mirrored

It's portraiture week in class - and that includes self-portraits.   Much though I like taking portraits of others, self-portraiture is way down on my list of favorite genres to practice - much though I'm intrigued by the self-portraits of others.   Of course this is in part physical vanity (my nose is especially bony here - although in part its profile could be said to bear witness to  history, recording a very aggressive tackle with a lacrosse stick in my more sporty past - and the jawline is depressingly soft.   Etc).   But I'm very aware that for me, self-portraiture means - or I want it to entail - something far more complex and searching.   So for me, the genre lays bare a kind of intellectual vanity (and concomitant anxiety), too.   I either want these images to emphasize some sort of conceptual awareness, or at least to engage with issues of identity in a less obvious way than by depicting myself gazing into a mirror.   "Glancing" might be more like it - I don't have a good relationship with mirrors, and duck and weave and close my eyes in the hairdresser's.

But without a sense of oneself in a mirror (or maybe in photos taken by others), how would one know what one looked like?   In the Introduction to his excellent Face - an introduction to contemporary photographic portraiture - William Ewing makes a point of telling one how early photographers could readily dupe their clients because these people didn't have mirrors - at least, not easily scrutinizable, clear-surfaced mirrors - in their homes.   Not for them the self-inspection in the hall mirror in the morning on one's way out the door (and it was, indeed, in doing just that, today, that I thought that the lighting might work for a quick hand held shot - I'll bring out the tripod and the release cable when/if I magically develop more hours in the day, later this week).   But this does capture the suspicion, the reluctance, the deliberate head-angling as one tries to convince oneself that one's able to face the world first thing.   

And the minute I engage in any kind of self-portraiture, I'm filled with respect for the courage of people - Catherine Opie, say, or in a very different context, Jo Spence - whose self-portraits don't in any way aim at self-flattery, but rather take a long hard look at who they are, and how others might (literally or figuratively) see them.   I tried a few shots like that earlier in the weekend, but just looked like a rather grouchy groundhog.