On Self-Portraits - by Tom Moen
The self portrait is a common theme for artists of every time and genre. It seems inevitable that at some time artists turn the easel or the camera on themselves. There must be as many reasons for doing this as there are artists doing it. Ego plays a part in it, “I’m portraying everyone else, but nobody’s portraying me, so I’ll have to do it myself”. “I need to do it for posterity, or I’ll be forgotten”. Photographers often use themselves as the subject in order to test the lighting set up they will use for portraits of others.
There is something different about holding or viewing picture of ourselves that is compelling, even as we protest that we don’t want our pictures taken. After all, we could look a mirror and see a real time image from many angles. That doesn’t seem to be as satisfactory as holding an image of ourselves and looking at it.
Families trace their history through photo albums and now on discs or on Face Book. As we look through albums, we remember what was going on at the time, where we were, what we were doing. The photos jog our memory of the past. I have had groups of older adults look at a portrait of someone they have never seen and come up with what they think that person’s life history was. It always amazes me how they come up with details of the stranger’s life that are surprisingly accurate. It’s as if they’ve known the person all their lives.
What happens when a photographer uses double exposure to put himself in scenes with mannequins? Tony Umile has done this and the results are on display at Flatirons Acura, in an exhibit he calls “Self Portrait of a (Wo) Mannequin”. There are eighteen black and white prints where Umile has taken a self portrait and blended it with an image of store displays with mannequins. The resulting images have a surreal quality, leading one to wonder, “What is the real portrait”? Umile’s portrait is usually in the background and often partly obscured by other parts of the image, which includes not only the mannequins, but whatever else happens to be in the window at the time, including reflections of objects outside the window. This can be both distracting and intriguing.
Traditionally photographs were considered to be the true translation of what was being photographed. “Photographs don’t lie”. Photographs were used to show how things really are. News photos of war and natural disasters, of poverty and slum conditions, of the lives of the rich and famous, all were “the real thing”. That has changed over the years as photography has also been used to show how we want people to think this is the way life is. Photographs capture a moment in time and we never know what happened just before and just after the shutter was snapped. Photography has been used for propaganda purposes, so now we have to be wary of what we are looking at.
Umile’s images do that to us. We look at them and see a portrait of a person, but along with it are portraits of non-persons, all in the same image. What are we to think? What is real and what is not? We begin to look for what is real in the picture. Is that a real person or another mannequin? Is that a portrait of Michael Jackson, or a mannequin? Our world is not what it seems and we may become disoriented, or we come to realize that maybe we have to take another look at the world we live in, and figure out what is real and what isn’t. Isn’t that what artists in all media have been doing for centuries and isn’t photography finally catching up? Umile has produced a set of images that give us the opportunity to explore in photographs what we usually look for in other media. He has advanced the art of photography beyond what we usually look for in a photograph.
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