Representation in Self Portraiture This is a blog to keep track of my dissertation research and to help develop ideas in an organised manner.

This book may be relevant for my dissertation - similarities to Goldin...


Whistle for the Wind
Ryan McGinley
Rizzoli Internation Publications, Inc
978-0-8478-3831-8

Mobile Devices, John Kelsey p7
Naked pictures
Seem like they're projected onto the photographs
"We are always putting out, always on screen, always leaking, and our new nakedness puts a fresh body on so much everyday exposure and connection. But we also remain somehow innocent in our promiscuous, free, and unstoppable leaking. And our new nakedness is as easy going and generic as an emoticon." p9

Interesting set of photographs, not self-portraits however? Which is a shame but I may be able to work some of this in, photographs of truth which may have been concealed... taboo?



Simon Johnson www.thephilosophicalphotographer.co.uk

Previous blog post, included a small piece about her 'The Hug' portrait.
http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1725489160125905015#editor/target=post;postID=5326458816258421618

Information collated by googling 'Nan Goldin Self-portrait'
- in my mind the photograph 'one month after being battered' is prominent

Self portrait on the train, germany 1992
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/goldin-self-portrait-on-the-train-germany-p78047

" Goldin's harrowing self-portrait Nan one month after being battered 1984 (Tate P78045) marked the end of a long-term relationship with her lover, Brian. After this she slid into depression accompanied by increasing bouts of hard-drug abuse. She entered a clinic in Boston in 1988 and recalls: 'I didn't have any knowledge of light, consciously - none - until I went to the hospital in 1988. I lived in the dark, I lived by night. I had no idea that light changed in the course of a day. I didn't spend enough time outside to know that.' (Quoted in I'll Be Your Mirror, p.449.) Almost all her photographs of the period 1978 to 1988 were taken indoors, at night, using a flashbulb. In the clinic she began to photograph herself in natural light, the change in colour tones and atmosphere reflecting the change in her visualisation of herself, and her world, without the intense hyper-reality of intoxication. Afterwards, learning how to live without drugs and alcohol, she said that she used 'the camera to fit back into my own skin, to relearn first my face and then the outside world' (quoted in A Double Life, p.11). This new-found mood of tranquillity is reflected in Goldin's pose of contemplation in this 1992 Self Portrait. She has explained: 'What I'm interested in is capturing life as it's being lived, and the flavour and the smell of it, and maintaining that in the pictures … it really is … about wanting to see the truth, and accepting it, rather than about trying to make my version of it.' (Quoted in Nan Goldin: I'll be your Mirror, p.452.) "

Nan Goldin, One month after being battered 1984
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/goldin-nan-one-month-after-being-battered-p78045

"The dark shadows behind her head indicate the use of a flash bulb. As a photographic print, this image exists in an edition of twenty-five. It marks the end of a long-term relationship and a particular period in the artist's life and provides the emotional climax of Goldin's slide show and book The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. It also appears in Goldin's more recent slide show series of self-portraits titled All By Myself 1995-6. She has explained the situation leading up to this image: "

"For a number of years I was deeply involved with a man. We were well suited
emotionally and the relationship became very interdependent. Jealousy was used to

inspire passion. His concept of relationships was rooted in … romantic idealism … I craved the dependency, the adoration, the satisfaction, the security, but sometimes I felt claustrophobic. We were addicted to the amount of love the relationship supplied ... Things between us started to break down, but neither of us could make the break. The desire was constantly reinspired at the same time that the dissatisfaction became undeniable. Our sexual obsession remained one of the hooks. One night, he battered me severely, almost blinding me. (Quoted in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, p.8.) "

She has said 'I want to show exactly what my world looks like, without glamorisation, without glorification. This is not a bleak world but one in which there is an awareness of pain, a quality of introspection' (quoted in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, p.6)


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Nan Goldin
A Double Life
David Armstrong
1994
ISBN - 1-881616-21-5

The foreward is split into two parts, first half is by David, second half by Nan

Lots of drug use, great friendship, Nan worshipped the queens
"but more often it seems we're just an old married couple now who never have sex, at least not with each other." p8 on his relationship to nan

David was the first person Nan ever photographed p9
He named her Nan and showed her her personality
"I became the person I wanted to be when I was with David"
"Before I met David I had looked inside myself and found emptiness but he looked inside me and found pearls."

"After being brutally beaten up by my boyfriend in 1984 my relationshipwith drugs crossed the line from use to abuse. By 1986 I was in my full-blown addiction." p10
Had burned bridges, HIV entered their world by 1981, several friends had died

"I started by taking self-portraits ) using the camera to fit back into my own skin, to relearn first my face and then the outside world." p11

(Nan  Goldin 1993, Berlin)

Lovely pictures, very interesting varied, most seem to be nan's pictures or david's pictures, very few self-portraits, but you get a good idea of the world and life being led here.
Ended with the self-portrait on the train which is interesting

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Nan Goldin
I'll be your mirror
edited by Nan goldin david armstrong, hans werner holzwarth
 Whitney museum of american art
ISBN 3-931141-33-0

Contents
-Directors Foreward, David A. Ross p15
-In/of her time: Nan Goldin's Photographs, Elisabeth Sussman p25
-All yesterday's Parties, Luc Sante p97
-Case #7: Dora, Cookie Mueller p129
-"My Number one medium All my life: Goldin talking w/ J. Hoberman p135
-Nan's Manhattan, Darryl Pinckney p203
-A Last letter, Cookie Mueller p274
-Pictures of life and loss, Marvin Heiferman p277
-Deep pictures of us all, Joachim Sartorius p319
- For Andrew Wood, James Fenton p367
-Postcards from America: X-rays from hell, David Wojnarowicz p374
-On acceptance: A conversation, Goldin talking w/ Armstrong + Keller p447

Directors Foreward - David A. Ross p15
Goldin feels strongly about Lou Reed's poetry, velvet's music + the song "I'll be your mirror"
"She shares her life with us, shares her need for a release, and her expectations of the sublime. And as we observe all this in sumptuous detail, we are rendered mute."

In/of her time: Nan Goldin's Photographs, Elisabeth Sussman p25
"As single images, Goldin's work can be seen as "social portraiture."

"Goldin's world was on of self-definition in a constructed , self-created space, recorded by constant picture taking." p27

"As if sensing that the camera would reveal a new identity, independent of conventional society and relating to a world constructed of each other and of a fantastic symbiosis with glamour, Goldin's friends became enamored of picture taking and posing." p28

"Goldin now began to use a Pentax camera. In her earlier work, she had had to shoot in available light." p30 "...Most significantly, by 1973, she was beginning to shoot in color." p30

"Even when photographing in natural light, she often unconsciously replicated the effect of artificisal lighting. In many of her works, radiant natural light, such as sunset, takes on the unnatural effulgence of a stage backdrop." p31

Slideshows, were cheap and allowed a narrative to be shown, Goldin's preferred method p32
The Ballad of sexual dependency, slides always change each time it is shown p33
description of the ballad, mirror meaning of reflection, confirmation

"The emotional climax of the narrative is the photograph Nan one month after being battered (1984, pp. 198-99). a self-portrait showing Goldin's disfigured face, her eye smashed and bloodshot, staring into the viewing lens, after being beaten up by her longtime boyfriend. This event signaled the end of a relationship and of a period in the artist's life." p36
SELF-PORTRAIT, BRIEF DESCRIPTION

Slideshow 'All by myself' series of self-portraits, series documenting her own downside and subsequent recovery.. presents herself in pain and despair. p37

"Goldin's extended portraits of herself, CookieMueller, and Siobhan reveal the editing process that she has used since 1991 to organise the narrative structure of her work." p40
how a photograph is presented, curated changes how it is percieve and interpreted
 "Goldin takes these pictures (of individuals) one by one, without predetermining their meanings, but then assembles them in what she calls an extended portraits ... they more accurately approach the way memory works."
   
