1.1 A Summary of this Course
This week I started a course called INDOOR SELF-PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHY by photographer Taya Iv. The course description really caught my eye, as I’ve wanted to study more about the history of self portraiture, selfies and how it relates to identity. This course won’t necessarily get too heavy on the theory and history but it will help me work on my technique to help improve my subverted selfie project. Specifically, the course description describes how:
Indoor self-portrait photography is one of the best genres for photographers who want to gain confidence, express themselves, and learn to see potential in seemingly insignificant places. Learning how to photograph yourself can help you as a photographer in general and allow you to empathize with models, confidently break the rules, and take outstanding photographs that accurately define you as an artist.
So I enrolled. And as I’m doing with my different courses now, I’m going to post work I do in this course as I progress in it. The first class’s assignment was to craft a biography, which I did. Like a lot of writing I do, I was quite in-depth as I wanted to express to the course professor where I am at, so she can help push my work. So, without further fanfare, here is my introduction to me, which provides more insight into some of the inspiration behind the self portraiture I’ve done over the last two years:
What’s in a name?
I’m Steve. But what’s really in a name? Wasn’t it Shakespeare who asked - “would a rose by any other name smell just as sweet?” If my parents had named me Thomas, would that change who I am today and the directions I’ve taken in my life? Regardless, my folks named me Steven Robert Han Lee. Why Steven? When I ask my Mom this, her go to answer has always been just because she always liked that name. Wikipedia notes how:
Steven is a common English first name… particularly significant to Christians, as it belonged to Saint Stephen (Greek: Στέφανος Stéphan), an early disciple and deacon who, according to the Book of Acts, was stoned to death; he is widely regarded as the first martyr (or "protomartyr") of the Christian Church.
The article further notes how:
The name "Stephen" (and its common variant "Steven") is derived from Greek Στέφανος (Stéphanos), a first name from the Greek word στέφανος (stéphan), meaning 'wreath, crown' and by extension 'reward, honor, renown, fame', from the verb στέφειν (stéphein), 'to encircle, to wreathe'. In Ancient Greece, crowning wreaths (such as laurel wreaths) were given to the winners of contests. Originally, as the verb suggests, the noun had a more general meaning of any "circle"—including a circle of people, a circling wall around a city, and, in its earliest recorded use, the circle of a fight, which is found in the Iliad of Homer.
The circle metaphor seems apt in describing my earlier life, when I was much more of a high functioning depressive, working for several nonprofit organizations, where I organized events and even fought corruption that broke out in one of them. In that sense, I was involved with a circle of people trying to make life for the larger circle just a little bit better.
I recently found out that Robert was the name of the groundskeeper of the Williams Lake Stampede grounds where my Mom kept horses and served on the Association’s board. Ultimately, Robert was another person who worked to help a greater circle of people. I remember his wife Rose, who painted oils on canvas. She let me have a go once when I was very young, maybe two or three years old. I remember the feel of the paintbrush in my hand and the palette laid out in front of me, with the remnants of the browns, reds, and dark green. I remember the wood panel walls of the trailer they lived in, and the chiaroscuro light that made the edges of everything I remember feel as though it was out of a dream.
As a teenager, I changed my name to Steven Hanju Lee, to reflect the name of my father. Han was his name here in Canada, and it’s been a part of me since birth. But when he came to Canada in 1952, the customs and immigration officials misheard his name and recorded it as Han Choo Lee, not as Hanju Lee. My Mom and I found this out in the early 90s when his family found those family members who were stuck in the authoritarian dictatorship of North Korea. Each letter that came from them was addressed to “Hanju Lee.” It was something he never corrected customs on in the moment. I guess between having English as a second language (even though he could speak half a dozen), and perhaps growing up with unstable governments you didn’t trust, it might have been easier to just accept and move on. And it ended up being a name he lived with for the rest of his life.
