Conceptual

Liz Rideal Laminated photo-booth strips

This huge work by Liz Rideal is a self-portrait within many other self-portraits. The artist installed a photo-booth in the basement of the National Portrait Gallery in London and invited the public to ‘disguise or reveal themselves’ in a series of four photo-booth snapshots with the aid of props and costumes. If you look carefully you can make out a line drawing of the artists face towards the right hand side of the work. The artist included many photographs of her arm and hand bent into different shapes which appeared black against the white of the booth backdrop. These were then sequenced together to form the line drawing of her face, made up literally of the ‘hand of the artist’.

The idea was to invite ‘ordinary people’, artists and celebrities into the gallery to create a mass portrait of photographs taken identically but with each person performing in an individual way for the camera.

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