A few weeks back, WIRED Magazine held a a contest for some of the most interesting self portraits out there. Given the fact WIRED is a computer and technology industry centric periodical, I'm sure it attracted a lot of technical competent people to the competition. After all - geeks and soccer mums are the largest growing segments in the digital photography vertical.

I never gave this much thought - but doing a self-imposed assignment on your self-portrait could reveal much about who you are as a photographer... It will express your techniques, your vision and perhaps - your own vision on your self.

I invite you to check out the Editor's pick and form your own opinion...

Star Wars Last Supper
Eric Deschamps was commissioned to paint this by Giant magazine before the final Star Wars installment was released. From the painter: "They wanted selected Star Wars characters in the Last Supper. I started out staying really close to the poses in the actual last supper painting then ended up straying away from them a bit to make the wide range of characters fit."




House Last Supper
What better theme for a medical show - where doctors, specially in House, really do feel like god... This is their Season Four promotional figure and its beautifully done. Set in an operating room with a patient for a table, it mimics da Vinci's Last Supper perfectly.



Northern Exposure Last Supper
In an episode of Northern Exposure, local DJ Chris Stevens has a dream sequence where he imagines himself as Christ at a Last Supper while he tries to figure out how best to honour his mentor Tooley. It is from the Season Four episode, Heroes.




Battlestar Galactica's Last Supper
I don't really watch Battlestar Galactica much.... and do I have not much to say about this image outside the fact it is will lit but you start getting the drift, where TV shows and series such as The Sopranos, Star Wars, House, Battlestar Galactica (and I'm sure there are a lot other ones that I never found) make use of the same theme - where a number of characters can be groups together, with a central focal view, highlighting importance of some sort - be done using a bit of humour.


Commercially this is done as well...


Mickey Mouse Last Supper
One of several works by pop artist and culture jammer Ron English. Notice how the disciples are divided between Disney and Warner Bros. characters all looking to Mickey Mouse, the first cartoon superstar, as Jesus. What puts it to the top though is cartoon spokesperson Joe Camel as Judas. Symbolism well picked and distributed....




iPhone Last Supper
The iPhone Supper is a nice riff on the ascendence of the iPhone, but it could have been so much better. How about a pink iPod Nano to the left of the Iphone and maybe a Zune in the Judas spot. But hey, I'm just the aggregator, not the artist.




Cookie Last Supper
The Last Snack, a photo by Tom Altany, was nominated for the International Color Award for color photography (Advertising category) in 2006.



But what about the controversy?



France's Catholic Church won a court injunction to ban a clothing advertisement based on Leonardo da Vinci's Christ's Last Supper.The display was ruled "a gratuitous and aggressive act of intrusion on people's innermost beliefs", by a judge.

The authorities in the Italian city of Milan banned the poster the following month.

Italy's advertising watchdog said the ad's use of Christian symbols including a dove and a chalice recalled the foundations of the faith and would offend the sensitivity of part of the population. The Catholic Church used a similar argument against the advert, which also shows two of the apostles embracing a bare-chested man in jeans. "When you trivialise the founding acts of a religion, when you touch on sacred things, you create an unbearable moral violence which is a danger to our children," said lawyer Thierry Massis.

And if that image caused controversy - just think of what this image did...



The “half-naked homosexual sadomasochists” sparked controversy at the Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco. Under pressure from a media blitz orchestrated by Christian conservatives, Miller Brewing Co. asked to remove its logo from the poster (pictured above). U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was among those defending the image.
I was all set to issue a major news release promoting this latest addition to the global boom in queer Christ art. Right-wing Christians don’t own the copyright on Jesus! It’s important to create new images of God based on the experiences of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) people.

The double edge of content....

I'm of course talking about Annie Leibovitz... Perhaps one of the most influential photographer of our times. We all know a little about her, or at least seen pictures that has made her so well known and famous. Why do we like her work so much? - well, content is one. Annie seems to be a very passionate person. She learned early in her career that once you have the technical aspects down, that once you know how to use a camera and able to produce good images... its time to push the content and bring all of those aspects together.

She has been playing with Disney stories for a white now. I saw the series for the Wizard of Oz a few years back, but her new series on Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and Cinderella are equally phenomenal. She does have a superb pos-processing crew, but from concept, planing, organizing and executing the images - Annie is the best.