My Fine Arts Background
Currently, I’m a bachelor of fine arts student at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, although my depression has put me in a situation where I’m not even sure I’ll be able to complete my degree. I’ve focussed on lens based work during my degree, and I’ve been fortunate enough to have studied a lot of photography as well as performance art. One of our professors, Ana Black, studied with and was an assistant to performance artist Marina Abramovic. Like a good performance art piece, I try to make sure my own subverted self portraits aren’t too preplanned, and that they feel authentic to the moment I’m experiencing. When Professor Black studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, she got to scan and archive work by Francesca Woodman, who is definitely a hero of mine. She was so brave with the stories she told through each of her photographs. And as a suicide survival myself, I have a small inkling of the kind of anxiety and depression she likely went through which led her to take her own life at the young age of 22. Other heroes of mine include:
Henry Horenstein: who was maybe the first photographer who ever inspired me to turn my camera towards myself after I viewed his HUMANS series, in a project I did for an introductory digital photography course at university;
Robert Mapplethorpe: is another photographer I really admire, as he used his self portraits as a way of looking at his identity as a gay man (who was likely gender fluid). I’d like to do more of that - as I came out demipansexual last year and gender fluid / gender queer this year (I go by they / them). With my latest mani pedi I let the aesthetician pick out colours to paint my finger nails; and a week ago I had my armpits waxed for the first time;
Scott Schuman (the Sartorialist): who doesn’t specifically shoot self portraits, but what I like a lot about him is how he’s able to approach strangers on the street, strike up conversation and take their photos. Overall, his work is a kind of a subversion of the fashion and modelling worlds, which I appreciate. I got to meet him in 2019, at a book signing, and it wasn’t very busy yet so we got to chat for quite awhile which was really insightful;
Cindy Sherman: (who I missed meeting by an hour, on the opening night of a retrospective they had a few years ago at the Vancouver Art Gallery). Sherman too is brave and is absolutely amazing at creating worlds through her portraits. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then Sherman has certainly mastered that formula. I also love how you can sometimes see the mechanics in some her early work (as well as in Woodman’s) - like the shutter release cable being held in her hand, with its long cord leading down to the ground and out of sight to one of the sides of the frame;
Andy Warhol: and specifically his use of Polaroids, which in their day were kind of an equivalent to how we snap shots so easily on our smart phones today. He’s also famous for the quote about everyone looking for their 15 minutes of fame - which seems more relevant today in the age of social media than ever before.
Why am I here?
I signed onto this course because I want to find new ways to push my portrayals of myself further. On January 1, 2020, I started a subversive selfie project on my Instagram feed (@steveleeart) to try to present a more honest look at my life. I found myself frustrated looking at the perfectly curated pages of so many friends which often felt like a “best of” look at their vacation and holiday photos. My goal was simple: to post a selfie a day that was authentic to how I was feeling during the moment I shot the photo. I suffer from anxiety, depression, diabetes, and high blood pressure. I’m also overweight and because of my depression I tend to turn to junk food for comfort. I also overspend and as such I’m surrounded by a lot of things I probably don’t need and I’ve had issues keeping my place organized. All of these are things I’ve explored in my subverted selfie project. I’ve also tried to talk about my counselling, and things I’ve done to improve my life.
On another hand though, part of me acknowledges the idea that my selfies are a part of me yearning for some kind of attention. In her book, THE SELFIE GENERATION, author Alicia Eler notes how “The selfie is largely both an adolescent and celebrity social phenomena, because both categories of people are intensely focused on how they are perceived by others” (15). I was bullied a lot as a teenager, in an age that existed a few years before social media existed as it does today. So there are times that I realize how others may or may not perceive my “project.” Many don’t even realize it is an art project. But then I also straddle that line of whether or not I’m over sharing. Am I feeding my own demons when I express ideas about the depressions that plague me? Overall, I am fairly consistent about remembering to post each day, although there have been chunks of time when I did shoot a photo but didn’t get around to uploading it. This fall I also started to upload the photos from the project to my 500px, Flickr, and VSCO accounts - so they don’t just live on Instagram. With my body issues, I’ve posted some nudes - shots of me from behind - but those can set off the Instagram algorithm alarms, and my account may or may not get deleted with further “violations.” I do appeal each time a photo gets pulled, and usually they get reposted. But still… I’d hate to lose my old posts on that platform. Not so much the photos, as those are backed up, but the text captions I’ve written for many of them are not backed up. You can see my shots here in these Flickr albums:
A few of my favourite things…
I love movies. I own around 8,000 titles on DVD and Bluray, with a few on VHS. Some of my favourite movies I’ve seen in cinemas this year include WEST SIDE STORY and SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME. It’s hard to chose an all time favourite but Alfred Hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW is up there, about an injured photojournalist nonetheless. One of the last films I saw before the pandemic that I loved was A HIDDEN LIFE. So good!
I’m reading more too, and recently finished a great book by Shawn Achor called THE HAPPINESS ADVANTAGE. I also read pretty much everything about creativity and writing by Natalie Goldberg this year (start with WRITING DOWN THE BONES), and I loved May Sarton’s book, JOURNAL OF A SOLITUDE. As a work of nonfiction, it is over 50 years old, but parts of it felt like it could be reflections on today’s social media soaked consumer driven pop culture.
