#24 Self Portrait

History of Estonian Academy of Arts goes back to 1914, founded as Tallinn Industrial Art School. After Estonia’s re-independence from USSR, in 1994 Estonia became European Union member state, and in 1996 the institute was renamed as Estonian Academy of Arts and certified as a sole public-low Art University in Estonia. Our institute is member of ...

Since I started working on Haptic Interface Design and especially on the field research into the haptic quality hidden in various textures, my digital camera has been working exactly as my third eye: it automatically focuses on and catch what I do not see exactly with my two naked eyes but I feel by touching, hearing, smelling or by instinct. Ac...

There’s a famous photograph by Ugo Mulas showing a picture by Michelangelo Pistoletto that reflects the viewer’s image. It’s a masterful shot consonant with the picture’s subject matter, a work of art itself and a difficult work at that precisely because it acts like a mirror. It’s a work whose photographic rendition requires some degree ...

What do you think of self-portraiture in the self-timer mode in photography? Well, the first thing that comes to mind when I hear a picture’s been shot that way is “vanity”; anyone having recourse to such a technique is out to show himself at his appealing best. Mind you, that’s understandable because we all implicitly reject the image we ...

Creativity is not a continuum. There are times it waxes and times it wanes. One has to learn the art of stopping to look, enjoy and listen, and unravel those hesitant interludes. Like in prosody, when the stressed follows the unstressed, or in music, in that hardly perceptible pause when the downbeat heralds the upbeat. That’s where the essence o...

Your short stories frame the fascinating even if painful contrast between tradition and modernity. Do you recognise yourself in this contrast? India is a very old culture, and the eternal continuum between tradition, the past, and the present is something that is present in all Indians. There is no clear defining line that separates the two; India...

In front of a coup of coffee “When I saw myself, I wasn’t there”, hissed the poets (funambulists) of the art, our art, when age-old conventional forms were suddenly torn asunder by concepts. That was indeed the time when art practices were centred on the conceptual (by way of example see a square metre of felt under the entry “Vincenzo A...

Describing Luis Sepúlveda is no easy matter. Here’s a man who in his lifetime has been a novelist, poet, playwright, both for the stage and radio; a man who was one of Salvador Allende’s personal bodyguards; a man who has been a guerrilla fighter in many conflicts in different South American countries; a man who has travelled the world as UNES...

In front of a cup of coffee. In the digital era self portraiture enables anyone to produce a work of art instinctively, without knowing anything about photography. I have been using this technique for several years, with children, adolescents and adults from all walks of life, helping them to make self portraits using my own camera, or letting t...

The House of illycaffé is heading for its seventy-fifth anniversary this year. When approaching these milestones the need to stop and ponder, to do a bit of stock-taking, to snap a self-timer shot of corporate performance and achievements thus far, is felt more than ever. The very title of one of the major events to celebrate, with all our collabo...