limited in revealing the whole self or the environment where they were taken, powerfully express an inside emotion, differently from images that reveals a lot about where the shoot was taken. The location and the objects in it, almost always reflect important aspects of our identity, interests, relationships and lifestyle, whether we consciously realized this or not. Also what we include or exclude in this environmental self- portraits reflects the aspect of our lives that we wish to reveal or hide. Thus, not always self portraits are consciously aware of everything that their image reveals about their personalities. It is possible to notice aspects or identity that are weak, confused, outdate, unexplored or misunderstood. In fact the process of creating the self portraits might be an unconscious attempt to draw that underlying aspect of self to a higher level of awareness.
They simply sense the emotions, thoughts, memories and identities during the process of creating as well as afterwards when viewing it. I find this an amazing way to communicate without words. While some people are “verbalizers” who rely on words, others are “visualizers” who experience themselves better via images. The personal significance of the shot may never be truly accessible to everybody but it is something that can only be experienced by the photographer. I arrived at the conclusion that self portrait are an amazing tool for self reflection, depicting feelings of subconscious incubation like anxiety, helplessness, disability, sadness, loneliness, loss of meaning etc. They help to understand objectivity emotions so that it is possible to clearly identify and control them. Pictures in this catalogue features Francesca Woodman, Nan Goldin and Vivian Meier, three female photographers who took many self portraits during their lives. I bet they all had different reasons of doing it but still, they have in common an immense artistic talent among with a powerful personality, often shrouded in a veil of mystery. Enjoy it.
Vivian Maier (February 1, 1926 – April 21, 2009) Vivian was born in France and for part of her life she bounced from Europe to United States before going back to New York City in 1951. in the U.S she began working as a nanny for the rest of her life. By 1956 she left NY and moved to Chicago, where she died in 1956. Maier’s massive body of work was discovered in 2007 when the historian and collector John Maloof wondered into an auction house and won some boxes containing part of Meier’s work. Inside those boxes he found more than 100.000 negatives, thousand of prints, 700 rolls of undeveloped colour film, homemade documentaries and audio recordings. Why Vivian never shared her work? Who was this woman? She was described as Mary Poppins from the three boys she raised like a mother, as well as an eccentric, strong, highly intellectual and intensely private woman. Because we know so little about Meier’s life we can’t avoid to enter a mystery world whe looking at her work. Her self-portraits takes us along the discovery of this silent and complex woman’s journey of self knowledge and creative exploration.
“Well, I suppose nothing is meant to last forever. We have to make room for other people. It’s a wheel. You get on, you have to go to the end. And then somebody has the same opportunity to go to the end and so on.” Vivian Maier
Reflection on a mirror - -Undated
Reflection on a mirror -Undated
Reflection on a window shop - Undated
5, May 1955
3, February 1955, New York
Untitled, 1956
Untitled, 1960
Undated
Untitled, 1975
Untitled, 1976
Untitled, 1978
Undated
Undated
Francesca Woodman (April 3, 1958 – January 19, 1981) Francesca was born in Denver, Colorado, where she grew up. She later moved to Ny to study Photography an the “Rhode Island school of Design” but one of her strongest influences was Italy, where she spent many summers of her life with her family. Later she won a scholarship and went to rome for a year to continue her studies. While she was living there Francesca took some of her best pictures and becomes to experiment with an old maths book she found that subsequently became “Some Disordered Interior Geometries”, her first artist book she made and published. After her return to Rome Francesca settled back in New York and only a week after the publication of her book, she killed her self by jumping out of the window of a building. Nobody knows what was going on in her mind. She left behind an amazing body of work of about 800 pictures where from some of her photo we could interpret a wish to disappear from this world. She was obsessed by angels and maybe she dreamed of becoming one of them. We will never know what made her give up on life but we can at least try to understand her trough the powerful images full of magic and mystery. Her work influenced by Gothic and Surrealism explore the role of the body in space. Her self-portraits are essential and fascinating. To explain her presence in most of her pictures Francesca used to say: “It is a matter of convenience, I am always available”.
“Am I in the picture? Am I getting into it or out of it? I could be ghost, an animal or a dead body, and not just a girl standing on the corner...” Francesca Woodman
Boulder, Colorado 1972
Untitled, 1975
Untitled, 1975-80
Untitled, Providence, Rhode Islands 1976
Untitled, 1976
Untitled, 1976
On Being an Angel, 1977
From Angel Series, Rome 1977-78
From Angel Series, Rome 1977 -78
Self-deceit #1, Rome 78
Untitled From Swang Song Series 1978
Untitled, New Youk 1979
Untitled, MacDowell Colony Peterborough, New Hampshire, 1980
Nan Goldin (12, November 1953) She grew up in Boston, she left home when she was about 13 years old. She went to a free school in the 1960s which she described as “the existence of the knowledge of truth”. A teacher helper her to get a polaroid camera and she became the school photographer at the age of 16. at the age of 18 she started to photograph the gay and transsexual communities she had been introduced to by her close friend and fellow photographer David Armstrong. In these early works, she maintained a particular focus on images of drag queens, which continued as a powerful motif throughout her work. At the age of 19 she started drinking at the age of 19 when hanging out at the drag queen bar. Part of her work had to do with drinking. She wanted to remember everything that happened the day before so she needed to record every single thing she was writing while people were talking to her. She attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where she began creating a body of work that would later form the basis of her most well-known project, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.
“My work has been about making a record of my life that no one can revise. I photograph myself in times of trouble or change in order to find the ground to stand on in the change. I was coming out of a melancholic phase. This was taken when I was traveling extensively, on the road from hotel to hotel. You get displaced, and then taking self-portraits becomes a way of hanging on to yourself.” Nan Goldin.
Self-portrait in my room, NYC 1983
Nan one month after being battered, 1984
Nan at her bottom, The Bowery, NYC 1988
Self-portrait in the mirror, The Lodge, Belmont, MA 1988
Self-portrait with eyes turned inward, Boston 1989
Self Portrait writing in my diary, Boston 1989
Nan Goldin, Self-Portrait in my Blue Bathroom, Berlin 1991
Self-portrait in my room, Berlin 1994
Self-portrait in the mirror, Hotel Baur, Zurich 1998
Self Portrait Laughing Paris, 1999
Self-portrait in my pyjamas, The Priory Clinic, London 2002
Self-portrait-in-green-Sweden, 2013
In my home, Berlin, 2013
ACKNOLEGMENTS: http://www.vivianmaier.com/ http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/francesca-woodman-10512 http://www.victoria-miro.com/artists/7-Francesca-Woodman/ http://fraenkelgallery.com/exhibitions/nine-self-portraits http://www.shootingfilm.net/2013/10/nan-goldins-self-portraits.html
“The copyright to the images depicted in this catalogue/book belongs to the photographer or artist and/or the artist’s representative, agent or publisher. This work is expressly not of a commercial nature and where possible, each image has been credited with the artist/photographers name, image title and date. The images are shown for illustrative purposes only and to accompany text. I claim no ownership or rights to the images shown and a full bibliography to the image sources is to be found in the catalogue. Alessandra Mureddu”