Search

The article explores the provocative self-portrait photography of Iiu Susiraja, showcasing her unconventional use of everyday objects like hotdogs and household items to challenge traditional notions of femininity and body image. Topics discussed include the portrayal of identity, gender dynamics, and the intersection of art and personal expression.

In 1853, Rosa Bonheur first exhibited what would become her most widely celebrated work: The Horse Fair. Although the work's modern setting and animal-focused subject matter do not obviously characterize it as an instance of classical reception, the artist claimed that it was inspired by the Parthenon frieze. A significant amount of feminist and queer scholarship has been dedicated to Rosa Bonheur's life, career, and art practices, all of which reveal the complex ways in which the artist negotiated the gender norms of 19th-century France. These ranged from her decision never to marry, instead living in households with two women, to her officially sanctioned practice of cross-dressing when conducting art studies in public. In view of all these things, one of the most remarkable elements of The Horse Fair is the very probable inclusion of the artist's self-portrait, clad in masculine clothing and riding with legs astride her mount. Taking seriously Bonheur's Parthenonian quotation, how should her self-portrait within the male-dominated arena of the horse market be understood? The author argues that, by classical analogy, Bonheur may be regarded as a gender-bending Amazon of a sort that was radically distinct from the scores of so-called "amazones" promenading about Paris. A comparative consideration of contemporary visualizations of the Amazonian rider trope suggests that Bonheur appropriates and, as it were, refashions this modish, gendered imagery to make a bold statement of women's equality with men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the creation of an art project called Pulse: New Cultural Registers, which aims to challenge negative narratives about El Salvador and its diaspora. The project combines personal and historical archives with seismic records to create a visual representation of the cultural legacy of the 1980s and 1990s, when El Salvador experienced a civil war. The artist, who is part of the Salvadoran diaspora, uses this project to honor her late mother and the artists who worked during this difficult time. The goal of Pulse is to create a space for dialogue, representation, and solidarity with El Salvador, and to create a more hopeful and restorative future. [Extracted from the article]

Arts-based pedagogy is a methodology that integrates artistic practices with other domains to enhance student learning, and it has been shown to engage students and deepen their knowledge acquisition, help them connect theory and practice, inspire positive mood and social learning, and more. Though arts-based pedagogy is not yet widely used in LIS courses, it aligns with skills that information professionals today are asked to develop, such as creativity and design thinking. This short communication offers two arts-based approaches that instructors can use to imbue their classes with creativity in the form of self-portrait drawing. The first is an hour-long reflective drawing activity appropriate for the beginning or end of a course, and the second is a longitudinal activity in which self-portraits are used for taking attendance. These are "small teaching" approaches that can be readily integrated within an existing course without much effort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article translated from the German original, author Kathrin Asper explores Frida Kahlo's life and art—the scars and cuts of life, both physical and emotional, that were balanced by the light side of existence. Suffering the consequences of polio contracted as a child and a streetcar accident that left her with lifelong pain, Kahlo found herself through painting, using her experience as a palette. The themes of her art include suffering, transience, and nearness to death as well as the cuts of her husband's, Diego Rivera's, love affairs. Rarely were these experiences portrayed without the juxtaposition of the bright, beautiful, and colorfulness of life, however. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Facing China: Truth and Memory in Portraiture" by Richard Vinograd is a comprehensive study that goes beyond the traditional definition of portraiture in China. The book explores the social, cultural, and ritual contexts that shaped various forms of identification in Chinese portraiture. It examines ancestral and commemorative portraits, portraits documenting foreign relations, literati painters' involvement in the portraiture process, the communication of bodies through portraits, and the critical reflections and agency of portraiture. The book covers a wide range of time periods and uses unexpected juxtapositions to highlight thematic affinities. It is accessible to readers with varying levels of knowledge in Chinese history and will be of interest to art historians and those interested in the negotiation of identity and personhood in visual culture. [Extracted from the article]

