Self Landscapes

A book about taking pictures, of me taking pictures…

Self Landscapes: Reflections on Photography was a photo book I created as part of my MA coursework. This was my first proper foray into photography theory, with the images being an investigation of theory by Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes - such as the notion of the photograph as a ‘transparent envelope’. Somehow these images of reflections thwarted that transparency and made us focus on the performance that resulted in the image.

Self-Landscapes began by accident. An otherwise perfect photograph of the city ruined by my shadow, or my reflection in some window, invading the frame without permission. Then I began to take these "selfies" deliberately. I became fascinated by them. They seemed to defy categorisation. They were not landscape or street photography in the strictest sense, neither were they self portraits, the usual explorations of identity. With my face obscured by the camera in almost every shot, my identity was only 'photographer'. The act of photography itself was being photographed, and therefore in some way interrogated.