SELF-PORTRAITS
Anthology Series
Who I was, and who I am. Across different spaces and times, these images hold a familiar look, an unexpected angle, a place that felt like home. The shifting pieces that make up my life.
When I first started taking self-portraits, I told myself it was just for practice. I wanted to learn my camera — how light curved around skin, how to balance composition when the subject was me and the photographer was also me. But that’s not the whole truth. Somewhere between setting the timer and checking the frame, it became something more than an exercise. It became a conversation — awkward, quiet, sometimes uncomfortable — between who I think I am and who I appear to be.
John Berger once said that every image reveals how we see and how we want to be seen. That feels true in every frame I take. Self-portraits live in that in-between space — half private, half public — where I’m both looking and being looked at. Maybe that’s what makes them so compelling.
The first photos looked forced — my expression halfway between curiosity and self-defense. I remember thinking, I don’t even know what my face looks like when I’m not trying. Most of us only see ourselves in fragments — mirrors, reflections in store windows, quick glances while brushing teeth. A photo freezes that into something solid, something we can’t immediately adjust or look away from.
So I kept taking them. I’d try different moods, different angles, sometimes smiling, sometimes not. But no matter what, the photos felt incomplete. Each one seemed to reveal a part of me I didn’t know existed, and hide another part that I wished would show. It made me wonder: when I take a photo of myself, am I trying to capture my identity — or am I trying to create it?
It’s easy to dismiss it as vanity, especially in a world full of selfies and filters and perfectly curated feeds. But I think something deeper is going on. When I look into a lens, I’m not just showing myself to others — I’m also trying to see myself.
I think we all perform a little, especially in front of a camera. There’s something about being observed, even by yourself, that changes how you act.
As the series grew, I started to include more context — my desk, the kitchen, the small messes of everyday life. I realized that identity doesn’t live only in the face; it’s in the surroundings too, in the ordinary spaces we inhabit without thinking.
hgh
Susan Sontag wrote that “to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.” I think about that often when I take pictures of myself. Maybe every self-portrait is a small act of claiming — a way of saying this is me, as I see myself. But Sontag also warned that photographs can separate us from reality, that we start to mistake the image for the person. When I look at my own portraits, I sometimes wonder if I’m seeing myself or just a version I’ve learned to perform for the camera.
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