Thursday, February 12, 2015
Whose gaze?
When you put yourself in front of the camera, who do you imagine looks at you? Does that gaze feel accepting, critical, curious, harsh, etc.? When you are behind the camera photographing another, what influences how you look at that person? Do the following sometime this week. Take your camera and tripod into a room alone. This could be the studio or your dorm room. Lock the door. Using the self-timer, photograph yourself totally nude for at least 30 minutes (an hour is better). Write about your experience on the blog. Don't show the pictures to anyone, and DO NOT post the pictures on the blog! And if you use a school camera, don't forget to delete the pictures!
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I had recently just had to pose nude for a project I am doing in my constructed image class. I took the photos in the studio while I was completely alone with the door locked of course. Over the course of an hour and a half, I posed nude while wearing a series of masks' I made for my project. To be honest I have posed nude before for projects, but during those times I had texture overlays on the image making my identity sort of antonyms. However, here I had no intention of changing the images in photoshop, making every detail on my body revealed.
ReplyDeleteIf there was one thing I tried to avoid was having my genitals exposed. Of course there were some images where I failed to position myself correctly. I have always found it to be hard to look at images of myself were my genitalia is exposed, perhaps it's because I'm not used to looking at images of myself naked. If I am going to have pictures of myself naked I'd much rather have no genitals exposed, manly because I feel as though genitals can be a distraction for what is really going on in the photo.
As stated before I'm not someone who likes posing nude. Perhaps over time I will be more comfortable in my own skin? This is something only time can tell.
When I first put myself in front of the camera, all I can think about is how this person is going to expose me at a later time. For example, if I’m at a party with all of my friends and someone takes their phone out to capture the moment I always make sure to always look my best and to see the photo as soon as it’s taken. Also, I always make sure that the photograph becomes either cropped or there is a filter placed on it. It’s under the intention that this photograph is most likely going to be displayed on a media site like Facebook or Instagram. Once it is posted, I look again to see how I look in it and if I don’t like it chances are I will untag myself in it.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was photographing myself with no clothes on, I could almost see the same emotions happening to me again as I would if I was back at that party. At first I didn’t really want to fully expose myself as I tried to cover up my body and position myself in numerous ways that covered my flaws. After doing this for a few moments, I decided to just try a few photographs completely exposed. Taking a short break, I looked at the first few photographs and I couldn’t really grasp myself to look at them with the right amount of respect or detail. This was the first time I was looking at myself nude on film and I didn’t really enjoy what I saw.
It’s almost like that moment when you get out of the shower and you end up glancing at yourself in front of the mirror. As much as you don’t want to see what’s looking back at you, you end up looking at it for a while before you quickly turn away and put your clothes on. In this instance, I wasn’t able to run away from the images and I found myself wanting to continue this experience to see what the end result would turn out to be. As I continued to take many more photographs, I positioned myself in a way that made me feel appealing towards the camera. Although I would have loved to Photoshop myself, I was slightly content with what I was seeing.
When the final images were captured, I could notice a major difference from the beginning of the photo shoot to the end. I was enjoying myself and wasn’t so negative with the results. I also could notice a change in posture and facial expressions, as they weren’t so dark. Will I ever do this again… most likely not! But it allowed me to gain some respect for myself instead of always being so worried about what people think or most importantly how I feel!
I am definitely not a fan of seeing myself in any type of photograph so seeing this post made me really nervous. Being comfortable with my appearance is something i've struggled with for a long time, especially my body.
ReplyDeleteWhen i started photographing myself i was very conservative in the photos. Most were of my back, and i never got my whole face in the shot. It was obvious by my facial and body expressions just how uncomfortable i was. Although i was very uncomfortable with these first few shots I tried taking some more that were from the front with a little more exposed, still keeping my face pretty hidden though.
Looking through the photos i was very harsh on myself, critiquing every detail. Posing nude is not something that i enjoy, maybe over time i will become more comfortable with myself but as for now i don't see myself doing this again!
