Over de Kloof die bestaat tussen jou en mij. en de verantwoordelijkheid die ik als fotograaf draag in de beeldvorming van de persoon voor de camera
(2025)
author(s): Tobias Reinbrandt Haan
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023
Photography
In this research paper I aim to verbalize methods of working when portraying other people in order to find out how I want to tell the stories of people living in different social contexts than my own, through the realm of documentary making, in an honest and ethically justifiable way. My research consists of analyzing relevant aspects of the history of documentary photography over the last century. Through the work of artists like Dorothea Lange, Robert Capa, Nan Goldin & Susan Meiselas, a timeline is mapped out in which I recognize the role of the Western perspective and the changing dynamics within the domain of visual representation. Secondly, I make comparisons with the use of two case studies from the Netherlands. I describe elements of and reflect on the work of photographers Jan Hoek and Jan Dirk van der Burg, with both of whom I share an arguably similar background. By doing so, I counter their practices while verbalizing a way of working for myself. Lastly, the research done for the paper contains the tracing of my past, and the path that I have walked to come to this point. With the recognition of the privileges in my background, I have been able to better position myself as a photographer.
Self-portraiture: on photography’s reflexive surface
(2016)
author(s): Elisavet Kalpaxi
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition deals with narcissism, narrativity, self-portraiture, and photography. It illustrates a practice-based research project instigated in 2007 that aims to decode and recover narcissism as a useful sense-making scenario or system. This approach can help make sense of photography and self-portraiture in the present, and can be employed in the development of visual strategies in photographic self-portraiture.
Here I present the practical work that was produced and the theory that influenced my practice: namely, the revaluation of the relationship between self-portraiture and narcissism, and ideas from the semiotics of photography and narrative theory. The three main sections of the exposition illustrate the chronological development of my work, and each section is divided into two parts.
The first part of each section presents the practical work, whereas the second part illustrates the theoretical aspect of this project, which stems from a wish to reflect on my own art practice and increase my understanding of self-portraiture, while also interrogating narrative codes and devices in photography, such as the double, mise en abyme, and mirroring structures, and their association with narcissism. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, semiotics, and narratology, I argue that narcissism in self-portraiture can simultaneously represent an imaginary withdrawal of the artist, a structure within the work, and a vehicle for narrativity. By eluding structured language systems, narcissism provides a vocabulary for narrativising procedures, as well as meeting the artist’s/viewer’s modes of engagement.
These ideas informed the practical component of the research project and provided the basis for a number of visual strategies employed in the development of the photographic self-portraits that are presented in the second part of each section. In these sections, I also explain the different strategies adopted in producing my images: the role of codes, narrative devices, layering, and reframing for understanding the density of an image and its inherent narcissism. In the process I propose that narcissism should receive a much more central role in the consideration of images and the way they communicate with a contemporary audience.
About exchanging a portrait •
(2016)
author(s): Gert Germeraad
published in: Research Catalogue
This is a text concerning artistic processes. It has a starting point in a project where I am making a portrait of a colleague artist while he is making mine. During the making of this portrait and thereafter I question my ways of working in which I occasionally find myself confronted with artistic blocks. In a period of two and a half years I investigate and articulate my artistic process as it meanders and expends over the different attitudes and problems I encounter in my work. I give a critical analysis of my motives and working methods and try to extend the range of possible ways of working.
This text can be read as an extension of my previous text "Rationality, Intuition and Emotion, exploring an artistic process" that is published in the Journal for Artistic Research, JAR 3.
This is a text concerning artistic processes. It has a starting point in a project where I am making a portrait of a colleague artist while he is making mine. During the making of this portrait and thereafter I question my ways of working in which I occasionally find myself confronted with artistic blocks. In a period of two and a half years I investigate and articulate my artistic process as it meanders and expends over the different attitudes and problems I encounter in my work. I give a critical analysis of my motives and working methods and try to extend the range of possible ways of working. This text can be read as an extension of my previous text "Rationality, Intuition and Emotion, exploring an artistic process" that is published in the Journal for Artistic Research, JAR 3.open exposition comments (0)