Self Reflecting Selfie Inspired By William Kentridge

My name is Abigail Ostorva and I am a senior with a BFA concentration in Graphic Design. Hopefully this is my last semester and I will graduate in May of this year. I enjoy spending my time by creating art, hanging out with friends, and playing games with those friends. I have always had a love for art, but only recently decided to try to make a career out of it.

I don’t usually find myself to be drawn to more well known contemporary artists, since I don’t always see their work. Instead the work I see more often is by small artists that I follow on social media, such as Adam Ellis and Thom Minnick. I enjoy seeing the various art styles that these artists have and the different techniques they use to make their work come to life. However I also find myself drawn to Renaissance artists such as Caravaggio. I always enjoyed how well they understood the basics of art and how they mastered these basics to create exceptional work.

When watching the videos from Art21, the one that stood out to me most was William Kentridge’s idea of how artists often use someone else’s pain as their subject matter, but through working with it develop a type of sympathy for the pain. The idea of sympathizing with someone else’s experience by experiencing it yourself through art is one that many artists probably agree with, and I personally have found that I often have to use art as a way to understand someone else or even myself. This is why I modeled my selfie after his work.

 “To collect photographs is to collect the world.”

This quote from the reading is a simple one, but it holds true. We live in an era in which most people who have a phone, have a pretty good camera built in. This ease of pictures has developed so much that there's specific social media dedicated to the act of taking and sharing pictures. These pictures are then shared across platforms with people from all over the world. Not only can these images be shared, they can also be archived into one’s personal collection. By collecting these photos anyone who can do this is able to experience the world through someone else’s eyes.


“Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it.”

This quote from the reading is one that I don’t entirely agree with. It seems more true when thinking about the time when cameras first became popular. However in the modern world, altering of photos is easy to do, and even more so, socially acceptable. When looking at photos online you must look closely to discern whether any photoshop or other editing software has been involved. This happens often enough that you begin to look at most pictures with a critical eye, almost as if you are expecting the photo to be altered in some way. Of course not everyone thinks this way, and would still take a picture as fact, but it’s becoming more and more apparent with the rise of AI and other technologies that photos can no longer always be taken as fact.