Last Updated on 11/11/2021 by Chris Gampat
All Images by Mary Stuart. Used with Permission and Creative Commons License on Behance.
When she isn’t at home in Rome, photographer Mary Stuart is a world-wandering traveler, photographing people and projects all over the globe. Heavily inspired by movies and cinema, Stuart documents these trips with self-portraits shot from her hotel in a given location.
“There’s a deep sense of loneliness, of being away from home in a no-place/neutral-impersonal-place like a hotel is, in an atmosphere of waiting.” Stuart explains, “Those series depict me in my room always naked and pictures of the buildings and the city I’m in.” Interestingly enough, like many artists, Stuart’s beginning with photography started as an outlet for her youth.
“…in late 2008. I was suffering from panic attacks and couldn’t even get out of my room, so my mother thought was a good idea to give me my first camera ever, a canon 1000d, to make me go out and soothe my anxiety by taking pictures, using the lens as a sort of protection from the world.” Stuart says, “It worked, people started telling me that I was talented and I continued.”
In terms of inspiration, Stuart says that she is heavily inspired and influenced by movies and cinema. “I love to take both architecture, portrait and self-portrait photos mixed together as they were some frames from a movie.”
The glory of self-portraits is that the gear setup is rather lite, Stuart says the majority of these travel logs are shot with a Canon 50D, 5D Mark II and 24-70mm F/2.8L II. She says she has stuck with Canon over the years because that is what she learned with, but that both Leica and Fujifilm have really interested her of late.
You can find her full self-portrait series over on Behance, and her facebook page.
