The Looking glass Jonathan Bain Final paper

The Looking Glass

  

My self portrait is in the form of well… a self portrait. As a photographer,videographer, and artist I wanted to show something that truly represents me, and what better way than to show that through my camera (or its parts). To me my camera is everything. My camera made me into everything I am. It brought out my passion and a drive I never knew I wanted to learn more about. Making this piece was just as interesting as it was time consuming. I had to set up my old camera in a locked down location where I’d be able to properly frame myself and each of the camera parts. I then had to dismantle my second camera (my current canon 80D) and hold each piece in a proper part of the frame to give it the illusion of it floating in between my hands, not including framing myself with my arms wide open (which my mom laughed at me for). 

But why did I create this piece? Well for one, it looks really f****** cool. But also like I mentioned before my camera is my purest form of expression. Just like the many different pieces to my camera, my life itself has its many different parts that form into what I am today. I was never good at school, I always saw I had a much more creative approach to things, which is probably why I found artistic forms so intriguing. l started off drawing and painting from a young age, then I moved on to learning more about music. I played the piano, guitar, vilon, and trumpet when I was in middle school. Unfortunately I sucked at reading music, and classes became too expensive to take so I fell off after about 5 years. But right before my 17th birthday I believe, I was cleaning the house and stumbled upon my moms old Canon T3 camera (actually the camera used to take this picture). From the start I was obsessed with the camera. I went around shooting with a few friends around where I used to grow up, then it moved to people around school, then portraits for families, to fashion, to a few years down the road and working with companies or big artists I never pictured shooting for. Now in college I slowly started to move more into film and i'm currently studying video production. Like all my camera parts coming together to make a working DSLR camera, all my past experiences have come together to make my film passion what it is. Knowing the right music, how to artiscally set up a scene or tell a story, everything came full circle to work on perfecting my craft.

I tied this back to the “Private Live/Public Space” because I post all my work publicly, whether it be Youtube, Vimeo, Instagram, etc. Maybe I’m not physically there to see how people view my work, sometimes my work isn’t even creative, sometimes it’s just a vlog. It’s my form of expressing who I am, but how people interpret that is 100% up to them. But also how all my past experiences have shaped me into who I am. I hope to someday make a film of my own (if my writers block ever gets better lol).