Tag: the body

new self-portraits

I made some new self-portraits last night and this morning, experimenting with the bridal/wedding aesthetic. Here are some examples:

Things that worked well:

  • I finally bought a handheld bluetooth remote thing to use with my phone to take photos, I don’t know why I put this off for so long. I think because I like to use the bare minimum when it comes to equipment/tech so I was just being stubborn about it, idk. But using this made things a lot easier and quicker.
  • Using a wedding veil as a prop gave good results aesthetically.
  • It was refreshing doing something different to usual, new theme, new clothes, new props.
  • Usually I listen to music when I’m taking photos. This time I didn’t and I preferred it. I think I was able to focus more and things seemed to flow better and it felt more productive.

Challenges:

  • The wedding veil was hard to work with, though I like the way it looks. It’s long, it kept sliding around and I was often half tripping over it. Also being covered in it made me hot really quickly from the synthetic which I didn’t expect because it’s so light but it felt very bad on my skin.
  • Realised a simple thing which is that I need to make sure I drink more water while I’m working, the tiring-ness of making photos/videos tends to kind of creep up on me and then I’ll suddenly feel faint and dehydrated.
  • Making self-portraits is a lot harder when I have my period, there’s just more to think about, plus the intense pain and fatigue and increased anxiety. I don’t feel as much like moving my body around and doing things that rely on physical action, so I usually try to plan my longer shoots around this. I wasn’t able to do that on this occasion and it felt particularly precarious doing a shoot that involved all white clothes and underwear. Really need to try and avoid this next time. It’s frustrating to have to think about this.

trying to reflect on my self-portraits

I’ve been trying to think with more depth or precision about what I like and don’t like about my photos, what makes them work or not work. But I get kind of annoyed and frustrated when I feel pressured to do this. The pressure is from myself but also in the context of the course because it’s important to reflect on our work. I’m not frustrated by being encouraged to reflect, I’m frustrated because I feel like I can’t articulate clearly enough why I think certain photos work and others don’t. Maybe I should try to write about them more frequently.

This one works:

Why does it work? It just feels right to me. Why? Things feel like they’re in the right place. The long exposure effect has placed a ghostly image of the phone receiver over my body in a way that looks right. The lamp in the background works and makes the photo better than if it wasn’t there, I think.

This one works to me because of the way my body is angled. It creates a small but, to me, significant tension. And I like the laptop being there, the image would be less interesting to me without it. I think the laptop kind of “ruins” the image which I like. Because the body element of the photo has a sensual quality and then there’s this blunt, inanimate, technological object next to the live body. I guess that’s been something I’ve been working with the whole time, the intersection of the live/sensual/sexual/corporeal/moveable with the inanimate – laptops, phones, hard surfaces.

class 11/04/24, research paper ideas

In class we talked about the research paper. I keep thinking that I want to write about Francesca Woodman, I have felt an affinity with her and her work for a long time. But I don’t know what I would want to research specifically. Some thoughts:

  • I relate to her interest in the body. I’m interested in using the body as one’s work, which she also did. And she often photographed her body in a way that explored/depicted physical interactions with her own flesh. Distortion. Subtle discomfort. Clothes pegs on her stomach and breasts, a telephone cord in her mouth.

  • Her photographs are often analysed through the lens of her suicide. Her death and cause of death are often projected onto all of her work, her work is read as her attempt to “deal with” mental illness or something. There is something compelling to me about the way people try to psychoanalyse her through her work, especially when she herself said that her main concern was composition not emotion.

  • When I look at her photographs I feel relieved. I think this happens because she was able to create this uncanny sense of balance or visual “rightness” but she did this through the apparent awkwardness and visual imbalance of the composition. She often privileges space in her compositions, she will photograph herself in an intriguing pose but her body will be positioned right on the edge of frame, with most of the photograph taken up by the room she’s in. Things are often off-centre but in a way that makes perfect sense.

  • I think she was interested in dreaminess, mirrors and angels, as am I.

  • I think often about what kind of work she would have continued to make if she had lived longer.

  • I perceive a kind of tension between a certain presentation of “candidness” and a very deliberate stylisation that she creates in her photographs and it’s something that I think comes up in my photographs too.

  • The blur and the glow. Her photographs have these. I’m also interested in these, my photographs have them too. I bought a monograph of her work from a gallery in Paris and when I read this quote from her my heart beat so fast: “And as Woodman herself wrote in an undated diary, ‘A while ago my pictures started getting smaller and smaller – now they are getting whiter and whiter and soon there will just be small … areas of glow.'”

OnlyFans, Instagram, reactions and reflections

I was talking to Martina about my project and she asked me if I would still have done this project/be using OnlyFans if I was still with my ex-boyfriend, who I broke up with not long after the course began. I said that I would still have wanted to do the project and that he probably would have been okay with it to an extent, or at least would have reluctantly “let” me do it. But that I would probably have needed to run things by him, check what he was and wasn’t okay with, check certain photos with him etc. And I don’t know if he would have been okay with me making custom content for subscribers. I don’t mean that entirely as a criticism towards him because I think it would be mostly reasonable to not be okay with something like this (depending on the reasons) especially when it’s being introduced into a relationship as opposed to being something I was already doing when we met. But it was interesting to think about the restrictions/parameters that this would have placed upon my work.

I spent some time with a man recently who called me one evening, I think drunk, and started asking me why I post photos showing my body on Instagram. He asked me to imagine how I’d feel if I had children one day and if those children were to see those photos what they would think. I told him the next day that I didn’t like the way he had spoken to me. He said he was sorry and that maybe he was “jealous”. “Jealous of who?” I asked. “I don’t know,” he said.

I was messaging with a male friend who I don’t talk to super often (this was quite a while ago) and I mentioned that I had broken up with my boyfriend. He said that he assumed we must have broken up because of the kinds of photos of my body I had been posting on my Instagram stories. What he didn’t realise was that I had broken up with my boyfriend, yes, the only boyfriend that he had ever known me to have, but that was a while ago and I was actually in a new relationship (my most recent). So I was in fact posting photos of myself while also in a relationship with a man.

It’s frustrating to feel like men are only capable of considering women and their bodies in relation to themselves, other men/people and in the context of ownership in general. I know there are men who are capable of more than this but I haven’t encountered many of those lately. There are some other recent situations I’ve been in that I would like to write about to illustrate this but they feel too personal to reveal at the moment and/or too emotionally gruelling to recount.