Not so long ago I photographed a young woman. She asked if there was a self-portrait that showed me as I am – a photo “where you feel most like yourself?”
The question was not out of place, as I tend to seek out some sort of truthfulness in my portraits of other people. Indeed, the photo of her I liked most was where she looks directly at the viewer with a mixture of candour and languishment. Taken on a sweltering hot day, it feels as though the heat had cast away all forms of pretence.
Things are quite different in my self-portraits. Surely, I look at myself with the same disregard for beauty. I don’t care whether I look good in these self-portraits. But none of them aspire to showing me most truthfully, and they are staged.
There is inexplicable joy in photographing yourself, which is unlike any other creative joy. Choosing a location, setting up a tripod, finding something to wear and do, all of this conjures up a singular, private and phantastical universe – torn loose from reality and yet undeniably connected to it (this may be true for any photograph.)
These sessions are not about identity (finding out who you ‘really’ are), they are about otherness. They are not try-outs for things in ordinary life. What is so marvellous is precisely that these versions of myself exist only in the photographic realm - and in the photographic realm anything is possible. I can look at them with a sense of wonder, as if I don’t know the person in the photo, but I would perhaps like to know more about them. It’s much like looking at old photos at a fleamarket.
Claude Cahun famously said that behind each mask was just another mask. I take it as an incentive to stake out one’s own place in the photographic realm and relentlessly photograph to not find oneself.
