March 16, 2011

A History of Me

I’m feeling particularly enthusiastic after the last few days of my life. Yesterday’s post with the park photos felt like a huge weight off my back and the feedback I received from people made me glow like a little worm of the glowing type. Today, I want to share something that’s deeply personal but also extremely public. It’s all of the photos from the 52 Weeks Projects that I have started, and in some (2) instances not finished, over the last 3 years. The basic premise is that you take a self portrait each week for an entire year. Some people are more adventurous than others and I guess I took that adventure to another level.

All of these photos tell some sort of story about me. Early on in the project, I was interested in simply the idea of the project but I started running out of creative ways to light an image quite quickly and I have to admit, until the Lego photo, I’m still a bit ashamed to this day that those first few images were so lame.

The only thing I felt I could convey for 52 weeks through these images was a story about me. I’m aware this is going to be a really long post so I won’t attach the often quite long text that originally accompanied each image but if you’re interested, you can check out the flickr post and the responses I received from my photographic friends on flickr via my stream here. By the way, mulletgod was my online name, it’s referenced in a few of the images (obviously in some, not so obviously in others).

I am really proud of this body of work and just earlier I was looking at the folder where all of these images were stored and I have nearly 23GB of originals and final edited images for this project. It’s something that I put my heart and soul into for many hours and as I’ve mentioned previously, it’s something that gained me quite a bit of attention. I was interviewed by the LA Times as a result of the Cookie Monster photo which overnight gained nearly 100 000 views and I’ve had offers by many different people/organisations asking to license images for their use. I had an exhibition in Wollongong (where I was living at the time) and even taught people how to do lighting after they saw that I had the chops to do it!

I’m enthusiastic still about taking self portraits, but one a week feels a bit too much for me. I think when the inspiration strikes, you’ll see more of these.

So without any more fanfare, here it is.

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