I was inspired by Frida Kahlo’s family portrait and the way she loved her family and live so she painted the portrait to save the memories of family so she even painted a fetus of a baby that might be her lost baby that she couldn’t deliver.
The idea of my project is to make a family portrait addresses the title “family” as family is very important to me and always comes first. Due to the pandemic, I had to do my project digitally so I collected a recent small circle picture of each family member such as me and my other two sisters but when it came to my parents, I got a picture of them together as they representing one person for me not two. Then at the bottom of each side of the portrait I put a big rectangle picture of all of us together from 2005 on the left and 2020 on the right showing how we still together and we always will do. My background is green and I was inspired by Kehinde Wiley as he used flowers in the background to shows the relation between plants and human as plants are very important and we all love it. So, I chose the green color because green color means nature and family is our nature.
According to Finkelstein, “The self is a storage and retrieval system, a repository of the roles we have in the world as, say, the perfect mother, ardent lover, reliable bureaucrat, brilliant doctor and so on.” As it shows the roles I have in the world as my family represents the world and I have a role in this family.
Moreover, according to Susan Sontag, “to collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store.” This is the reason why I brought a picture from 2005 where we were in Egypt, showing the style of the photo and fashion style at that time, comparing it to 2020 photo in America and it was taken as a selfie with totally different style of fashion.
In addition, I chose to make my project about family because I see them representing myself identity because they are who made me what I am today. According to Guy-Ernest Debord, “The images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished." As my family is my stream where every aspect of my life detaches. As these moments will never be reunited but I always have them in my mind.
To conclude with, the relationship between my photos and my identity is the spectacle that few people can see it. My project tells a story about my family and shows my love to them and myself identity that is exists in the spectacle as long as I am still alive. It can be also a memory for someone else such as my children who will be added in this portrait later on. Our past became a memory and our present will become a memory too.
References
https://www.fridakahlo.org/portrait-of-frida-family.jsp
http://www.susansontag.com/SusanSontag/books/onPhotographyExerpt.shtml
http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/16
Finkelstein, Joanne. The Art of Self Invention: Image and Identity in Popular Visual Culture. Tauris, 2007.
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