On Self Portrait

Lee Friedlander. “New York City”, 1966

 

“Self-portrait is the sublime memory of the ancient myth of Narcissus, it is the projection of the past into history. It's an allegory and emblem, a story and a lie. It can be absolute fiction or unconscious truth,” says Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco presenting the exhibition The Painter in the Mirror (Palazzo dei Diamanti, Ferrara, 1995).

 

This seems to me a very appropriate definition for self-portrait.

In Photography, from its beginnings, many photographers have ventured into this particular style, but it's not my intention to compile a series of names and images here, because it would not be taken care of.

 

In a documentary about the career of the great photographer Elliott Erwitt I saw a few weeks ago, just some days after going to his photographic exhibition here in Rome, he was asked why his self-portraits were always very ironic. He replied that he was bored of seeing faces of photographers always serious and posing, and that if he had to self-portray, it was better to have funny pictures. A nice answer from those who have impressed forever the drama of racial segregation in America. After all, in the self-portrait, he had found his way of making people smile and breathe a sigh of lightness, a sign of a profound irony that is a gift that only the great masters have.

Elliott Erwitt, "Self Portrait"

Also renowned are self-portraits of Vivian Maier who, among one photo and another on the streets of New York, never missed an opportunity to portray herself in every shop window she encountered. Street and proto-selfie.

And yes, selfie, this word that makes every photographer's hair stand on end, and which has now become a word of ordinary use and madness, since 2013, when the Oxford Dictionary proclaimed it word of the year, as Ferdinando Scianna writes in the splendid book “The Empty Mirror”:

“Everyone is entitled to their celebrity quarter of an hour, Andy Warhol prophesied. The trouble is that there aren't enough quarters of an hour for everyone”.

Selfie then becomes that emptiness multiplier with which we little human beings delude ourselves to survive the oblivion that brings death with it.

Vivian Maier. “Self Portrait”, New York, 1954

But to end an existential and thought process—which started with the great dilemmas of ancient Greek philosophy—in such a superficial way is too embarrassing. So I would like, for now, not to mention this compulsive practice of modernity to return to our dear camera.

It made me think of an unusual book that I was lucky enough to purchase recently: Lee Friedlander's “Self Portrait”. A single edition from 2005 that collects the self-portraits of the American photographer over a six-year period; first published in 1970. 

Lee Friedlander: “Self Portrait” (The Museum of Modern Art, 2005)

This book was born almost like a game, when the photographer carelessly found his shadow in the scene he was portraying, he says in the introduction. He calls himself an “intruder”. But what initially irritates him will then become a “gift” and that intrusion will become thought of, desired, and therefore one of his most famous books.

Lee Friedlander. “Provincetown, Cape Cod, Massachusetts”, 1968

Lee Friedlander. “Canyon de Chelly”, 1983

The ability to turn an error into a work of art is not for everyone, and it makes us think.

 

I came back with this thoughts when, a few days ago, while I was photographing a model for a fashion shooting, in a magnificent sunset light through the streets of the Colosseum, I could not avoid that my shadow constantly entered the frame, having the low sun behind. A long and well-defined shadow that made me mumble trying to remember what novel it was in which someone sold his shadow to the devil. For duty of information then I remembered it was in the classic of Adelbert Von Chamisso, that PeterSchlemiel who sold his shadow to the devil for a bag of gold but who refused to sell his soul to get back the shadow from the devil – from here comes the saying “sell your shadow to the devil”.

In the end, even photographing one's own shadow is a self-portrait, as in Erwitt's famous shot and as Friedlander himself.

 

There is no doubt that with it you can make irony or not, but self-portrait always has a psychological implication. We are not talking about others, of more or less recognized faces in front of our lens, but of ourselves; and how we want to be seen. By the way, go and look for the diagram “Johari's Window” on  self-portrait, about the Psychology of Photography, or the texts of Phototherapy by Judy Weiser.

There are many studies by psychologists on this issue, and the central point is that showing or not showing parts of our face and body is a form of internal communication with the observer.

At different levels.

Photographing one's eyes is very different from showing only one's own shadow or the lower half of the face: with the eyes we offer the possibility of entering into the depths of our soul, with the mouth we decline sensuality and with the shadow we deny every chance to know something about us – maybe.

