Self-Portrait

About this work

This is the write-up I did regarding this piece for the course for which I made it.

The night before the assignment was due, I reflected on the fact that in all my earlier self-portraits, I didn’t want to make a self-portrait in the traditional sense. I intentionally avoided representing my face—in Mosaics [not on this website], I make myself an abstract composition of shapes; in I Cannot Thee Forget, I exclude my nose and mouth; in Worth Ten Thousand Words, I process the image of myself so as to avoid having to put my [unedited] face in the portrait. Some of this I had done subconsciously, but it was all because I still have insecurities about my appearance that I’m yet to come to terms with. This act of carefully dancing around depicting my face was what inspired me to make Self-Portrait.

The only thing different about Self-Portrait is that there is no [deeper] meaning that warrants me obscuring my face [as with the other portraits] — I did it because I wanted to do it, because I could, and because I didn’t want to show my face.

Process

This is the write-up I did regarding this piece for the course for which I made it.

At the beginning of fall 2023, my brother took [a] photo of me under a tree outside the Kaneff building [at UofT Mississauga] on his Polaroid camera. Though he let me keep the original, I took a picture of it on my phone, which I used as the base image for this work.

I decided that I wanted to censor my face with pixels (as opposed to a giant black bar or scribbles) and searched the internet for some ways to do it quickly but ultimately settled on doing it manually. I brought the image into Photoshop and covered my face with 49 transparent 7x7px squares. I then used the eyedropper to select the pixel at the center of the area that the square covered and set it as the fill for the whole square. I repeated this process for all 49 squares and then scaled everything up.

Modern thoughts:

In the original write-up, I say: “The piece is less about insecurity and more about the lengths to which I’d go to obscure them.” There were definitely easier ways to do this in Photoshop, but I think the process of manually placing those squares only underscores the deeper message in this piece.