Barthes on Portraiture

I have been questioning what I am trying to achieve with my self portraiture assignment. Earlier today I came  across this quotation from Roland Barthes.

“The PORTRAIT-PHOTOGRAPH is a closed field of forces. Four image-repertoires intersect here, oppose and distort each other. In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art.” (Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, London, 1984, p. 13).

Barthes is presenting a view from the perspective of the subject. When making self portraits one is both photographer and subject so there is even more scope for schizophrenia.

I have used Barthes construct to help analyse the approaches I have been using with my ‘I am an Ironman’ self portraits.

With these portraits I have been trying to capture myself when I am ‘too tired to pose’ by shooting immediately after I have been exercising. By so doing I have been consciously trying to eliminate the ‘the one I want others to think I am’ dimension.

Also, by using a fairly deadpan formal construction for the portraits – 2/3 body shot facing square to the camera against a plain background – I have sought to eliminate any photographer driven expression or ‘the one the photographer thinks I am’.

This leaves two dimensions unaccounted for ‘the one I think I am’, and ‘the one he makes use of to exhibit his art’. The former is perhaps what I am trying to get to with the photographs, although I have also been using the self portraits as a means of personal exploration, i.e. photographing myself to see what this might tell me about myself.

On the question of which photographs are used in my art, so far I have made several photographs in each shoot and have selected one of set for inclusion in my final edit. Perhaps I should try to limit this edit process also by for example selecting the first shot from each shoot. As an exercise to see what this might mean I have shown below an example of the first frame and the selected frame from a recent shoot.

It looks to me as if my body language in the selected image is more posed. The hands on the hips could be seen as a conscious expressive gesture – though what it was aimed to express I have no idea. The reason I selected the image was because the image was slightly different from others I had made in the series and I wanted to introduce some variety in my poses. So I have in reality been exercising photographic editorial control.

This has been an interesting exercise. I want to pause and think about the what this means for my work, but I am moving towards the idea of always using the first frame.