2021-06-01 13:44:03
Maria Kn ‘Self portraits‘Maria Kn brings us a stunning collection of self-portraits after feeling the urge to free herself of the way other people wanted her to be and look in front of the camera.
“Over the last 10 years, I have been in front of countless cameras. Being photographed for brands, for products, for magazines, for portfolios, for art galleries and exhibitions. A photographer or a whole team standing in front of me, scanning every inch of my face and body to get the best shot for their purpose. Over time, I would have a pretty good idea in advance of how the photos would look like when the photographers changed lenses, angles or the light, despite having no monitor to take a peak on. I would just know. Sometimes I would even ask myself in my head, ‘why is she/he moving over there with that lens?’ Or ‘this angle really won’t work’ and then those pictures didn’t show up in the final selection. I learned so much watching other people work and since I always had an interest in shooting film at some point I thought it would be interesting to regain full control over my images.
After having shot mostly film pictures of landscapes where my shoots made me travel to I wanted to see how I can make myself the subject, the stylist, makeup artist, art director and photographer all in one. So I started to leave a few shots of my film rolls to take some self-portraits here and there. Then Covid hit and remote shoots became a thing, where the photographer sits on the other end of a Zoom or Skype or whatever call and tells you where to position the phone, yourself and all your surroundings in order to press the button to take the picture at the right time. The whole world started to take pictures either within their very close groups of friends and family or via a screen and possibly thousands of miles between the team members. A whole new workflow appeared where I was asked more and more to be a ‘content creator’ rather than a model or actress, shooting everything by myself to keep safe distances and avoid gatherings of people.
This made me wonder, how I am shooting all the images and videos by myself but somehow I still do not control the way the images will eventually turn out. There is still a team, an art director, a photographer who will decide how they want to capture and portray me. I felt an urge to free myself of the way other people wanted me to look. I started to tell these little voices in my head that I can’t be all of that just by myself and that I might not have the creative capacity to do all that, to shut up. I bought a cheap background system, lots and lots of film, some fabric, a tripod and started to load all of that on my bicycle and head out into nature. I looked for areas where there were no people and started to set up my gear and get naked. Running back and forth between the spot, the camera, back to my things to grab a jacket to throw over when people did came by was an exhilarating process. It made me reevaluate why I create, what inspires me and drives me. It made me understand how important it is to keep pushing the creative process, as things can always change and last but not least how much effort it takes to make truly inspiring images.:”
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