Why all the self-portraits

"You should see the nice self-portrait I took." She started laughing, saying: "I've never heard of anybody praising themselves like that." "I'm not praising myself," I replied, "I'm praising the photo". "Yes," she said, "but it is a photo of you in it".

And then I understood a fundamental difference between us. To her, a photo is not a photo unless there is a person in it. The photo is about the person, not about the aesthetics. I've been distressed more than once while taking a picture of something, such as a beautiful scene or an interesting building, and suddenly this friend jumps into the frame! See, for her my picture is incomplete because in her mind there is no real subject if the subject is not a person. In my mind people often clutter the picture, especially when my subject is something else.

Lest my self-portraits, which I post here on this blog, seem like gross vanity allow me to explain. I like taking artistic photos. And although I mentioned that people sometimes irritate me when they're in the photo this is only because they were not the thing I wanted to picture at the time. In actual fact, I like taking photos of people too and enjoy doing portraits and artistic renditions of the human body. Unfortunately most people feel shy about being the subject for photography and since I'm not a fulltime photographer I'm not planning to hire a model anytime soon. Hence, I take photos of the only willing human subject I have easy access to -- myself.

To me it is all about an artistic play with light and shadow, colour and composition. And as an artist, I like to walk that tightrope of provocation: the semi-nude photography that hint at something, but never reveals anything. I especially like interesting compositions, strange croppings focussing on unusual parts of the anatomy.

And I feel it is complimentary to this blog. I try to be really honest and frank about myself. I'm practising the art of self-revealing; it is not always easy, but if I want to be a true artist, I believe that is what is required of me. But of course, there is only so much my audience can learn about me. Art, be it in word or in image, is always just a representation of the real, it is never the real itself. And the representer always influences how he or she wants to represent the real. Art is always a filterered representation. Filtered first by the artist’s rendition and filtered secondly by the viewer’s own preconceptions, expectations and subjectivity.