Tierney Gearnon

Tierney Gearon, a Los Angeles-based photographer, often casts her children as subjects. In 2001, her “I Am a Camera” exhibition in London sparked controversy, featuring portraits of her two nude children. Now, she’s turning to her children again, producing a book of 26 portraits — one for each letter of the alphabet.

Luca Bosani

I - YOU

“I - YOU” is a Performance made near Liverpool Street Station for an entire afternoon that has been documented through Black/White Digital Photographs. 'I think that when anyone sees another person, consciously and unconsciously, a judgement mechanism is triggered. My aim with this performance was to invert this mechanism.' - Bosani

“I - YOU” is an invite for the other person to look and know himself inside before judging the other from the oustide. Bosani is trying to encourage others to think more before expressing an opinion or making jokes towards the different and to the unknown, of which the words and the thoughts can be really offensive. He is questioning himself on what defines the identity: the face? the clothes? the behaviour? the inner world? and how people categorize and label other people.

PHOTO BOOTH

Bernhard Handick

Who Is It? Altered Identities

Bernhard Handick experiments with photography and remixes it with other media, exploring the theme of identity. Born to a Sri Lankan mother and a German father, Handick was fascinated by traditional Sri Lankan ceremonies ever since he was a child, and in particular by the use of masks to project alternative versions of the self. Since 2010 Handick explores this subject with a personal technique applied in post-production to his own shots or archive photos. He particularly works on photos and images of female nudes, like a painter of sculptor, in a mix of analogue and digital, spontaneity and conceptualism. The pictures seem to depict human identity's floating jumble, altered differently depending on the shot. It's up to people's eyes and unconscious to convey this identity into lasting and recognisable shapes.

Lucas C. Simões

He takes a seemingly normal portrait and transforms it into something completely unique and interesting. These cut-outs are made from the same stacked image and have up to 13 layers. I love the abstract geometric figures and shapes he has created with these portraits.

"In this series of works I invited intimate friends over to tell me a secret as I took their portrait. However, my intention was not to hear their secret, but to capture the expressions of each one at the moment they revealed their secret. I also asked each one to choose a song for me to listen to in my ear phones while I photographed them. And, after the photo session, I asked each one if the secret had a color, and these are the colors the portraits carry. From this photo shooting session I chose 10 different portraits to cut and overlap."

Aziz and Cucher

Dystopia

"An inventory of a bizarre skin growth, Dystopia seems to document a pathology. It seems clear that at some level this pathology is not only dermatological, but cultural, commenting, perhaps, on the gradual but waxing loss of identity and the means of communication in a technological environment that promotes anonymity and conformity".

The intention was to suggest an evolutionary change signifying the loss of individuality in the face of advancing technology and the progressive disappearance of face-to-face, direct interaction. It makes you focus on their identity rather than how they look because their facial features are not visible. Therefore, you look at their hair, their skin colour, wrinkles etc to determine what they might look like.

Vibeke Tandberg

Faces

Tandberg focuses on her own psycho-social relations to the world around her. In computer manipulated photography and film she explores issues of identity, gender and beauty. Tandberg portrays personality via the people who come and go in one’s life; she mixed her acquaintances’ faces with her own, without revealing which one was herself. At first glance, the photographs look like a series of the same person, however as you look closer you realise they are different but with the same hair and shirt. It makes you focus on similarities and differences between their faces and whether they are relatives or completely unrelated.

John Baldessari

Much of Baldessari’s work involves altering movie stills from obscure Hollywood pictures of the 1950s and ’60s. John often crops the original using as little as a tenth of the shot and either digitally gets rid of unwanted clutter or paints right over it. Sometimes he adds circles or bars that look like censor marks or Band-Aids. He covers up obvious emotion and disrupts the image’s environment. The dots remind me of when criminals faces are pixelated so as not to reveal their identity.

Rafael Goldchain

I Am My Family

I Am My Family is an autobiographical exhibition that features digitally altered self-portrait photographs. It suggests that grounding an identity within a familial and cultural history that has been subject to erasure, geographic displacement, and cultural dislocation involves a process of gathering and connecting scattered fragments of past familial history while at the same time acknowledging the impossibility of complete retrieval. 

In reenacting ancestors through a relationship of genetic resemblance, and through the conventions of the portrait photograph, the self-portraits in I Am My Family suggest that we look at family photographs in order to recognize ourselves in the photographic trace left by the ancestral other.

Michael Najjar

Nexus Project

The Nexus Project investigates the implications of the future enhancement of the human brain with minia-turized computer chips, infiltrated in the neuronal structures of the human organism. Such a development will give birth to a new form of life - the cyborg, a hybrid compound of human and machine. A new set of questions are raised concerning issues of difference and identification between biologically correct beings nad technically or genetically enhanced humans. This development brings with it a host of new concerns: what impact will they have on human consciousness? How will society cope with this kind of being and what implications will they have for our social and cultural interaction?
The project consists of 9 photographic portraits which have undergone a digital modification of the iris, which gives the portrait faces an intimidating, almost inhuman look whilst at the same time it exerts a strong direct fascination on the viewer. The similarities between each of the portraits even though they are all clearly different people is what I like about this series and the way that their data has been collected shows their differences.