All yesterday's Parties, Luc Sante p97

[X]

Case #7: Dora, Cookie Mueller p129

[X]

"My Number one medium All my life" NanGoldin talking with J. Hoberman p135

movie watching - shared experience
more related to film, and how ballad was like film, etc

190-191 - self portrait? ex lover on the bed, smoking cigarette
 196-197 bruised eyes self portrsit?
198-199 self portrait one month after being battered

Nan's Manhattan, Darryl Pinckney p203

234-235 self portrait, sat on a bed
not a particulary relevant chapter

Pictures of life and loss, Marvin Heiferman p277

Casta Diva song to the Ballad
"The aria that Callas sings sings - "Casta Diva" from Bellini's opera Norma - implores the goddess of the moon to use the power and the beauty of light to reveal truth, to soothe pain to strengthen character, to illuminate a path to peace. Nan Goldin has asked nothing less of the medium of photography. For more than twenty years, she has upheld her belief in the power and beauty of photography and her commitment to photographic truth." p277
"Soon pictures were being taken, not to trigger memory, but to become memory itself. They were the only way to remember what had happened the night before." p278

Deep pictures of us all, Joachim Sartorius p319

"Nan replied, "I don't choose people in order to photograph them; I take photos straight from my life. These photos come straight from relationships, not from observation." Nan Goldin photographs what she knows. Her work has the compelling conviction of authenticity" p321 ...

"She questions our identity. She questions the human condition and the way we live, as individuals, now." p323

seeing of seeing

"Helmut Newton praised Goldin's self-portraits above all. And rightly so. Rarely do we find in contemporary photography such boundless self-effacement. The self-portraits lay bare her integrity and absolute honesty even more explicitly than her other works." p324

On acceptance: A conversation, Goldin talking w/ Armstrong + Keller p447

[X]

Need to look at next: Ballad + All by myself





Simon Johnson www.thephilosophicalphotographer.co.uk

Side Article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2003/sep/05/guardianobituaries.obituaries
announced after Coplans death, small summary of his life etc.

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The book is full of many articles written by Coplans, so some research before hand was necessary:
Source art.net: http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/index/fyfe/fyfe8-17-01.asp
"spent time with the photographer Lee Friedlander and began to take his own photographs" 
interesting how all these artists are connected
"It functions as both a look backward at some of his best essays and a look forward to how some of his analyses of other art anticipate his own work"
"An interview with Jasper Johns, for example, is a series of questions about process that subtly coaxes Johns to reveal his esthetic values."
"Our familiarity with Coplans' own photographic output resonates in his description of a Weegee photo of a nearly naked man sleeping on a fire escape, who is "transformed by Weegee's merciless lens into the image of an aging helpless child," "
"or when he notes that Brancusi often appears in his own photographs "as if to say for a work of art to exist, there has to be a maker, an artist imposing his will." "
"The book's chapters are sequenced in such a way that two of the last essays, on Watkins and Philip Guston, seem to launch him into his own project, a dark burlesque of the body's natural architecture."

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Provocations: Writings by John Coplans
Edited by Stuart Morgan
p. 1996  by London Projects
1-900602-00-8

Sections to read:

p7 Introduction by Stuart Morgan

p115 Interview with Jasper Johns (1972)
p205 Weegee the famous (1977)
p231 Brancusi as Photographer (1980)

p213 C.E. Watkins at Yosemite (1978) *
p227 The private Eye of Phillip Guston (1980)*

p237 Epilogue: A letter to my Son Joseph (1995)

INTRODUCTION BY STUART MORGAN 
Coplans had been a solider in the past p7
then painter, teacher, founder/editor of artforum mag
1962-1980 wrote art criticism - voice was informed and independent
one of coplans strengths - empathy

his interests are his own p8
referring to: Watkins at Yosemite: rediscovery of an ignored 19th c. photographer, opportunity to reinvisage history, ruminate over photography and landscape in 19th c.

disregards the term 'conceptual art' p9
When is the painting finished, would have answered never, having the last word

mentions weegee p10

referring to Branchusi: argues he was "pursuing a continuously renewing potential." p11
IF I NEED: three principles of serial imagery (plus a generous 3 more) p11

May re-read if necessary... probably not terribly relevant to my dissertation.

INTERVIEW WITH JASPER JOHNS (1972) p115
according to Johns
discussing his lithographic series Fragment - according to what
consists of several linked panels - 5 or 6

Upon reading, I found it doesn't seem very relevant.

WEEGEE THE FAMOUS (1977) p205

"It has been said that' not he who is ignorant of writing but ignorant of photography will be the illiterate of the future.' But isn't a photographer who can't read his own pictures worth less than an illiterate? Will not captions become components of pictures? - Walter Benjamin p205
"The images Weegee brought back from another world would deeply trouble us. A gritty, raucous and self-advertising voyeur (who called himself "the famous") ..."
Weegee - Ouija board , prediciting of events, phonetic

"In a photograph shot vertically from above, a flabby and nearly naked man sleeps on a mattress on the fire escape below. He is transformed by Weegee's merciless lens into the image of an ageing, helpless child." p209

Interesting, if I was to introduce weegee into my dissertation, but really the focus should be Coplans

"Finally, our awareness of Weegee's excitement promotes these images of ostensibly banal horror which is capable of moving us. Weegee does not apologise. The private eye had a vital insensibility that is precious. This is his fascination" p212

BRANCUSI AS PHOTOGRAPHER (1980) p231

Sculptor, used photographer by end of the century
Though by 1918 was very influential artist, but merely competant as a photographer
"for all are to a greater or lesser degree evidentiary: they record the specific appearance of things or people at a given moment." p231
light crucially affects sculpture

documentary used in relation to his photographs p232

"the photograph speaks of the past, of things completed, of those set aside for the time being, of actions about to be taken, and of a range of thinking going on" p233

Two views of Bird in space

he bends photography to his will p234
continuously renewing potential

"Brancusi often appears in his own photographs, as if to say for a work of art to exist there has to be a maker, an artist imposing his will." p235

C.E. WATKINS AT YOSEMITE (1978) p213

THE PRIVATE EYE OF PHILIP GUSTON (1980) p227

"The brushwork and drawing imparts a feeling of his persona" p227

EPILOGUE (1995) p237

This letter is about the disposal of my body after my death... p237
what should be done with my ashes

interesting, great sense of personality, humor... consideration etc...

SERIAL IMAGERY: DEFINITION (1968) p77

might be worth reading later... if the self-portraits are seen as a series of work...
 