Even though I have posed nude for myself a few times for different projects, it's still something that is relatively difficult for me to do. I almost always don't end up showing my face, and there have been many times where I haven't completely created the images that I wanted because I felt that my body did not look good enough, so I settle for something different that makes me look better.
ReplyDeleteI've always been self-conscious about my body ever since I was a kid. I remember being 5 years old and refusing to eat because I thought I was fat. Now I look back at photographs of myself at that age and realize I was actually the scrawniest little kid I may have ever seen in my life, so its absolutely crazy to me that I already had such crazy insecurities before I even finished kindergarten.
I've found myself getting progressively more and more insecure about my physical appearance, which is why it has been a long time since I have shot any nude photos of myself. Reading this post was terrifying to me, but once I did it, it was very enlightening and somewhat empowering. Ive always been more insecure about my stomach than any other part of my body, so naturally that was the place I also chose to hide from the camera. Even when I finally decided to try some shots with my stomach exposed, I still cringed at the sight.
Although I don't think I'm going to be able to do this again any time in the near future, I think it was good for me to confront my body and my imperfections. In a way, it gave me a sense of acceptance of myself, and somewhat stifled my urge to constantly critique every inch of my being.
Like most people I am very particular about what pictures of me get posted on social media and how it presents me as a person. I kind of assume anyone and everyone can/will see it; I know it seems ridiculous but you never know who is searching you on the internet. I generally don't care what pictures my friends take of me at parties and things like that because if they're inappropriate I will remove the tag and if they're really bad i'll ask them to take it down and it hasn't been a problem yet.
ReplyDeleteBefore doing this exercise I have only photographed myself naked once and I was facing away from the camera with only my backside in the image. While i was doing this I didn't have trouble so much with seeing my body nude but rather I didn't know what to do with my facial expressions and my hands were just kind of awkwardly there. I give the figure drawing models a lot of credit because it's hard enough to see yourself naked let alone an entire class of people who you don't know that are trying to capture all your bodies little imperfections to make a better drawing.
I hardly ever photograph myself and when I do, I hardly ever include my face. I think it's because we're more judgmental about our own appearances than of other people's. When you're photographing another person, you try to make them feel comfortable so their pose is natural and shows their personality. When photographing yourself, there's not necessarily anyone there to make you feel more comfortable. For constructed image last year I photographed myself for the body/form project. It gave me a lot of anxiety to photograph myself nude for that project especially since someone knocked on the studio door a few times and every so often I could hear people outside the studio having a conversation. I rushed through taking the photos but if I was taking photos of someone else, I would've taken my time and paid more attention to lighting and composition. When I was photographing myself for this blog post, I felt more relaxed than I had in the studio because I was home alone and knew that no one would be knocking on the door. It was also a more familiar environment which made me feel more comfortable. I found that I didn't like most of the photographs that I took in either situation because I knew that they were of me and didn't like how I looked.
ReplyDeleteI think most people are very critical of themselves in photographs, myself included. It's hard to take an image of yourself and put it up on the wall for a critique, you feel vulnerable. Yet when I photograph people I am not critical of how they look. I am paying attention to how the photograph is framed, their positioning, etc etc, not thinking negatively about how they look. Yet that is so hard, almost impossible, for me to remember when I am being photographed.
ReplyDeleteI hardly let anyone photograph me and since I am a photographer, I am usually the one taking the pictures. That being said, self portraits have never been something that I did too often and posing nude is something completely new to me. For the first few minutes it was very uncomfortable even though I knew I was the only one in the room, just the feeling of having my photo taken made me very tense and I think the photos make that very clear. After the initial discomfort, it wasn't too bad, more just me having fun and being comfortable and myself. I think that this experience opened my eyes to what my subject may feel sometimes. Some people are comfortable in front of a camera but some people aren't and I definitely fit into that category and I'm not the only one. I hadn't really ever thought of how my subject was feeling, I would always try to be relaxed and have the operations run pretty relaxed as well so my subject would feel comfortable but this project definitely got me thinking more about what the subject is feeling when someone is looking at them intently, focusing, setting the composition, etc. Even though while I am doing this, the subject isn't the only point of focus, I am sure that for the subject it feels like they are.
ReplyDelete