September 14, 2017 - 14:03
The TEDx talk by Riva Lehrer indeed triggered a series of thoughts in me. In my opinion, the empathy that we are all born with as human beings is essential to the creation and appreciation of arts. However, as viewers, when we encounter situations where our empathy can’t work so well (such as in the occasion of disabilities because not many of us have truly experienced it), we would automatically search for stereotypes in our mind to fulfill the blank space. Just as Riva said, we would always picture people with disabilities as unhappy and sad but it is not always the case. In my opinion, the most important thing is to embrace all possibilities: people can be happy or not with or without disabilities; people can have a wonderful or awful life with or without disabilities.
I really like the idea of portrait because it contains so much freedom and privacy in it; Viewers get to see what the poser/portraitist want to show to them. I especially like Laura Swanson’s Anti-Self-Portraits. They first caught my attention because of the title and after I saw the pictures I still wondered about the meaning of it. They also reminded me of surrealism. What I found interesting is that they all use the names of the object which covered most of the people in portraits as the names of these portraits. The seeming disconnection between the name of the portraits and the true subject they depict is worth deep consideration. People seem to be hiding but what are they exactly hiding from?