![]() ![]() ![]() The men who bought her work profited through their 'discovery' of a great 'unknown' street photographer. Unlike Narcissus, who destroyed himself in the contemplation and admiration of his own image, Vivian Maiers interest in the self-portrait was more like a. ![]() As the critical theorist, Roland Barthes puts it, ‘The photographic referent not the optionally real thing to which an image or sign refers but the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph.’ By this logic, Maier’s self-portrait only records the presence of light to form an image of herself in the exact frame and at the very specific moment in which she pressed the shutter closed. RT scalawagmag: Two years before she died, artist Vivian Maiers life’s work was liquidated because she couldnt afford to pay the fees on her storage units of photos. Simultaneously, by depicting the mechanisms through which she represents herself, with the fracturing line of the mirror cutting off the rest of her body and her camera in plain view, Maier’s image confirms the limitations of this objectivity. The photograph explores the objectivity of the camera’s vision, with which the medium of photography has frequently been described or defined by. Self-Portrait, (1971) shows Maier’s head and upper torso reflected in the mirror of a public bathroom, lit by a strip of fluorescent lighting. ![]() Lacan’s dictates offer an interesting means in which to reconsider Maier’s portraits in relation to the language of photography – the medium’s manner of representation. ![]()
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