Photographing My Complicated Body

On self portraiture.

I’ve been reflecting on self portraits lately as I put thoughts together for a practice group I will be facilitating through Kinship Photography Collective in September (join us 8/28 to hear more from all of the facilitators for this cycle of practice groups!). This reflection is also happening after a summer largely spent not making self portraits, a significant break in otherwise continuous making of photographs over the past five years, and it has been interesting to return to the reason I continue to go through the process of sitting for my own camera over and over again.

Self portraits have often made beautiful images of incredibly painful moments in my life. I remember sitting for the camera alone in the days after being diagnosed with endometriosis. This was a particularly tumultuous time in my life as I tried to cling to the careful illusion of wellness I had built for myself, while also feeling myself being agonizingly remade, my entire life becoming radically different in every way within a matter of weeks. I had turned the camera on myself as a distraction to the grief I was feeling, and found that the act of seeing myself, really looking and sitting with the person that was simultaneously creating and being created through the camera gave me a path back into my body after years of dissociation.

It is this yearning for a relationship to self that has driven much of my work as a self portraiture artist. When I first began using self portraiture to sit with my health, I found that the camera allowed me perspective; I could function as the gaze reflecting back on myself. Much of my life has been spent struggling to validate my own reality, particularly because of chronic illness, and self portraiture became a way not only to make evidence for others, but to show myself what I was experiencing. 

Self portraiture became a lifeline in many ways from 2019-2023, a nearly compulsive practice that I reached for in hard moments, in confusing moments where I felt myself drifting from my body and sense of self. When I was acutely ill with an infection-turned-sepsis, the camera became glued to my hand, photographing being the only thing my incoherent mind could latch onto. There was something deep in the practice of really looking with the lens, staying in the discomfort, that I needed.

An assignment I love to give in practice groups is to create a love letter, and in particular, create a love letter that is complicated. To me, complexity is not inherently negative, but rather an opportunity for richness. I grew up in a family with equal parts love and complication, lived my childhood in a place that is beautiful yet felt incredibly lonely, feel intense admiration for and frustration with a body that is often in pain and a state of dysfunction. My mind holds many thoughts and feelings at once, sometimes in states of contradiction. 

With self portraiture, I am able to hold attention to my own body, the site of many of those contradictions. The parts of myself I struggle with, the parts that might be classified as physically sick, or mentally ill, the parts that grieve trauma, the parts that feel dissonant to my sense of identity, can be held within a photograph, within a state of care. The photographs themselves are nearly irrelevant (I say nearly, as I do hold importance to some final images I’ve made), but it is the process that invites me into a near meditative state.

I learned as a young child how to dissociate in order to distance my mental self from my physical self, primarily because of chronic pain or uncomfortable symptoms. Yet, self portraiture demands a level of embodiment that calls me back into myself. I have a terrible sense of proprioception, but with the camera I can see a record of my body in space, work with that body, mind moving between the imagined camera’s eye and my own, to move deeper into the felt sense of where I am in space.

This movement in and out of my body, into and out of photographing and photographs, not only helps me draw deeper to my own sense of self, but over the past three years I have noticed that the deeper I move into awareness of my self in self portraiture, the more aware I am of the connections between my body and the world around me.

Because I photograph myself within the river, and feel the water in my sinuses, pressing on my chest, tugging gently at my limbs, I become more aware of the relationship between the river and myself. Because that photograph comes home with me and ends up on my studio wall, my awareness is brought again and again not only to that embodied moment, but to that larger relationship occurring happening within the photograph.

That desire for connection is one of the things that drew me to photography in the first place, and I find myself more and more curious about the ways self portraiture can expand those relationships. The way that I have considered self portraiture has changed; what began as a process of self compassion has evolved into one of curiosity and expansion. Once a distraction, now a mindful process.