Like many photographers I feel more comfortable behind the camera than in front of it so this assignment presented something of a challenge. I found the diary-keeping tedious and after a false start just about managed to maintain interest for two weeks. When re-reading the enteries, the main point that came across from them was an unwillingness to reveal too much about myself. I’m not sure the best way of describing it, reticence, ambiguousness, self-restraint, holding back? Whatever the best term is, I wanted to take this feeling and translate into into an image or series of images and initially I thought of going down the route of self-absented portraiture. I rejected this approach as it felt a bit cliched; the majority of the photographers we have examined in the course material have chosen to portray themselves obliquely, either through taking on a different identity or by absenting themselves from their images and I felt there was almost and expectation to go down this route; to be post-modern about how to approach this assignment. However, I want to pursue the idea of not revealing too much, of holding back, more directly by trying to produce conventional images to put myself in the picture but at the same time to limit the information available to the viewer.

Having decided to produce a self-portrait with limited information I thought about how this could be achieved and came up with a list of methods that I could use to put myself in the picture but at the same time limit the amount of information I was giving to the viewer. The techniques I chose to use were using shadow, light and shade, a screen and reflections and from these I have produced a series of five images.