Collaboration
Self Portrait Service
Informed Consent | Photo Portrait Practice
Self Portrait Service
Informed Consent | Photo Portrait Practicewww.selfportraitservice.info
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Self Portrait Service is a photo portrait practice with its roots anchored in the ethics and protocols of BDSM: informed consent. This is a collaboration with Sam Richardson and anyone who wants to make a portrait with us. This project is ongoing and open to anyone within the LGBTQIA spectrum. We do this work in service of our collaborators: their needs, desires, and visions for imagining themselves. We work to empower people to direct and determine their own self-representation. This free portrait service is for those who have historically been denied access, power, and control of narrative. We aspire to create an archive of sorts through a collaborative public that de-centers and shares power, rather than using a proprietary lens. Considerations of ownership and collaborative authorship are essential. Each person depicted owns and has full rights over their image. They fill out a contract or bill of rights to determine what access, if any, is granted to Sam and I and they specify under what circumstances we may be granted access. In queer community presentation and representation are a complex, beautiful and unending part of our existence. There are transformations, undefined spaces, play and theater all rendered through our image-identity. Due to this reality, Sam and I are determined to facilitate a way in which queer community can depict oneself as they wish to be seen. The writing of the depicted in concert with their image expands and individualizes each subject beyond the stillness of the photograph.
As photographers from intersecting identities of privilege and marginalization, we strive to acknowledge and account for the existing commonalities within queer community, but especially for difference. The queer community spans so many experiences, and we do not claim to speak for any other than our own. We mean to empower, facilitate and create space and occasion for self-expression and exploration. This project as a series may seem disjointed at times, as each image is truly of its own making and style, but that is the point. We press against the expectations of documentary photography, the digestibility of image-identity and at times the aesthetics of photography itself. We do not feel that this project or our process is a solution to the power dynamics inherent to photographing someone, or that perfect collaboration is even possible. We do however have a vested interest in bringing up these considerations and questions about portraiture, ownership, representation, and the camera. We hope to provide this service to as many people as possible, to share our access as image makers and to help explore, celebrate, document, heal and support.
As photographers from intersecting identities of privilege and marginalization, we strive to acknowledge and account for the existing commonalities within queer community, but especially for difference. The queer community spans so many experiences, and we do not claim to speak for any other than our own. We mean to empower, facilitate and create space and occasion for self-expression and exploration. This project as a series may seem disjointed at times, as each image is truly of its own making and style, but that is the point. We press against the expectations of documentary photography, the digestibility of image-identity and at times the aesthetics of photography itself. We do not feel that this project or our process is a solution to the power dynamics inherent to photographing someone, or that perfect collaboration is even possible. We do however have a vested interest in bringing up these considerations and questions about portraiture, ownership, representation, and the camera. We hope to provide this service to as many people as possible, to share our access as image makers and to help explore, celebrate, document, heal and support.
interested in making a portrait?
contact
Index