Understanding who we are from our photograph of a sunset over the sea is not the same thing as portraying our face.

You can conceal it or not, you can make our face an impenetrable mask, you can make yet another reference to Narcissus and everything behind it, and looking at many self-portraits on the web it seems more like an artistic and vanity speech itself rather than a sincere communicative act. It can also be used in an ironic way, as we have seen with Erwitt and Friedlander, and at the same time also have a role in telling some stereotypes of a society, such as in the work of the Japanese photographer Tomoko Sawada (1977) whose self-portraits sarcastically and critically mock the stereotypes of Japanese society.

Tomoko Sawada. “School Days”, 2004

Tomoko Sawada. “Decoration \ Face”, 2007

It can also be a dramatic act.

Who among us has not felt a shiver staring at the restless eyes of Van Gogh's self-portraits of 1988, just when photographic portraits came into vogue?

“The painted portraits have a life of their own that originates from the soul of the painter and that no machine can capture,” wrote Van Gogh.

Vincent Van Gogh. “Self-portrait”, 1887-88

Peace to his soul, he was wrong.

 

And you don't even need to be posing in front of your camera to disprove his words, just look at D'Agata's disturbing and devastating self-portraits, while injecting the heroine into a vein or writhing with spasms of pain.

Of course, here we are far from Erwitt's shadow on the lawn with daisies instead of eyes.

D'Agata is a completely naked, even in the most miserable layers of one's soul, in a moving way in his sincerity, like no one else has ever been able to do.

As well as, on the other hand, Araki's self-portraits in intimacy with his wife Yoko.

Antoine D'Agata. Phnom Penh, 2007

For many people this speech is incomprehensible.

There have been a lot of times, over the years during courses or lessons, showing certain type of photographs, I was asked what kind of photography is this... almost with contempt.

Why get this far?

 

Might as well then float harmlessly on the surface of our lives with tons of selfies.

A selfie-portrait between friends, in joy, does not hurt anyone. It's like a veil of watercolor that colors our days, without the need to “show so much”.

But it's precisely this amount of courage that perhaps helps to understand.

Putting your own face on it is not always interpretable in a single dimension.

It's precisely in the emotional superficiality of our daily smiles, I think, that the terror of the void Scianna spoke of is felt more than in the extreme self-portraits of D'Agata or Araki.

Getting completely naked – literally – in front of the eyes of strangers, showing your wounds, obsessions, weaknesses and loneliness is the only way to sink your flesh into the void that is under our feet. It's a form of perversion, maybe, but it is also a strong affirmation that “I am here”, I exist, with all my imperfections as a human being: not the same vacuous “I am still here” of selfies, but it's  to impose one's existence through the camera on emptiness and absence. Not to caress the abyss but to slap it.

The thousands of images that, instead, we see and take every day without thinking, our selfies, are much more scary, because they absolutely do not scratch that horror vacui (terror of the void) that starts from Aristotle and reaches Heidegger up to our smartphones indeed: they really don't want to see it, they are a distraction.

An illusion.

Because in their multitude and continuous multiplication, they never say anything true about who we really are.

 

We are constantly exposed, but nobody knows who we are deep inside.

Stefano Romano. "Self-portrait during Covid-19", 2020

READ ALSO:

• On Manipulation 
• The Factory of Permanence 

Elliott Erwitt: “Home Around the World” (Aperture, 2016)
Vivian Maier. “Una fotografa ritrovata” (Contrasto, 2015)
Ferdinando Scianna: “Lo specchio vuoto. Fotografia, Identità e Memoria” (Editori Laterza, 2014)
Lee Friedlander: “Self Portrait” (The Museum of Modern Art, 2005)
Adelbert von Chamisso: “Peter Schlemihl, The Shadowless Man”
“New Trends in Japanese Photography” (SKIRA Photography, 2016)
Antoine D'Agata: “Anticorps” (Editions Xavier Barral, 2013)

Also take a look at this if you are interested in Psychology and Photography:
http://www.truecenterpublishing.com/photopsy/selfportraits.htm

 Italian version