I – Portrait and Self-portrait
Portraits and representations of oneself and of others have made up a large part of the photographs submitted to the competition of the German Youth Photo Prize from the very beginning. In the 1960s and 1970s women – mostly photographed by young men – appear merely in portraits, but in the following years more and more women begin to photograph.
In the pictures taken by the youngest competition participants, the subjects are often presented in very tight detail and with sudden immediacy. In this way the photograph becomes an experimental field for facial expression and gesture.
As the age of the photographers increases, the way the subject is staged and the backdrop selected become more important. Portrait photography makes a special contribution to the search for the personality of the subject. Not infrequently the young people appear both as photographer and model in their most extroverted form.
In recent times subjects are more often presented in a technically distorted manner as if they were a person from an artificial world. The superimposition or the comparative juxtaposition of the portrait with the facial features of these avatars represent new forms of expression in portrait photography.
