Self- Portraits

[Tom dinning]

Do you ever get upo in the morning and think you'd be better off staying in bed and the reflection in the mirror would disappear?

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Or maybe you could go to work and leave the reflection behind, out of harms way. After all, you don't want to frighten any aonimals and small children, do you.

_D306416 by tom.dinning, on Flickr​

For all those other days, though, I'm always looking for a suspect to experiment with. Since I'm on my own most of the time (Christine thinks its better for the rest of the world if I am) I experiment in the hope one day I'll get a shot that makes me look like Dustan Hoffman.

_DSC8691 by tom.dinning, on Flickr​

 

[Asher Kelman]

Tom,

You have invested a lot of self-voyeurism and made good use of your prize catches. This is only possible because of your habit of liking yourself but then again dismissing your own pretenses! Your choice and sequence of images is effective. But some images are not really sequences of what happened in that order, are they? Rather your selected photographs, when ordered according to your whim or logic (and therefore made to become neighbors), influence one another and bleed their dominion of time, space and purposes into each other. The effect is to have us on a string and you can lead us anywhere.

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The use of sequences in telling stories is obvious and there are lots of great examples. The recent appearance of a much awaited book, "Sequentially Yours" by Elliott Erwitt The Art of Photographic Sequencing, (hailed by the BBC) is a particularly masterful example of this. Time magazine interviewed him** last october here.

Whereas Elliott Erwitt is "sparse on humor", Tom, you are really joking with us all of the time! When you draw a picture with your camera, you do it with all the adjectives Time magazine used for Erwitt, (touching, funny, sad, irreverent and full of surprise.") but with a wry wit and the irreverence turned against yourself!

This sequence of pictures is far richer than looking at independent and isolated individual shots. The choices made in "what is next to what", creates an extra dynamic that's between the pictures and perhaps even leads us to getting to know the person of Tom Dinning better. This is rich work to be revisited without boredom or the feeling that "What's to be read is read!" This is photography that has been honed over many years. It's economical, skillfully crafted and presented well. The content most often shames the composition, but some times the design and use of space, puts the subject in the dock, especially in these self-portraits.

Certainly, to me at least, this work is on a par with the stellar oeuvre of the deservedly celebrated Elliott Erwitt!

A delight!

Asher



Recommendations:


1. "Learning to See" a free PDF book by Tom Dinning

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/51219371/learning to see PDF.pdf

2. "Sequentially Yours"by Elliott Erwitt, ~$57 with free shipping from Amazon.


**"The book playfully presents a series of unscripted vignettes that bear the personal hallmark and humor of his classic images and movies, but with an original twist— rather than single shots, the photos are shown as sequences. The result is somewhere between single exposures and films, and the stories play out like silent movies—touching, funny, sad, irreverent and full of surprise." Time Magazine

 

[Charles L Webster]

Very nice, every one of them.

I like the imagination and better, the sense of humor you have brought to these photos.

Thanks for sharing,