Nino Cais is approached as an aesthetic case study: how stereotyped colonial iconography can be subverted through a staged visual irony? In late past, European artists travelled to Brazil fulfilling anthropological missions: to register and make known the "New World", fulfilling political, scientific and/or pragmatic purposes. Cais conceives exotic iconographies that disable colonial political dogmatisms; he assumes a deep identity, opposing uniformity of taste, patterns of behaviour, proposing racial counter-movements and social criticism. He pursues cultural themes, interacting for strong convictions, subverting stereotypes by staging a new iconography -- presenting himself as a singular 'projected/introjected' self-portraits; deconstructs decolonial stereotypes, thus ensuring an aesthetic and ideological precision without shackles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The photographs of the works "You are dead" and "The milk of the end" lead the writing by revealing new artistic visual representations about breastfeeding in contemporary times based on self-portraits. Three photographs from each trial were chosen for their visual connections to milk production by the human body. The works produced by visual artists, mothers, make visible an action reserved for the intimate space and tension the dominant representation regime on breastfeeding, enabling the construction negotiation for a new visual repertoire. Autoethnography and ethnography are recognized as critical scientific methodology and serve as an instrument for research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The introduction of the Dialogical Self Theory in the field of education has not received the recognition it deserves. In this article we intend to prove the importance of research in DST, reviewing its main contributions to the psychology of education for the past decade. To this end, we have organized it into three thematic areas: dialogical teaching and learning processes, professional identity in different educational levels, and studies pertaining to inclusive education and, particularly, intercultural education. We conclude with a section dedicated to future lines of research, in line with the most recent international reports on twenty-first-century education. After this review, we can state that DST constitutes a revolutionary epistemological approach, which permeabilizes the boundaries between the inter- and the intra-psychological, taking the mental and public planes as two parallel societies in constant dialogue, and and giving back to psychology its central function in the study of mental dynamics, that 'black box' which socio-constructivist trends had partially omitted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study aims to investigate the psychological mechanisms behind the change in the facial expression of some of the beheaded characters in Caravaggio’s works, starting from The Head of Medusa, from the artist’s youth, and up to David with the Head of Goliath, a mature workpiece, searching the continuity between them through a series of self‑portraits/ self‑insertions of the artist in his work. The psychodynamic analysis I propose is limited by the constitution of its practice to the study of the process of image production and the artistic imaginary, rather than to the investigation of the man or the artist, who is out of reach, by means of figurative and symbolic language. This approach aims to highlight the drives of the unconscious, the structures of censorship and the operating technique of the defensive mechanisms that ultimately could contribute to the production of such masterful images that are both seductive and confusing. The study incorporates and continues the contribution of authors such as Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, who applied Laplanche’s theory of generalized seduction in the analysis of Caravaggio’s works, but also the mirror stage of Lacan and the masterful study of Donald Winnicott regarding the reflection of the baby in the mimics of his mother, an unconscious unclear image that will stand forever for the perception of the self. The change of the affective resonance, expressiveness and emotional relating to violence is natural in the course of human evolution. While not even the artist Caravaggio can elude it, his work can illus‑ trate by deflection these transformations of the dynamics of the mind, it can raise new questions and open new perspectives of understanding the artistic drive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Portraits on social media are value-laden constructs. Whether documenting graduation or flexing in the gym, users express what they care about and present it for others to evaluate. Since "global" portrait genres are produced and consumed in different locales, their interpretation and evaluation may vary. We thus ask: What values do people identify in different types of social media portraits? Which evaluative criteria do they use when judging them? An analysis of 100 interviews with users from Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, and the United States reveals that people consistently recognize genre-specific values in portraits and evaluate them through a narrow set of communication-related criteria. Such evaluations vary across cultures in ways that only occasionally match established comparative literature on values. We reflect on the relational character of the criteria adopted for the evaluation of portraits worldwide, highlighting its association with new modes of sociability in digital spheres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a case study of a 66-year-old artist who experienced a stroke leading to left-sided hemiparesis and visual neglect. Topics include the initial symptoms and physical examination findings post-stroke, the results of magnetic resonance imaging showing a right-sided lentiform nucleus infarction, and the artist's depiction of his condition through a self-portrait illustrating his visual neglect and distorted perception.

Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu is an important personality who dedicated himself to developing culture and art, created his works with this aim, and tried to make society progress in this way. His passion for art and literature, especially poetry, made him create successful works that can be studied on. It is possible to reach some information such as the artist's biography, personality, and view of life through these works. Not every artist prefers to have clue about his biography and view of life in his works. But Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu is not such an artist. He shared information about himself and revealed historical data in most of his works. Lines under his portrait paintings and poems named as self-portrait are adequate evidence. In this study, Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu's thoughts about life and himself will be tried to reach through examples of mentioned poems and explanations in this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agnolo Bronzino performs a visual experiment in Anton Francesco Doni's I Marmi (Venice, 1552). "Do you see these pigments?" he asks as he shows his palette to a group of Florentine artisans. Bronzino had mentally dismantled a painting by Andrea del Sarto and loaded his palette with those pigments that Sarto would have used. With them, he painted a copy of the Sarto. How was this strange mind game rendered as a form of art criticism, as a demonstration of craft and technique, and as a visual exercise for a lay audience who could not paint? Doni's Bronzino invited viewers and readers to think and see with the imagination and eyes of painters, a strategy adopted by painters of self-portraits, notably Anguissola Sofonisba's Self-Portrait (Łańcut), c.1555. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to Sarah Gendron, following Terrence Des Pres's notion of "Holocaust etiquette", there are two forms of art which government sponsored museums and memorials feel to be "safe" in representing the Holocaust: pure abstraction or direct, realist representation. The former is permissible since, with its "perceived capacity to sidestep misrepresentation", it "does not seek to portray the event or those involved in a figural way"; the latter is acceptable for precisely the opposite reason, because they "present themselves as re-presentations, portraying moments 'as they were' without intervention, manipulation, or interpretation." The artist appears to bear witness to the event, "providing proof of its 'having definitely been.'" Art which does not fall into these two categories offers more of a challenge to the post-Holocaust world's ability to grapple with the meaning and representation of the genocide of the Jews. One thinks of the photorealism, or blurred "photorealism" of Gerhard Richter; the symbolic art of Józef Szajna where thumbprints, for example, stand in for human beings at roll call; or the anonymous mass of Menashe Kadishman's shalechet (fallen leaves), each representing a human face, all the same but all different. Sieg Maandag's paintings cannot be regarded as falling squarely into any one genre; some are abstract (increasingly so over time), some naïve or surreal figuralism or landscape. Maandag's paintings are reflections of moments of his life and by no means all obviously "Holocaust art." In this paper I argue, however, using Susan Suleiman's notion of the "1.5 generation", that it was his experience as a boy in Bergen-Belsen that stamped Maandag's career as an artist. Through an analysis of several paintings, especially the unfinished and untitled work of a perpetrator who has a fork emerging from his eye pushing into the mouth of a child opposite; Het mooie hemd (the beautiful shirt, 1986); three faces; and the 1983 self portrait where Maandag's crumpled face and an empty speech bubble betray an inability to speak, I suggest that Maandag's concentration camp childhood and subsequent knowledge of the Holocaust are, as Raymond Federman says of his fiction, the "gap" in him that "controls my work and gives it its urgency." Sieg Maandag, famous as the boy walking past the laid out corpses in George Rodger's photograph after the liberation of the camp, deserves greater recognition as a "Holocaust artist" not only because of the subtext of his works but because his oeuvre is in its own right a significant contribution to the field of art perse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reads Carla Lonzi's collective self-portrait Autoritratto (1969) through the interpretive lens of interruption. I identify interruption as a critical and unexplored stylistic feature and formal strategy that is fundamental to the text's nascent feminist sensibilities and praxis, and to the alternate personal history it imagines. Interruption functions as a structuring principle and mode of critique that is generative rather than destructive: by interrupting the content of audio interviews and re-staging her experiences textually, Lonzi creates a space where the acts of listening and dialoguing are revealed as essential to creative expression and auto-narration. Although the text predates Lonzi's radical feminist writings, it engages with gestures central to Italian second-wave feminist discourses: namely, the personal and communicative goals of autocoscienza. In part, this article addresses how the social and historical critiques within Lonzi's feminism find earlier expression in the narrative techniques and ambivalent self-assertion in Autoritratto. