Those of you who know me well will understand how much I loathe being in front of the lens. Periodically a masochistic urge happens upon me to train my own lens upon myself and make a self portrait. Perhaps, for a photographer, self portraiture is the ultimate challenge, the pinacle of our art form. It is one thing to make an image of someone else, and to deem it “expressive”, for we really know nothing of what a person’s expressions mean save for what we suppose them to be. Self portraiture strips us of all such blissfully ignorant buffers. I know how I felt when the shutter clicked. I know the mutterings of my heart that day. I know the vocabulary of my photographic expression of a subject. On a whim I made this portrait. Please pardon this self indulgent moment; I am extremely happy with this image. The stars of my personal sentiments, the visual vocabulary of photographic expression, all aligned. I’m quite excited to have made a true portrait.
