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Ipseity Series
My photographs are very personal. In my images, I take whatever topic, feeling or situation that I am dealing with and use that as my inspiration. Also, I am motivated to see if I can use the limitations of the camera as a means to reinterpret how I see myself, and those around me.
This body of work is a continuation of my attempt to truthfully express myself, and my use of a camera to capture the effort of trying. In the last year, I began shooting with a Holga camera. Through a fortuitous accident, I shot a roll of film where my frames overlapped. I decided to deliberately use this idea to talk about inner dialogues and the notion of the external persona versus the internal reality of the self. The Ipseity Series is about identity, and how conflicted I feel about the contradicting sides of my personality. I found a visual way to express, literally and symbolically, that I feel dissociated from myself at times. The objects that are carefully chosen for me to interact with or to illustrate a specific theme for an image are picked based on symbolic meaning. The overlapping frames with the blurred edges give a surreal feeling to the images while still maintaining a sense of reality.
The ongoing body of work relies heavily on pre-visualization to determine how the figures interact, the tone of each shot, and its emotional impression. I assume a character for each figure in the frame – the shoots are closer to performance art than straight self-portraiture. It is an exploration of myself in my environment. This series also allows me to actively acknowledge certain sides of my personality that I don't readily show to others, even those closest to me.
- Amy Theiss Giese, 2007
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Copyright
© 2002, Photographic Resource Center, Inc.