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her self-portrait of c.1578, Marietta Robusti, daughter of Tintoretto, and a successful artist in her own right, represented herself not with the tools of her chosen profession but with a keyboard instrument and holding a music book. Much has been written about how this painting, and others like it, reflect the necessity for well-bred 16th-century young women to promote their musical skills. However, little effort has so far been made to connect the world this image represents with the documentary evidence available in Venetian domestic household inventories. The current article analyses post-mortem and other inventories in order to establish the musical instruments found in 16th-century Venetian homes, and the rooms in which they were found and potentially used. Such inventories, through their employment of simple language and stock descriptive adjectives, offer strong insights into ordinary lives in Renaissance Venice, including the domestic lives of the otherwise invisible musical women of the Venetian household. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Manuscripts and notes by Michel Foucault on the visual arts recently deposited at the Bibliothèque Nationale reveal a reliance on canonical oil paintings by the 'old masters'; a respect for the primary sources in the history of European art; an understanding of the necessity of research in both literary and visual sources, particularly self-portraits; and a sense of the value that a certain philosophical milieu – beginning with Sade and Nietzsche and expanding to his near contemporaries, Bataille, Blanchot, and Klossowski – could offer to an understanding of paintings. The essay argues that Pierre Klossowski's monumental drawing La Nef des fous (1990) provides an essential key for understanding the place of Hieronymus Bosch's painting of the same title in History of Madness and the centrality of theories of similitude to Foucault's thinking about visuality ca. 1960–74. The later significance of the figure of the artist for Foucault can be traced to these earlier writings on painting and madness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Boxer Codex is a ca. 1591 compilation of accounts, written in or translated into Spanish, of the peoples of Southeast Asia alongside illustrations made by a Christian Sangley (Manila Chinese) artist. Scholars should understand this work not as hybrid but as a collaboration between imperial cultures. Evidence of the self-portrait of the artist as a Christianized Sangley and the earliest-known image of a bayoguin, a Tagalog man operating as a female spiritual, medical, and community leader, suggests the rewards of attending to the visual rhetorics of colonization alongside current scholarly emphases on materiality and trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose an efficient method for robust and accurate 3D self-portraits using a single RGBD camera. Our method can generate detailed and realistic 3D self-portraits in seconds and shows the ability to handle subjects wearing extremely loose clothes. To achieve highly efficient and robust reconstruction, we propose PIFusion, which combines learning-based 3D recovery with volumetric non-rigid fusion to generate accurate sparse partial scans of the subject. Meanwhile, a non-rigid volumetric deformation method is proposed to continuously refine the learned shape prior. Moreover, a lightweight bundle adjustment algorithm is proposed to guarantee that all the partial scans can not only “loop” with each other but also remain consistent with the selected live key observations. Finally, to further generate realistic portraits, we propose non-rigid texture optimization to improve the texture quality. Additionally, we also contribute a benchmark for single-view 3D self-portrait reconstruction, an evaluation dataset that contains 10 single-view RGBD sequences of a self-rotating performer wearing various clothes and the corresponding ground-truth 3D models in the first frame of each sequence. The results and experiments based on this dataset show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on accuracy, efficiency, and generality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS PubMed WorldCat 3 Helland J. Aztec imagery in Frida Kahlo's paintings: indigenity and political commitment. Opinion was polarised until a body of evidence emerged to support the pollution haven hypothesis that FDI decreases emissions in high-income countries and increases them in lower-income countries [[6], [8]]. Elsewhere irony is evident; the debutante's dress and lace gloves are out of character since Kahlo usually wore indigenous dress; the only piece visible in this painting being her necklace. Kahlo's painting reveals the dichotomy at that time between the landscapes and cultural and natural histories of the two countries. [Extracted from the article]

In this paper, we present an exploration of arts-based knowledge translation through photography highlighting the lived experience of Osteogenesis Imperfecta (OI), a genetic disorder. It forms part of our larger photovoice research project that involved six female photographers with physical impairment. This group of women shared their personal experiences through photographic stories to challenge pervasive, limiting negative attitudes and assumptions that surround disability. In this paper, we focus on the data, analysis and discussion to one type of impairment, OI, and two photographers' work to present their: embodied expertise and knowledge of living with OI; self-portraits as contemporary disability identity, contributing to intersectionality in feminist and disability arenas; authentic voice as co-authors of this paper using Drew and Guillemin's interpretive engagement framework; original arts-based research insights currently absent in the meagre qualitative research on OI. By presenting, analysing and interpreting self-portraits