What Is Auto-Representation?

When photography first began, it was recognized as a medium in which one could capture and preserve a moment in time. Photography was seen as the revolutionary way to document reality; events, places, and people. Soon, though, artists got their hands on cameras and shifted the way in which photographs were interpreted. No longer was photography only a tool to create images of the embodied world, but it became an art medium for the imagination, just the same as paint and pastels. The once honest and trustworthy photograph became a piece of artwork that could capture more than what the human eye deemed authentic.

Everyday people stare at billboards, magazine covers, movies, television, or pictures on the Internet of someone or something that they classify as beautiful. Some things people glance over and other things fascinate them. For example, when Farrah Fawcett’s famous picture of her in her red bathing suit came out; many

By definition, self-perception is your interpretation of your own behavior. However, your interpretation of yourself could be influenced by what others think and say about you. Sometimes people find themselves over analyzing who they are and they end up degrading themselves or they try to change who they truly are. As emotional human beings, they seem to find themselves being more judgmental toward their own actions and appearances. When others make assumptions, they only see the outside and make judgements based on appearances rather than looking deeper in order to discover the true beauty that’s exists beneath. “Lonesome, With Snails”, “The Mother”, and “Portrait of My Body” are three essays that will be used to explain how self-perception

People tend to views an image based on how society say it should be they tend to interpret the image on those assumption, but never their own assumptions. Susan Bordo and John Berger writes’ an argumentative essay in relation to how viewing images have an effect on the way we interpret images. Moreover, these arguments come into union to show what society plants into our minds acts itself out when viewing pictures. Both Susan Bordo and John Berger shows that based on assumptions this is what causes us to perceive an image in a certain way. Learning assumption plays into our everyday lives and both authors bring them into reality.

In reality, even the models and the people we look up to, the people who we are supposed to look like, struggle with their own self image:

In contrast to Dillard’s essay and her overall message on how we shouldn’t live life behind a camera, but yet go out and experience things for ourselves, made me think about how you see yourself as a person. No matter who you are, you have never seen your whole body with your own eyes, only a reflection. It’s freaky if you think about it long enough because you look in the mirror and you see this person standing looking back, and that person is you. Every person is concerned on how others view them no matter what the case. Plus, even more so now because of all the social media that blasts your self-image that you create for yourself by posting endless selfies and pictures of you on cool trips, all in hopes to boost your self-esteem by getting

Furthermore, the “selfie” or digital image seeks to represent a moment of time or fun that does not prove to be an authentic representation of one self. Moreover, it can be eluded from the text that self portraits are the art and the selfie or “digital” image is the human need. The text elaborates this ideology, stating “…digital photography has

During the Great Depression, Walker Evans worked primarily as a photojournalist and documentarian, using the medium of photography to capture American life in visual detail. Many of Evans’s most famous photographs appear in his book, co-written with James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The book was in part

Analysis of: American Legion Convention-Dallas: Street photography by Garry Winogrand Skip, Philadelphia: A photograph by George Krause Art is such an eternal concept and part of our lives. It lives on through generations, transcending many periods, and can speak through many mediums. Art is a way

Image is everything in today’s society appearance of things have become more important that what they really are and these images are being constantly fed to us through the media. Image has both a positive and negative influence on the individual but most people have been drawn into

Image I’ve never been seen in a picture. No, I don’t mean in a supernatural sense, as if I’m a vampire and don’t show up in mirrors. I mean that a camera has never, “captured” me. What you see in this photo was punctiliously orchestrated. From my consummately fabricated scream face to my eyes open seemingly taking in every gloriously horrifying moment of what is a thrill to most but a bore to me. I’m hiding who I am. Not just from the outside world but from myself. Everything I do is scripted. I try to convince myself it’s true. That the lies are real; but when I come home at night, to my much too desolate apartment, I have no choice but to accept myself for what I am. I accept that I’m alone and always will be. I accept that no one will ever

The definitional meaning in any form of art is dependent on the receiver, and their own perceptions. In Chapter Thirteen, Photography’s discursive space, contributed by Rosalind Krauss, analyzes perception of photography and the attempt to transform revelation from one perceptional context to another. For example, an illustration of a mountain

In Roger Scruton's Photography and Representation the author establishes the idea that ideal photography is not art. In the same breath he says that ideal photography is not necessarily an idea which photographers should strive, nor does it necessarily exist. Yet, he bases his argument upon the ideal. In reviewing his paper, I’ll take a look at why he painstakingly tries to make this distinction between ideal painting and ideal photography. His argument is based upon the proposition that photographs can only represent in a causal fashion, whereas painters create representational artwork via intentional relations. Scruton manages to create a solid argument, but in the end I’ll decide it is not a fair assumption to say that photographs

iii. Charles Cooley "believed that people always see themselves about other people. Your sense of self, he believed, is formed by imagining how you appear to other people" (Bevan, J.L. & Sole, K. 2014).

Untitled is freighted with untold stories. You feel the gentle breeze along with the heat of the day; the stale grass; the mute mutterings of the wind; and that moment smothered under the weight of its sheer lassitude. This portrait is somewhat less of a person or place but more of a single moment in time. He never has diminished what he sees but somehow enlarges both the trivial and the momentous. By supposing that photography is at its most vibrant when it seeks to understand not just a setting, but a single moment in time; or even just an feeling, or hard-to-place emotion, Eggleston makes the case for photography engaging on a deeper emotional level than simple aesthetics.