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| Self-Portrait of former dancer Ingrid Endel, www.123inspiration.com |
Pictured here is former dancer now turned amateur photographer, Ingrid Endel. Her image depicts a still-motion photograph of her mid leap, in the middle of a clearing in a wooded area. Her face is hidden behind the figure of her body, but the posture of her hands and body suggests a liberating freedom and fiery passion. The blurring of the photograph centers all of the attention on the subject, Ingrid. This in combination with her clothing and movement create an ephemeral, dream-like look to the photograph. The “dark side” seen around the edges of this photograph are literally blurred away and objectified, so that the only thing now in focus is the image of Ingrid’s dancing figure. It seems almost as if the viewer of this image has been granted a glimpse of an intimate moment in Ingrid’s life, showing her in a state where “the barriers to our essential Being fall away” (Nuñez, 2009). In this moment, Ingrid has captured her raw self, in a state of her own choosing, free from the immediate gaze of any other person but herself as subject, spectator, and photographer. This image exemplifies how the act of taking one’s own photo can allow for catharsis and revelation of the inner self.
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| Cristina Nuñez - Despair, www.celesteprize.com |
This photo displays a similar degree of passion to the previous one, but pictures Cristina Nuñez in a moment of extreme sadness. Her muscles are tensed, neck strained, face grimaced, and fists clenched around the remote shutter device. In this instant, where Cristina obviously is in severe emotional distress and pain, she chose to take a picture. She captured this moment of outright, raw, blunt emotion as a way in which to cope with her feelings. In this way, Nuñez is truly exemplifying the concept of self-portraiture as therapeutic. By taking a photo of herself at such a vulnerable time, Nuñez is morphing her pain into strength, in turn raising her self-esteem and improving the image she has of herself. This process of therapy allows Nuñez to accept the faults and struggles she has faced in her life, and move on from her past downfalls to reach new strength.
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Like the previous photograph, this image depicts sadness and regret in photographer Katie West. Her self-portrait shows a hand covering part of her face as she looks longingly off into the distance. Once again, we see that the self-portrait acts as a link to an extremely intimate moment in the subject’s life. The image, however, is in no way meant to be for anyone other than Katie herself. The self-portrait she has taken here represents her establishing a connection with her inner self. The vulnerability exhibited in this image is something most other people would never want to make concrete through a photograph, yet Katie has done so here as a way of dealing with her emotions and confronting them through the medium of photography. This process of understanding and becoming comfortable with oneself makes way for another process which Nuñez claims allows us to “anticipate the times and forsee what human beings will be and need in the future. This is the artists social role” (Nuñez, 2009).
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