Robert P. Taylor's Reflect: 101 self-portraits

Reflect -- Main Page

Opened January 1998 -- no major revision since This web gallery or "webbery" explores the arrangement of visual data in the form of drawings of the site's artist and creator, Professor Robert P. Taylor of Teachers College, Columbia University. Like several other Taylor websites (see Related Taylor websites link below), this one explores characteristics of classifying and arranging visual data, but unlike those others, Reflect has a single subject - it uses the relatively new medium of the web to approach an old subject - the self-portrait. Artists render themselves for various reasons. While a common reason for self-portraits is certainly that the artist is his or her own cheapest and most available subject, artists render themselves for a wide variety of other reasons, too. Self-reflection, for example, is another, as this site's title implies. Still others are reflected in the texts accompanying various Reflect sketches. But this site also embodies another reason for its creation, one not unique to collections of self-portraits alone, a reason equally applicable to any sizable, single-subject collection of images. By narrowing the focusing to a single subject, any such collection highlights the issues of classifying and arranging into exhibits. Through hyperlinks, a website is an ideal environment for implementing the classifying and arranging schemes one can come up with. It is, because it provides the means to simultaneously exhibit a given image in two or more "installations" within the same website, an exhibition possibility that overcomes some of a curator's most intractible problems in a traditional, non-digital exhibition. So besides whatever intrinsic value there might be in displaying self-portraits, this site was implemented to exploring such matters further. Index to all Exhibits (below) provides site navigation and embodies the exhibition schemes that were settled upon.

Site background Site's creator and artist Related Taylor websites

Index to all Exhibits Comments