Self Portrait Grid and process

Right when I understood the assignment, I knew I wanted to do a sequence of similar images of myself, with a plain background, showing different emotions or actions. (I also only knew about the project a day before it was due.)

I sketched out 3 ideas of layout/theme/color inspired by Stephen Shore, Andy Warhol, and Zhang Huan’s “Skin” as seen on the sheet you gave us about the assignment.

 

As I constructed the grid; arranging the pictures, editing and sizing them–my idea changed as I played with InDesign’s features, and playing with photoshop. A teacher of mine, last semester, advised us to make about 10 variations and save them along the way, to force yourself to experiment, starting over and over again.

So I used that strategy for a few times:

until it evolved into my final project; pops of color, and a simple sequence of portraits:

…

After the critique on Tuesday, I realized that the center picture is holds a large stature. I didn’t disregard the center photo when creating the grid, but intentionally put a not-so-important photo there because in photography ( which this partly is), the center is the least important part– in fact, nothing should be placed in the center. So after the critique, it became apparent that, with what i wanted to portray, the center should be left empty. Although, that too is a large statement. Because of these two factors, I chose to eliminate a whole row so that there would be no “center photo.”

Another important critique I received was that the colors seem to organize the real and the fake. Except, i didnt organize any of the pictures into category because I wanted to confuse the real with the fake–that was for me to know. I even thought that the boring/ordinary pictures juxtaposed with the exaggerated photos was explanation enough. So maybe I shouldn’t have put colors at all (which was my original idea).

I resized the images back to their original orientation because it didn’t have a purpose. But am keeping the one photo that is not a self portrait to change the dynamic and show its significance to my life.