Photography and Self-Information

When you carry your eye to the viewfinder, you turn into not merely an observer of the world—you turn into an observer of your self. In that second, when your finger rests on the shutter, a silent dialogue unfolds between internal and outer, between the one who sees and that which is seen. Roland Barthes in his “Camera Lucida” spoke of the punctum—that unnameable level in {a photograph} that pricks you, wounds you, attracts you. But what if this punctum is definitely a mirrored image of your individual inside, a mirror of your soul that you’ve unwittingly captured in an alien view?

Photography just isn’t merely a technical file of actuality. It is an existential act, the place you expose your self to the world whereas concurrently hiding from it. Walter Benjamin wrote of the “optical unconscious”—of what the digicam sees however the human eye overlooks. Perhaps it’s exactly on this unconscious that your true nature hides, that a part of your self that you just conceal even from your self. Each style of images affords a unique path to self-knowledge, a unique gateway into the labyrinth of your identification.

D600, 1/200sec., f/8, ISO100

Click for an enlargement

Let´s start the place self-knowledge is most evident and but most complex—with the self-portrait. Rembrandt drew his faces for many years, Cindy Sherman dressed herself in lots of of identities. The self-portrait is a confrontation, an encounter with a stranger who bears your identify. Susan Sontag famous that “to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.” But how will you applicable your self when your identification is a flowing river, not a stable stone?

In making a self-portrait, you turn into concurrently topic and object, artist and muse. This duality reveals a basic reality about human existence—you might be by no means merely one, however all the time many. The first self-portrait is usually a direct gaze into the lens, with out masks, with out pose. The face as it’s. The second self-portrait ought to emerge in fragments—a hand, a shadow, an overview. Not the entire, however a component that paradoxically speaks extra of the entire.

D7000, 1/250sec., f/8, ISO200

Click for an enlargement