Reimagining the Self-Portrait

Turning the Lens Inward: A Journey from the Street to the Psyche

In today’s world, the intimate and transformative vision of the self-portrait has been relegated to the commonplace “selfie”. Countless selfies pervade the stream of online content with no visible end in sight. Yet, self-portraiture has been a form of artistic expression for hundreds of years - with the first known self-portrait dating back to the early 15th century. Why do we create them? What is it that we yearn to express in self-portraits?

The first time I turned my lens from the outside world to the inner one was during the COVID-19 quarantine. Time was tediously passing by and my days were full of anxiety, dejection, and general malaise. The streets of NYC were in many ways closed to street photographers. The outside world became a ghost town. Photography, my everyday passion, seemed to be put on hold indefinitely.

That is, until I discovered the revolving mirrors in my parents bathroom. In seeing myself fragmented, split apart in despair through the bathroom mirror, I realized how in this moment, the outer world became a complete reflection of my inner one.

It was like a window into my psyche had been opened. A cracked, fractured window, but through that window, I was able to find my creativity once again. And it opened up into planes upon planes of different worlds, all laid out in front of me. I realized that self-portraiture itself could serve as a mirror for my soul.

The dark, shadow aspects of my experience could be expressed in the self-portrait, as well as the lighter, more peaceful parts. This novel exploration of self-portraiture not only allowed me to psychologically survive quarantine, but opened up for me an entirely original and unusual approach to photography. I began seeing traces of myself everywhere - in shadows, on the street, reflected in puddles. I also began to notice other photographers who had undergone similar transformative experiences in their photographic process - Sarah Simon’s powerful self-portraits come to mind as well as the inimitable Cindy Sherman, who used self-portraiture to question the very nature of her own identity in a media-saturated world.

Each person sees the world in a unique way, through their own eyes, which is why no two people can ever make the same photograph. And this brings me to wonder, is every photograph we take in a way - a self-portrait? Don’t we all see something of ourselves, something we have desired, hated, cared for - reflected in the outside world? Is this mirror of our own mind made manifest in the external world what keeps us drawn to photography again and again?