Professor Doris Cacoilo
Self I As Image
April 19, 2017
Since the beginning of this course the idea of the self has been observed and critically analyzed throughout its history.The self has been progressing in many ways including self portraits, photos, and even the latest trend, the selfie. However, its not the self being progressed that is interesting, its the image of the self that has been reinvented throughout time that holds many messages and history. The first artist we ever looked at in this course was female photographer, Cindy Sherman. She was eccentric and unique in her photos, she was creating an images that didn't capture her in the real world. Sherman was different in everyone of her photos, she gave a different tone, atmosphere, and meaning to her photos. She reinvented the image of the self which was usually just a picture or portrait of ones regular self. This caused a phenomenon known as the "Cindy Sherman Effect", which inspired other photographers and artists in the art world to adopt her new found style. Sherman once said "The art world was ready for something new, something beyond painting. A group of mostly women happened to be the ones to sort of take that on, partly because they felt excluded from the rest of the [male] art world, and thought, ‘Nobody is playing with photography. Let’s take that as our tool" (Hoban, 2012). In essence, Sherman is the founding mother of the changing of self representation of self in images.
From her I learned quite a few things that have altered my perspective of images of the self. We show a part of who we are through our images, even though it may not even look like the physical manifestation of ourselves, it may be the things we hide from the real world. Images of the self not only shows the stowed away quirks of us, its also gives us access to information on culture. Susan Sontag writes in her book "On Photography", that "But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present" (Sontag, 2010). We can't get a clear image in our heads about an event or place or even people unless we have some sort of visual representation of it, and images from photographs can do just that. This is another reinvention of the image of self. If we have never seen Tokyo, we can see it in images, we can see the people who live there, how they look, what their environment looks like, their daily routines, their culture for the most part we are visually able to see and interpret. We learn a bunch of information just through images that writing can't show us.
One last reinvention that the self image has gone through is the way its used to manipulate the consumers, or for a more humane term, us, the people through advertisements. Joanne Finkelstein, author of "The Art of Self Invention", states that "The ideal consumer as extrapolated from the barrage of contradictory interpolations from adverstising billboards to magazines spreads to TV commercials is a bundle of conflicting drives, desires, fantasies, appetites" (Finkelstein, pp. 176, 2007). This means that society has been feeding on peoples fears and insecurities to create a social construct of physical false beings with elite status and wealth that we the consumer should strive to become. We the consumer are reffered to not as human beings but just materials, it, as long as we can generate money we have value and can become the self images that society has created. This reinvention is not positive and has wrongly assumed a place in our everyday lives.
However, we have the power to control the self in the images we create. We can make them to reality and not a fabricated nightmare someone else has made for us and wants us all to achieve. Images of the self are prominent in our everyday lives and they do wield some otherworldly power over us if we allow them to. Its up to us in the end to change this by reinventing the image of self again into a more realistic portrayal of us, more humane, more advanced than before and most importantly, more of the true self. If we can't connect on more than just that level of an image as material, then we will never change, even when we say change is happening.
Work Cited
Finkelstein, J. (2007). The art of self invention: image and identity in popular visual culture. London: Tauris.
Sontag, S. (n.d.). On Photography. Retrieved April 19, 2017, from http://www.susansontag.com/SusanSontag/books/onPhotographyExerpt.shtml
P.S: I have no idea why when this gets published the formatting gets messed up, tried fixing it no
success, best to read in edit mode.
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