English 357, Project 1, Step 3
Self Portrait   (15 pts.)

DRAFT DUE: 11:59 pm, Wed., Sept. 22th.
Send one copy of your draft to a classmate as instructed below, and post another copy in our Drop Box.

PEER CRITIQUES DUE: 11:59 pm, Sun. Sept. 26th.
Click here for critique form. Post your critique in our Drop Box for your classmate to read.

FINAL VERSION DUE : 11:59 pm, Sun., Oct. 3rd.
Post your completed project to our Drop Box.

Instructions

You've taken a good number of photos by now—pics of things you were drawn to consciously or unconsciously; people or things in your daily path; the landscapes you find yourself in, etc. You've also spent a good week looking at, and thinking about, well-known photographs and internationally recognized portraits. I'd like you now to pare down your walkabout collection to 7 (give or take), and, with these 7 as a base, create a verbal-visual portrait or profile of yourself in a visual culture.

Your aim is to

a) create a piece of art to be displayed in public,

and

b) make a statement about who and where you are, preferrably with some tie-ins or references to the visual culture you live in.

This is a very open project. Use your imagination.

Audience

This is for yourself as well as for anyone interested in quality photography, visual media, and the art of portraiture. Imagine that your final product will be on display in the NDSU Union Gallery, the Plains Art Museum downtown, The Spectrum, The High Plains Reader, Nichole's (a great pastry shop in Fargo which displays local art), and so on. Your audience is intellectually curious, well-read, and well-aquainted with the fine arts. They may also have some background in media studies or rhetoric. You'll need to create something original, illuminating, rich and moving to impress this audience.

Purpose of the Assignment

I want you to "slow down the media torrent" a bit by reflecting on, and engaging with, one of the prime technologies of that torrent: the camera. Most of us take photography for granted and have forgotten what a marvel it was originally considered to be. The purpose of this assignment is to introduce or re-introduce you to the camera and the experience of "writing with light." In other words, I'd like you to play with this technology as if for the first time.

In a sense the aim here is a backwards one: I want the assignment to de-familiarize the camera for you.

Another aim is the opportunity to creatively reflect on who you are and your own place in visual culture. I want you to consider how it feels to live in this culture, how images and image technologies touch you on a daily basis, how you "see" yourself and how you feel yourself "seen." In a sense, you are also de-familiarizing yourself.

An additional aim is to help you gain appreciation for the art of portraiture. (Note: it's interesting to consider that EVERYTHING in our increasingly visual culture might be a "self portrait"—images that collectively say something about who we are as a culture. At any rate, I do want you to learn something about one very specific kind of visual art: the portrait and the self-portrait.)

And, finally, the purpose is to give you one kind of practice in "verbal-visual writing"—something increasingly expected of people in just about all professions.

Recommended Process

1. Reflect a bit on your original 50 photos.
   
   What did you tend to focus on? What did you leave in and what did you leave out, and why? Is there any pattern? As you took your pics, what were you thinking or feeling? What did the manner in which you took the shots say about the person you are? Are the pics you took purposeful and directed, or are they more random and exploratory? What did you do (this is important) that you didn't plan to do? Were you inclined to take simple quick shots, or did you fiddle with your camera or maybe add effects afterwards? Were you alone or with someone else, and why? How do your photos stack up against the ones you examined in Step 2 of this project?
   
   
2. Make your selection.
   
   Use your analytical mind as well as your intuition. Which ones make the most ESSENTIAL statement about you (strip you down to your core or most crucial self)? OR which ones reveal you in your greatest COMPLEXITY (show that there is perhaps NO core, that there are even MULTIPLE selves)? Which are the most CLEAR and REVEALING, or which are simply the most suggestive, MYSTERIOUS, evocative? Which ones, grouped together, make the most unified—or disunified—whole? Which ones say something about the VISUAL CULTURE you live in, even if they only say that you IGNORE or screen out the visual media in your everyday life?
   
   In making your selection, you're free to rely on your own criteria. You can pick the shots based on some clear idea or intention, or you can pick the shots based on a gut feeling. Whatever you do, try, as best you can, to keep in mind the idea of visual culture and your place in it. Be aware, as you make your choices, that we live in an increasingly visual world, one saturated in mass media images.
   
   
3. Create your portrait.
   
   With your 7 shots in hand—or on your hard drive :) —make a verbal-visual representation of yourself. That is, further refine and/or develop those 7 in any format and with any software you like: Power Point, Microsoft Word, .pdf, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, etc. (You can use that software both to "shop" or enhance your individual pics as well as to present/frame the final product.)
   
