Self Portrait

This week’s assignment reminded me a lot of the film we watched in class the other day. The film about how the human body have been drawn, sculpted, painted, etc. is just like the assignment. I am taking my actual form and manipulating it to what I think that I represent. I really liked this assignment because it was creative and fun. It also allowed me to link what we were doing in class to this blog post really easily.

The photo of me differs from my ration/symbolic representation because the photo of me is myself. I am mirrored in the camera and this is what I actually look like. There is no Photoshop, disfiguration, or change to the image of myself. It was simply taken from real life. The picture of “me” in sign form is very different than my actual picture when you first look at it. The image is not of a person at all, but of shapes that make up what I believe I generally look like.

There were a few areas of intersection between my empirical representation and my symbolic representation. This intersection was in the mouth. In the empirical representation I am smiling in the picture taken. In the symbolic representation I have a sign that says “smile” where my smile would normally be. The other areas of intersection were the general shapes of the signs. I picked signs that were the general shapes of my actual features. My head is somewhat oval, so I chose an oval sign, and my nose is a triangular shape so I chose a triangle sign.

I chose the symbols I did because they have some meaning to me. The sign that represented my head says “welcome” because I am a welcoming person and very easy to get to know and become friends with. The oval eye signs (I have oval eyes in my empirical representation) say “private property no trespassing.” This is because I am guarded when it comes to certain things and like my privacy. The triangle sign I used for a nose is an exclamation point. This is because I think I have a very outgoing and energetic personality. As I stated above, where the mouth would be I have a smile sign, because I like to smile and in my real picture I am smiling. I made my bangs a fashion sign because my bangs in real life have no definite shape, but they are a representation of my love for fashion and the latest trends, which is why I chose the “fashion style” sign. Last but not least, my ears are the life is good sign. I made my ears oval as well because that is the closest shape to my actual ears. I chose “life is good” because I really do believe that life is good, and I cherish every moment of it.

I think that every one of the signs in my photo describes me symbolically. There is nothing really that rational about my symbolic image. Everything is a metaphor for who I am deep down. The only somewhat rational thing about the image is the sign that says “smile” because it is where I am actually smiling in my empirical image.