Live Encore: Photography for Self-Discovery

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] Hey, I'm Desdemona Dallas and I'm a photographer and filmmaker working here in New York City. I focus most of my work around gender and social justice issues and have been using photography as a means to understand better myself and the world around me through this practice that I'm going to be sharing with you today. In today's live class, we're going to be talking all about how to dive into those internal questions, ideas, and themes that you might be considering and talk about how to turn them into a photo or a photographic series. We'll be talking about how to use light and color and going through a variety of different journaling prompts to really get to the bottom of what it is you're trying to figure out for yourself and how to use photography as a means to bring those things to life. I really hope that entailing this class you leave with a better sense of understanding yourself. We're always learning new tools and ways to discover a little bit more about who we are, and the camera has been something that's been overlooked in these processes and I think that if you leave understanding anything, it's having a new tool and a way to really look at yourself [MUSIC]. Thanks for watching my Skillshare live class. Recorded with participation from the Skillshare community. Let's get into this. [MUSIC] 2. Getting Started: Hello. Thank you for being here today. My name is Risa Goodman. My pronouns are she, her, hers, I'm a product manager here at Skillshare. Thank you for joining us today for our live session with photographer and filmmaker Desdemona Dallas. Hi. I'm a photographer and filmmaker and I'm based out of New York City. A lot of my work dives into gender and social justice issues and have been cultivating a practice over the last few years which usually focuses around asking intimate questions of myself and trying to find the answers to those questions through my lens. I'm excited to take you all on this journey today. I'm a Skillshare teacher and have a few other Skillshare classes out there. If after this class you're interested in diving in more about lighting mostly and portraiture, I love working one-on-one with people. The same kind of questions that we're going to talk about today, I often use for my one-on-one sessions to try to really bring an intimate session out with people and the people that I work with. I'm very excited to be sharing this work with you today and hopefully you can bring it into your own practices as well. That's an awesome introduction. On that note, what are we going to do today in this session? Yeah. Today I'm going to go over a little bit of my work, and then I'm going lead everyone through some journaling prompts, and we're mostly going to be talking about the use of the camera and the lens to actually spend some time in self-discovery. I find often for me that photography can be used in the same way that a journal might be used for some other people to really cultivate these questions that you might have about yourself or the world around you and focus on those questions and then use those as a place to really tap into your inner creativity and use those questions as a way to create work and get to the bottom of them through exploring those questions through the camera. 3. Desdemona’s Examples: I'm just going to talk a little bit first about my own experience with this work and how I came to discovering this as a good practice for myself. I wanted to talk first about the practice, using this practice, and using it through self-portraiture. That was really the first way that I started getting integrated into this work, was taking just photos of myself and being really experimental in that practice. I was asking a lot of questions about myself and my body and my relationship between those two things. This is my first photo series that was focused on that, this self-portraiture. Doing a self portraiture really allows you to step away from yourself a little bit and gives you the opportunity to see yourself in a different light and expand on who maybe you think you are and being able to look at your own self and be able to portray, maybe there are different characters or different ideas or emotions and seeing yourself express those things. I think is a really great way to first start this practice after we go through some of the journals, doing it through self-portraiture, is a really great way to get started. Here's another self-portrait that I took. I love the difference between these two. This one was really personal. I was trying to really capture an internalized strength. This one for me was at a time where I was working outside a lot and really feeling like my own smallness in larger world around me. I was thinking about how to capture that and thinking about the ratio of myself to my surroundings. These are just two different examples of different emotions I was feeling and how I captured them through self-portraiture. Here is the portrait that I was doing. The self-portraits turned into this work that I actually took and started capturing other people. Though, the first one that I showed you all, that was trying to capture this strength in relationship to body. I really liked that concept, people's relationship to body and self. So I continue to expand that and got my friends and other people who are interested in exploring that too into creating a series with me. That's a great thing to think about too, is we're doing this work is the difference between focusing on one photograph versus a series of photographs. Here again, working with this relationship to self and body, I just started taking photographs of people, just asking them to be in a space of being really intimate with me and open to being accessing that intimacy with their body and capturing that. It was a really fun series and I got to really get a lot of different people involved and each one of these sessions, I think also the person that I was working with was able to get a lot out of that as well. That's an overall example of how the journaling practice that we're going to be using today. How I've taken that journaling practice and used it in a few different scenarios throughout my own work. Dallas, I had a little bit of a question about the process that you just