   Your portrait MUST contain something of those 7 photos, but you can include any other image you wish—even material from books, the web, family albums, etc. (Be sure to credit your sources on a separate document or at the end of your portrait in some way. Be inventive.) You can also include simply more new photos that you are taking (if by chance you've continued to take more).
   
   Your portrait must contain both visual and verbal elements. That is, it needs to include WRITING as well as images. The VERBAL element can take many forms:
   
   • Writing can be digitally added to the pics themselves, so that the verbal element is part-and-parcel of the visual.
   • Writing can ACCOMPANY the pics, as in captions under or over the pics--or as in an separate, attached written document.

   Whatever form the writing takes, it should not simply summarize or explain away the pics! The writing should be an interesting, vital component of the finished work.

Again, remember that this is a CREATIVE assignment, and you are free to make something interesting with whatever software or digital materials you like. It's more important to CREATE SOMETHING INTERESTING than it is to create something "perfect," whatever that means. That is, I'm looking for something ENGAGING and even risky, something WHICH SHOWS THAT YOU'VE STUDIED AND ABSORBED COURSE MATERIALS in creative ways. I'd rather get something gutsy that doesn't completely succeed than something dull but which has nothing technically "wrong" with it. Just be sure that your finished product reflects a good month's worth of thinking and a good couple weeks of focused work on the self-portrait itself.

By the way, this is a PERFECT opportunity to experiment with some kind of software you've always wanted to learn. For instance, maybe you've always wanted to create a really fancy web page without using templates. This is a good time to learn! Or maybe you want to finally dip into Flash or Photoshop, because you've always heard about them but never actually used them. Or maybe you already know how to use Power Point, but have never tried some of its many features. (For instance, you can actually make a film or music video in Power Point.)

Some Quick Examples

• A Power Point presentation which automatically plays a sequence of slides with photos in an order that reveals how you came to be who you are. In other words, a "history of myself."
• A Photoshop collage made up of your 7 required walkabout pics, all having something to do (let's just say) with your love of music. You'd add to these photos an assortment of select CD covers, and you'd even insert music to make it a multi-media piece. (Remember, though, to credit any sources. You can attach a separate Word document, add a slide at the end of a Power Point, or whatever. I'm not picky about format; just as long as you do credit any sources.)
• A web page with links to your different "selves." (Each link and page would have something distinctive on it, and all pages would ultimately link back to the homepage, or what you might instead call your...soul? your "personality central"? your heart? your "home plate"?
• A single, well-worked "picture," presented in a .pdf file, which in some way morphs all of your 7 walkabout photos together into a single image. You'd create it using Adobe Elements, as well as visual effects your camera produces.

Don't copy my ideas! Come up with your own. If you DO borrow something of the above, be sure to credit me as your source. Really. (Either that, or you'll need to pay me for my ideas in T-lot after midnight...)

How to Use Steps #1 and #2 in This Final Step

Or: What does your walkabout exercise or your short essay on August Sanders have to do with this final step, the creation of a verbal-visual self-portrait?

Well, I'm hoping those tasks will "feed" your self-portrait, explicitly or implicity. I hope the freedom of the walkabout helped you to take interesting shots and notice the visual culture around you, and I hope you learned something about portraiture from Sanders. There may ultimately be no DIRECT link between your self-portrait and those preliminary tasks, but the idea is that those first two steps will at least have a QUALITATIVE impact on your final work. You are perfectly free, if you wish, to directly reference or allude in some way to any of the steps, readings, PPTs, Sanders photos, etc., but it’s not required.  

EXAMPLE: one of the things which intrigues me about Sanders’ photos is the way he draws our attention to CATEGORIES of people (bakers, hikers, boxers, circus workers, etc.) but at the same time magnifies their complete INDIVIDUALITY. For instance, in plate #13, he doesn’t give us the personal names of the two subjects, just their occupation: “Boxers.” This encourages us to see them as categories or types. And to some extent, that’s what each of us is: a member of a group. At the same time, however, the two guys in the photo are utterly different from each other. We see them as completely distinctive individuals. It’s almost hard to believe they’re the same species! (Well, they’re maybe not THAT different.) This tension between sameness and difference, belonging and isolation, lends the photos some of their strangeness and even makes me experience the actual strangeness of being human.  

Ok, so—how might I use this info and my experience of Sanders’ pics in my OWN portrait? Well, when taking snaps of myself, I might frame myself as a TEACHER, with all the usual trappings of teachers (office, desk, blackboard, briefcase, etc.). At the same time, I might look to see how I am LIKE NO OTHER TEACHER. I.e., I would compose shots or a shot which reveals how weird and distinctive I am. My self-portrait might include a desk with an apple on it, but it might also reveal my 7-ft poster of Jim Morrison clad in black leather behind my office door ;)   Thus: by studying Sanders’ art, I discover techniques for my own work. I learn a way of approaching a self-portrait that had otherwise never occurred to me.