of OI as valuable arts-based knowledge, we hope to provide readers with a better understanding of disability and femininity as a pathway to greater inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on what student teachers tell about the emotional dimension of their identities with self-portraits. Narrative interviews with self-portraits were conducted with two student teachers in the final stages of their studies. The interviews were analysed by using narrative analysis, followed by a thematic cross-analysis of the two emplotted stories. The findings emphasise the importance of vulnerability as a significant emotional dimension of student teachers' identities, showing them to be vulnerable in relation to themselves, to others and to cultural teacher stories. From the perspective of student teacher identity construction, it was notable that the student teachers described moments of feeling unsuited to being a teacher, which made them feel vulnerable. The article discusses the meaning of self-portraits for research and for teacher education; telling stories with self-portraits can be used to understand the emotional dimension of student teachers' narrative identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A special thanks for their assistance with this brief introduction goes to the Estate of Luchita Hurtado, the Luchita Hurtado Studio, and Hauser & Wirth. Luchita Hurtado fully celebrated life. Luchita Hurtado: I live, I die, I will be reborn (A. Bowers, M. Govan, J. A. Gaitán, S. Lehrer-Graiwer, M. Heilich, M. Mullican, & Y. Peel, Contributors). [Extracted from the article]

The present study aims to address the theme of abjection and identity in the American young adult novel Felix Ever After (2021), by Kacen Callender. For that, this bibliographic research uses the content analysis theory proposed by Bardin (1977) in order to make analytical clippings, since, like any literary work, the novel is multifaceted and leads in different directions. The work, divided into four parts, presents the aforementioned theme of abjection and then, in the final part, addresses the issue of identity and two forms of empowerment and response to abjection, the use of self-portraits and the acceptance of love. The theoretical basis used derives from the Queer Theory, the Cultural Studies and Intersectionality, since it is a novel whose protagonist is a young black, transsexual, queer, belonging to a less privileged economic class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although mental illnesses and personality disorders are largely destigmatized in the contemporary age, some genres, such as self-portraiture and consequently selfies, are still framed in interpretation by diagnostic labeling. One of the disorders that was often taken into reference when approaching self-picturing is narcissism. However, such an approach to the visual genre is limiting its interpretation. This article analyses two sets of self-portrait photographs of a Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, who spent some time in psychiatric asylums. This episode divides his work into two phases. In the first period, Munch self-records his various actions in space, while in the second one, he focuses on his face and a static half-a-figure. While the first one is actively reinterpreting the world through the self-image, the second one is centering the self as the world itself. Rather than defining which sets are more narcissistic, this article proposes distinguishing between performative/extravert and contemplative/introvert definitions of self-pictures by defining anthropocentric and solipsistic self-portraits. Distinguishing between anthropocentric and solipsistic self-portraiture may have impact not only on analysis of Munch's photographic and painterly self-portraits but also on the interpretation of contemporary genre of selfies as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The French artist Pierre Bonnard created more than two thousand paintings, many of them now dispersed around museums across the world. He painted in a slightly eccentric manner—on unstretched canvas—and often worked on these paintings over decades. They typically depict closed spaces, interiors, that open out to vistas beyond the room. He also produced a number of self-portraits and a very large number of paintings depicting his muse, Marthe, often going about her toilette. Almost of all these paintings have very strange effects—for the most part overlooked by viewers from his own time to today. These effects, which Peter de Bolla calls "ghosts," are often depictions hiding in plain sight. In this essay, de Bolla patiently explores how such effects can be seen in one painting, La salle à manger sur le jardin (1930–31), leading the viewer into the strange world Bonnard depicted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Negative attitudes about and behaviours towards women with disability are harmful and exclusionary, contributing to poorer health, income, educational, and employment outcomes. Our study focused on what audiences learnt, felt, and did (what changed) after viewing self-portraits and stories by women with disability. We questioned whether a public exhibition of their artworks, created through photovoice methodology, could be an effective platform to provoke social change and increase inclusion for people with disability. We collected audience response to our exhibition to address a research gap and to provide an example for other photovoice researchers. We employed interpretive thematic analysis through a generic social processes framework to interrogate responses. Our findings indicate that audiences learnt as much about themselves and their views of disability as they did about