I say a week, I got sick of looking at my face and only did 5 or 6 days…
Self-confidence, self-assurance, and admiring your own beauty is extremely difficult, and for some almost impossible. I am, unfortunately one of these people who finds it impossible to be okay with myself, which I guess is why I stay behind the camera, rather than in front. This isolation period has for some allowed people to become comfortable in their own skin, and I wish that was the same for me, in fact I have become repulsed with my own body, uncomfortable, and disturbed by what I see. I don’t know whether my indulgence of social media, the impulse to find new content, often including beautiful photographic sculptures of the body, or just my critical mind has taken over everything. All I know is it’s tricky, but facing these faults within myself using my creative outlet of photography could help.
So, using themes, personal experiences, and explanations about myself I photograph over a couple of days. I firstly, based the images on myself, and my looks in general, photographed multiple versions of standard self-portraits, and hated all of them! I decided to think about the way I can obscure myself, which I guess reflected that of the opinions for myself. So, the conversion from faced self-portraits, to the observations of body negativity, trying to obstruct that, became more impactful and important to me.
My following experiments was the exploration of my relationship with food, often great, often awful, however during lockdown horrific. One of the unattractive elements is to be photographed in the midst of eating, and I brought both together, which I felt not amazingly successful, however something to look for, in use of improvement.
Next was my preferable shoot. I wanted to explore themes of my clumsiness, and just be a little artistic, after watching Cat Garcia’s talk with Leica Akademie‘s Robin Sinha, and Garcia’s explanation of the importance of the use of light. I decided to photograph myself being more conscientious of the light around me. I never use artificial lighting, but I have also never photographed only myself before. So, this is where the problems arised. I knew that during specific times of the day I had the light hit inside my flat perfectly, but also at the times when it would be easy to project certain lighting on only specific areas of my face. I used a multitude of liquids on my face, exploring this disastrous side of me, and looked at it more artistically.
I have been trying to learn a little more about editing for collages, digital manipulations, and crossing imagery, so the next set of imagery was looking at these elements.
Tyler Bishop-Harris 