In contrast to existing photographers who deliver message literally, self-portrait ones make access to social, cultural and artistic allegories by using metaphors. Self-portrait photographers express their social conditions sensitively within the rang...
In contrast to existing photographers who deliver message literally, self-portrait ones make access to social, cultural and artistic allegories by using metaphors. Self-portrait photographers express their social conditions sensitively within the range of public culture in modern society or by using human criticisms and satires. They also depend on photos as recording means, but take metaphoric approaches to message communications. These two opposite aspects are combined into a resolution of both realities and metaphors. Based on the resolution, self-portrait photographers reproduce another form.
Although being a kind of portrait, self-portrait forms a non-simplified but significantly different phase. Self-portrait workers add their own subjective thoughts in clarifying how they are recognized within the world and how they make themselves balanced with the world.
Sindy Sherman reproduced by herself women's images which had been transformed by mass media such as films, televisions and advertisements. Then she made what she was like objectified variously through making up herself into characters who had been appeared in famous films. These image changes reflected the time when women dreamt of being move heroines rather than breaking originalities, challenges against men-oriented dignities and women's sexual sacrifices. In other words, the artist sought to make recognized figures having a real humanism, not idolized.
Self-portrait works by Nan Goldin show quiet cries. She reveals her pains from violence to other people in somewhat common and natural ways. Through the works, the artist said she was never different with ordinary women and asked them to be changed.
Self-portrait works by Andy Warhol keep surfaces only remained. Those works cannot be expected to explain a human being with hospitality only longer. The artist reveals his own artistic ideal through self-portrait as a whole as well as its surface. While, the surface represents Warhol' s demands for returning himself into nothing and becoming an existence like a mirror of the whole world. The artist reflects the figure of his times through creating self-portraits. Here the figure has brilliance, but emotionally dried, mechanical abstractness and represent the current appearance of ourselves who are spiritually obsessed with mass media.
By dealing with 'death', many photographers show an extreme drama of the essence of self-portrait, that is generation and change. They are attracted to the strong image of death which is impossible to experience and beyond imagination.
As discussed so far, self-portrait artists used photos to make self-interpretation about allegories such as the situation of the times, trends of art and fixed ideas of modern people, So self-portrait works represent the identity of their creators. The self expressed by means of such photo works is like a drama and at the same time the very transfer of the identity as aforesaid.
Photographers show their own roles, appearances and self-consciousness through self-portrait works as environments in which they mirror themselves reflectively. Knowing themselves usually starts from the dimension of their own private matters, but late extendedly from those of common issues among contemporary people. That is, self-portrait by artists is the very self-image of their own and at the same time that of everyone.
The researcher hopes that this study will help make better understood the orientation of self-portrait and thereon make clear the identity of ourselves by reviewing what attitudes and expressions artists use in defining themselves. This is assumedly expected to provide open possibilities in creating self-portrait works. Finally the researcher wishes that the study will be an approach to various and more profound studies on self-portrait, have been so far done only intermittently.