Hasselblad Open Studio 2012 Tokyo

My Hidden Ego
Freudian Rear Mirror Psychology in Portraiture

Monica Silva

"Existence is actually an imperfect tense which never becomes the present" Nietzsche.

"

Topics
1 Opening session: LIFE ABOVE ALL project, The key as photographer to new discoveries 2Self-portrait in art and history 3 Psychology in self-portrait: Analizing a portrait to discover a new me 4 Freudian Rear Mirror; Psychology on photography: as therapy for disturbs 5 My Hidden ego and other aspects of portraiture 6 Moldelling the soul matter: Discovering new personalities and its secrets 7 Acting Out: You photographer reflected in the Universe 8 Authors biographies, and reading suggestions 9 Biography

Everybody is a reflection of you.

The universe is a reflection of you. This includes supposedly opposites such as good and bad, conscious and unconscious and personality and male and female. It is important to understand these opposites in our personality and merge them, or we will be at continual war with ourselves and everyone else.

Life Above All

Evocations and inventions for a photo project.
From the book The Anthology of Spoon River by E. Lee Masters

"All is vanity and a chasing after the wind" Vanity runs fast within our thoughts as time goes by.
Contemplating a skull is like remembering our weakness. We have always been opposed to the void left by the Vanitas, we reject our human condition, seeking a form of staying connected to the memory. Photography thus helps us live longer making the image of a person, immortal.

...and God created man as his image and likeness "...a picture is often the photographer self-portrait, as he tends to project in the model his physiognomic features and his own inner world..."
The Ego in the Mirror by Stefano Ferrari

Gustav Coulbert Self-portrait, 1844

Hobein 1542

Salvador Dal 1954

Lebrun 1790

Ingres 1804

Self portraiture in the history of art

David Bailly Self portrait with Vanitas 1651

Albrecht Drer Self-portrait 1493. This is among the earliest known formal self-portraits. He is dressed in Italian fashion, reecting his international success.

Drer 1500

The craze of Frida Kahlo for self-portraits

Photographer & Psychologist

Shoot, analize, discover yourself

Self-Portrait Theraphy

Cindy Sherman
Cindy Sherman in the series "A Play of Selves" works (recalling Duchamps style) on the change of identity and on the analysis of the definitions of appearance usually dictated by the photographers. She appears only in her photographs, playing with disguises, amatoriality and a research of oneself as different entities, referring to the fragility of me in front of the mechanisms of identification and social recognition. In 1975 with the series "Untitled ABCD" she works on her face as on canvas, using makeup and accessories to take on different connotations.

Cristina Nunes
22 years of self-portrait - Self-portrait experience My life from 25 to 45 in self-portraits, which shows the evolution of my inner consciousness and growth. These pictures and texts reveal the way I've seen myself over the years and my inner struggle. My need to look at myself in pictures was instinctive, at the beginning I thought it was my own need of attention. Now I understand that I was actually p r a c t i s i n g m y o w n k i n d o f s e l f - t h e r a p y. Photographing myself I felt free to express what I needed to say, I felt important (to myself), worthy of love and a wholesome life.

Peter J. Witikin

Joel Peter Witkin Born in Brooklyn September 13, 1939. The subjects of his work were often dismembered corpses, transexuals, hermaphrodites and the deformed.

Richard Avedon Self-portrait 1980

Helmut Newton Self-portrait with his wife and model1981

Annie Leibovitz

Claude Cahun

Her work was both political and personal, and often played with the concepts of gender and sexuality. Cahun's work encompassed writing, photography, and theater. She is most remembered for her highly-staged self portraits and tableaux that incorporated the visual aesthetics of surrealism. Her birth name Lucy Schwob

"The awareness of yourself, abolishes any kind of subjection"

Freudian Rear Mirror

Richard Avedon
On Photography bySusan Sontag

"... I often think that people come to me to be photographed as they would go to a doctor or a fortune teller to find out what and how they are, thats why they depend on me, I have to win them over, otherwise I have nothing to photograph, the concentration starts from me to involve them, sometimes its strength is so strong that you wont hear a noise, time stops. We live a short, intense period of intimacy, but it is undeserved, has no past nor future, and when the shooting session is finished, when the photograph is done, nothing remains except, of course, photography. "

Francesca Woodman

Diane Arbus
"Theres always a difference between what we want and what we can not avoid from others to know about us; its the distance between intention and effect"

The Arbus wanted to accommodate perhaps, in the negative, the invitation of Giovan Pietro Bellori, seventeenth-century art theorist, who suggested the artists to "measure the nature of the intellect with the compass" in order to suppress the irregularities caused by the imperfections of matter.