Simon Johnson www.thephilosophicalphotographer.co.uk

Original Blog post: http://simonjohnsondissertation.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/self-portrait-photographs-by-lee.html

Self Portrait: Photographs By Lee Friedlander
Afterword by John Szarkowski
p. by the museum of modern art
1970

Quoted by Friedlander, new city, new york, feb 1970
-Self portraits span 6 years
"and were not done as a specific preoccupation, but rather, they happened as a peripheral extension of my work."
so not consciously aware of what he was doing, it seems? However, every photographer is conscious of the editing process selection, creation of the book etc... so not completely unconscious decisions go into these things.
"I might call myself an intruder. At any rate, they came about slowly and not with plan but more as another discovery each time."
"I suspect it is for one's self-interest that one looks at one's surroundings and one's self. This search is personally born and is indeed my reason and motive for making photographs."
"The camera is not merely a reflecting pool and the photographs are not exactly the mirror, mirror on the wall that speaks with a twisted tongue. Witness is borne and puzzles come together at the photographic moment which is very simple and complete. The mind-finger presses the release on the silly machine and it stops time and holds what its jaws can encompass and what the light will stain. That moment when the landscape speaks to the observer."
 interpret this as thing being manipulated or being truthful

General observations on his self-portraits:
breaks general conventions of photography
-reflected photographer in windows
-shadows of the photographer in the shot
-seen in the mirror, revealling the camera, breaking the illusion

22 Louisiana 1968
  implied leering, presence of observation... 

27 new york city 1966
   same, stalkery

 The Friedlander Self, by John Szarkoski (4 pages of text)

first page
-talks about the ease of self-portraiture
"the obvious disadvantage of the self as subject is the fact that it inevitably raises the issue of conflict of interest. When the artist is also the subject, wearing two hates at once, is he (she) first of all the servant of historic and artistic justice, or the agent of self-advancement?"
Talking about the bias that is offered to the photographer, this could be a more general statement
"Albrecht Durer who appears in his own pictures as only marginally less spiritually beautiful than Christ himself, whereas the artist's brother Hans appears to be just another calculating northerner." 
LOOK AT HIM. Very biased and conscious of it?
"Even Vincent Van Gogh, showing himself with his head swathed in the great white bandage, the visible  badge of his folly, paints himself as an exemplary-as a radiant-fool, not to be confused with all those other uncounted fools who also sent their severed ears to whores and afterwards painted their self-portraits badly, or not at all.
Interesting... add this back into chapter 2 VAN GOGH after thinking about it.

-Rembrandt portraits
"Only a dunce or knave would compare the work of one of the greatest of the dead painters to the work of any photographer, much less one still in excellent health, like Friedlander, and I must emphasize here that I am not really comparing their work, certainly not comparing their brushwork or anything of that sort, but merely suggesting that there might be some interesting point of similarity in their attitudes, which allows them both to look at their own selves with such remarkable and rare disinterest." 

-list of best self-portraits
"perhaps it would be more useful not to think of these pictures as portraits at all, but as landscapes, of a variety that Friedlander was perhaps the first to call....social landscapes."
 clear or vague impression of Friedlander..... "or some other thick or thin slice or suggestion of him should perhaps not be regarded as a description of his true character, or his person, or even his public persona, but simply as a kind of identifying mark-something similar to a signature, or a fingerprint, or a royal seal, that indicates that he, Friedlander, a reliable witness (like Kilroy) was there, and testifies to the precise, objective accuracy of the report he is giving us." 
  not identity but a signifier to some identitifying mark.... still a representation is it not? A signpost to Friedlander?

"One could think of these pictures not exactly as portraits but as sketches of tentative identities being tried out to see if they fit, in which case they might be adopted as more or less permanent roles and obligations."
interesting, to think of them in another way than self-portraits and that the self isn't something that is accurate, but more the opposite/
STILL, there has been conscious choice in this construction of portraits is there not
ALSO, I don't haave to take this view as truth I can obviously disagree with it
"In the Friedlander pictures the fictional identities are not attached to older historical or literary characters, but are new peronae constructed of the very process of photography. In this sense they might be profitably compared to the fictional self-portraits of Cindy Sherman, which are similar in the sense that both photographers are interested in the exploration of roles, but dissimilar in the sense that for Sherman the roles would appear to be designed in the mind, like advertisements, and then realised by the means of photography, whereas for Friedlander one cannot properly think of the idea in the absece of, or distinct from, the photograph in which it is embedded"
comparison with Sherman... meaning??

* * *

Friedlander at a conference, had nothing to say about his images.
360 pictures as slides
brave person asked where one was made
Friedlander continued to tell the place where every one was made
Was asked if it was relevant where they were taken
"Friedlander considered the question for a moment and, wit a respectful seriousness of manner that I have no reason to belive feigned, said yes, he thought it was relevant that the piture had been made in Chattanooga, because if he (Friedlander) had not been in that city he would not have been able to make that picture." 

* * *
"Similarly, if he was not Lee Friedlander he would not have been able to make these portraits. Lee Friedlander is the person who made these pictures"
"Friedlander's so-called self-portraits can also be seen in this light, as pictures that are determined to conceal the fact that artists' lives are more interesting than other lives."
"What is the main subject of these pictures? Or perhaos that question is too broad and difficult, and should be broken down into two narrower and easier questions; first, who is the subject of these pictures? And second, what else is their subject?"
-first Q is straightforward. the who has changed continually, mailman, rapist, salesman. roles.

"These roles, although obviously based on fact, were not taken too seriously as truth; it was rather as though an inventive, high spirited child had found the key to the little room behind the library, where the pattern book of human types is kept, and proceeded to revise the book using it for his design bits and pieces of the real world."
shifted to new ground (the who)
first noticed in 'canyon de chelly arizona' ...
"and that what I was now looking at was not an artistic invention but the real Friedlander, the man himself, part cowboy and part con man, but mostly witch doctor......"
"Or, alternatively, I was mistaken earlier, and all those earlier whos were also the real Friedlander. Or perhaps I am mistaken now, and the fact is that Friedlander has become a more skillful poseur."
 dependent on writings themselves, and writings by other people of them for an subjective or objective (or so we assume... at this point) 

second question... a false dichotomy, red herring

"Let us call it a photograph, an example of that species of picture that attempts to produce the illusion of clear meaning by recording the image on a camera's screen. One can produce this illusion even with the simplest of materials, even with subject matter that we carry always with us. Or perhaps these materials are not so simple as they seem. It has surely been pointed out that the fisherman, no matter how carefully he studies its deeps and shallows, never fishes the same river twice."

  
  
 
  




Simon Johnson www.thephilosophicalphotographer.co.uk

(book 1 of 2)
The complete Untitled film stills
Cindy Sherman
P. by museum of modern art, New York
 2003?
0-87070-507-5

The Making of Untitled
Her starting inspiration, a film consisting of mostly images: Chris Marker's La Jetee p4

Cindy had experience in film making, stop motion animation
wasn't in to painting... "I was into conceptual, Minimal, performance, body art, film-alternatives." p5
Dressed up for parties, in character

"I knew I wanted to go on making little narratives, but without using other people. I wanted to work alone; I wanted a controlled situation in my studio." p6
"This kind of imagery would solve my problem of trying to imply a story without involving other people, just suggesting them outside the frame: something clicked" p6

"I didn't want to title the photographs because it would spoil the ambiguity" p7
arbitrary numbering of photographs
"I really didnt know what I was doing at the time, I was playing."
"Whenever I install any of the Film Stills in a group, or order them in this book for example, I try to destroy any sense of a continuum; I want all the characters to look different. When I see two blonds together I get nervous that they look too much alike."

