Chosen Photographs Analysis.

Chosen Photographs Analysis.

In response to the theme of portraiture, self-portraiture, and documentary photography and Trans lives and experiences and the LGBTQ+, I decided to create a series of photographs in my home environment and combine them with found imagery (photographs that were taken when I was a child and teenager), focusing on my use of close-up and mid-shot camera angles and compositions in order to focus the main part of my images solely on my chosen sitter, in this case myself. By creating my series of in this way I feel like I have been able to create a timeline and narrative within my photographs correlating to my chosen themes of focus and my own issues and struggles with gender identity and expression as Trans male. I feel that by creating this timeline I have been able to accurate create a series of ten photographic images that have documented the expression of my gender identity and the process it has taken me to finally be comfortable and accepting of who I am as a Transgender male, whilst also documenting the journey of my transition so far. For this response to my final major project, I was mainly focusing on the formal elements of shape, colours, tones, lighting, as well as portraiture, documentary, and self-portraiture styles of photography.

By documenting these portraiture and self-portraiture photographs in this style with the found photographs and documentary photography in mind. I felt that I was able to link my photographic responses to my research of the contemporary and historical photographers Del LaGrace Volcano, Catherine Opie, Lia Clay Miller, and Claude Cahun who have also focused their photographic works on the LGBTQ+ community and the lives of the Transgender community, and occasionally sometimes the artists’ own struggles with their sexuality and gender identity and expression through the themes of portraiture, self-portraiture, and documentary photography. By researching the work of these contemporary and historical artists and photographers, I was able to see the ways that other photographers create a narrative or timeline within their own work to tell their target audience about the issues with gender identity and expression. Within my own photographs I wanted to attempt to replicate this in my own way through the collection of newly made and found imagery that dates back from when I was around 4-5 years old and first started to experience a discomfort with the gender that I was born as, leading all the way to the present date. I feel that my use of found imagery from that time, during my teenage years and now the present date all create an accurate representation of how I have experienced my own struggles and issues with gender identity and my own expression of how I felt. For example, the fact that I only have one photograph from my teenage years, when I was forced through social aspects of my life to dress and present myself in a more feminine way instead of how I would have preferred to which was more masculine. I feel that the fact that I only have the one photo from then shows that I really was uncomfortable with that time period of my life and the contrasts a lot with the images I created for the end of my series of photos: showcasing my gender identity and how comfortable I am with being and expressing myself as a Transgender male.

A lot of the photo manipulation techniques that I will be using for these photographs that I have created will be kept fairly simple, such as using the clone stamp tool to remove anything in the background that could distract attention away from my chosen sitter as well as using the burn, dodge, and levels tools on Photoshop in order to edit and alter the lighting and shadows to make them slightly more contrasting in some of the photos. I decided that I wanted to keep the editing techniques and processes simple as I don’t want anything to distract the attention away from my chosen themes of focus and the sitter within my work since I wanted to use this work as a form of documentation, kind of like a photo diary of my transition process up to now.