Erin Bunting in Huron, Ohio is creating
A Face A Day 2013: 365 Self Portraits and Others...
Why did you decide to do this project? This is my fifth year-long project in 5 years, but it is the first one that I've made public via a blog and Twitter.
Noah Scalin's
Skull-A-Day project visited the Sandusky Cultural Center a few years back. I loved it so much, and was so excited and inspired by it. I tucked the idea of a daily year-long challenge away in my mind until the time was right to pursue my own project.
My first 2 year-long projects were writing projects. My first photography project was 365 days of self portraits in 2011. Last year was "No Day Without Art," which incorporated self portrait photography as well as lots of other media, from papier-mache, to theater performance, to playwrighting, to stop motion animation, to masks, to sculpture, to painting, to jewelry, to a leather corset, to linoleum block prints, to sidewalk chalk. You name it.
For 2013, I really wanted to get back to self portraits, but didn't want to give up the freedom and discovery of exploring other art forms. Also, I wanted to look deeper into a style of self portraiture that didn't literally use my own face. Many of the faces on the blog are not my own, or even human, but the images are still, nevertheless, very personal and very much self portraits. Sometimes using another face uncovers even more emotional truth, allowing me to get even closer to the bone.
As I said, I am also a writer. This year, I wanted to blend my writing and my photography, as well as my love of self portraiture, and creating a blog seemed like a good way to mash it all up for 365 days. I don't write every day. I didn't want to put dual pressures on myself. But when the spirit moves me, I scribble a little something. I shoot the photos a day ahead, and I try to write the posts in one draft, without over-editing and re-working them. I want everything to feel spontaneous and fresh. I'm not trying to be super-profound. I'm just chronicling the 365 days as I go. I just hope that when people look at my portraits and read the words that go with the images, that they feel something, think something, understand something or discover something -- not necessarily about me, but hopefully about themselves or someone they know.
How has doing a yearlong/daily project affected your life? My 365 days projects haven't just affected my life. They've saved my life. I began making self portraits as art therapy during a particularly difficult time, and got hooked on the art form as a way to say the unsayable. For me, self portraiture is how I journal. Taking pictures of my outside is how I look inward. And even if nothing else good happens on any given day, as long as I made my "face," it was a day worth living.
See all of Erin's faces
HERE.
Why did you decide to do this project? This is my second year doing this project. I took a year off and really missed it.