"I was mostly going for the look of European as opposed to Hollywood types. Some of the characters consciously influenced, for example #13 by Brigitte Bardot." p8
"What I didn't want were pictures showing strong emotion. In a lot of movie photos the actors look cute, impish, alluring, distraught, frightened, tough, etc., but what I was interested in was when they were almost expressionless." because there's a lot of overacting.
"I looked for it consciously; I didn't want to ham it up, and I knew that if I acted too happy, or too sad, or scared-if the emotional equotient was too high-the photograph would seem campy."
"None of the Film Still characters was a particular stretch because I never knew what I was setting out to do- it wasn't like I had these visions in my head that I had to realize"

Left impression that there are are other people outside the frame p8-9

"I'm not sure if I was yet aware of the fact that in most early films, women who don't follow the accepted order of marriage and family, who are strong, rebellious characters, are either killed off in the script or see the light and become tamed, joining a nunnery or something. Usually they die. I think I must have been unconsciously drawn to those types of characters" p9
"I suppose unconsciously, or semiconsciously at best, I was wrestling with some sort of turmoil of my own about understanding women .... They were women struggling with something but I didn't know what ... but I defiitely felt that the characters were questioning something-perhaps being forced into a certain role. AT the same time, those roles are in a film: the women aren't being lifelike they're acting. There are so many levels of artifice. I liked that whole jumble of ambiguity."
-experiemented with men but didn't work out, cliches were so contrived and stereotypes few

"I tried to think of ways to make the loft look like it could be other places" p10
"I wanted those first six shots to look cheesy so I deliberately used warmer chemicals in the darkroom to make the film reticulate, which gives it a sort of crackling, grainy look."
-Went to an opening in character, Duchamps creation
 "But I loved performance art, the idea of performing; I saw a lot of it and briefly toyed with it myself"

inexperienced with make up p12
Didn't think what she was dong was political

"I wanted the pictures to be mysterious, and to look like unidentifiable locations. So I used types f buildings that looked as if they could be anywhere-just like I used to make my studio look like hotel rooms." p13
Cindy Sherman tried to strip away all identity in a photograph, perhaps this is more impossible than portraying a completely accurate recording? Maybe I have this the wrong way round?
THINK OF THE GUY WHO COPIES SHERMAN'S IMAGES




"Generally I didn't take more than six shots of any one character or scene" p14
More subversion with more photographs.... But this may not matter so much as it's already heavily constructed.

"At some point I accidentally loaded a roll of color film, so there's  one roll of color shots . I didn't like them at the time because they looked too real, too contemporary. I like them now, perhaps because they've faded and have their own truly vintage color, washed out and purplish." p15
Changed opinion.perception over time
In reference to #43, "I did a lot of severe cropping, which was why I felt OK about giving other people control of the camera: I figured I could always crop down to what I wanted" p15

small point about looking like the characters she portrayed
"Throughout my life I've tried to keep looking different, so my hair has been all different colors, all lengths and styles. As a result, a lot of these characters look like me in the periods of my life since I shot the Film Stills- perhaps unconsciusly I've been following them, or at least their hairstyles. Occasionally I've felt that as I've gotten older I've come to look more like some of them." p15

After this, run out of cliches and started experimenting with color.. p16

#4, 1977 cindy against the door
#3, 1977
#54 1980
#58 1980
#6 1977
 #13 1978 library
#48, 1979

Interestingly, found her earliest photographs the most interesting, with the exception of 2.

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(book 2 of 2)
Untitled Film Stills
Cindy Sherman
   with an essay by Arthur C. Danto
P. Jonathan Cape London, 1990
0-224-03017-5

Photography and Performance: Cindy Sherman's Stills
-Arthur C. Danto

Heroes, Greek Gods, lessons for the West, Pre-Raphaelites,
"There is a deep and unanswered question in social history of why, in the early 1960s, a great reversal took place, in which the objects that define the very form of life that had been routinely dismissed as aesthetically unacceptable, began all at once to swamp artistic consciousness, and to flood the precincts of high art with the energy of a profound revolution" p6
"Who ever could have imagined the soup can or the soda bottle becoming the motifs of fine art? Or comic strip, the numbered painting, or the advertising image?" p6

Transformation of the art world, Sherman's work in response to this perhaps. p8

"it is widely accepted that all the stills (and nearly all her work to date after the series of stills came to an end) are of cindy sherman herself. The "of"requires as much by the way of explanation as the "by" in describing them as "by" Cindy Sherman, when the latter does not entail that she took the picture. She, Cndy Sherman, is, for example, in no sense the subject of these works, even if it is an important fact about them that they are more or less all of her." p9-10

pose is like a painting p10
just some actress playing the part

"In this sense, none of Cindy Sherman's images is of Cindy as. They are of The Girl, for whom Cindy Sherman posed. So the images are of Cindy Sherman in a way that is incidental and even secondary in any given work, but curiously centra and essential to the work taken as a whoke, The whole for once is greater than the sum of its integral parts." p10
"In whatever sense it is that the individual stills are of her, none of the works so far as I can tell is in any sense a self-portrait of Cindy Sherman. They are portraits at best of an identity she shares with every woman who concieves the narrative of her life in the idiom of the cheap movie" p10
"Sherman's face is a neutral base on which she inscribes the countless faces of The Girl in her myriad embodiments."
USE THIS... seems to suggest and cohere with Butler here, the individual person is irrelevant, a naked body for example is just that, stripped from identity, identity is not the physical shell but the mental aspects and experiences/memories that make up a person is it not? What is being transcribed here in Sherman's work is her actions, and actions create this identity... 
(directly follows on)
"Nor do they have as contemporary counterparts the photographic studies of his own aging body by John Coplans. From Coplan's photographs of his body it would, I think, be possible to recognise his body if one saw it naked, so remarkably unanonymous are they. But I cannot imagine anyone who could recognise Sherman from the stills." p10
-so little she resembles them, was surprised when he met her
-Herrnsteins pigeons
-Performance art p11

The stills are all frozen dramas
"The Girl is always alone, waiting, worried, watchful, but she is wary of, waiting for, worried about, and her very posture and expression phenomenologically imply the Other: the Stalker, the Saver, the Evil and the Good who struggle for her possession." p13

 Better Stills in this book!



Simon Johnson www.thephilosophicalphotographer.co.uk

I thought perhaps my conception of what the unconscious mind is may be a little bit narrow if it just contained Sigmund Freud, also, his theories may not be correct or may be considered to not withstand modern day ideas etc...
A more general research of the unconscious mind may help me develop my argument and what to be discussed in the 4th chapter of the dissertation.

Of course wikipedia is not a reliable source of information, however it is a starting point - a framework for me to begin my research:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscious_mind

-Concept of the unconscious was popularised and developed by Freud
-Empirical evidence suggests that unconscious phenomena include repressed feelings, automatic  skills, subliminal perceptions, thoughts, habits, and automatic reactions,^[1]
   possibly also complexes, hidden phobias and desires
-----http://apa.sagepub.com/content/47/4/1061
-In psychoanalytic theory, unconscious processes are understood to be expressed in dreams in a symbolical form, as well as in slips of the tongue and jokes 




Simon Johnson www.thephilosophicalphotographer.co.uk

P-E-P Archive (Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing 
http://www.uclan.ac.uk/students/library/pep_archive.php 

From: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/freud_sigmund.shtml
Freud developed the theory that humans have an unconscious in which sexual and aggressive impulses are in perpetual conflict for supremacy with the defences against them. In 1897, he began an intensive analysis of himself. In 1900, his major work 'The Interpretation of Dreams' was published in which Freud analysed dreams in terms of unconscious desires and experiences.

