For my portrait brief I wanted to play with the theme of ‘selfie culture’. so with this in mind I set of to research selfie culture and try and find artists who are exploring it. At this point I found Richard Prince, Prince finds selfies via Instagram, then comments on them, and the transports them on to a canvas. I found this idea really interesting as selfie represents vanity in some regards, this is shown in a lot of Prince’s subjects who upload very staged and unnatural photos. by using this technique Prince is almost exposing this vanity.
I wanted to replicate this to a degree, but one key difference in my work is that I wanted to take it in the other direction. so I set about taking an image of my self taking a photo and trying to represent my self naturally. I did them as if I was taking a photo for an ID. I then set about doing this with a friend and stranger, these were my results.
When critiquing these photos I would say that the do give of a certain natural look, however not to the extent I hoped for. this brings up the question. I was very happy with my stranger photo because it looked natural and beautiful. In future I Would of used a 50mm lens in order to blur the background more and therefore emphasise the subjects more
Richard Prince’s Website http://www.richardprince.com/photographs/
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