CiteULike: Tag self-portrait

Photo albums: Images of time and reflections of self

Andrew Walker — 2008-01-23T23:33:49-00:00

Qualitative Sociology, Vol. 12, No. 2. (1 June 1989), pp. 155-182.

The advent of popular photography has allowed ordinary people to visually record their view of themselves and the passage of their lives. Photographs not only record events but also allow the maker to group them for presentation in a structured manner comparable to verbal narratives, most commonly in photo albums. We examined more than forty albums created by amateur photographers in order to investigate the psychological and social functions of photo albums and their value to scholars as documentations of social life. Albums are intensely personal; they create a relationship between the presenter and the viewer; the audience is small; the possessor plays an active role in the album's presentation; and there is an accompanying verbal narrative. This narrative is crucial to the understanding of the album. This paper explores the structure of these narratives and their role in creating the meaning of the album. In the absence of a possessor/presenter, a narrative can be constructed by determining the type of album being examined and establishing the personal relationships and themes within the album. We suggest devices and procedures for reconstruction of such a narrative in the absence of a presenter.

Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography

Linda Rugg — 2006-08-09T19:43:55-00:00

(08 December 1997)

<div>Photography has transformed the way we picture ourselves. Although photographs seem to "prove" our existence at a given point in time, they also demonstrate the impossibility of framing our multiple and fragmented selves. As Linda Haverty Rugg convincingly shows, photography's double take on self-image mirrors the concerns of autobiographers, who see the self as simultaneously divided (in observing/being) and unified by the autobiographical act. Rugg tracks photography's impact on the formation of self-image through the study of four literary autobiographers concerned with the transformative power of photography. Obsessed with self-image, Mark Twain and August Strindberg both attempted (unsuccessfully) to integrate photographs into their autobiographies. While Twain encouraged photographers, he was wary of fakery and kept a fierce watch on the distribution of his photographic image. Strindberg, believing that photographs had occult power, preferred to photograph himself. Because of their experiences under National Socialism, Walter Benjamin and Christa Wolf feared the dangerously objectifying power of photographs and omitted them from their autobiographical writings. Yet Benjamin used them in his photographic conception of history, which had its testing ground in his often-ignored Berliner Kindheit um 1900. And Christa Wolf's narrator in Patterns of Childhood attempts to reclaim her childhood from the Nazis by reconstructing mental images of lost family photographs. Confronted with multiple and conflicting images of themselves, all four of these writers are torn between the knowledge that texts, photographs, and indeed selves are haunted by undecidability and the desire for the returned glance of a single self. </div>

REMBRANDT AND THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE SELF-PORTRAIT

Douglas Lackey — 2006-11-02T12:17:35-00:00

The Philosophical Forum, Vol. 37, No. 4. (2006), pp. 439-455.