The conscious + unconscious mind
http://psychology.about.com/od/theoriesofpersonality/a/consciousuncon.htm

According to Freud, the mind can be divided into two main parts:

1. The conscious mind includes everything that we are aware of. This is the aspect of our mental processing that we can think and talk about rationally. A part of this includes our memory, which is not always part of consciousness but can be retrieved easily at any time and brought into our awareness. Freud called this ordinary memory the preconscious.


2. The unconscious mind is a reservoir of feelings, thoughts, urges, and memories that outside of our conscious awareness. Most of the contents of the unconscious are unacceptable or unpleasant, such as feelings of pain, anxiety, or conflict. According to Freud, the unconscious continues to influence our behavior and experience, even though we are unaware of these
   underlying influences.

The Id, Ego + Superego
http://psychology.about.com/od/theoriesofpersonality/a/personalityelem.htm MORE DETAIL

three elements of personality--known as the id, the ego and the superego--work together to create complex human behaviors.

1. The id is the only component of personality that is present from birth. This aspect of personality is entirely unconscious and includes of the instinctive and primitive behaviors. According to Freud, the id is the source of all psychic energy, making it the primary component of personality.

2. The ego is the component of personality that is responsible for dealing with reality. According to Freud, the ego develops from the id and ensures that the impulses of the id can be expressed in a manner acceptable in the real world. The ego functions in both the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious mind.

3.  The last component of personality to develop is the superego. The superego is the aspect of personality that holds all of our internalized moral standards and ideals that we acquire from both parents and society--our sense of right and wrong. The superego provides guidelines for making judgments. According to Freud, the superego begins to emerge at around age five.

The Interpretation of Dreams
http://psychology.about.com/od/sigmundfreud/gr/interpretation.htm

[X] his theories have not faired too well...
I'm more interested in how he went about interpreting his own dreams here. Also, the unconscious stuff is paramount, and this can be discussed in reference to Sherman, Friedlander and Coplans.



Simon Johnson www.thephilosophicalphotographer.co.uk




Simon Johnson www.thephilosophicalphotographer.co.uk

 Useful information to look through: http://www.masters-of-photography.com/S/sherman/sherman_resources.html

General information from http://www.cindysherman.com/
   turned the camera on herself
  "most of her pictures are of her, however they are definitely not self-portraits"
   interesting to think that, of course I an contest this point of view
   "Sherman has raised challenging and important questions about the role and representation of women in society, the media and the nature of the creation of art."

begun in 1977, Sherman places herself in the roles of B-movie actresses. Her photographs show her dressed up in wigs, hats, dresses, clothes unlike her own, playing the roles of characters. While many may mistake these photographs for self-portraits, these photographs only play with elements of self-portraiture and are really something quite different. In each of these photographs, Sherman plays a type -- not an actual person, but a self-fabricated fictional one. There is the archetypal housewife, the prostitute, the woman in distress, the woman in tears, the dancer, the actress, and the malleable, chameleon-like Sherman plays all of these characters.
 
 "For a work of art to be considered a portrait, the artist must have intent to portray a specific, actual person. This can be communicated through such techniques as naming a specific person in the title of the work or creating an image in which the physical likeness leads to an emotional individuality unique to a specific person. While these criteria are not the only ways of connoting a portrait, they are just two examples of how Sherman carefully communicates to the viewer that these works are not meant to depict Cindy Sherman the person. By titling each of the photographs "Untitled", as well as numbering them, Sherman depersonalizes the images."

"There are also very few clues as to Sherman's personality in the photographs - each one is so unique and ambiguous that the viewer is left with more confusion than clarity over Sherman's true nature. Sherman completed the project three years later, in 1980, when she "ran out of clichés" with which to work. This series gave Sherman much publicity and critical acclaim; she had her first solo show at the nonprofit space, the Kitchen, in New York City. In 1980 Sherman also created a series of what she called "Rear-Screen Projections" in which, similarly to the Film Stills, Sherman dressed up and paraded against a projected slide background"

"Sherman's second most known body of work came some time after the Film Stills had already been well received, around 1988-1990. In the History Portraits Sherman again uses herself as model, though this time she casts herself in roles from archetypally famous paintings. While very few specific paintings are actually referenced, one still feels a familiarity of form between Sherman's work and works by great masters. Using prosthetic body parts to augment her own body, Sherman recreates great pieces of art and thus manipulates her role as a contemporary artist working in the twentieth-century. Sherman lived abroad during this time in her life, and even though museums would appear to be the source of inspiration for this series, she is not a fan of museums: "Even when I was doing those history pictures, I was living in Rome but never went to the churches and museums there. I worked out of books, with reproductions. It's an aspect of photograph I appreciate, conceptually: the idea that images can be reproduced and seen anytime, anywhere, by anyone.""

Books:

Simon Johnson www.thephilosophicalphotographer.co.uk

 born July 14, 1934

self Portrait, third edition. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2005. ISBN 0-87070-338-2. By Friedlander and John Szarkowski.

Self Portrait. New City, NY: Haywire Press, 1970.

Lee Friedlanders 'self-portrait' book, might be worth to get it out again
http://simonjohnsondissertation.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/self-portrait-photographs-by-lee.html

Information about the artist: http://www.moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_id=2002
Other works by Friedlander in the 1960s included the series of works that appeared in Self-portrait (1970). Contrary to the tradition of the genre Friedlander only appears in the photographs in the most oblique way, in reflections in mirrors and glass or merely as a shadow.

 Guardian Newspaper article on self-portraits
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/22/lee-friedlander-in-picture-review

New book with 500+ photographs
Sometimes, as with the series in which his own reflection is caught in shop windows, or his shadow on pavements and walls, he seemed to be playing with, or sending up, the conventions of "good photography"
There is humour aplenty in his photographs, but it is knowing, at times almost cynical
It is, I guess, a self-portrait of a kind, albeit a metaphorical one
Among the most recent self-portraits is a series of him in hospital, before and after his quadruple bypass surgery. In one, he bares the long scar that runs down his torso, the mischievous tone replaced by a more sombre one that caught me unawares. A life laid bare, then, but slyly and with a self-questioning smile.

http://www.masters-of-photography.com/F/friedlander/friedlander_articles2.html
dialogue exchange ON Friedlander

http://www.masters-of-photography.com/F/friedlander/friedlander_articles3.html
from his self-portraiture book

Lee Friedlander - Lafayette, Louisiana 1968

My Work may not be famous today, but one day... BY ME

Simon Johnson www.thephilosophicalphotographer.co.uk

b.1920 - d.2003
We only have available to us what he has been quoted to have said and no primary evidence that we could directly ask him of his work.
Source: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/john-coplans-2353
In 1971 he settled in New York as the editor of Artforum, a position he held until 1977. A year later, under the influence of his friend the photographer Lee Friedlander, he began once again to take photographs.

In 1984 Coplans began taking the photographs of his own body with which he established his international reputation as an artist. These large-scale black-and-white images, enlarged from 4×5 inch Polaroid photographs and often presented in groups, are candid and sometimes humorous explorations of his own body. By cropping off the head, Coplans presents these depersonalised images of the body as a surprising, intriguing object, fascinating in detail and malleability. His work also stands as a riposte to the cult of youth and beauty represented by commercial photography and what he saw as the vanities of the 1980s art world.
 