the women photographers. The audience described feelings of empathic engagement. They also expressed an unsettling between previously held assumptions around disability and new perspectives gained through the exhibition. Audiences changed how they view women with disability by engaging with the underlying messages of equality in the self - portraits and stories. Audiences thought the exhibition would change other people's views, too, indicating a pathway to greater inclusion for people with disability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across various projects in the 1960s and ’70s, Joan Jonas created forms of self-portraiture enmeshed within environments. Engaging a range of media including mirrors, water, and video, Jonas repeatedly emphasized her body’s interrelation with surrounding natural and media ecologies. The resultant ecological portraits offer a model of being that encourages audiences to acknowledge their own embodiment in encounters with nature, whether experienced directly or through mediation. This article excavates this intermedia practice and explores the forms of ecocritical thought her performances and records might produce. Working in an era of expanding media experiments across performance, sculpture, and video, Jonas’s multimedia projects collaborate with the surrounding environment to explore the emergent openness of art in the 1970s. This article takes Jonas’s Disturbances (1974) as its starting point, arguing that Jonas featured the reflective and refractive properties of water to meditate upon the ecological resonances of the myth of Narcissus, the distorting optics of video, and the mediation of nature broadly. Similarly, in recent projection-based projects, Jonas has continued her exploration of the body’s relationship to both nature and media by incorporating her body into projected nature videos. In keeping with her stated unwillingness to “penetrate space,” ecological portraits across Jonas’s career reveal her multidirectional entanglements with spaces near and far, from waves in a pool to global oceanic crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the self-portrait poems of American poet Robert Creeley, featured in numerous portraits and photographs by various artists. It discusses an ecstatic introduction to abstract expressionism and art criticism which suggests the relation of plastic arts with poetics. He was a prodigious collaborator who produced numerous art books, folio works, and projects with artists that inspired him.

This paper draws attention to a neglected aspect of grief: its "sweet" sorrow. This sorrow presents us with a formidable challenge, namely, to explain how what is bitter—the misery of loss—can be found to be sweet. Those drawn into this sorrow suspect that it is somehow too sweet. Are their suspicions well founded? Why is it and it alone sweet to those who delight in it and why is it not just sweet but companion‐like and even dear? Guided by the observations of St. Augustine and C. S. Lewis, I propose that this sorrow is a form of self‐pity that displaces the significant other from the center of one's concern and affords an enhanced intimacy with oneself. The proposal vindicates the impression that one finds in this sorrow a companion that can take the place of the significant other and also positions us to address one of the most fundamental questions that might be raised in connection with grief, namely, whether the one who has died is a proper object of concern or whether our grief is ultimately for ourselves, for a loss that is ours and ours alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The maternal embrace is an iconic pose for women posing with children. Characteristic of mother and child depictions in Christianity, even contemporary images appear as loaded patriarchal symbols. This essay examines the taxonomy of the mother across a range of photographic images from 1920 to the present. Looking for representational alternatives to the passive, silent mother images that dominate photography and visual culture, I want to show the mother to be more diverse than widespread representations will have us believe. I find autobiographies and photographic self-portraits by ambivalent mothers, lesbian mothers, black mothers, and childless mothers. These offer new possibilities and critical voices often absent from feminist discourses that usually deride or celebrate motherhood in overly simplistic terms. In turn, I have sought to complicate representations of the mother and the maternal embrace by analysing my embodied experience of being her. As a photographer-mother, I have floundered between antagonism and affection toward pictures of women with children. In response, I transport the mother from one world of appearances to another: from the symbolic realm of passivity, stillness, softness and silence to the affective and embodied realm of touching seen in the close-up zoomed-in details of mother and child imagery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"If we possess the land," cultural activist Ben Caldwell said, "we can become erasure proof." The essay reveals how BIPOC community arts spaces negotiate spatial sovereignty that fortify ecologies of culture and place. The work analyzes a culminating activity in a participatory action research process structured around the themes of land, story, memory, and leadership. The axis of the paper is an intergenerational conversation with cultural producers and arts administrators at Self Help Graphics & Art in the Latinx neighborhood of Boyle Heights, Kaos Network the African-American neighborhood of Leimert Park, and Visual Communications in the Asian Pacific Islander led neighborhood of Little Tokyo. The conversation is set in