Assignment 4 - Conceptual Reflection (Book 1)

 IDENTITY (Book 1)

Process, methods, and intentions:

Relevant technical details (aperture, shutter speed, ISO, lighting conditions) 

For this portion of the project I decided to keep the same ID picture throughout to maintain a sort of continuity and focus on the main subject. This was meant to take control of the cold, institutional photo, to show that there's an actual person behind the calculated picture required by the university for the card. The base photo is under the same lighting and utilizes it's already pixelated appearance.

Image editing decisions (contrast, tonality, colour, sharpness, effects, physical manipulation) 

Instead of changing the photos (aside from a few photos) in photoshop, I chose to physically alter these to display energy and personality, sort of like my first project completed during this course. Like graffiti!

I wanted to alter these pictures to enforce the idea of denied identity even if my changes are completely "out there" in terms of reality. Your identity is what you make of it.

To contrast the neutral colours present in my ID picture, I used a mixture of editing on photoshop and after that I drew over each one except for the gray/green photo (felt it would be too much on this one).

Layout (image order, structure, elimination of nonessential photographs) 

While I didn't eliminate any of the photos, I did have a way that I wanted to order the first three pictures (front cover, denied, and identity). I would've preferred to have identity as the cover but as per the project outline, the base photo was used instead. In a way this was a good thing because it led to a strong message at the beginning of the photobook. 

Who am I? How do I come off to other people? Can you see any sense of my personality through the ID picture or is it just taken at face value? 

The photos start from having small changes to my face and background being changed entirely. My face remains pretty neutral throughout the book. And as a nod to the school yearbook idea, all of the pictures are shown on one sheet with one being slightly off because not everything is as it seems and nothing is going to be 100% perfect.

I used the black paper to end the book, it gives the viewer a visual break and acts as completion of the series.

Note artists and photobooks you considered (found on the course blog, in the project outline) 

I chose to take inspiration from both Suzy Lake's "Transformations" and Arnulf Rainer's "Face Farce" series for book 1. I also wanted to make this feel like a mix between a school yearbook and a paper doll/mask type book.

Readings (Moodle) 

I dove a little deeper into Arnulf Rainer's "Face Farce" series and found it really interesting that he found energy in black and white photographs. Something inside himself seemed to escape from the "calm" portrait into something that's more chaotic in nature. Rainer was able to almost "break" the images by overworking them using crayons and watercolour, this somewhat challenges the norm when trying to capture the "perfect photograph".

Concept development 

I've gotta say I had a really hard time when trying to figure out how to make these photos seem more interesting to me.

Originally I wanted to use make up to change my face into a more masculine one, to see if it would still look like me after that. After printing out a few images on a smaller scale and doodling on them I found that I liked those way more than my previous idea, this project about self portraits felt more like me when using this idea. After taking a look at Lake's and Rainer's works this thought was really cemented in my mind.

To reinforce the idea of a school yearbook mixed with the idea of a list of identities behind the face of normalcy, behind the ID photo. I would like this book bound from the top as opposed to the left as a regular book would be.