Photography is a form of placing that person you photograph on a pedestal. It is imperative that the pedestal be the right size. - Tony Vaccaro
DIRECTIONS: Through portraiture, answer the question, "What is identity?
WHAT IS IDENTITY?
Types of identity HERE.
DEFINITION
i·den·ti·ty: the condition of being oneself or itself, and not another; the distinguishing character or personality of an individual; condition or character as to who a person or what a thing is
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE...
...male, female, young, old, gay, straight, rich, poor, middle class, black, latino/latina, asian, white, pacific islander, rural, urban, physically challenged, mentally challenged...(this list could go on for quite an amount)
DIANE ARBUS
"I don't press the shutter," Arbus once noted. "The image does. And it's like being gently clobbered."
Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park
“My favourite thing is to go where I’ve never been.”
“Photographing is not about being comfortable, either for the photographer or the subject."
"There's a quality of legend about freaks," Arbus said. "Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats."
RICHARD AVEDON
There’s always been a separation between fashion and what I call my “deeper” work. Fashion is where I make my living. I’m not knocking it. It’s a pleasure to make a living that way. It’s pleasure, and then there’s the deeper pleasure of doing my portraits. It’s not important what I consider myself to be, but I consider myself to be a portrait photographer. - Richard Avedon - 1974
A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion .... All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth. - Richard Avedon, In the American West: Photographs, 1979-1984
Ronald Fischer (1981)
CECIL BEATON
"Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary. "-Cecil Beaton
Silhouette portrait of Audrey Hepburn by Cecil Beaton for Conde Naste, 1964
CINDY SHERMAN
"If I knew what the picture was going to be like I wouldn’t make it. It was almost like it was made already.. the challenge is more about trying to make what you can’t think of." - Cindy Sherman
Untitled #359, 2000
more to come...