The self-portrait experience

In front of a cup of coffee.

In the digital era self portraiture enables anyone to produce a work of art instinctively, without knowing anything about photography. I have been using this technique for several years, with children, adolescents and adults from all walks of life, helping them to make self portraits using my own camera, or letting them use their own small digital cameras or cell phones. Everyone, as they release the shutter, expresses an innate determination to affirm their existence, their awareness, even if unconscious, that they are making art.

A photographic work of art as I understand it is an image that encompasses multiple and sometimes contrasting meanings: it deals intimately with the human condition, it contains a rich diversity of stimuli to thought and feeling, it has a special relationship with time… all within a single harmonious configuration of visual and formal elements.

Facing the camera lens can be an opportunity for a unique experience and a deep non-verbal dialogue. The human eye scrutinises the mechanical eye, gazing into the bottomless pit in search of an image that captures our vision of our self. It looks both inwardly and at the outside world, present and future.

Through the act of looking, the self portraitist acquires a triple identity: author, subject and spectator at one and the same time, and it is this which gives the self portrait its communicative power. The author draws the attention of the spectator, as though whispering in their ear “this concerns you”. We are invited to immerse ourselves in the intricate dynamic of identities and relations between the three roles, an exchange which ensures the author’s immortality in the hearts and minds of posterity. The self portraitist possesses an intrinsic power and freedom of action which is akin to that of the gods. As Michel Tournier has said, the self portrait is the only possible image of the creator (and his gaze) at the very moment of creation.

Following Rembrandt and Van Gogh, more and more people today feel a strong urge towards self representation, to leave a lasting image of themselves which will outlive them. This need may be felt more urgently at certain moments of our lives when our identity is in question, or it may respond to the deeper compulsion of the artist who, as Bob Dylan says, is in a constant state of becoming. The self portrait is also a particularly potent way of expressing problematic feelings and emotions. By objectifying “the bad” in a photograph, we separate ourselves from what we dislike and open up a space for catharsis or renewal. The barriers to our essential being fall away.

Besides looking inside, every self portrait is always a form of performance. It is impossible to construct one’s own image unselfconsciously. All our action, our acting, is inevitably mediated by how we want others to see us. Yet there remains a space, an intense inner dialogue of perception, thought, judgement and acceptance which I believe is independent of the other’s gaze. It is a wonderfully powerful process which needs no words because the work itself contains everything and has no need to be translated to hit the target.

Performance also means stepping outside of oneself, imagining oneself as someone else, as in the work of the young Japanese artist Tomolo Sawada whose ID 400 presents passport photos of herself as four hundred different women. “Here is the astonishing plasticity of the ego”, as Stefano Ferrari points out in his book, Lo Specchio dell’Io – autoritratto e psicologia (Ed. Laterza), “the Promethean need to be and to try everything… to identify oneself with new personalities, to become the other”. And again, “this drive, this urge to recognise and express the multiplicity of identities which coexist within each of us is a defining characteristic of our times”.

Many of us fear the camera lens. In most cases I believe this stems from a problematic relationship with our own image, the gap between how we see ourselves (which remains more or less unchanged from adolescence or infancy) and the image which we see in the mirror. For Barthes photography neither represents nor reflects reality, rather it gives it meaning. We are not our self portrait, we are much more. That is what makes the self portrait such a valuable tool in reuniting our inner and outer images, a way of using our actual bodies and faces to discover our real selves.

To complete the process, however, it is necessary (I would say indispensable) to communicate this discovery to others. The artist, by his constant effort of introspection, separates himself from the outside world, and this is often the root of his existential suffering. By intimately sharing his work with an audience he has the chance to free himself from the confines of the ego and, as in Zen, become one with the cosmos.