Let’s talk about Photography in its first couple of years invented – the Victoria era. Post-mortem photography, which also known as memorial portraiture or memento mori, was a popular photography practice in the mid-1800s. It was a way for people to honour and remember the dead back then. Shortly after the death, the deceased would usually be propped up into a standing position and be photographed (sometimes with the living ones), and they would look incredibly life-like.
Looking at those photographs, in some cases one can hardly distinguish the dead and living ones. From the same basic form (which in here is the photograph, time and space) yet the “living” and “dead” blend into each other. If we put them altogether at same level of consciousness, it could be either they are all living people or all deceased. This creates a twisted towards the self in the photograph and the one outside.
Could one say the self inside a photograph is the same with the self outside?
Taking portrait as the closest form of expressing the self. I found using self-portrait painting or drawing is the easiest way for me to explain my point of view about the self in portrait photography. If drawing or painting is the recreation of a moment, photography is capturing the “have been”. According to Susan Sontag in her “On Photography” (1979), “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.”
I would like to think, the person inside a self-portrait drawing under analysing was already being seen through a third-party interpretation (which is the artist). Compare to photography, what we are looking at is the most basic raw form of the model. In another way of saying, while looking at a drawing we see the “thing” through the artist, that “thing” does not exist in photograph. Rolan Barthes once said in his book “Camera Lucida” (1980, p.6): “Photography is unclassifiable because there is no reason to mark this or that of its occurrences; its aspires, perhaps, to become a crude, as certain, as noble as a sign, which would afford its access to the dignity of a language: but for there to be a sign there must be a mark […] Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it what we see”.
I would like to define the self as a subject has its identity. Putting this in self-portrait drawing context, the “self” inside a drawing could be one of the many outer sides we have, depending on how much understanding of the artist has towards his model. However, the self inside a portrait-photograph can hardly be seen as the same one on the outside. According to Barthes, it’s a “cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity”. From what he sees about portrait-photograph, there are four image-repertoires intersect, oppose and distort each other inside a portrait-photograph: “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”. In another way of saying, “I do not stop imitating myself”(p.13). From this I assume, once one imitates himself, the imitated self is no longer the same as the original although theoretically they are still one.
--- Ann Nguyen --- 