Dingo the Dissident

THE BLOG OF DISQUIET : Qweir Notions, an uncommonplace-book from the Armpit of Diogenes, binge-thinker jottings since 2008 .

Tuesday 11 July 2023

Self-portraits.

My teenage interest in painting
was ignited by the self-portraits of Van Gogh,
followed by those of Rembrandt.
I have daubed several myself.
Good photographic self-portraits are,
I think, much rarer, because technology
often gets in the way of originality.
(The more complicated the equipment
the less interesting and 'authentic' the result.)

This modest example is by
famous American photographer Eve Arnold.


















It can be compared with this one by the great Vivian Maier...












...though neither is half as interesting as a Rembrandt, Van Gogh
Otto Dix or Alice Neel self-portrait.


2 comments:

Bearz said...

Thank you for this brave shop window self portrait, probably taken in the 1930s. It is good to discover older versions of the kind of the sort of photographs I have tried to take in the recent past.

Wofl said...

My friend Bob pointed me towards this photo-selfportrait site, which has much the same photos as several others.

https://photographycourse.net/famous-self-portrait-photographers/

But most of them are pretty self-conscious, contrived and trashy. Painted self-portraits never look self-conscious.