Los Angeles—a megalopolis on the Pacific Rim recognized globally for its creative and cultural production. "How to Become Erasure Proof" provides a robust conceptual framework, and highlights BIPOC strategies for community organizing that cherish culture and land. The discussion contributes to broader movements centering BIPOC imaginaries, creative flourishing, and organizing for spatial justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay refers to the existing accordance between the peculiar fractal structure of Autorretrato sin mí by Fernando Aramburu (2018) and the tendency towards fragmentation and the breaking-up of the frontiers among genres that characterised the Spanish narrative of the last few decades. Aramburus text is compared to other selfreferential writings (literary traditional self-portrait, autofiction, autonovela). The fractal structure of the text and the "posibilidades de lectura [...] de lo mismo y lo multiple" are given close attention. These were already fully taken into account by Zavala in relation to the short story cycles and the fragmented novels, that this special structure exhibits within a unitary narrative frame (specifically that of the literary self-portrait), even if this same structure is bound to multimedia and multifocal discoursive practices, due to its pictorial origins. The specific creative tension released by the "fractal structure" of Aramburu's self-portrait is connected to the "fractal character" according to the theory of the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on a series of selfies taken by a Celebes Crested Macaque monkey who seized a camera from a human photographer and absconded with it. The monkey's smiling self-portraits appeared in the international press, sparking legal and public controversy around issues of copyright, royalties and fair use of the images. Arguably, the very fact of the debate is indicative of the breakdown of the traditional dichotomies that separate the human from the animal, the natural from the technological. It further calls for a reassessment of photography as a unique act that combines all these aspects and yields surprising definitions of agency and creativity. To this end, the article draws on the Vilém Flusser's philosophy (particularly the concepts of 'apparatus' and 'program') and develops these to examine the ways in which the automation of photography has changed our perceptions of intention, memory and agency to the point that we are all 'monkey photographers.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The self-portrait is a genre that we associate with painting, but I would like to present the idea that it is a phenomenon that reaches other arts and is linked to other artistic expressions that are not so evident to us. In other words, it is an aesthetic phenomenon that covers various representations and all of them answer to the same challenge: the need for human self-objectification. On this occasion we are going to contemplate the literary dimension of the phenomenon, without renouncing to consider the plastic dimension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay offers a close reading of Verdi Yahooda's work Photo Booth Classic (1974–present), its presentation as artists' pages in n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal, 17, January 2006, and in the exhibitions Said (London: Camberwell Space, 2008) and Now! Now! In more than one place (London: Cookhouse and Triangle Space, Chelsea College of Art and Design, 2016) organized by the Black Arts and Modernism project. The differences in format and presentation over time, as well as the making of this work, as an action performed by the artist in monthly cycles over forty years, are considered in relation to other artworks, the use of documentation as medium, and questions about feminism, ethnicity and Jewishness. The aim is to move beyond the ready identification of this work as simply another example of a woman artist's performance made as if self‐to‐camera, or as identity politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Birthing is a natural phenomenon. However, in the era of modernisation, it has dramatically changed and transformed into a technological affair. Some feminists claim that advances in medicine and assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) have opened up numerous opportunities and choices for women to free themselves from their destined role of maternity by separating sex from reproduction. But are these technological artefacts always there to emancipate women or just another way to keep them subordinated to serve social needs? Other feminists argue that technology is a controlling tool. It eliminates a woman's choice and uses her body as a baby-manufacturing machine to perpetuate pervasive social roles and responsibilities. Again, if technology is simply a patriarchal trap, then can technological exclusion be the key to all reproductive issues? It seems not! Technology is the inevitable new reality of the world influenced by socio-cultural practices, values, norms and belief system that has a strong impact on human existence. The present paper is an attempt to critically explore and evaluate the ethical challenges posed by technicization of motherhood from two opposite feminist perspectives. I argue that these ART-centred debates are significant but polarised and insufficient to resolve maternal problems. Thus, we need an egalitarian model of technology that saves women from the threat of technicization, and be able to provide a dignified use of it. The paper discusses the impact of technicization on maternal self in relation to ARTs and proposes suggestions to overcome this problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]