October announcements: Art Detour, Broken Word…
—October 10th and 11th, 10 am – 5 pm. I’ll be displaying and selling crafts (and hot chocolate) at the Ojai Art Detour. 204 North Blanche Street. Stop by and say hi.
—I’ll be reading new material at the upcoming Ojai Broken Word event @ Farmer and the Cook, October 29th, 7-9 pm.
—My review of the 2009 Sarah Lawrence Women’s History conference was published in the annual Women’s History newsletter.
darts, sweethearts, and modern guilt
Modern Guilt
A Dart for My Sweetheart
self-portraits — self-representation
Bart's Books, Ojai, California — August 2009
i’ve been around cameras nearly all my life. my biological father was a photographer and i have memories of his manchester, new hampshire apartment surrounded with matted black and white pictures and cameras of all shapes and sizes. some of these cameras followed me around during my life as i’ve moved from place to place. when i was in my teens i bought a Nikon F1 SLR and eventually learned how to develop my own photos. sooner or later it became apparent that film was too expensive and developing time intensive for something that was more or less a hobby. so i sold my film camera and went digital.
i started taking self-portraits as soon as “wasting film” largely became an equation of of storage space. i had never taken these pictures seriously until recently when a number of disparate events intersected. justin posted a image of himself on facebook with food in his teeth; i stumbled across a savage love article about a romantic relationship that started by posting “misleading” pictures; finally, martha recently show me a sketchbook that she drew in high school many of which contained self-portraits as self-exploration…
this got me thinking a lot about how we carefully select pictures to represent the “best” of ourselves — the most representative of what we want others to see in us. yet is the “best” always the most accurate? justin’s picture taught me me that what we find unflattering, embarrassing, or problematic might be worth showing openly to others, because if we show the “worst”, and people like us — or are even attracted to us — in spite of this, then these are the connections are worth keeping.
these self-portraits that are not an attempt to portray either what i want others to see of me, or what i think is the “worst” of me, but rather incomplete set of images that i hope can convey some sense of dimensionality of character and self, that mysterious substance that dissolves the closer you look into it. Read more…