Psychology in photography The camera and thethird eye

In the science of psychology the camera represents the extension of the psychic aparatus, in one of its main cognitive organs: The Eyes

Picasso
by

Richard Avedon

Psychology in photography
When photography becomes the tool to the cure of a soul

Samuele Bersani Sony Music

Paolo Sorrentino Film Director

Matteo Becucci Sony Music

Noemi
Sony Music

James Sallis Writer

Frank Nuovo

Ansel Adams
A "great shot" is the one that "comunicates all the emotions that the photographer feels for his subject ...

My Hidden Ego

My Hidden Ego
Find an ego underneath, take your subject towards a new self

My Hidden Ego project Angela

My Hidden Ego project Federico Brugia

My Hidden Ego project Marta Ilardo

My Hidden Ego project Ismael Lo

My Hidden Ego project Paride Ursino

My Hidden Ego project Davide Rossi

My Hidden Ego project Gianluca Macaluso

My Hidden Ego project Kim

My Hidden Ego project Nicoletta Mantovani

Wim Wenders says that every photographer shows his soul thru his photography
(from prefacy of the book Stories of Peter Lindbergh,)

On My Skin
An ordinary looking object or body, if observed with real attention, they become something sacred. The camera may reveal the secrets that naked eye or mind can not see, everything disappears except what is on focus thru the lens. Photography is an exercise of observation and the result is a stroke of luck: the thousands of negatives that fill several drawers of my study are very few exceptional ones. The camera is a simple tool, even a fool can use it, the challenge is to make through it, that combination of truth and beauty called art. Its particularly a spiritual search. I seek truth and beauty in a transparent autumn leaf, in the perfect shape of a snail on the beach, in the beautiful female back, in the texture of an old tree trunk and also in other forms of fleeting reality. Sometimes, while working on an image in my darkroom, i can clearly see the appearance of the soul of a person, the emotion of an event or the life essence of an object, by then my heart overflows with happiness and tears free down my face, I can not help it. ("Portrait in Sepia" by Isabel Allende)

On My Skin KharmaSutra

On My Skin Seta-Baricco

On My Skin SexLigious

On My Skin Mising You

On My Skin Lobjet du desir

On My Skin Il Vangelo di Luca

Portraits are about more than just capturing a face. They are about capturing a life. That's why they are such an invaluable aid to leave tracks of a persons existence

Modelling the soul matter

When photography becomes the tool to mutate the expressive form

Nicoletta Mantovani

Nicoletta Mantovani

"The camera is my sketchbook, the instrument of intuition and spontaneity. To photograph is to hold your breath when our faculties converge to capture eeting reality, at which point the captured image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy. Photographing is recognizing at the same time and in a fraction of a second an event and the rigorous arrangement of forms perceived with the eyes that express and signify that event. You put on the same line of sight mind, eyes and heart. It is a way of life. (Henri Cartier-Bresson 2004) "

Acting Out
First thing a photographer should do before shooting, is to exit himself to create a bond between his inner and outer world. He will be the one and only to decide when to freeze the situation he is living the moment, its his interpretation of reality, which is defined as an act of re-production and re-creation.

Cristiana Capotondi Sette Corriere della Sera

Shannyn Sossamon Corriere della Sera

Yelena Isinbaeva Style Magazine

Samuele Bersani Sony Music

Michael Fassbender
Corriere della Sera

Bibliography & Sites

For those interested in exploring the topic covered in this workshop, I suggest to search on the work of Linda Berman and Judy Weiser, first to use "phototherapy" as a tool adjuvant to psychotherapy and the project "Photo-Unconscious" of Ayres Marques Pinto. On Fotografia by Susan Sontag Beyond the Smile and The therapeutic Use of photography Albums (1993) Linda Berman Ed. Erickson Ideas on photography Marra Claudio ed. Mondadori Photography therapy thru the images of Luigi Ghirri A. DElia ed. Maltemi The exuberance of shadow-reflections on photography and psychology (2008) Carlo Riggi ed. Le nuvole PhotoTherapy Techniques: Exploring the Secrets of Personal Snapshots and Family Albums (1993) Judy Weiser PhotoTherapy Centre Press "The Art of Inner Worlds" Portraits and Psychology edited by Christopher Chapman. Psychology in portrait, art and in literature Stefano Ferrari ed. Laterza The Mirror of the Self. Self-portraiture and psychology by stefano ferrari Ed.Laterza Someone To Love Cristina Nunes book of self portraits techniques. Some disoredered interior geometries Francesca Woodman.

