Introduction and Sontag Excerpt

 

Hi! My name is Kassandra Brown and I’m working on getting my BFA in Illustration. I’ve been drawing since childhood, usually cartoon characters. I’ve always been interested in adventure, magic, and fantasy. I grew up watching anime, cartoons, and adventure movies and still absolutely love it all. I loved all Studio Ghibli Miyazaki’s animated movies, adventure fantasy films like Lord of the Rings, and the Harry Potter films. So my illustrations are based more on fantastical characters and magic. But I also am interested in more traditional art, but my knowing the area is very shallow. 

Kassandra Brown Self Portrait inspired by Báez. 2023.

Firelei Báez “To See Beyond It And To Access the Places That We Know Lie Outside It’s Walls” 2015.

For my introduction selfie I chose to base my portrait on Firelei Báez’s “To See Beyond It And To Access the Places That We Know Lie Outside It’s Walls” (2015). I became interested in Báez’s portraiture and how she sees the human body as a link between the artist, viewer, and subject. Her work looks magical and very conceptual, which inspired me to make my portrait. I used the colors of the Belize flag, my parents native country, blue, red, and green to show my roots. I don’t know much about my culture, but seeing my her work makes me want to delve deeper into my culture. 

 

Susan Sontag excerpt from “On Photography”

 

“To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store.”

 

When reading this quote I agreed with Sontag that collecting photographs is the same as collecting the world. Photos can capture a moment, and doesn’t take a expert hand to do so. It’s cheap in the way that everyone can do it using their phone that they carry on hand, can accumulate and store all in one place. Photographs are a experience captured and something physical to keep. 

 

“While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency”

 

With this quote she explains how photographs can be narrowly selective in the way that photos only capture a small portion of the world, and depending on the angle, time of day, month, year, the image changes. The example she used was about photographers that took photos of sharecropper subjects and imposes standards on their subjects;  in this case to show a particular reality of poverty, dignity, and exploitation. Though the photo is reality, it is curated in a way to interpret a certain point of view.