On Laura Swanson's "Anti Self-Portraits"

When I looked at the thumbnails for “Anti-Self Portraits”, I did not immediately realize why Laura Swanson’s work was included in the suggested viewing for this assignment. Her use of untraditional portrait styles (such as having the body and/or face covered or obscured) and her subtlety in the inclusion of any subject (many of the pieces are not immediately obvious in their connection to a person or body) makes her work quite unlike that of the other artists we had discussed in class. In this collection and in “Hope, NY”, Swanson illustrates herself through her relationships with and interactions to objects, which are often – though not always – impacted by her short stature. When you first view the piece, for example, of her lying behind a hotel’s bolster pillow in “Anti-Self Portraits”, the visual star of the image is not herself but a pillow accompanied by an almost comically familiar assortment of accessories: a Hilton guidebook, a patterned beige bed runner, and some pamphlets presumably detailing amenities available to hotel guests. Only upon a closer viewing does one see the feet poking beyond the right corner of the pillow, and the black hair on its left - Swanson is lying down behind the pillow, which happens to be nearly the same size as her body. Immediately it might seem like she is hiding either her body or identity, but in actuality the piece has an effect that is more illuminating than many more traditional portraits I have seen. Though she calls them anti self-portraits, something I love about Swanson's pieces is that they are, in my opinion, better examples of portraiture than standard busts or uncontextualized figures: instead of producing the illusion of an identity given by a studied and painted face, they convey the vital parts of Swanson’s identity that are the way she sees herself and how she exists in the world. In the Ted talk “Valuable Bodies”, Riva Lehrer disputes the misconception that portraits of disabled people and their bodies are compensatory or inherently painful; Laura Swanson’s self-portraits illustrate that point incredibly.