I don't really know how an abstract artist such as Nicolas de Stael (1914-55) would have 'seen' the subject at the point of rendering it through paint onto canvas (see example attached). The immediate view - or views, in the presence of things that can obviously be assessed from a multitude of angles - would have provided a three dimensional surface that through approach and technique could be worked into an impasto painterly depiction. The actual line, light, colouration being a springboard for his vision, highly personal while in some ways within a discourse of the period.
When I was taking self-portrait photos recently I was lying on a mattress pictured from above. I knew that the sheet beneath me was in a sense referencing a canvas and therefore my body lying upon it, through all the decisions and accidents encapsulated into a single moment - were a similar repository of shapes, lines and palette. It was more than a sensation of teetering on what may have been de Stael's abstracting thought process, but more like a reversal out from it. It seemed possible to 'be' the subject while subtly containing an 'interpretation', at the same time.
Then there is the subsequent issue of the gaze. In art this is usually regarded as the masculine gaze, which in the history of art is often regarded as having been, like the artists themselves, more than masculine but macho, objectifying and predatory. (I wouldn't include de Stael in this.) For many years women photographers have tried to wrestle back control of modes of representation, often through simulating and subverting the male point of view.
In many ways being a trans self-portraitist photographer makes me an absurd intruder in the no-man's land of that debate, tip-toeing in workman's boots - or stumbling in 5" heel stilettos - amongst the barbed wire of a generation deep ethical minefield. Patriarchal values become less clearly a display of power when, for instance, the female model and the male picture-maker is one and the same person. Also, when typical visual affectations (the result of female objectification by men) are appropriated not so much from art but more often from magazines and everyday culture, then the TG view is a prism confusedly splintering the light into too many colours. Trans people are those unintended recipients who unexpectedly engage with the wrong conventions (mimicing and exploring), which were intended for others by their creators, be they clothes designers, advertisers or producers - or artists. Those endless female depictions that surround us, selling every shade of meaning from sophisticated to sexually available, in new ads or old paintings, are, large or small, still the essential building blocks of appearance offered to us, and to some extent for finding an identity.
When I was taking self-portrait photos recently I was lying on a mattress pictured from above. I knew that the sheet beneath me was in a sense referencing a canvas and therefore my body lying upon it, through all the decisions and accidents encapsulated into a single moment - were a similar repository of shapes, lines and palette. It was more than a sensation of teetering on what may have been de Stael's abstracting thought process, but more like a reversal out from it. It seemed possible to 'be' the subject while subtly containing an 'interpretation', at the same time.
Then there is the subsequent issue of the gaze. In art this is usually regarded as the masculine gaze, which in the history of art is often regarded as having been, like the artists themselves, more than masculine but macho, objectifying and predatory. (I wouldn't include de Stael in this.) For many years women photographers have tried to wrestle back control of modes of representation, often through simulating and subverting the male point of view.
In many ways being a trans self-portraitist photographer makes me an absurd intruder in the no-man's land of that debate, tip-toeing in workman's boots - or stumbling in 5" heel stilettos - amongst the barbed wire of a generation deep ethical minefield. Patriarchal values become less clearly a display of power when, for instance, the female model and the male picture-maker is one and the same person. Also, when typical visual affectations (the result of female objectification by men) are appropriated not so much from art but more often from magazines and everyday culture, then the TG view is a prism confusedly splintering the light into too many colours. Trans people are those unintended recipients who unexpectedly engage with the wrong conventions (mimicing and exploring), which were intended for others by their creators, be they clothes designers, advertisers or producers - or artists. Those endless female depictions that surround us, selling every shade of meaning from sophisticated to sexually available, in new ads or old paintings, are, large or small, still the essential building blocks of appearance offered to us, and to some extent for finding an identity.