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Self portrait as avatar (not the blue kind)

May 24, 2010 by Brad 

A friend of mine, Chanelle, is in the middle of an ambitious series of self-portraits. The series seems to have something to do with coming to terms with being in front of the lens, and some things more profound than that, which I ought to leave to her to put into words. As for me, I can empathize. I am not a big fan of getting out from behind the camera. It’s safe behind it. It’s risky in front, if you’re at all uncomfortable with aspects of your own appearance, expressions, being open to misinterpretation, or if you simply have control issues. I plead guilty to all of those to one degree or another.

Recently I was reminded of an article I read about one of Flickr’s biggest stars, who hit it big through her own self-portraiture in Iceland. One of the issues that Flickr self-portraitists have to deal with is the community there and its comments and links. Most comments I’ve seen on Flickr are supportive, but there are pockets of crankypants party-poopers, and when any topic gets enough attention, they will spill over and taint the scene. Female self-portraits suffer from a dual edged sword of critique. If they’re pretty, they’re accused of pandering to make viewers. If they’re not, well… that comes with its own obvious set of harsh commentary, or dismissal and little attention. Male FLickr users sometimes feel like they are at a disadvantage to female self-portrait creators, because our current culture appreciates the female form and aesthetic over the male. And that can make the men even less attractive: they can get whiney about it.

In actuality, I don’t have the answer to that matter at the moment. But I noticed some of that whine creeping into my thinking. So I told myself to get over it already, fired up the iMac’s built-in camera and Photobooth program, and cranked out an approximation of her current Twitter avatar self-portrait. Okay, so she’s still objectively more attractive than I am. But I wound up with a self-portrait that I can live with. And as I break it down, my issue with most of her other self-portraits that I wouldn’t feel comfortable trying to recreate is that I’m more than 10 years older and probably 100 pounds heavier than she is. It’s not really a male/female issue.

I’m a believer in actual distinctions between males and females. Some are natural. Others are cultural. Some matter in certain arenas, macro or micro. But on the subject of self-portraits, I think my little exercise of copying Chanelle’s vision for this photo has helped me get past an unnecessarily applied distinction.

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