I’m currently taking through my grade 8s on a Self-Portrait project.  One of the tasks I get them to do is to take Faceless Self-Portrait photos such as this one:

Here’s how we got there:

First: As a way of introducing symbolism we look at other images of self-portraits including a couple of paintings by Van Gogh that originally were thought to be still lifes.  Another way to look at these is as a self-portrait and a portrait. I ask the students “What we can tell about these people?” from their chairs.

Van Gogh Chair & Pipe 1888
Wikipedia.com

Van Gogh: Gauguin’s Chair, 1888
Wikipedia.com

Once they get the idea and get ‘beyond the chair’, we discuss how personality and interests can be reflected in objects.

Next: I then show them a few photos and ask them what they can tell about this person:

The students figure out that it is me.

I then give them the same task. They must take a photo of themselves and or objects that symbolise them. They then up load these to our online virtual learning centre into forums. I set the forums so that they are set to “anonymous” so users names are not posted with the photo. In the next class we have fun guessing who’s who. They generally know each other well and I get to know things about them. A fun lesson! Here are some of the photos my students created this this year:

Tips for teachers:

Have instructions available for students on how to upload their photos.

For better photos it’s worth doing a short photography unit before this. My students had already done a unit on photography during which we focused on composition techniques. This helped to get more interesting photos on this particular task.