Artist Myra Greene uses portraiture to investigate the construction of racial identity. In character recognition, Greene adopts the wet-plate collodion process, a 19thcentury photographic method. Greene photographs her own nose, lips, ears, and skin as if dismembered from the rest of her body.
Artist Myra Greene uses portraiture to investigate the construction of racial identity. In character recognition, Greene adopts the wet-plate collodion process, a 19thcentury photographic method. Greene photographs her own nose, lips, ears, and skin as if dismembered from the rest of her body.
Artist Myra Greene uses portraiture to investigate the construction of racial identity. In character recognition, Greene adopts the wet-plate collodion process, a 19thcentury photographic method. Greene photographs her own nose, lips, ears, and skin as if dismembered from the rest of her body.
personal and public, I was forced to ask myself, what do people see when they look at me. Am I nothing but black? Is that skin tone enough to describe my nature and expectation in life? Do my strong teeth make me a strong worker? Does my character resonate louder than my skin tone? Using a photographic process linked to the times of ethnographic classification, I repeatedly explore my ethnic features in Character Recognition. The lessons learned are haunting and frightening in these modern times.
What is the main focal point drawing your attention?
Why is the shot captured in high contrast black and white? What do you think these photographs are exploring?
Why has the photographer hidden details?
Why are there blurred areas? Why would a sinister and dark mood be created?
How has the photographer positioned their
viewpoint? How is the artificial or natural light used effectively?
Myra Greene(American, b. 1975; resides in Chicago, IL)Myra Greene
writes, throughout my artistic practice, I have returned to the body to explore issues of difference, beauty, physical and emotional recollections as they play out on the surface of the skin. In her two recent series,Character RecognitionandMy White Friends, Greene uses portraiture to investigate the construction of racial identity and focus on the ways her own body relates to others.InCharacter Recognition, Greene adopts the wet-plate collodion process, a 19thcentury photographic method that was implicated in the history of colonialism and slavery and used as tool for ethnographic classification. If ethnographic photography was at times aimed at creating a typological record of racial physiognomy, Greene amplifies and examines these preoccupations by photographing her own nose, lips, ears, and skinwhich she describes as the features of race as if dismembered from the rest of her body. Although Greene is working with a highly-coded historical process, one that evokes a complicated and disconcerting past, her photographic studies reorient it in a number ways. She uses a black glass plate, instead of the conventional transparent glass, which results in a unique positive image instead of a negative that could be used to make endless reproductions. Moreover, in making self-portraits, she willingly stands before the camera and controls the process. Her photographs capture not only parts of the body but their small expressive gestures. Effectively allowing the body to speak back in this manner, Greene