youmeyou (2013 – 2019)
Interesting but true, I never considered submitting my work in your Portrait Awards 2020, until a befriended photographer asked me why not ? The answer I admit is that I do not consider myself as a portrait photographer, I never had the feeling that I have a teacher of mine once said the green thumb of portrait photography. What I do is working about identity.
So after a project in 2013 called maybeme, a work questioning the construction of our own/ my own identity by photo album/ photo box pictures, I wanted to do a project where I could explore the relation between me and people I know having the sentence in my mind, that every photograph is a self-portrait (I can't remember right now who said that …).
So I did a mind game: if this is true for my whole body of photographic works it has to be true to the portraits within as well, which means I do have to take a very close look at the portraits to find out what exactly I photographed of myself when I took the picture of the other person.
The answer for me was and is I photographed one aspect of the person's personality which is also an aspect of my own personality but in these single pictures I did not feel it was worked through yet, not detailed enough, felt not finished in a certain sense.
So with this in mind I considered possibilities to somehow solve my problem and came up with the idea to extend the (term) environmental portrait to a series of pictures which are supposed to allow a more differentiated view into the aspects I photographed in the single picture portraits.
The form I chose for each portrait was a book, introducing the name of the body of work youmeyou and the name I call the person with, before you could start with the pictures.
The pictures have different formats, their presence and their space is measured within the white space of the pages. I wished to create an unbroken flow of the pictures when you turn the pages, so that it be possible to see the pictures as one portrait.
Each picture has a space of one double page of its own.
Because I prefer to work out a presentation for the wall, I tried it out first there, the pictures needed different sizes there too, to make it possible to see them as one and I think because they have to share the space different distances between each picture were necessary as well.
I have absolutely no idea what will happen in a digital presentation, but I do hope it will not be a complete disaster.
I started the experiment with four extended portraits and managed to show three of them to the persons I photographed (I showed the book form). The result was astonishing. Two of them considered themselves seen in the sense of perceived as a person and were very moved, the third one needed explanations to decode the pictures but then agreed to my view to be true. All three of them allowed the extended portraits to be published.
I finished the first four extended portraits of youmeyou in October 2019.
Andrea Brehme, January 2020
