In 1999, ten years after coming to critical attention in Australia, Tracey Moffatt AO (b. 1960) created the one and only self-portrait in her oeuvre. In the hand-coloured photograph, Moffatt presented herself as a photographer, holding a camera in her hands. The black-and-white photograph in this diptych is a different shot from the Self portrait of 1999, although it was clearly taken on the same occasion, with the artist wearing the same knitted olive-green top and head scarf. It features Moffatt's instructions for the retouching of the second image, which was hand-painted at a studio in New York in 2005. Although it appears as though Moffatt is standing in a sun-drenched landscape, the original photographs were taken in a studio in front of a painted set, a reference to the movie-style painted landscape sets in her photographic series Something More (1989) and her short film Night Cries – A Rural Tragedy (1989).
Purchased with funds provided by Tim Fairfax AM 2013
© Tracey Moffatt
Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.
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