That’s what I mean by using course materials to inform and enrich your own work and your own ideas.  

Now—please don’t just copy what I describe above; do your own investigations :)

Supplementary Notes

If you feel you've put a certain kind or amount of work into your finished project which may not be immediately evident to me, or if you've experienced any number of technical troubles which slowed you down, or if your project is so ambitious that you finally can't completely finish it, by all means feel free to attach a brief "Supplementary Notes" which explains things to me. This will assure that my grading is informed and fair. I'll take into account anything discussed in these notes.

Drafts and Critiques

By 11:59 am, Wed., Sept. 22, send a draft of your work as a Word document to the person ABOVE you on the following list. ALSO post a copy of your draft to our Drop Box. You'll see a Thread there titled, "Project #3: Drafts."

If you are first on the list, send your draft to the person who is last on the list.

By 11:59 pm, Sun., Sept. 26, critique the draft of the person who sent you their work. CLICK HERE FOR THE CRITIQUE FORM.  Post your critique in our Drop Box. You'll see a Thread there titled, "Project #1: Critiques."

By 11:59 pm, Sun., Oct. 3, post your the final version, your completed Project #1 self portrait, to our Drop Box. You'll see a Thread there titled, "Project #1: Final Version."

How Your Work Will be Evaluated

Remember that the numerical scale in this course is only 100 points; this means that 20 pts. (the ultimate point value of this project, counting the walkabout) can easily be the difference between one-to-two semester grades.

Outstanding = A = 14-15

"Outstanding" means the document is both verbal and visual, provides the viewer with a strong impression of who you are, and shows engagement —whether implicit or explicit—with questions about visual culture. It shows very conscientious attention to the craft of photography and portraiture, and to the principles of visual design. It may even play with or creatively modify conventional design principles. It has a strong creative spark and stands out from the rest. It is an engaging piece of art, an imaginative portrait, suitable for public display. It avoids cliché and sentimentality. Verbal material is proofread and edited for clarity, conventional correctness, and reading pleasure. The work shows conscientious attention to class and instructor feedback. It has a title which actually adds something to the work as a whole. Your work was critiqued and you completed a well-developed and conscientious critique yourself.

Very Good = B = 12-13

"Very good " means the document is both verbal and visual, provides the viewer with an impression of who you are, and shows engagement—whether implicit or explicit—with questions about visual culture. It shows attention to the craft of photography and portraiture, and to the principles of visual design. It has at least some notable creative and/or original points, and is fine for display in a public place, though it may lapse, just a bit, into cliche and sentimentality. For the most part the verbal element is well-edited and proofread for clarity and conventional correctness. Shows attention to class and instructor feedback. It has a title which works coherently with the whole piece, though it may not add much. Your work was critiqued and you completed a critique yourself.

Fair = C = 10-11

"Fair" means the document is both verbal and visual, and, though it provides the viewer with some sense of who you are, could give a stronger impression. It may show some inattention to the craft of photography and portraiture (visual design is weak, photo effects are sometimes accidental or irrelevant). It is ok for public display, though may not particularly attract engaged attention and may be undermined by cliche or sentimentality. May contain verbal material which is awkward and/or unclear, or which lacks proofreading for stylistic and mechanical flaws. Shows at least some attention to class and instructor feedback. It has a title, though it may be just an obvious tag or summary, or doesn't seem to fit especially well. Your work was critiqued and you completed a critique yourself, though the draft you turned may have been incomplete or perfunctory, or the critique you did for your classmate may have been unhelpful or undeveloped.

Poor = D = 8-9

"Poor" means the document is weak verbally or visually or both. It gives only a dim picture of who you are, may be quite undeveloped, is undermined by cliche or sentimentality, and/or shows a considerable number of stylistic or mechanical flaws (appears not to have been proofread or edited). It shows little attention to the craft of photography and portraiture (visual design is noticably awkward, photo effects are accidental or irrelevant). Shows almost no attention to class and instructor feedback. Could be publically displayed, but lacks magnetism of any kind and/or might actually irritate its viewers for inattention to craft or art. It lacks a title or the title makes little sense. No draft was turned in, and/or no critiques completed.

Unacceptable = F = less than 2.25

"Unacceptable" means the document may altogether lack verbal or visual elements; may be excessively full of style or mechanics problems; may be too short/incomplete to count as a month-long project; and/or does not provide any sense of who you are. It would be inappropriate for public display, either because it is simply lacking any craft or development, or because it has no coherent sense of itself.

Have I seen the sea or has the sea seen me?     —Lawrence

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