My self portrait is an image of me fixing my hijab or my scarf. The idea behind this photo is me looking back into the mirror seeing how others see me walking through the world. Just as Cindy Shepard transformed herself into many different beings, I change frequently based on my specific ways of wrapping my head covering. Not only do I always tend to fix my scarf, it has become a habit from a young age to place my hand on my head and make sure my scarf is still in place. This photograph is something that people hear about often because Muslim women tend to say “I’ll be right back, I have to go fix my scarf,” multiple times throughout any given day.
“Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it.” http://www.susansontag.com/SusanSontag/books/onPhotographyExerpt.shtml
My inspiration for this picture came from Cindy Sherman’s Untitled work where she took stills in order to replicate things such as movie posters for films that were not mainstream. Her stills have a very different outlook on self reflection and the ideas behind seeing oneself through a unique lens. Sherman created her own photography style that no one seems completely able to replicate today.
As Eva Respini put it, “The success of this body of work is in the seemingly endless variation of female types that Sherman has presented to us—the girl on the run, the bombshell, the bored housewife, the vamp. Sherman has mined these stereotypes to great effect and presented us with a variety of characters that are familiar, but also spark our own narrative.”(https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/261/3368)
Some might be very familiar with this narrative of fixing clothing or even fixing a scarf so I chose this to be my image in order to allow a new idea about the hijab form in people’s minds.
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