A Self-Portrait: John Coplans 1984–97 (exh. cat., Long Island City, NY, P.S.1, 1997)
John Coplans: A Self Portrait 1984–99 (exh. cat., Edinburgh, N.G. Mod. A., Dean Gal., 1999)

Self-Portrait (Frieze No.2 Four Panels)

Image summary: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/coplans-self-portrait-frieze-no-2-four-panels-p78534/text-summary

At first glance don't notice the images are slightly askew and don't match up, the eye compensates for this. Evokes camera moving up and down the body.

"I have the feeling that I’m alive, I have a body. I’m seventy years old, and generally bodies of seventy-year-old men look somewhat like my body ... I’m using my body and saying, even though it’s a seventy-year-old body, I can make it extremely interesting. That keeps me alive and gives me vitality. It’s a kind of process of energising myself."    ---(Quoted in A Body: John Coplans, p.175.)\

When he returned to art making in the early 1980s, he returned to the goals of that movement – the expression of universal, primordial feelings located in the psychic unconscious – using photography and his ageing body as his subject. He recounted a daydream and its result: ‘I travel down my genes and visit remote ancestors, both male and female. Inspired by these journeys to the past ... I begin directing an assistant as she takes photographs of my body. To remove all references to my current identity, I leave out my head.’ (Quoted in A Body: John Coplans, p.166.) 

For Coplans, genetic memory is the locus for a collective unconscious, a means of getting in touch with universal feelings. He believes that perception is the only means to express the unconscious, but that this ‘expressiveness’ is ‘extra-linguistic’, something which cannot be communicated in a known language. (Chevrier, p.6.)

As his photographic self-portraits evolved in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Coplans became interested in the difference between what the eye sees and what the camera records. His photographs present the body as an object seen in a way which is impossible to the naked eye. In such early works as Self Portrait (Torso, Front) 1984 (Tate P11672) he had represented his ‘self’ as a section of flesh, depersonalised through its lack of an identifying face. He now went on to represent this self as multiple – a series of selves

READ MORE IN DEPTH WITH WORK TO ELABORATE  

Further Reading:
A Body: John Coplans, New York 2001, reproduced pp.126-7
Jean-Francois Chevrier, John Coplans: Self Portraits, exhibition catalogue, Galerie Lelong, New York 1991
Stuart Morgan, Frances Morris, Rites of Passage: Art for the End of the Century, Tate Gallery, London 1995, pp.74-87, reproduced pp.82-3 no.17

 BOOK: Provocations -  http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/index/fyfe/fyfe8-17-01.asp [√]

27th Feb ---- further research into these self-portraits

Self-portrait (Back with arms above) 1984

Image summary: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/coplans-self-portrait-back-with-arms-above-p11671/text-summary

Viewed from a distance, it has a sculptural, monolithic appearance. Up close, the silver gelatin print has the graphic quality of a charcoal drawing.

In 1979 he took up photography. He explained: ‘I decided to become a photographer because I wanted to go back to being an artist. I had had enough of art history, critics, museology ... I chose photography because I could not go back to painting ... photography ... is a medium to build an identity out of a composite personality, to find an artistic identity.’ (Quoted in John Coplans: Self Portrait: Hand/Foot, p.46.)

I was very interested in this idea of genetic memory.’ (Quoted in Morris, p.75.) He began to think about the body as being able to express a language originating in a collective unconscious, something universal, primordial and direct.

Coplans uses a video camera and monitor to view parts of his body. Once he has selected an area, an assistant takes a photograph using positive/negative Polaroid film

By photographing sections of his own body, but always excluding his face, he divests it of a sense of wholeness

Presenting an ageing male body as textured surface or surreal object rather than the locus of a thinking subject depersonalised rather than defined by his identity, Coplans subverts traditional self-portraiture and historical representation of the body in photography.

Self-portrait (Torso, front) 1984

     A slab of dark-textured flesh, his torso also evokes a crudely-rendered face: his nipples and the dark hair framing them may be read as eyes and his creased belly button a downward curving mouth. Viewed in this way, the Self Portrait recalls a painting by Belgian Surrealist painter René Magritte (1898-1967), The Rape (Le Viol) 1934 (Menil Collection, Houston), in which a naked female torso is substituted for a woman’s face.

same as the other images (rest of the details)

Simon Johnson www.thephilosophicalphotographer.co.uk

Susan Sontag - On Photography
published by the penguin group
first published in this form 1977

On from omnipresence of photographed images.

Contents
In Plato's Cave 3
America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly 27
Melancholy Objects 51
The Heroism of Vision 85
Photographic Evangels 115
The Image World 153
A Brief Anthology of Quotations 183

----In Plato's Cave
humankind lingers in Plato's Cave (in denial, without truth) in mere images of the truth p3
This means, for example I have only ever seen pictures / video / depictions (representations) of the Pyramids, I have never actually SEEN them before. Same could be said for the planets... We could so easily be being decieved.
'inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems.'
"In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads-as an anthology of images."p3
Develop the philosophical side for masters... 
"Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood." p3-4
"To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed" p4
"What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings." p4 YES NEED.
"Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire." p4

"But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does" p5
"A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture ma distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what's in the picture." p5
"While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency." p6 YES NEED FOR 3chpter
"Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tactit imperatives of taste and conscience." p6
"The immensely gifted memebers of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930a (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russel Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film..." p6 SUPPORTS multiple image selection, selection.
"... In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. These occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity -and ubiquity- of the photographic record is photography's "message," its aggression." p6-7 NEED interpretations

 
   




Simon Johnson www.thephilosophicalphotographer.co.uk

Dissertation Question: To what degree can a self-portrait be taken to be an accurate representation of whom it portrays?

Dissertation entire plan summary:
chapter 1 - introduction, define terms in question, suggest problems facing answering the dissertation and how we might overcome.
chapter 2 - Van Gogh - illustrate the conscious vs unconscious creation of self-portrait, illustrate the difficulties (make a parallel with Berger, ambiguity of the image)
chapter 3 - Photographers with conscious actions in mind in creation of their work.
chapter 4 - Freud and the unconscious to suggest things beyond our control in creating work (but still this presents us with a problem in representing ourselves does it not?)
chapter 5 - THE SEER, switch focus from the photographers creation to the seer, the interpreter of the image (death of the author)
chapter 6 - Freud analysed his dreams, this will anaylyse my self-portrait project (400 images) which will lead on to suggest chapter 7 nicely.
chapter 7 - social media (to support the claim, later) This will develop my conclusion that the representation is 'seer' dependent and the more seers there are there greater the accuracy of meaning will be, context dependent (coherentism) etc.
chapter 8 - If I have words and time to develop some thoughts, possible worlds, personal identity (Locke) + Parfit....
Conclusion

longer version from December: http://simonjohnsondissertation.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/16th-december-revised-dissertation-plan.html

Chapter 2 summary (so far) how to lead into chapter 3:
-begins to address problem if the artist consciously manipulates an image.
-suggest they would, human nature
-may be an unconscious choice
-painting a good choice to discuss this problem - slowed down, likened to photoshop
-can't help relating Goghs work to the life

-Gogh's work seemed more spontaneous, could be painting feelings, or influenced by them
-this suggests not consciously manipulating images, but still problem of not being in control of outcome??
-prove the unconsious has more affect than we care to admit
-Gogh chose to start self-portraits - conscious choice
- maybe intentionally chronicling his mental state, possible to be misinterpreted?
-Paris, seemed happy and his paintings changed (with his mood)
-then near the end diminished
-pint why would someone paint themselves unflatteringly? subjective. ALSO, not well known artists, these were perhaps just for technical development and not really meant to be seen.
-still suggests consciously choosing (even if it is to manipulate)
-V.Goghs incident with Guagin, his ear, and then portrayal of it.
-last self-portraits , first glamourous, determined... one shows perhaps his mental stability.