showed that arc from the self-portraiture going to the ability to do the portraiture of others. I think that for me it's helpful to really start on my own internal exploration, which is why I like to start with self-portraiture. It gives me the ability to think about the different shots that I want to set up and also be really personal with my myself, what are the feelings that I'm feeling? How am I experiencing this emotion? What conclusions to these questions am I coming up with as I'm exploring it through self-portraiture? I feel once I'm able to have a little bit better of a grasp on how I'm experiencing those questions and narratives that I'm trying to work with, I can start to bring those same ideas into work with other people. A lot of times, once I start working with others, we'll sit and we'll have tea and long conversation about the ideas that I'm trying to articulate before we even go into the portrait session so that we're really getting on the same page. This one that was talking about the body, we have these really beautiful conversations about sexuality and how people were feeling their experience with themselves in their own body and maybe even some of the things that they were afraid of or they didn't like about themselves, or the things that they really loved about themselves. I was able to really understand where they're coming from and take that information into the session. I think that this practice can be really beautiful because it isn't always just about you as an individual artist, but it can be used as a practice where you're really bringing other people into these questions. Because I think so often the things that we're thinking about and considering, they're oftentimes universal issues that we all have our own thoughts and ideas about. So allowing other people to come into that process can be really powerful. 4. Conceptualising Your Portraits: Now I'm going to guide you through a few prompts. I want you to just spend some time thinking about any questions or ideas or themes that have been coming up for you in your own personal life. Things that you've been contemplating and that maybe you're trying to get a better grasp understanding of and spend a little bit of time just jotting a few different ideas down, considering those different questions, what's coming up in your life. What are you trying to dive deeper into and just writing a few of those down. I'm just going to ahead, and get started. [MUSIC] Once you've written some of those themes, you can start to think about what emotions those things bring up for you. How do these themes feel internally for you? What different feelings come up? What are the textures of those feelings? [MUSIC] As you're thinking about those feelings, spend a little bit of time considering what visually do these emotions bring up for you. You close your eyes and think about those emotions. What comes to my mind? Maybe it's a memory or a person, or a place. As you start to really touch into the visual narrative, you can either start writing these visual pieces down. Or if you'd like to, you could start drawing them. [MUSIC] I'll just give everyone a few more minutes to finish up what their thoughts are and complete any drawings that you might be working on. If you want to go back and spend a little bit more time on some of the earlier questions, go ahead and do that. I'm going to just finish this up in a few minutes. [MUSIC] We'll just go ahead and close that up. I hope that wasn't an insightful practice for everyone. Then I'm just going to go over a few more examples. Just as you're working out your own narratives and stories and ideas. Hopefully, this can give you a little bit more ideas to work with. This is another series that I worked on and this was similar also in the sense of working with bodies. But this one, in particular, I was really thinking about the relationship between people and the environment. So this one, in particular, I was really trying to use the element of water to bring this idea of what is our own human imprint on the Earth. This was a photo I took out at the beach and I was really focused here on thinking about the shape of the body and how it's similar to water, but also how water shapes around it. Part of that series is also this photo. Again, thinking about the similarities between body, shapes, and the world around them. This one, I had people on these rocks and showing just how similar the bodies are to the rocks. Again, thinking about what is the human relationship to the world, and what is the human's relationship to the environment. That was another approach, this one was really location-based, I'm really thinking about how to bring that narrative to life through the locations that I was choosing. The shots are much more focused on shapes versus the other series was focused a lot more on showing the actual face and seeing the expression. This is just a different approach. Can you talk for a minute about making that move from the single photograph to the series? I think that as I started practicing this a little bit more and getting into these ideas a bit more I felt that you can tell such an amazing story through one photograph, and one photograph can really capture the entire essence of an idea or theme that you're thinking about. However, I also feel that a series can allow for there to be a little bit more exploration where you can really start to explore that idea from multiple different sides. For example, in the piece that I just showed, I was able to focus on water and Earth. The first one is really about the ocean and about the movement of the waves and it feels like there's a lot more fluidity in that piece. Where the second one is more about the Earth and the rocks and it gives me more of this sense of a mountain and is much more still. Both of those allow to bring ideas to the same topic. However, they're showing two very different sides of the same topic. I feel like doing the series just allows for further exploration. However, if you're wanting to just do self portrait and just exploring the self, it can be really beautiful to set up a backdrop for yourself and get more innovative if you want to use props or the color that you're doing, then that is an image on its own that already has so much exploration within it. It really depends on the approach that you decide to work with. Do you want a tab? They are really set up shot where you're thinking about all of these different ideas in the one shot. Or do you want to be exploring out narratives from a lot of different perspectives? 