....are photos of my self, self-portraits; everything else is easy. Taking self-photos of myself means telling a story, showing the lines of my life and the tears fall where they may, or may not..... tears that may or may not be too strong enough to taste or touch, or maybe they're too strong to even confront.
(These are duplicates. When I post some others soon I'll replace these with current ones. But I wanted to get the story posted first.)
It means showing fear of alcoholism, drug addiction, mental and physical sickness, real and unreal. Taking a photo of myself means showing happiness, doubt, sorrow and letting it fit in, letting it find its place of balance.
It means showing vulnerability, weakness and loss. It means showing the images of funerals of family and friends written across my forehead and maybe forgotten, maybe just remembered, maybe just recently eulogized....and it means telling the stories of the weddings, the births, the divorces, all the pleasure, the unbelievable love that never ends that finds its mark on the lines and grooves of my face; and a self-portrait means a mental picture for all time and of all time come and gone, life time after lifetime. It means the passing away of my youth and the coming of old age.
A photo of me means showing the way my mind works or how it doesnt work. It means an image stimulating my art, creating my music, relying on, or being discouraged about life and hope, or hating it for its hopelessness, shallowness and uselessness. (The Eyes of March)
A self-portrait means I get to reveal the dark and the light of my inner tumultuous yin and yang that never quits, that never stops spinning, that never gives me a moment's rest; and why should it? Why should I expect it to?
A photo I take of myself is an image of grief and laughter contradicting each other and never getting resolved; and I get fed up with it. It's an image of wanting, missing and sometimes mostly of finding, if I'm lucky.
It's an image of conversations and memories of travelling companions moving across my skin on my face like shadows from clouds in the sky. A self-photo is an image of the waiting and the useless, pitiful, purposeless praying to empty nothingness of an image of stark putrified disbelief in all things holy.
A self-portrait is an image of anger, my moodiness, isolation, socialization, visualization and often my pathetic attempts at aloneness, as a hermit, as a ghost.
Self-portraits are images of ambition, drive, the down-time filled with relaxation and sleep, and it's a photo of good and bad misfortune and all the upside down relationships drawn across my face, scratched across my lips, sliding down the side of my head like blood.
When I take photos of myself it means a whole entire identification set of selfs, of my history, the crimes I've committed in the past all there on my face for all to see if they know how, hiding in secret behind the rocks and stones and behind of the soft valentines of kisses. It's an image of my secret personalities, the strange identities and the special moments filled with dreams that have come true and those that failed to make it and those that would and will never come true.
A self-portrait means I get to shine that camera lens directly into my own eyes, into my own face as deep and as hard as I can drive it in until it hurts, as far as I can let it go to penetrate deep into my brown eyes, to let it go past my soul, to get beyond my spirit (if there is a spirit), to go way back into the back of my head so far that it pierces my heart, cracks thru my mind's eye, touches my diseased body (past-present-and-future) without restrictions, without censorship, without alteration, without bias, without manipulation, without affectation, without personal affection to try to "look good" and feel good about it.
As far as I'm concerned, a self-portrait (a photo of myself) is the hardest most difficult photo for me that I'll ever want to take because it means putting that camera lens directly into the deepest places, into the deepest best and most worst spaces where I never let anyone go unless it's in a photo, where I guard it night and day, where very few people ever stay too long. And when that camera lens is pressed into that spot, then I let it snap, and snap, and snap again, and snap again as freely and as fast as I can snap it.
And what's the point of all this? Because for me, for my personal concerns and issues as a photographer/artist or whatever it is, the intimate self-portrait, (a photo of myself) that I can share with others ...it says to the world around me, "I was here. Somebody was here, somebody lived here, somebody had a life and lived it.....and that was somebody was me."
Everything else..... all the other photos I take, they're easy.
(These are duplicates. When I post some others soon I'll replace these with current ones. But I wanted to get the story posted first.)
It means showing fear of alcoholism, drug addiction, mental and physical sickness, real and unreal. Taking a photo of myself means showing happiness, doubt, sorrow and letting it fit in, letting it find its place of balance.
It means showing vulnerability, weakness and loss. It means showing the images of funerals of family and friends written across my forehead and maybe forgotten, maybe just remembered, maybe just recently eulogized....and it means telling the stories of the weddings, the births, the divorces, all the pleasure, the unbelievable love that never ends that finds its mark on the lines and grooves of my face; and a self-portrait means a mental picture for all time and of all time come and gone, life time after lifetime. It means the passing away of my youth and the coming of old age.
A photo of me means showing the way my mind works or how it doesnt work. It means an image stimulating my art, creating my music, relying on, or being discouraged about life and hope, or hating it for its hopelessness, shallowness and uselessness. (The Eyes of March)
A self-portrait means I get to reveal the dark and the light of my inner tumultuous yin and yang that never quits, that never stops spinning, that never gives me a moment's rest; and why should it? Why should I expect it to?
A photo I take of myself is an image of grief and laughter contradicting each other and never getting resolved; and I get fed up with it. It's an image of wanting, missing and sometimes mostly of finding, if I'm lucky.
It's an image of conversations and memories of travelling companions moving across my skin on my face like shadows from clouds in the sky. A self-photo is an image of the waiting and the useless, pitiful, purposeless praying to empty nothingness of an image of stark putrified disbelief in all things holy.
A self-portrait is an image of anger, my moodiness, isolation, socialization, visualization and often my pathetic attempts at aloneness, as a hermit, as a ghost.
Self-portraits are images of ambition, drive, the down-time filled with relaxation and sleep, and it's a photo of good and bad misfortune and all the upside down relationships drawn across my face, scratched across my lips, sliding down the side of my head like blood.
When I take photos of myself it means a whole entire identification set of selfs, of my history, the crimes I've committed in the past all there on my face for all to see if they know how, hiding in secret behind the rocks and stones and behind of the soft valentines of kisses. It's an image of my secret personalities, the strange identities and the special moments filled with dreams that have come true and those that failed to make it and those that would and will never come true.
A self-portrait means I get to shine that camera lens directly into my own eyes, into my own face as deep and as hard as I can drive it in until it hurts, as far as I can let it go to penetrate deep into my brown eyes, to let it go past my soul, to get beyond my spirit (if there is a spirit), to go way back into the back of my head so far that it pierces my heart, cracks thru my mind's eye, touches my diseased body (past-present-and-future) without restrictions, without censorship, without alteration, without bias, without manipulation, without affectation, without personal affection to try to "look good" and feel good about it.
As far as I'm concerned, a self-portrait (a photo of myself) is the hardest most difficult photo for me that I'll ever want to take because it means putting that camera lens directly into the deepest places, into the deepest best and most worst spaces where I never let anyone go unless it's in a photo, where I guard it night and day, where very few people ever stay too long. And when that camera lens is pressed into that spot, then I let it snap, and snap, and snap again, and snap again as freely and as fast as I can snap it.
And what's the point of all this? Because for me, for my personal concerns and issues as a photographer/artist or whatever it is, the intimate self-portrait, (a photo of myself) that I can share with others ...it says to the world around me, "I was here. Somebody was here, somebody lived here, somebody had a life and lived it.....and that was somebody was me."
Everything else..... all the other photos I take, they're easy.
