Darkness in the light

Darkness in the light

Portrait of:  Cindy Sherman Poppy Gauss

I chose Cindy Sherman because reading and looking at her self-portrait work inspired me. In my self-portrait to tell a story in a image is a powerfully thing. I did a self-portrait to express my emotional mindset of death and beholding of your loved ones memories of the good and bad of grieving. That's why in this photo the feeling of losing someone you love and respected is gone like a empty space. I've felt like my light was gone. But I had my family to give me hope. Cindy Sherman's portrait "Poppy Gauss" brought feelings to me and got me thinking about the death of my grandmother. Sherman's work to me is again Powerful, making me have a flashback of the moment  just by looking at her photo is interesting to me. Her doing self expression through her portraits and trying to tell a story through her photos and her characters is amazing. "Cindy Sherman opened a lot of the doors. She was the trendsetter in terms of distorted characters within self-portraiture. Originally painters painted self-portraits, and then she kind of blew it open with photographic portraiture, and now there are all these avenues younger artists are taking, which would not have been so easy without her work". "Cindy is an incredibly influential figure. She fundamentally nailed it in terms of understanding the way images are constructed. Portraiture was never considered something conceptual in quite the way that she took it on."(www.artnews.com/2012/02/14/the-cindy-sherman-effect/) That's why I feel connected to Sherman's work in a deeper level with every self-portrait I see from her. I learned that every photo has a story or a deeper meaning. That's why in my self-portrait, it's my personal story about my emotional mindset in the photo.