Thursday 4 November 2010

Reality Research: Dita Pepe

Dita Pepe - Self Portraits (1999 - 2008)

'I feel that everything in life is relative. When I look back on my life, if things had been just slightly different, I could have ended up being someone completely different from who I am now' - Dita Pepe on her work of self portraits.

Pepe's series of images is actually named Self Portraits with Men she has been working on the series since 2003. The images she produces highlight how her life could have been altered by decisions she made - with men. The quote I have taken from the Auto Focus book highlights this point. This work I feel is composed really well and also with a sense of humour which I always find is a good thing. The images are portraits of her taken with men at their homes or in their surroundings. The children in the images are also that of the Father figure in the images.

What I find fantastic about these image is that way that they are all believable, this is what I want to make a sense of in my images. Technically the images look very natural but I believe there has been use of fill in flash with most of the images. In some of them it has been flashed in from the left side, other straight on. Where ever it is it has been put in to add that extra contrast from the background to the foreground, even if its just by a few stops. The images are all taken in such a mundane and ordinary fashion that they all could be the truth, its up to the audience to persieve their version of the reality. In contrast with my idea where I am looking at my family and their ambitions when they were young to see whether the ideas and ambitions change through generations, as a kind of experiment. Another idea I did think about trying out was just depicting my ambitions and creating self portraits of these to find which reality the audience view best. Or even looking at the top ten and bottom ten jobs and depicting them through imagery.

Pepe's images are snapshot images in a way a from looking at the way she has photographed the ones in the series you get the feeling that she understands the basis of a good 'snapshot' photograph. All of the images are taken in a very laid back, family album kind of way. Other series of images Pepe has made include a very similar series except they were called Self Portraits with Women, very original titling! In the Auto Focus book it talks about how Pepe's images are 'Masquerade' in that they are not actually her, instead all of her imagery depicts different people but never herself (as does Sherman)

Both images taken from Auto Focus: The Self Portrait In Contemporary Photography, pg. 108 and pg. 109

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