I'm Basically Bragging

Eien Sykes Bidwell University of Wollongong, Australia

Date

April 24, 2015
Image

I can still say I honestly love my classes. Some a little more than others, but they're all great. Before I came here, everyone said the classes would be over 100 people. Since I'm an art major that doesn't seem to apply? My largest lecture is maybe 40 people, and then the tutorial is 1/3 of that. So my classes are all not very big. It makes things a lot easier. The coolest thing is my photography teacher, who lets me do basically whatever. I told him at the beginning that I already took a ton of photo classes, so if I wasn't paying attention he shouldn't be offended. This past week we all printed nice copies of our Portraiture project. I did this awesome self-portrait series about my gender identity, ranging from: the misconception of gender being a binary, practicing how you express your gender, and the frustration to be recognized. I'm not sure I'm describing this right. I find it really dramatic; its got a lot of contrast, a cool color palette, and I finished with 7 or 8 of them. The image I attached this week is one of the images that wasn't included in the final 3 to hand in. My teacher picked up on the frustration and he said “struggle” when relating to this. I wish I could come up with a title for this one or any of the others, but I can't detach myself enough to come up with that.

I just found it really cool because I've never really done a photo self-portrait and it was kind of fun to do. I had the lights all set up, the camera was set on a tripod, and I was constantly having to run between the buttons and my poses. With all the blurred attempts and failed shots I had about 70-80 images on my memory card. And in the end I only needed to hand in three. So partially this is me showing off, and partially this is me admitting that I just cannot explain my work very well. My teacher joked that maybe I should write an artist's statement, but I think I could write a few pages. Photography is one of my favorite things, I'm a little sad I don't often get to play with it as much as I would like.