Selfie/Anti-Selfie

For this project I wanted to include both images of myself and without myself to explore how the presence of yourself impacts the image. For this I have captured a spectrum of my physical presence in the image. I have an image where I am clearly in the photo, one where I am completely absent and one that is sort of in the middle which is the shadow photo. For both the shadow photo and the empty table setting photo I feel a sense of cold and emptiness. The way that both images are framed makes me want to fill it with some sort of other presence. At least with the shadow image there is a bit more sense of a person, but it could just as easily be argued that the shadow photo has the same amount of emptiness as the table since the photo is not actually capturing a person but rather the shape of a person. So is it really a person? The image of myself has the most obvious sense of a self-portrait or selfie. I take up most of the frame and my facial expression can be used to help read the tone of the photo. The way this image is framed makes the image more about me than the space around me which is what the other two photos focus on. It seems to me that when people are included in the frame of a photo, our eyes look to them for guidance on how to read the image.