Cindy Sherman

Sherman's photographs are portraits of herself in various scenarios that parody stereotypes of woman. A panoply of characters and settings is drawn from sources of popular culture: old movies, television soaps and pulp magazines. Her approach forms an ironic message that creation is impossible without the use of prototypes; identity lies in appearance, not in reality. Working as her own model for more than 30 years, Sherman has captured herself in a range of guises and personas which are at turns amusing and disturbing, distasteful and affecting. To create her photographs, she assumes multiple roles of photographer, model, makeup artist, hairdresser, stylist, and wardrobe mistress. With an arsenal of wigs, costumes, makeup, prosthetics, and props, Sherman has deftly altered her physique and surroundings to create a myriad of intriguing tableaus and characters, from screen siren to clown to ageing socialite.

Sophie Calle

Sophie Calle, is the photographer which I am currently investigating and I am particularly interested in her The Hotel, Room 44 collection. In terms of context, I have discovered that Calle managed to secure a job as a chambermaid in a hotel which lasted three weeks (meaning Calle had three weeks to produce the photographs for this project - a similar time period to that given to me for the Territories project). In 1983, Calle worked in a Venetian hotel, with the primary purpose of photographing the contents of visitor’s hotel rooms. She took notes on her subjects, who were staying on the fourth floor of the hotel. According to Ian Jeffrey, Calle had intended the images to be exhibited as a group. Susan Bright said Calle ‘investigated the role of the photographic document and how it functions as something public and also artistic. The crossover between what is public and what is private and the blurring of boundaries between them are constant themes of her work, which takes an autobiographic approach’. 

In terms of subject matter, I am particularly interested in the way in which Calle has photographed and positioned a range of personal belongings next to each other, in order to create a narrative sequence. Subject matter ranges from drying washing, to disordered beds and luggage. Something which is fascinating about this series of work, is that the objects captured are extremely personal and private, (indicated through the way in which Calle had to acquire a maid’s job in order to gain unrestricted access to the belongings), however, there is a distinct lack of personality and real identity, due to the lack of human presence within the frames. In this sense, although the objects act as visual signifiers of the owner’s personality, this can only be interpreted or guessed by the audience. 

Annette Messager

Fragmented Bodies, Divided Identities
Annette Messager creates installations which offer a catalogue of fragments; of bodies, identities and images. Similar to Lorna Simpson, her work features many small photographs but in this case, Messager has photographed parts of the body close up and positioned them together to form one whole piece, or what's best described as a cross between sculpture and photography.

The photographs themselves depict sensuality and sexuality in the pointed tongues of women, age in the balding head of a man, and absurdity and randomness in an elbow or knee close up. They represent the embrace of human diversity which is a key theme in my project because identity is a concept based on similarities and differences and this diversity in the human race conveys that.

This piece, which I saw at the Tate Modern, makes me think of people's possessions and recording information. I may use this idea in my family tree model as it would be a unique and creative way to record the facts and data that I have researched.

Lorna Simpson

Lorna Simpson combines photography and text to address issues of identity, race, and gender in our society.

5 Day Forecast (above)
The structure suggests a diary of sorts, or at any rate a ‘forecast’, to use its meteorological metaphor. The similarity of the pose in the photographs, however, suggests the drudgery of repetition with little variation on the horizon. Underneath the images are ten additional plaques, each featuring a single word. From left to right they read: ‘Misdescription’, ‘Misinformation’, ‘Misidentify’, ‘Misdiagnose’, ‘Misfunction’, ‘Mistranscribe’, ‘Misremember’, ‘Misgauge’, ‘Misconstrue’ and ‘Mistranslate’. The words, with their negative connotations, imply a repeated breakdown in communication, within personal, professional and racial relationships.

Wigs

She explores identity as a problematic condition, focusing on African American culture and each of her photographs depicts a message related to a person's race or gender.

"I do not appear in any of my work. I think maybe there are elements to it and moments to it that I use from my own personal experience, but that, in and of itself, is not so important as what the work is trying to say about either the way we interpret experience or the way we interpret things about identity."

This particular piece, which features over 100 photo-booth like framed portraits, made me think of a huge visual family tree and almost reminded me of a crime board due to the layout of the photos. I therefore intend to create something similar with my family tree but linking them together in a way that reflects both this Lorna Simpson piece and a crime board.

Identity is a Contested Concept

Identity is a contested concept. This means that there is no agreed way to define it. There are two concepts used to describe identity - sameness and difference.

The concept of sameness is based around the characteristics that you share with others such as dress sense, music taste etc. This is a very important part of identity as it can push people towards adopting different norms and values. Identity as sameness is also relative to when you meet someone for the first time; in the first conversations you have with a new person you tend to look for things you have in common, e.g. shared background or interests.

The concept of difference can be seen as the opposite. Identity as difference is when characteristics and features distinguish you and make you unique compared to the people around you.