Inhabiting the Frame: Real and Imagined Identities through Self-Portraiture - Winter 2027

This two-day, intensive workshop explores self-portraiture as a method for constructing and interrogating identity, rather than simply capturing a flattering likeness. Participants will work with costume, masks, personal objects, and family photographs as tools for developing a visual language to express their interior experiences.

Through guided discussion and extended image-making, participants build a small body of work grounded in staging and self-obscuring rather than documentation—creating image sequences that reflect personal memories, themes and relationships. Across two days, participants move from concept and reference to sustained, prompt-driven shooting time, leaving with a series of images and a working method for continuing this kind of self-portraiture as a tool for reflection and self-expression on their own.

Day 1 Outline — Concept & First Shoots

• Introduction: self-portraiture as inner-state expression
• Artist reference discussion
• Group discussion: costume, masking, averting the face, and "becoming someone else" as strategies for revealing rather than concealing the self
• Prompt-based shooting session #1 (students work independently and in pairs, instructor circulates for feedback)
• End-of-day review: what’s working, what’s challenging?

Day 2 Outline — Deepening the Work

• Morning check-in: reviewing Day 1 images, identifying threads worth developing
• New prompt set, building on themes from Day 1
• Extended shooting time
• Optional: props/costume exchange or collaborative posing exercise (students may photograph each other under the same conceptual constraints and/or make use of multiple forms in a single image)
• Final group critique: sequencing images as a small series, discussing next steps for continued work

What to Bring:

• Camera (digital or film) you are comfortable operating
• Self-timer or long cable release required for film shooters
• Suggested (optional, not required): a few costume pieces, fabric, or meaningful objects from home

Images © Danielle Quenell