John Steck Jr.: Older Photographs: A Decade of Me

Friday, June 26, 2009

Older Photographs: A Decade of Me

Last fall I got to show my self-portrait work to my friend Stephen Jacobs Beginning Color Class at The New England School of Photography. He was giving out a self-portrait assignment and had several people come in and show their work and discuss the process and different ways/styles of executing self-portraits. I normally would just show my graduating portfolio from NESOP and talk about that process, but this time I wanted to do something a little different.

I gathered up every self-portrait that I had with me here in Boston and put them in a box. when I got to NESOP I had an hour to figure out the way I wanted to show them. I scattered them all about the tables and for the first time ever in my career I saw ten years worth of my self-portraits all at once. I had never really thought about doing that before, especially since the different groupings of self-portraits were done for different assignments or projects. Some of the ideas from one grouping may have led to ideas in other groupings but they never really crossed over in my mind.

I basically laid them out in chronological order and figured it would be best to describe the different stages of the work, and what each grouping meant for me at the time and what it means to me now. The work became more related to each other than I thought and it was quite amazing for me personally to see that progression, of not only maturing as an adult in the images, but also maturing within the work as a photographer.

These images here are selects from different parts of my life this past decade. Some were used in final portfolios for classes, some are out-takes, and some exist just by themselves. Please enjoy the progression as I do.