Identity

Identity - a concept that shows the social nature of a human beeing, an individual, self-extracting in social relationships. However identity is not stable and can change over time. It responds to events and experience that happen in life, for example it is manifested by the ability to work, consciousness and language, freedom and responsibility, focus and temperament. From the biological point of view, a human being is the highest stage of development on earth. While the animal's behavior is completely determined by instincts, human behavior is directly determined by thinking, feeling, will, the awareness of the society and himself...and these are basically the main factors that form our identity.

Identity, is an object of a lot of studies, especially philosophy, psychology, sociology and even photography. Photography has always been one of the powerful sources of visual communication that can have an impact on human mind. Through photography we can reveal identity; we can not only show how certain person looks like, but we can tell the whole story through photography- who is that person, what are his/her interests, we can tell the gender and the race of the certain person simply just looking at the picture. Every picture has an information; every photograph reveals the information about our identity.

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Lawler, S. (2008) Identity: Sociological Perspectives. Cambridge: Polity Press. 

Image: 

Avedon, R. (1957) Marilyn Monroe [Online]. Availiable at: http://www.richardavedon.com/#s=0&mi=1&pt=0&pi=3&p=-1&a=-1&at=-1 (Accessed 26 April 2012).