Research Beginnings

A few notes from the reading of the past week.

From Camera Lucida:

• In chapter 4, Barthes talks of three practices (or emotions, or intentions) of making a photograph: to do, to undergo, to look; the Operator, the Subject, and the Spectator – the same three I had established previously.
• In chapter 5, he talks of being photographed: "I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image." He goes on to talk about his (the subject's) concern to appear revered: "If only I could "come out" on paper as on a classical canvas, endowed with a noble expression – thoughtful, intelligent, etc.!"
• He goes on to mention the uneasiness of seeing oneself on paper, different from a mirror, and also says: "For the photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity." 

The points made here regarding photography and portraiture are pertinent to this investigation, and with plenty of room for discussion. I need to return to them later when I can conjoin them or counter them with research more specifically on self-portraiture. 

From Portraiture

• 'the oscillation between art object and human subject, represented so personally, is what gives portraits their extraordinary grasp on our imagination' - portraits are intriguing because of the resemblance, the notion that it is them.  
• A portrait is a portrait because of the artist's intention to allude to the subject by representation (portray them) foremost over the viewer's recognition of the subject.

Again these are not points specific to my research, but I feel it is very worthwhile to circle the subject widely, whilst slowly moving in, so that any opinions I have on the core topic, are well informed ones.

I found a couple of other books which would also help me in this respect. Train Your Gaze by Roswell Angier, and Self-portraiture in the Age of Photography edited by Erika Billeter. As well as helping with the method above, I think these 'simpler' reads will give me a more comfortable starting point to the topic, and hence more confidence when tackling the in-depth literature.

From Train Your Gaze

• 'Portrait photography is about (or records) the exchange between photographer and subject' - A solid and simple way of summing it up, which of course leads me to question the nature of that exchange, or of that record, when the subject and photographer are the same.
• Bayard's early photograph 'Self-portrait as a drowned man' was noted as one of the first portraits to deal with strong personal emotion, rather than informative representation. 

From my personal reflection

• The idea that the triangle relationship is not flattened, that the photographer and subject, although the same person are taking different roles (intentions?).
• I grasped on to the idea of performance. The inherent difference between portrait and self-portrait, being that the subject knows the image is being made, in what context it is being made, how it will be presented, how they look, how they will appear. And so through knowing, they will behave, perform. 

Following this reading/thought will be the second tutorial with Ed Dimsdale, and an attempt to determine a hypothesis.