ED2 Photo Assignment One

Self portraiture photographers

Vivian Maier
Vivian Maier was an American street photographer during the 50's and 60's. Vivian Maier was born on February 1st 1926 in New York, USA. She grew up in the USA and France as her parents moved around but when she was 25 she moved to New York to work and do photography. Vivian Maier died in 2009 aged 83, a lot of her work was un-printed and produced, so historian John Maloof went ahead and printed some of her work to show it in museums across the world.

  In this photo Vivian Maier has created a self portrait in a bathroom which is interesting as there is a mirror to her left which is showing a reflection of her so there is two of her in the picture. Maier is using a medium format twin lense reflex camera. These style cameras were first designed in 1870 and were a breakthrough in photographic technology as you didn't need to change any lens to focus and take pictures with. the next major breakthrough in twin lense photography were Rolleiflex cameras in 1929, these cameras were much better quality and designed. the disadvantages of these cameras were that on many of them you couldn't change the lenses so you'd be stuck with the lense on the camera unless you bought a different camera
It is seen in this picture that Vivian Maier is using a Rollieflex camera as these were the best at the time and Maier had started her photography around the same time these cameras came out.

This is another self-portrait that Vivian Maier created. She took a photo of her reflection in a mirror that this man is holding. this self portrait is good because she hasn't just took a picture of herself sitting in-front of a camera she has created something interesting and different. also the attention of the photo isn't just focused on her there is also other events going on around her which gets the viewer thinking about why the man is holding the mirror, is there a purpose other than the photo? and the person emerging from the walk way to the right of the photo. It is just a very interesting self portrait which is unique to many others.



Cristina Nunez
Cristina Nunez is a professional artist-photographer who has been taking self-portraits since 1988 as a form of self-therapy, to explore her creative identity and to raise her self-esteem. She has held workshops on self portraiture photography in various places such as prisons and photography centres across Spain. Her work as an artist-photographer has been internationally awarded, shown in many exhibitions and published in several photography books.

In this photo Cristina has also used a twin lense camera like Vivian Maier, these cameras a quite popular within self portrait photographers as they are small and can be hand held easily, they also look good in a photo. this self portrait does look like a generic  self portrait but it does have a different look to it as the corners are dark and it fades into the middle. this self portrait also has other objects to pay attention to like the Vivian Maier self portrait in the mirror, the viewers attention is also drawn towards the camera she is holding aswell as this is quite a nice part of the photo






this self portrait is also fairly generic but its interesting because she is using the same camera as the the previous self portrait I looked at. This self portrait is almost the same as the previous photo but she is a few more years older in this photo but she has still shot it in the same style as her previous photo.