[description: b/w portrait of a photographer reflected in the mirror between a model's legs]
It annoys me the way web-based art communities discriminate against self-portrait photographers. I know we're rare, and it makes sense to split the field into models on one side, and photographers on the other, but is there not even a tiny niche where we can fit in? There's also a lot of vitriol in the artistic community levied against "selfies". The honest truth is, selfies can be artistic as much as anything else (and mature artists will recognize this). On the other hand, they are easy, so a lot of people are going to take a lot of them that are simply not particularly good or artistic. It's just the argument about "snapshot" photography all over again. Is it not obvious, however, the difference between an artistic self-portrait and an ill-composed "selfie"? (You tell me).
Yet if you want to try to sign up as a "photographer", you will be expected to have experience with more than one model, and if all your pictures are pictures of yourself... Sigh. Our brains are designed to create shortcuts wherever they can (processing the world we live in would be an insurmountable task otherwise), and stereotyping (which often leads to discrimination) is one of those. I hate human nature sometimes, but I guess that's the price I have to pay for delighting in being eccentric - someone that refuses to fit into your mass-produced, standard sized boxes. I just don't want to be like everyone else. But I still dream about finding other people in the world that think like me... Diversity is great, but taken to its extreme - down to the smallest minority (the individual) - it can be very lonely.
