Illuminating Self Through Photography

Reflections on using self portraiture as a tool of self reflection.

My body hangs over the camera, eyes closed, backlit, shadow cast across most of my features. The word “hollow” is a rumination, a sensation, a prayer. I’m trying to come back to myself using the path I’ve frequently walked in these moments, a photographic practice rooted in self-witnessing through self portraiture.

Truthfully, however, I’m avoiding my own gaze and my heart is half in it. For someone who prides themself on giving their all, there is a thick cloud of shame upon coming to this realization. I’ve been spiraling into the familiar pit, the one where light becomes dim, connection painful, motivation utterly absent. Spurred by hormones, world events, personal events, I find myself making images to fulfill the assignment that I myself have written as a facilitator of a practice group around self portraiture, and my heart is not in it.

Yet, even in this imperfect moment of practice, I find that I am on a familiar path. Even in avoiding my gaze, I have still been perceived. The questions soon come-why am I avoiding my own gaze? Why, after years of looking upon myself in moments of extreme pain, discomfort, and trauma, am I uncomfortable with sitting and really looking?

This is what I love most about self portraiture, what keeps me returning again and again to sitting before the camera for myself. I hadn’t been aware until after making these darkened images of my face, after sharing them with a small group of others, what had been happening in that exchange between body and camera. I knew that I was going through a bout of depression, of course, yet could not find the thorn buried in the darkness.

I began using self portraiture more intentionally in my early 20s following a surgery in which I had been diagnosed with endometriosis. I remember feeling very isolated in my grief around my body, and upon suggestion from a mentor, began turning the lens on myself. The resulting project, Where the Red Flowers Bloom, gave me tools to survive a harrowing two years in which I became incredibly sick. In a time when my experience was often dismissed by others, I was brought back into my own body through making images of myself and sitting with the experiences instead of turning away.

Where the Red Flowers Bloom, 2019

Where the Red Flowers Bloom, 2019

The self portraits I made then and through the following years were less about a process of “proof making,” though the world demands a certain amount of proof of chronically ill bodies, and more about the process of looking. After feeling my sense of self stripped down through the medical gaze, self portraits became a way to self discovery and connection. I discovered things through the lens that had been pushed to the side, parts of myself I could nourish through witnessing them. I could make an image and show compassion for a struggling body in a time when much of the gaze falling upon that body was of scrutiny or dissection.

In the last 5 years, my self portraiture practice has shifted. While even in the initial projects, Where the Red Flowers Bloom, Vessel, and The Countless Moments that Make Up Waiting, there were bids for connection with others, they were mostly centered on identity and the tension between what I saw versus what others projected. Through practicing with the communities of Life at Six Feet and Kinship Photography Collective, I noticed my work beginning to shift into a “between space.”

Upheaval, 2024

What is between my body, and the world around me? I started photographing Upheaval before I knew I had a project. After feeling shattered by the trauma of illness and various other personal dramas, I began to consciously pick up the pieces of myself through photography. I found myself examining everything, from childhood memories, to relationships to land, to folklore, to microbiology. I felt an urge to remove myself from the medical setting (even as this project begins with a self portrait while battling sepsis), a longing to complicate the identity of “patient.”

What occurred in the photographic process is an internal struggle with the transition from crisis to stability. I’m still editing this work-every time I think I have a sequence that feels complete, I return to the work only to find shattered shards of narrative that don’t quite fit together. Languaging this project has slowly started to become easier as I spend time outside of producing the work, yet how does one make a statement about an ineffable experience?

Dear Valued Patient, 2022

Royal, 2023

In bringing the camera into my grandmother’s home, to the river, into my new home, to the mountains, I brought a way to access my internal experience through self portraits. For someone who is learning that they take time to understand their emotional processes, this is invaluable. I can lean into the sensation of my experience, the hollowness in my chest, the shadow that seems to literally cloud the edges of my vision, make a self portrait, and sit with the experience. The images become pieces that I can contextualize within the other work I am making as they visualize the patterns of thought I have been wandering through as a type of visual journal.

The sun is a fiery presence even before 10 am, the light having just burst over the hill in the backyard, promising another of the bone-melting southern summer days that have defined this season. It is searing through my eyelids, my skull filled with radiance even with eyes shut tight against the brilliance. The camera looms overhead, and it is painful to open my eyes. The shutter begins to snap quickly and I muster courage to crack open my gaze.