Yesterday I posted two huge sets part 1 and part 2 of black and white self portraits of mine from the past two years, a collection of snippets from my favourite works, most of which belong to their own set of pictures. I wanted to gather a big portion of my portraits into a collection so I could revisit and evaluate them now that I have been doing this for a while. It’s not the first time I review my own images and try and figure out what makes me tick, but this time I’m looking at my work from a longer period of time, and writing about it to you.

Before putting together those two collections of self portraits, I had never seen so much of my favourite works in one place. It did a world of good for me to go through all those pictures, select and see then in one big cluster. It made my vision a lot clearer and gave me more self confidence regarding my self portrait photography.

As an artist…. wait wait wait, am I an artist?

What is an artist anyway? Do I sound pretentious if I call myself an artist?

This is the first point of my post, trying to come into terms with being a self portrait artist. Yikes. I have never considered myself artistic, could never draw, paint, sing, play instruments, but I have always enjoyed art and been creative in other ways. I’m a very visual person but before getting a camera, there wasn’t really a way for me to express myself visually, other than doing my makeup and putting on an outfit.

I think I got my first digital camera when I was 15, and I’m sure I took some selfies with that, but mostly just played around without really knowing anything about photography. A couple years later I got a dslr and started to get a lot more into photography. I dabbled with it for a while and quite soon I started to take self portraits. Some day I will try and find some old self portraits to show you.

I’ve now been taking self portraits for a good ten years, getting more serious about it in the last two because of Steemit. I love doing them and I think it might be the time for me to stop downplaying it and call myself a self portrait artist. After all, that is a big part of what I do for a living. I never even dreamt that doing something like self portraits would pay my bills.

Let me start the first sentence again:

As an artist, it’s easy to doubt yourself and think that nothing you do is ever good enough.

I’ve done this for a long time and often I feel like I’m all over the place and have nothing consistent to show for my efforts. I keep switching between monochrome and colour, natural light and and artificial light, sometimes even a flash, sometimes I do more natural portraits, and other times I go all out and create a fantasy. If I were to put all of those different kinds of portraits together, it would be a mess. Sometimes the only similarity seems to be that I’m in the picture. But it's alright, it's a process.

Creating so many different kinds of self portraits is a hit and miss, and a lot more miss for sure. I don’t regret doing and publishing any set of portraits, because it’s all for learning and improving, slowly finding my own style and getting better at it.

Yesterday as I was going through my photographs and selecting my favourites, I started to see that I might not be that lost after all. I only selected black and white images because they are my favourite, and monochrome is always a classic and stands the test of time better than colour, and in my opinion, makes for a more dynamic image.

Finding my style

If you go through with the self portrait collections that I posted yesterday, I think you can see that there is a distinctive style forming. Trust me, I’m more surprised than you are. I feel like I have been actually creating and finding my style quite well, without clearly realising it myself. It’s been like an undercurrent that has been slowly growing more powerful.

The portraits are not in chronological order, on purpose, because I wanted to shake it up to better see what I have done and how well do they go together. I don’t believe that my work gets consistently better every time I shoot, there are hits from years ago, some misses in between, then a hit again. I believe in trying to get more hits as I learn more, and less misses, but the misses can’t be avoided unless I stop completely.

I think the style that I have going on, is something that gives me a lot of freedom to play around and express myself, but still be somewhat consistent.

First of all, they are all black and white, it’s clearly what I like to do the most. Secondly, I’m using available light, either daylight or often a single light source. I like dark images and heavy contrast, and a set that is not very complicated, yet most of the time I stay away from a studio-like setting. I notice some other interesting similarities in the images, like playing a lot with my hands. I like to do something with my hands; grab my hair, pull my shirt, hold a cigarette, to add some tiny element of action to a still image. In all my pictures there is an element of unrefined and raw quality, a little rough around the edges, always something that doesn’t quite fit.

My muse

I have said this before and I will say it again: I am my own muse. I do look at other people’s works; gorgeous fashion photographs, drool over Helmut Newton’s books, scroll instagram for beautiful half naked ladies, and while they do inspire me, where I find the most moving inspiration is in myself.

What I have going for me, is that I very rarely compare my works to the work of other self portrait artists or photographers. I always try and find my own way and compare to my own older works and improve on those. I do what I can with the tools that have been provided for me, there really is no use in comparing that to other people.

I have a unique look and I never try and copy images I see, I always work with my own toolset to create my vision. It’s much easier to work with what I got than to try and be someone else. There really is no use in comparing my work to other’s because we are not the same, we don’t have the same look, same tools, same ideas or same work methods.

Self love

When your passion, self expression and means of making a living revolve heavily with showing yourself off, you got to love yourself. Self pity, self hatred and putting yourself down are not desirable qualities and nobody wants to see that. If I didn’t like myself, there would be no reason to do what I do.

I haven’t thought that I’m complete shit regarding the images I make, but god damn, now that I see most of my favourite self portraits together, I think I’m actually pretty damn good. Excuse my narcissism but god damn, I really am good at this!

I am good.