This assignment was self portraiture.  I went the very clear route of taking pictures of myself.  The first one is a little more personal than the other ones.  In the first one you can see me grabbing my hair.  I have an obsession compulsion disorder having to do with pulling hair.  It's become more in the forefront of my mind lately because I have been trying to break myself of it.  But it's a big part of my life and has been since I has around the age of 8.
    The second picture is after a night out.  I had gotten dressed up and I don't do that very often and I thought it would be a good opportunity to capture that side of me.  I'm always very self conscious when I get dressed up but I do love doing it.  I like to "look pretty" in that way.
  The other three pictures were more of a last minute thing.  I ended up getting a cold and the last pictures just show me in my grungy clothes feeling awful and very "un-pretty" as opposed to the second picture of me all dolled up.  I did a black and white and then a color picture of very similar setups just to get two looks at it.  I like the color one because the focus isn't on my face, it's on my hand in the foreground.  

I'm not a huge fan of pictures of myself so I liked the blurred photo because it's still a picture of me by my face isn't the focus.  The last picture cuts off my head altogether and you get a partial picture of my body.  But it also shows the very personal space that I occupy: my bed.  I spend half of my day in the very space so what could be more me?


And that's my artist statement for the self portrait project *bow* :)

Tierney Gearon

    So last week in class we watched a film on Tierney Gearon.  I enjoyed the film, it had a lot of heart and emotion in it because of her project on her mom.  I thought most of her pictures were wonderful, especially some of her mother.  To live that life with a mother that is sick like she was, it must be hard.  But her relationship with her mother and the relationship that she allowed her children to have with their grandmother I thought was beautiful.  I remember one time in the film Tierney talked about her father not thinking it was a good idea for her to allow her kids to spend so much time with her mom.  I feel like it has to help her mother is some ways.  As much as the project was therapy to Tierney, having people around that love her and care for her and visit her often must help Tierney's mother through the troubles she has.
   As far as Tierney's work goes, I thoroughly enjoyed the pictures that she took of her mother.  I thought some of them told great stories and held so much emotion and were just beautiful photographs.  The photographs they first showed, however, that produced such scandal when displayed I thought were a bit disturbing too.  Some of the masks that she had the kids wear were just a bit creepy to me.  I feel like the nudity was the part most people focused on and that didn't bother me too much.  A lot of artists work with nude models and stuff.  Yes these models were mostly her kids of she didn't mean anything by it, it was innocent.  The masks however were a bit dark to me.  But like I think I would say for any artist, I respect the vision they have.  Early in the film, Tierney said something about how most people think she doesn't know what she's doing when she's messing around with her film camera but she really does.  And I really admire the ability to learn photography and master it the way she has.

Masculine and Feminine

http://artofmanliness.com/2012/07/29/bosom-buddies-a-photo-history-of-male-affection/


http://velvetparkmedia.com/blogs/male-femininity-photographs-sophia-wallace

Sally Mann

So on in our last class, we watched a video on Sally Mann.  We were instructed to write a one-page reaction to the video.  Here it is...

Sally Mann’s body of work is exceptional.  Personally, I thought the movie we watched on her was enthralling.  I don’t know why Roddy would think we would all fall asleep.  I liked the collection of her family pictures better than the death pictures but something about that project really struck me.  When the gallery cancelled her show and she was upset about it, eventually she came to realization that it would be alright if it didn’t get put on the walls.  That maybe it would never get on the walls and that was ok because the project was something that she needed to do.  I think that when she was talking about that project, that was what distinguished her as a great artist.  Not just a photographer but an artist.  She wasn’t worried about making money or having anyone see her work, but she thought her idea and her project were important and she was compelled to finish it even if no one would display it.  Because she was right, death is something that I think is hard for people to really look at and appreciate because we want to be so far from it.  It fills us with emotions that we don’t necessarily want to feel/ 

            But honestly I liked her earlier pictures better.  I loved the sharp, crisp, faces of her children that were full to the brim with emotion.  She got them to pose to well and their expressions, expressions that they had just from being themselves and being children, carried the photographs and really did make them powerful.  Some of the death pictures I was less impressed with because of the darkness in the prints or the blurriness, and what Sally called the impurities that she actually liked.  But I guess that is what make her different from me.  I like the perfectness of a photograph and she can appreciate the impurities.  I mean, I could appreciate her vision and her idea for her project and I thought it was thoughtful, provoking, and deep.  I’ll just end by saying that I loved the idea, and I can appreciate her view as an artist, but I wasn’t overly impressed with the photos.  But I was very impressed with her.