This is a hard one... from all angles and all perspectives. Photographs can be considered by many as an art medium, and I do mean all forms of photography. I mean, lets face it... when Magnum is selling a large number of images to be framed and hanged in public and private spaces due to their composition, feel and visual merits as much as the content the images depict - then you know that even war photography has a place in the arts market.

But not every one can shoot for Magnum - and in fact not every one produces good images. Problem with bad images is that, the moment you take a shot at it in terms of a comment - people will call it... well... art... Photographers have used the "arts" excuse all the time... "not sharp? call it art", "not levelled, not composed etc... call it art..." But some times even that has its problems... There IS such thing as bad art...

I'm not saying that all photographs need to make sense... but when you have exceptional photographers, with a large equipment inventory, celebrities as subjects, makeup, hair, props and end up with a photograph that when seen you end up scratching your head and thinking.... "what were they thinking?"


(above image: photographer unknown (to me) )

Its not like we are talking about Terry Richardson who is often the subject of great/bad photography and style arguments. Terry is controversial on subject selection as well as style (making use of point and shoots with on-camera-flash). While I don't personally like much of his work, I can appreciate the change of perspective he gave the industry a while back. I see the above image and ask my self - so photographer asks the beautiful Gisele to just lay on the floor - fix the hair, hands - place a necklace and gel the lights - click, and we are done? are we not trying any more? No - wait... its Gisele - and she is butt naked. That should count for something right? There are just no ways around it. The market bears what the market bears - and bad photography with a naked butt can still be chosen to go on print. There are photo editors and then there ARE photo editors....

Don't get me wrong - I'm not really one to be judgemental, but one thing should always be clear... even great photographers make terrible pictures.

It happens all the time... you could be an amateur photographer who just joined the photography revolution. Perhaps you are a student who just finished photography school and starting to create a body of work to gear up towards the discipline of choice. Or - a professional photographer in search of more to their craft. We are in a constant flux of learning. Learning technical material, processes - as well as (and we might do this not so inherently) vision, composition, subjects and themes... but is that so bad?

I had to give this some thought as I sat with a photo editor in my local market. While he liked the images on the portfolio, a small comment was made. You know - one of those comments that slips up without one thinking. We are looking at the port, he is asking questions and while I'm answering questions, I can see he is really engaged on the images and the stories behind them... Attention is been focused on the task at hand - eyes locked, brain working - but the mouth then says what's on the brain without the brain's permission... "These are great, love how you imitate other photographers..." well... not really imitate... you know... same subject and such... and sort of perspective... not sure why I said that... you are not imitating - I'm just saying that the pictures look like the work from such and such...

I knew what he was thinking... so no offence taken.. but this started a good conversation on vision and one's work. When we all start, we lack our own vision. We have seen images that have inspired us. Images that opened a world for us. Its like photographers say "an ok image takes 10 seconds of my viewing time and then its gone, a good image takes a comment and 30 seconds of my viewing time... a great image is burned into my memory and so my viewing time is infinite". With we are all photographers with these images (let it be photographs, paintings, drawings etc..) in our minds.... and we might get influenced by many of them. Some times we try to emulate them, some times we use them for inspiration.


(above images, from left to right: Vincent Laforet-200?, Oscar Graubner-1934, Conde Nast Cover-Sep 2006)

Its not that we are imitating other photographers and older work - but this also got us thinking - is this one of the reasons why its some times so hard to find one's own vision? Or is it the case of people who have the same image burnt into their mind, comparing work? Do our brain play tricks on us? Could we be better off having no inspiration when tackling a subject? I have heard from so many photographers in the past that its hard to have a totally creative view on a subject as many of them have been studies and tackled to much. That we are bound to find similar images of our work somewhere, some time... Perhaps there is a large percentage of validity in that idea.

Just a thought...

I'm sure he would use a digital camera...

I had found these two quotes from Ansel Adams that obviously supports my statement....

“For me the future of the image is going to be in electronic form … You will see perfectly beautiful images on an electronic screen. And I’d say that would be very handsome. They would be almost as close as the best reproductions.” -Interview with Paul Hill (1975)

“I eagerly await new concepts and processes. I believe that the electronic image will be the next major advance. Such systems will have their own inherent and inescapable structural characteristics, and the artist and functional practitioner will again strive to comprehend and control them.” -The Negative (1981)

I just found the quotes interesting and wanted to quote them

This is an old writeup I did in 2006... follow this link...

This is an old writeup I did in 2006... follow this link...

This is an old writeup I did in 2006... follow this link...

This is an old writeup I did in 2006... follow this link...