All the images here reproduced are used with the only means of education and are copyright of the respective authors

Judy Weiser website regarding the topic http://www.phototherapy-centre.com/ Self-portrait in art history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-portrait

Biography
Monica Silva was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil. She is based in Europe since 1986. For 8 years she has worked with major film studios as first AD for international advertising campaigns with directors as Robert Richardson, Federico Brugia, Daniele Lucchetti, Zack Snyder. In 2001 she joined professional photography, shooting many works in the music business with labels as Sony Music, EMI, BMG and Edel portraying Italian musicians for CD covers. Nowadays she does several editorial assignments, for italian magazines and newspapers: Max, Dove Viaggi Flair, Vanity Fair, Io Donna, Style, Magazine, Sette, Panorama Travel, I Viaggi del Sole, Corriere della Sera. In 2008 Monica Silva becames Nikon Pro Photographer and shoot projects in collaboration with Nikon Italy and other Countries tourism board. In 2009 she was assigned by the UNESCO ambassador Edith Tamagnini to carry out the photographic campaign for the book "Perpetual Freedom-San Marino World Heritage Site", published by Edizioni Minerva and sponsored by Cassa di Risparmio di San Marino (Savings Foundation of San Marino). In 2010, she helds a serie of workshops for Nikon School and in 2011 starts working with two major names of professional photography: Hasselblad, Manfrotto, for lectures and workshops on the psychology of portrait. Turning into arts From these multiple experiences, Monica Silva feels the need to express herself more creatively and move on from corporate obligations. Thus set first steps into the world of art photography, shooting articulated projects such as "Life Above All" in 2008 (interpretation of the collection of poems entitled "The Anthology of Spoon River" by E. Lee Masters) in exhibition at Mazzoleni Art Gallery (Milan), Stefano Forni Art Gallery (Bologna) and Pomposa Art (Codigoro). Follow the the project On My Skin," a serie of nude shots for the event Art Fair 2010 (Bologna) in collaboration with Stefano Forni Gallery and Open Project. In April of 2011 a new project comes to light: "My Hidden ego", a study project of the psychological aspects of the human soul. Simple set lighting for contemporary photos in order to highlight what is not shown of a person' self. The projections of interactive design is done by the designer Gianluca Macaluso from Deep. The exhibition was open to the public for two months and took place in the prestigious tuscany Palazzo Pichi Sforza (Sansepolcro AR) with the support of Mercurio Promozioni and Kemon. In November 2012, Monica Silva was awarded Best Photograph of 54th The Biennale Art in Venice with the picture Dorfles infinito e lo sguardo a Ghirri . The award was conferred by the judges composed by President of la Biennale di Venezia Paolo Baratta, the curator of the 54th Art Exhibition Bice Curiger and the artist Shirana Shahbazi. Recent works: Manfrotto School of Xcellence, Bassano Photography: Workshop "My Hidden ego" and "Light there be Light!" Hasselblad Workshops: "My Hidden ego" Portugal: Lisbon and Porto; "My Hidden ego" Monopoli (Bari) Brazil; Reportage in Sao Paulo and Salvador Bahia to be published in the main italian magazines next two months Most recent publications: "Gods", published by Skira. Portraits of the artist Gianluigi Colin and his works (Madre Museum, Naples) "Mitographs", published by Skira. Portraits of the artist Gianluigi Colin and his works (IVAM Museum, Valencia, Spain) Mayonnaise of strawberries, Moreno Cedroni, Mondadori Publishing The Voices of Books, Ezio Raimondi, published by Ed. Il Mulino Victor Hasselblad Italy - Cover story on Monica Silva's works

More about Monica Silva on

www.monicasilva.it