I&P Exercise 3.2
Make a list of some aspects of your personality that make you unique.
I&P p.80
● Start taking a few pictures that could begin to express this.
● How could you develop this into a body of work?
[9Dec20] In my experience, individual aspects of a personality rarely make a person unique – they are what make people similar – it is only the totality of all aspects that combine to begin to make the individual different, and ultimately unique.
Some physical characteristics tend towards uniqueness, fingerprints being an obvious example, and one’s DNA profile (although by family DNA likenesses we can all be identified).
A picture of my fingerprint, then.
Fingerprints
[20Feb] I have some inkjet acetate on order and had in mind a translucent variant on the Avedon / Starmer homage in C&N Assignment 3, but then thought of an easier way, merging the two in Photoshop, this time with the Kubrick homage (fig. A2) from the same Assignment.
Fingerprint advice came from the FBI, https://www.fbi.gov/services/cjis/fingerprints-and-other-biometrics/recording-legible-fingerprints, moderated by means of a course patterned ink pad which lends a pleasant mottled effect to the print (fig. A1).
1. my fingerprint
2. self portrait after Kubrick from C&N
3. mingled
Ailments
There are several defining moments in most lives. The second most important is having a first child — unless it is kept at arm’s length through nannies and boarding schools then your life changes in ways and to an extent that no-one could successfully describe to you.
But the primary event is learning how you are probably going to die (barring lightning strikes, under buses and similar mishaps). The knowledge never quite leaves your consciousness thereafter.
My self-perception is more as an expanding assemblage of symptoms than a personality.
Acquiring this knowledge changed my personality as a second stroke rewired my brain and tweaked all my bodily processes. Last year I started photo-documenting health events: there have been no diagnostic visits since Covid began, as the NHS has been busy elsewhere.
Hospitals are extremely reluctant to allow photography for reasons of patient confidentiality and so these often have to be taken surreptitiously.
Medical events, 2019-21
1-2. Eye scan, 24 September 2019
3. ECG 16 January 2020
4-5. Echocardiogram 16 January 2020
6-9. MRI 25 January 2020
10. Two months’ medication, 2021
11-13. Medication debris, 2021
Boothroyd, S. and Roberts, K. (2019) Identity and place. Barnsley: Open College of the Arts. [I&P]