5. Capturing Textures: One of the other things that appears really strongly in your work in the series you just showed especially is nature, and one of the prompts you talked about texture. I would love to hear a little bit about how you conceptualize the role of texture and how do you figure out what texture you want and then how do you figure out how to get it in the photograph? Can you talk about that for a little while? Yeah, totally. I'll actually bring up one other series that I think is a really great example of that. I worked on a series that centered my relationship with my mom and for this one, I felt like for me my relationship with my mother is always, I'm having my own ideas about her all the time and I think that through this series I was really able to see her in a different light and discover her own self as her own separate person. For this one, I only shot with film and so it's not as crisp as some of my other photographs and I think that in that sense the texture of these different light leaks that you're getting. This is a really great example of this light leak here. I think it really invoked that essence of there being this separation in between us. I loved the film aspect in this. Again, another way that texture can be used not only in what you're choosing to work with but texture, in this photo, this is a great example of texture because we get the texture of her hair in the backdrop of the texture of this water. Then again with this one, with the hair and the water, it's almost as though like her hair is the foam of the water itself. My mother to me is a very watery, oceanic being. Thinking in the sense when you're talking, when you're thinking about your emotions towards a certain topic, thinking about the texture of that emotion can be really important. With this one, I loved the softness of this. There's a really soft light, the soft light that hits her here and the softness of these leaves in the back. That's all an aspect of using texture and thinking about texture in these photos. Again, here, there's so much texture in this and so I think really accessing that part of yourself. Is this a memory that feels soft and how do you capture softness through, or is this an idea that feels soft, or is this an idea that feels that there's more harshness to it and maybe if there's more harshness to it, you're going to be shooting something that's more high contrast, that feels a little bit more jarring. Again, with my mom in particular, there's such a softness to my relationship with her. A lot of these photographs have a much more soft texture to them. That's just an example of how texture can come into play when you're thinking about how you are going to approach yourself for your subject or however you choose to tell this narrative. 6. Editing Your Photos: Editing is a super important thing to think about. Mostly the editing process what I'm thinking about is color. Again, when you're thinking along with textures, it's also really beautiful to think about what color you're invoking, like the color from my self portrait is really, really warm in town. Then in some of this other work, I have moved much more to a bluer hue. When you're thinking about these memories or ideas or themes, think not only about texture, but also think about what colors that comes from. This is again like why this is so can be such a point of self-discovery because you don't want to edit yourself in this. Maybe it's something that you didn't even realize had a softness to it in your mind, or maybe it feels really yellow to you, and you don't exactly know why. But if that's a color that's coming up when you're thinking about these themes, continue to dive into that. If you choose to go with self portrait and you're thinking of lemons, or you're thinking of yellow, like pull some lemons in. You might discover when you're actually looking at the photograph later that, that lemon you're like, oh, that actually reminds me of my childhood relationship with my grandfather or something. Our mind is always trying to give us these clues to, I think, deeper truths to ourselves. If you're able to see these themes or archetypes and really continue to hone on them, I think that, that will bell to open up new ideas and perspectives to you. This next series I'm going to show you is a series I did focusing on ideas around masculinity. I shot everything in this really blue hue. I was very typically thinking like masculinity and flu and was trying to evoke this coolness. Maybe there's a little bit of distance feeling in this. I feel like these photos ended up feeling a little bit like clinical and far away. When I brought them into the editing and shows that I didn't like the blue anymore. I turned them into this really beautiful warm tone. I felt that even in, I'll show you the change in. This is the blue. Then this is the more warm tone. I felt that there was so much more of a strong relationship I had to the subjects that I was photographing. Then I was really able to see them in a different light when this blue was placed on them. Here we have the warmth clues added in. Here we have, again, this blue and it just felt so, again, this distant feeling of not really feeling a connection. Then when the warmth was added into the photograph, I really felt something changed in my heart when I look at these photographs. That's the thing to really just playing around. Maybe the way that you shot something is not the way that you end up really liking it. You can take it into the editing and play around with that. See if there are other colors that feel more resonant to you and allow yourself to change along the way, just as we ourselves do change along the way. Just giving you a few more examples of the blue versus this one, especially to me, I just feel like the warmth really brought me in so much, I can see the eye so much better, and really resonate with the character of this person more with the warmer tones. 