Robert Mapplethorpe

1975

This image has stuck with me as a cornerstone of portrait photography since I saw it in Roland Barthes' Camera Obscura years ago. I find myself referencing this image in my own work, most times unintentionally at first.

The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation lists it as a self portrait, although I specifically remember it being called a "portrait of a young man" elsewhere. This makes me wonder, was Mapplethorpe also interested in the way that a camera can obscure identity?

Cai Guo-Qiang

epic.


(also known for his gunpowder paintings series.)


.

Starn Twins

Mike and Doug Starn.

I love most especially that their art is beautiful. There is a lot more to it than that - but it's still just beautiful right away.

Another really excellent thing that they do - making small things large. This among other things supports the investigative nature of photography.

I have this secret feeling that the twins are actually one person, carefully photoshopping himself into every photo an extra time. The vague rumor is that they never leave their house, perhaps really agoraphobic.. this just supports my theory. :p

Their Attracted to Light series was shown at rmcad while I was there. The handmade paper is especially nice.

Tim Hawkinson

Bird, 1997
(Made of artist's fingernail clippings)


Corner Clock, 1996


Emoter, 2002
(Moving articulated artist's face)


What I still like most about Tim Hawkinson is explanation of why his image is the source material for a lot of his work. He says that his face is "readily available" and that he "owns the sole copyright to his face", but also that in the end, the work is too abstracted to look like it even started as him.

Gary Schneider

Gary Schneider rocks.

It seems like he found a technique that worked for him in his own special way, and stuck with it for a long time. Yes, he's branched off into a number of new alternative portraits and they're pretty good as well, but his long exposure work still really kicks my brain's ass. His website is really excellent too - the writing especially.

Cindy Sherman

Untitled Film Still #58

It goes without saying that most female photographers today are influenced by Cindy Sherman, whether consciously or not. The idea that she is the subject in nearly all of her work, without her photos being "self portraits," once really engaged questions about the meaning of "self" for me.

Personally, her work speaks to me more about anonymity than identity - a comparison that has become really important to my work. In any visual art, but most specifically photography, the image ceases to be a specific person and becomes a person (I recall Magritte's La trahison des images/The Treachery of Images). With this in mind I feel like Sherman's work, yes, is a photography of a character or of some constructed personality - but whether or not this is the case in all portraiture is a more interesting question.



Untitled (Woman in Sun Dress), 2003

Here more recent work just kind of freaks me out, maybe more or less than it's intended to.

Lee Miller (and Man Ray)

May Ray, more or less a surrealist, said "I paint what I cannot photograph, and I photograph what I cannot paint."
How poignant.

I would really suggest the documentary Lee Miller : Through the Mirror to anyone interested in the history of photography.

The interaction between (Elizabeth) Lee Miller and Man Ray raises questions about authorship and process in photography that I think are still relevant today. For example, Ray is credited with inventing the printing technique of solarization, when Miller in fact discovered it accidentally

Acting as Ray's model/lover/student from about 1929 to 1932, Miller often printed images from Ray's negatives, resulting at times in arguments about the authorship of the final piece.

Miller's own work, when apart form Man Ray, was considerably closer to documentary photography than to surrealism. Her image is more known than her name, but her story is what I'm really drawn to.