Thursday, September 14, 2006

Self portrait

There was an intention behind this self-portrait photo which I think could be deciphered from the internal evidence of the photo alone, at least in a general way (with a regretful look back at the unfinished discussion on the artist’s intention).

Solution here.

2 comments:

jt said...

Can we also deduce that you were thinking of including this hand in the series you posted eleven days later? In which case, what was your intention ... what sort of hand was this intended to be? Would a viewer have been able to deduce that? And why didn't you go through with it?

Mary Adam said...

Actually, it’s a fair deduction, except I hadn’t thought of doing the Hand series at the time of the Self Portrait post. And even if I had, it would have seemed presumptuous to include anything of my own with works by the masters, unless it was something like “which is the odd one out?” (I’m awfully pleased that you have picked up on this.)

Now that you bring up what sort of hand it was [intended to be], it seems a nondescript enough hand, so the viewer wouldn’t be able to deduce much from it in the way of character. However, more could be deduced about the hand, but not from internal clues in the photo; at this point additional research would be needed. I don’t know if this is fair, after all I’m in possession of all the facts so it’s easy for me. All I’m saying is that in theory it could be done, the information is available. The photo was taken well before starting the blog (digital data), so there was no conscious intention at the time to use it as a blog post.