Now, I I do realize that with this post I’m not following the cardinal rule of blogging, which is putting content up as soon as it happens. But this is not out of laziness, simply technical issues that I didn’t have time to deal with last week. So hopefully this movie will make up for it.
A few weeks ago I attended the opening of the senior photography majors’ show in the Cube 4 Gallery in Siegfred Hall. A handful of artists exhibited their works in the small space, and there was everything from huge pictures of dogs fighting to calm portraits of an artists’ grandmother. But the ones that really stuck out to me were some self-portraits by my friend Halle Tate. Halle is a senior photography and sculpture double major here at OU, and she had an interesting idea — to take a picture of herself every day in 2009.
She decided to choose a few portraits from her collection of thousands of photos, which can be seen here on her Flickr account.
Although some of the photos are a bit revealing, Halle says that she wasn’t embarrassed to show them because most of her friends have already seen them in class.
The most interesting thing she told me about the portraits is probably that she decided to take them because she wants to be someone else. That’s a pretty interesting concept — using pictures of yourself to be a different person. Photography can be manipulated to show anything we want it to, and it’s interesting that she decided to do this on a daily basis.
This relates to a kind of internal debate I’ve had over the course of this quarter with blogging. Having a blog is all about creating your own personal brand. Basically, making yourself look as cool as possible, even if that’s not the case. The reason why I dislike blogging so much is partly because I feel that only a handful of people can pull off “branding” themselves, and I’m definitely not one of those people. Halle says that she takes these pictures because she wants to be someone else, but ultimately this is her own private project that she did for herself before she showed it to anyone else. I think that’s important.
Even though she’s showing the work to people, she takes pictures of herself every day for her own benefit. But for bloggers, part of the satisfaction of uploading pictures of yourself every day is that other people will see you. What other people think is a huge part of it.
Basically I think that Halle’s idea is great because she did it for herself first. I think that more people need to think about that before they start any sort of project, because in these days of internet voyeurism, everyone just takes pictures of themselves and spouts off rhetoric and shares stuff so that other people think that they are cool.
I think that Halle’s work could be misconstrued as just another project to show how much people are obsessed with themselves, but I think that it’s the opposite. Nobody will look at all of her thousands of self-portraits, but it doesn’t matter. She did it for herself and admits to wanting to be someone else, but stops there. She isn’t putting up some front, just showing it like it is. And honestly, I don’t think that most people don’t have the guts to do that anymore.
I was taking a look at Halle’s Flickr, at the self sets and I quite like them. There’s something so normal, yet personal about it, it’s inspired me to start a project of my own.