----> So with this in mind have talked though this and ultimately we do not know do we exactly what coheres with what, we can only suggets (come back later for chapter 7) ... now need to look at photographers in relation to this, those who perhaps may be influenced in their work/photographs, but surely not all steps of the process, the output, book making, image selection etc etc and so need to discuss how much they may be portraying truth in their images.

Suggested photographers: Cindy Sherman for created identities (untruth)
                                          Lee freidlander? (to contrast not being present in the photographs...)
                                          John Coplan for naked portraits (truth)

Previous research from other blog posts:

LEE FRIEDLANDER oaxaca, mexico 1995 + anza-borrego state park, california 1997
'self-portraits of photographers are usually arrogant affairs, representations of confident, prescient artists, often seen seamlessly wedded to their mechanical 'eye'. Rare indeed is the self-portrait in which the photographer admits to a decline in his powers with age, or lays bare his fatigue with the world. Here, however Lee Friedlander faces up to his imminent demise, a weary soul resigned to a slow dissolution back into nature'
Unflattering, perhaps has more meaning and significance than mine, mine is in a period of manipulation, power and that relfects my age. - FACE [book]

No portrait is ever really taken, rather made
Is Cindy Shermans portraits as opposed to self-portraits because they do not represent herself do they... what If I put on an elephant costume inside a box it is no longer a self portrait of myself is it? most of the light reaching the camera dfoesn't come from myself does it!?

Entire blog post about Freidlander: http://simonjohnsondissertation.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/self-portrait-photographs-by-lee.html 

John Coplans - seems to have a lot of self portraits... naked ones
1992 / 1990 diptychs / triptychs 






Also I want to read: Susan Sontag - on Photography
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------




Simon Johnson www.thephilosophicalphotographer.co.uk

 looking at: performative practice: identoty and agency at the causewayed enclosures of winmill hill and Etton
Archeology dissertation
2003
source: http://www.hardav.co.uk/MA%20-%20HTML/contents.htm

OVERVIEW
focuses on the creation of notions of identity through performance + disposition
main aim to create complex notions of personhood, identityage and gender
combining the work of Foucault + Butler
Dissertation focuses on understanding identity of people of the past
(this is quite relevant to my dissertation as a photograph is inevitably of a past event and can never be of a future one (or present for that matter)

Butler 1993
Foucault 1978 inter alia

Butler describing identiyy as regulatory ideals that we fulfill because of society to an extent
how identity was created through the practive and performances of people in the past
diverse nature of identity
emotion, memory, relationships + thought

CHAPTER 4 - deals with identity.......

CHAPTER 2 - Identity: a performative understanding
identoty is essential to any understanding of the past, and is certainly not unrecoverable
bodes well with photography
Today identity is seen percieved as a combination of things THE MAIN 5 Things from the identity book, sex relgiion culture etc etc etc they make up a distinct set up of person dont they

   assumes we are the same
butler, clearly demonstrated how the above cateogires are regulatory ideals 1993 p1
ientity is created

Judith Butler: regulatory ideals and performativity
draws on an eclectic range of courses... as I mentioned previously
regulatory fictions as donna haraway described them 1991 193
str8/gay /old young are not biological facts they are cetegories we create and recite through performance.
performativity is not a singular act, reiteration of a norm or set of norms
 They are discource which produce what they say, 'mid wife cry ITS A GIRL EG
its not merely a biological statement it;s a performative act binding gender to the body
produces that which it names

western view that gender is constructed while sex remains the same, Butler challenges this view
Elizabeth Grosz offers critique

Do I really need to crique Judith? As this is the basis for my definitions to begin the dissertation so I don;t really need to criticise anything these could jsut the best things that I want to ....

 Similarities between Bourdieu and Butler
essentialism

CHAPTER 4 - Identity and agency at Windmill Hill and Etton
inclusion / exclusion

Helpful and insightful




Simon Johnson
www.thephilosophicalphotographer.co.uk

Identities | Race, Class, Gender, and Nationality
Edited by Linda Martin Alcoff and Eduardo Mendieta
f.published by Blackwell publishing ltd 2003

Chapters of importance:

-Introduction: Identities: Modern and Postmodern
      Linda Martin Alcoff
     p1

Part I: Foundations p9

-1 Independence and Dependence of Self-conciousness
     G. W. f. Hegel
     p11
-2 On the Jewish Question
     Karl Marx
     p17
-3 Consciousness and What is Unconcious
     Sigmund Freud
     p29
-4 The Self
     George Herbert Mead
     p32

Part IV: Gender/Sexuality p147

-20 Gender Trouble, Feminist Theory, and Psychoanalytic Discourse
     Judith Butler
     p201

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-Introduction: Identities: Modern and Postmodern
      Linda Martin Alcoff

Social identities (ethnic, sex, nationality) centre of Political mobilisation since US cultural revolution 1960  p1
little agreement about the cause.
threat to democracy

In the West the principle social struggles of the modern era can be characterised firstly as struggles of social status, then social class and only then of social identity p2
oppression
"Why are so many people the world over so attached to their ethnic identity that they are willing to go to war over it, or is this commonly heard claim quite a mistaken interpretation of the real, underlying motives behind these motives?" p3
Why demand recognition of these identities than to rid oneself of them?

In Dissetation I think I would like to suggest away from these kind of identities, or perhapos I could touch on this that perhaps we will always be suade by our SOCIAL IDENTITY and this will always impact us, but in a self-portrait we can have a choice of an identity to assume, such as i don't know... simple example: being a bitch or being nice.

Identity is not in the main an individual affair.
Individuals create their own identity, not under conditions of their own choose p3

Stuart Hall "identities are names we give to the different ways we are positions by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past" (Hall 1990: 225) p3
Both imposed and self-made

Butler argues - biology is insufficient to explain all these differnt assossiations + attributes we have

identities need to be analysed not only in their cultural location but in relation to historial epoch too

Fanon shows how identity can affect inner life as well as outer life
 fact of blackness

Hegel perhaps first to open discussion of the construction of identity in the west p4
  fully developed self requires recognition from others
socially recognisable a necessity of the self

Marx deconstructs the political problem - how can a state repreenting general interests recognise special groups p4


Freud - complication for this debate
incoherant self, impotence of concious self, illusions of identtiy

Mead - individual self 'has' a perspective X
          - individual self is 'in' a perspective √

perspective precedes individual

identities are essentially social objects
Part 1 establishes the philosophical genealogy of theories of social identites.

 4 forms of identity powerful: race, class, nationality and sexuality

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

-1 Independence and Dependence of Self-conciousness
     G. W. f. Hegel p11

---Master and servant
Self-conciousness exists in itself.
it is by simply being recognised or acknowledged

I'm lost already... it's distinct by at the same time not entirely seperate, title implies a domineering over the concious....

spiritual unity, brings about a process of recognition...