7. Q&A: Now let's take some questions from the audience. This is talking about feeling isolated and trying to move into fun and playful and free art making. I really resonate with this. I think I've definitely tried to make my work more playful. Especially when we're doing more internal work with our art making, it can feel that you're dredging up all of these really intense and hard emotions, and it keeps us a little bit isolated from being able to feel this joy. Almost sometimes when I'm in art making and I'm not feeling very good, but I want to evoke these more joyful emotions, I'll just trick myself and play with things that are more colorful or think of more joyful memory and try to use that as a jumping off point. Thinking of times that made me feel happy, and what about that time they made me feel happy. I think it can be hard to access those emotions but if you can think about things in your life that you can draw pleasure from and focus on those and bringing those interior work, can really help you to guide your work into a more fun and playful space. There's a question in the chat about, what do you think about looking back over the past photographs from the self-portrait series versus creating a new series? I think that if you have old self portrait photographs and you want to look at those, and those will help inform a new series, I think that that's like a really personal question. Maybe you're in a place in your life where you don't really want to do a lot of looking back and you're more like, who am I now? What do I want to embody now? Then I would say go ahead and just start making new work but if you feel that looking back at it is going to help you to see something that you are looking for, trying to find an answer within, then go for it. Definitely look back at those and maybe there's what I was saying before, I think there's little clues that we're always leaving ourselves. Maybe there's a clue in that old photograph that would help you to create a new narrative. That was brilliant. I have one more question because it's just one of those questions everybody always wants to know about photographers. What do you shoot? What are the cameras that you use? I am of the belief that you can make work out of everything. I have everything from a $20 toy camera to my nice professional DSLR. If you do want to play with film, you can generally pick up really cheap film cameras on eBay or Amazon, and I think that they're really fun because that's when you start getting these weird light leaks. With those cameras, you never really know what's going to happen. Again, I'm really into this idea of the world around is giving all these clues. I think magic really happens with those cameras, you never know what you're going to get but for self portraiture, you're literally your iPhone is an amazing tool for self portraiture. For me personally, if I'm doing more portrait-based work, I use my Canon 5D, and with a 50 millimeter lens. I really love the way 50 millimeter looks for portraiture, and that's generally the size lens that I'm using, is a 50 millimeter. Who are some of the influences that have appear in your work or even in just your thinking around your work? I feel like I have a lot of influences as far as the work that I'm looking at, but I don't know if there's anyone specifically that I emulate. There's a filmmaker, Barbara Hammer, whose work I really love. She's a lesbian filmmaker who made work in 1980s, and she also did a lot of photography work, especially self portraiture work, which is so beautiful. She has this series about her relationship to cancer that she was experiencing, which is so beautiful and really that exploration of herself it has greatly impacted my work for sure. There's a follow up question. At what point do you invite comments from family or friends about your portraits or your series? That's a good question. I'm not very good at doing that personally. At what point? I think it depends on really how far you want to get into this series. It can be even as simple as after you did this journaling exercise and you have this idea that you want to work with. If you want to get other people involved and do a portrait series, you can. I've been thinking a lot about this and I want to do portrait work around it. Would you want to be involved? Starting to talk about the idea is a really great way to get other people involved in your work, which is really fun I think. Then once you start actually creating, maybe before you go into the editing process, if you're trying to figure something out, as far as do you want to change the colors, it can be nice to get some other eyes on it and see how it creates other emotions for other people. That's awesome. Then what could be your dream series or what do you want to work on next? Give us a little preview. The series that I showed you at the very end, that's my piece on masculinity. That's something that I've been working on for a few years now and continue to work on that. It's been growing over time. That's another series where I really brought in other people, had these intimate conversations with them and got other people's perspectives about their relationships to masculinity. It's just grown over time and I continue to work on that and have really loved being involved with seeing how that's evolved. I think that's another thing if you choose a series and want it, and love the exploration and it's continuing to bring out a lot within you, continue to follow that exploration and just allow it to grow and change. Especially as you're involving other people into that narrative, it'll just keep expanding your ideas on the theme which will just lead to more and more self-discovery, which is so beautiful. 8. Final Thoughts: We've talked a lot about different tools to really enhance these questions and emotional dialogues that you're having with yourself. Some of the things that I want you to continue to consider are thinking about the texture, thinking about the colors. Thinking about if you want to work with self portrait, or start to bring other people into the conversation. This is a great space to really open yourself up to having dialogue about interpersonal things with other people. If anything comes to your mind, any visual or narrative or color or texture, any of those things, consider them clues and really dive into those, and don't discard them. But, think about how you can enhance those ideas, and you can bring them more into your journey, into diving into these themes.