From Jesse Wender’s wonderful story on photographers’ self-portraits for The New Yorker:
There’s been a lot of talk about selfies recently. The Oxford Dictionaries named “selfie” the word of the year for 2013, and “Museum Selfie Day,” last month, encouraged museumgoers to take creative selfies in front of art. But what distinguishes a selfie from an artist’s self-portrait? A smartphone and a Tinder account is the easy answer, but, in general, we ask more from a self-portrait than we do from a selfie: more consideration, more composition, more psychological insight and aesthetic care. From family photographs to annual staged series and quirky snaps captured in a street windows, here is a selection of my favorite self-portraits.
John Arsenualt writes about his self-portrait, “Italian Stallion”: “My work is a visual diary, and I’ve been capturing self-portraits for the past twenty years. I discover an environment and figure out a way to place myself in it. Sometimes, the process is quick and spontaneous, like “Italian Stallion,” which was taken in Tuscany, Italy. My shadow splayed across the lying figure creates my self-portrait. My work is a time line of my life. It’s an ongoing process, and I like to think of it as one continuous body of work. When I’m capturing a self-portrait, I’m exploring facets of my personal relationships, my sexuality, and my identity (often poking fun at myself).”
View John Arsenault’s series of self-portraits
Browse all of John Arsenault’s work at ClampArt