---1. The Double Self-conciousness
self-conciosness itself has a self-conciounsess from outside itself. p11 
 talks about being in the other???
self-conciousness in relation to another self-conciousness
recognition
Yup, still lost... is this two independent self-conciousnesses engaging with each other? AH

---2. The conflict of the opposed 
       Self-conciousness

to be ego, it is individual p12
referring to them as objects
existing for themselves not yet surfaces ie self conciousness...
actions of each other

- that self conciousness is merely pure self-existence, being-for-self " p12-13
the person may be recognised as a person by not have attained truth of recognition as an independebt self-conciousness 

Could this perhaps be talking about say a child... a child of 2months old may lack a certain self awareness, as would say someone who is brain dead, but is clearly a person... perhaps/

negate each other
sublimate
 "The one is independent whose essential nature is to be for itself, the other is dependent whose essence is life or existence for another. The former is the Master, or Lord, the latter the Bondsman" p13
   
---3. Master and Servant
       Rule of the master

master is the conciousness that exists for itself...
mediated by other conciousnesses

---Anxiety

sovereign master, servant still exists for itself

      shaping and fashioning

object?? what is this object they keep referring to.

---The spirit
reason is spirit
reason is conciously aware of the world and itself

 Perhaps it's referrring to inner states as separate consciousnesses... such as reason, worry, sadness... they are different identities that become more prominent in certain situations... that could kind of make sense but it may not be the case. Either that or someone else has already written about it...

unity of objectivity and subjectivity

substance...?

CLARIFICATION FROM SPARKNOTES
http://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/hegel/section2.rhtml

-Hegel believes that consciousness of objects necessarily implies some awareness of self, as a subject, which is separate from the perceived object

-one becomes aware of oneself by seeing oneself through the eyes of another 

-Hegel explains that the realization of self-consciousness is really a struggle for recognition between two individuals bound to one another as unequals in a relationship of dependence. One person is the bondsman and one is the servant. The bondsman, or servant, is dependent on the lord. Because he is aware that the lord sees him as an object rather than as a subject (i.e., as a thing, rather than as a thinking, self-aware being), the lord frustrates his desire to assert his pure self-consciousness.

-Precisely because it is so abstract, the section has been interpreted in many different ways.

Some of the abstract things he describes may just describe positions in life such as employee and manager, or mother / son relationships, perhaps... but yes it's interesting to learn about oneself because of one another... I can see how that makes sense, self awareness i spossible through awareness of others.

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-2 On the Jewish Question
     Karl Marx

NOT RELEVANT

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-3 Consciousness and What is Unconcious
     Sigmund Freud
     p29

Simply an introductory chapter to Freud ( a nice prelude to when I study him in detail later in the dissertation

division of the physical into the conscious and what is unconscious is the fundamental premise of phycho analysis.
dreams nessesitate a view (not above)
"Being conscious" is purely a descriptive term, relies on perception

idea... capable of becoming concious, latent

Conscious, self-conscious, unconscious... I believe I need to clearly understand these seperate terms...
 self-conscious - Aware of oneself as an individual or of one's own being, actions, or thoughts.
 unconscious- Lacking awareness and the capacity for sensory perception; not conscious.

such ideas cannot become conscious because things oppose them

repression and resistance
concept of the unconscious from the theory of repression
Two types of unconsciousness, one which can become conscious and the other is repressed.

ego controls

Interesting, perhaps not entirely relevenat for a first chapter of my dissertation

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Quick background check on G H MEAD
source: http://sociology.about.com/od/Profiles/p/George-Herbert-Mead.htm
1863 - 1931
Theory of the self: self is a social emergent. Individual selves are products of social interactions. not present at birth but arises through social interaction
3 activities the self is developed: Play, Language + Game
Language: allows us to take on the role of the other
Play: allows us to pretend roles and express that of others. Role-playing essential in self-consciousness + self
Game: internalise roles of others to understand 'rules of the game'

Theory of Generalised other: organised social group
An individual defines his behaviour depending of the context of the group

Concept of the "I" and the "Me"
The self has 2 sides
Me = expectations and generalisations of others (generalised other)
I = response to the me. 
The generalised other is how we keep control over our individual members

• Mind, Self, and Society (1934)
• The Philosophy of the Act (1938)
• The Philosophy of the Present (1932)

-4 The Self
     George Herbert Mead

-The background of the genesis of the self

'the problem now presents itself as to how, in detail, a self arises' p32
exchange of gestures between animals - the conduct is the outcome of this preparation
"the meaning of a gesture by one organism, to repeat, is found in the response of another organism to what would be the completion of the act of the first organism which that gesture indicates and initiates" p32

symbols in our mind for things, talking about a chair not actually thinking about the chair are we?
language symbol
anything you say that has any meaning is universal
there is a language of speech, language of hands, there may be a language of the expression of the countenance.
"A person who is saying something is saying to himself what he says to others; otherwise he does not know what he is talking about: p33
Things that don't arise in others the same as ourselves such as bullying.

"It is the task not only of the actor but of the artist as well to find the sort of expression that will arouse in others what is going on in himself" p33

Well this is a lovely little quote, which may ease the transition from talking about these metaphysical principles of the self and ease that into the art and photography... They are expressions of ideas/the self and we try and create something that will have the intended affect in others, even if we can't achieve that as things can lose their context from being lost in time etc... 

Don't always use language to call out the same emotional stimuli in others, but we reply in  way that supports it, such as sympathy/empathy

play, child pretended to be a Mother, dogs play acting, attacking.

"The game represents the passage in the life of the child from taking the role of others in play to the organised part that is essential to self-consciousness in the full sense of the term" p35

Play, The Game, and the generalised Other. 

Were speaking of the self arising as an object...
previously spoken of these from POV of a child
difference between play + game, striking example from primitive people
definite structure of a relationship
of the other, the child must have an understanding of the rules of the game
Such as basketball, his acts are determined by assumption of other peoples acts in the game
Their attitudes affect his
"We get then an 'other' which is an organisation of the attitudes of those involved in the same process" p36 = The generalised other

So Im thinking now with this we have our self in whic we act and do things with and this is one kind of identity, but then we also seem to exert other identities which fall into this generalised other group.. So I may be part of a general group of the UK or be identified as a gay male... These are other identities which I may feel apart of and act within certain attitudes whch I may attribute to myself...
 IE Football 'my team is winning' their victories feel like my victories, etc

The individual takes the attitude of the social whole towards himself without reference to expression or any individuals
"The self-conscious human individual, then, takes or assumes the organised social attitudes of the given social group or community to which he belongs....." p37

The game has certain rules by which to play with
The child has no definite character, no definite personality p37
Property itself is a very abstract concept

unfortunate to mix up consciousness and self-consciousness
not on the same level

consciousness - reference to the field of experience
self-consciousness - ability to call out in ouselves definite responses belonging to others of a group
"A man alone fortunately or unfortunately, has access to his own toothache, but this is not what we mean by self-conciousness" p40

We cannot be ourselves unless we are also members in whom there is a community of attitudes which control the attitudes of all p40

"The individual possesses a self only in relation to the selves of the other members of his social group; and the structure of his self expresses or reflects the general behaviour patter of this social group to which he belongs, just as does the structure pf the self of every other individual belonging to this social group" p40
 

  



Simon Johnson
 www.thephilosophicalphotographer.co.uk