Reading Photographs: An Introduction to the Theory and Meaning of Images (Basics Creative Photography) by Richard Salkeld

Author:Richard Salkeld [Salkeld, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781350034044
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2017-10-05T04:00:00+00:00

4.3

Title: Tattooed

Photographer: Kenneth Benjamin Reed

Practices of body decoration and modification have ancient histories and traditions rooted in ritual; however, contemporary Western applications may be more concerned with individualism. Whether this signifies the expression of a unique ‘essential’ identity, or is evidence of the construction of an identity, remains a matter for debate.

What is identity?

The notion of individual identity is quite slippery. Where and what is it? Does it derive from your genes, from where you were born, from your race, class or education, your gender or sexuality? Or from what you look like? The colour of your skin, the colour of your hair, or eyes, or even the clothes you wear? Of course, it is all these things – together with the story of your life, your experiences and circumstances.

Nevertheless, conventional thinking proposes that whatever our situation, whatever poses we might strike, whatever fashions and styles we may affect, inside us there is our ‘real’ and ‘true’ identity; an individual essence which marks us from the cradle to the grave and which the skilled portraitist might strive to recognise, capture and represent.

This is an essentialist notion of identity, which assumes that such an essence defines us and is unchanging. While it is clear that we are all the products of our unique genetic inheritance which defines certain physical attributes, this doesn’t quite satisfy the idea of ‘character’; it might be argued that our character is intrinsic to our nationality, gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, even faith. But this is problematic: nationality, for example, is an entirely political notion, and interpretations of the meanings of gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity and faith vary widely.

Constructed identity

An alternative approach, and one which reflects the ideas discussed in chapters 2 and 3, is the ‘constructivist’ notion of identity. Just as it was proposed that ‘things’ only have meaning in virtue of their context – the way they are seen in relation to other things, how they are used, what they are called – so, too, it can be argued that identity is not fixed but is relational. Who we are derives from the circumstances of environment, but needn’t define us; who we appear to be depends upon how we present ourselves and to whom.

In short, our identity is an on-going (life-long) constructive project, and how we are perceived depends upon the interaction between our performance and the mastery of the conventions of signifiers of identity and the skills with which they are read.

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