"I paint self-portraits because I'm lonely, I paint myself, because I'm the one I know best" - Frida Kahlo.
Unlike Frida Kahlo, I began to create self-portraits because I didn't know myself enough.
When I started in photography, I really had no idea what I was starting, nor how that would change my life completely and forever. Next: fragments of me in time, light documents of who I have been and how I perceive myself through the camera and how this has helped me to stay alive. And how the way of self-portraying has changed ME. A brief account of my life, maybe…
I started taking pictures when I was about 15 years old, when in Venezuela you could buy a camera without having to sell a kidney to get it (but that's another subject). As usual, my first photos were based on capturing my surroundings compulsively, everything I saw and caught my attention. I never felt bad or worried about the quality of my photos. Although many, seeing them now, they were not good at all. None of those photos already exists, because eventually I go into kind of crisis that makes me erase a lot of photos.
Luckily, I then had the consolation of a great photographer.
"Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst photos." - Henri Cartier Bresson
Something that was calling me more and more was the fact of photographing myself. At that time, I was in the middle of adolescence. I understood many less things, I perceived many less things, and therefore I was someone very different from who I am now. The self-portraits I used to do were random, I did not expect anything, just put the camera in front of me on a timer and get a nice image. But what I did not perceive was that this act was transforming me, and it came from deep places inside me.
The first pictures I made were in the apartment where my dad lived alone, which I used to go sometimes. I lived in a separate house with my mother, they got separated when I was 9 years old and from that moment my life began to go around the problems of my father's anger, and the traffic between one house and another. Although generally I was more with my mother. I remember those first approaches to self-portraiture, I was very inspired by black and white photography. And I think that was because I felt the world like that at that time in my life. I liked to see my body in that range of only lights and shadows without colors.
I started making photos without expecting anything in return. It was a very pure act. I did not even stop to think about what would become of me in the future, but I was sure I needed this, this art, this act of photographing in my life. The self-portraits were also the first option, and the most comfortable to stop photographing everything around me and move on to photograph the human figure. I think it's a process that all photographers and artists must go through. What has to do with discovering the art that we want to do. Go discovering what moves us inside.
I am impressed to see these photos again and feel that although it has not been that long (I am now 21 years old. My birthday was 2 days ago), I have changed as if 10 years have passed. I have lived a myriad of experiences, every time I understand and discover new aspects of my mind, and my body. I see these initial photos, and I can perceive all the emotions of loneliness, boredom, and nostalgia that I feel at that time. I did not understand myself.
My sexuality had always been a complex issue for me. Since I was little I liked men. But at that age, between 16-17 I was with a girl from my high school who came to love a lot but with whom I never managed to transcend, it was like a nice friendship with kisses. We ended up because I saw some pictures that she had sent to another guy, and I cried a lot but I did not understand why. Inside I was made a scribble. It was obvious that things like this would project in my images. Little by little I understood myself, although many times I avoided myself.
Sometimes I liked to play at being a giant. In this sense, it is that I auto fiction. All my photos are created, or I try to create them, from my emotions. But sometimes, I not only self-portrait as documenting, but I create a character around that, or a visual concept beyond my face and my body, and I create images like this one above. But they always talk about me and who I am and what I represent.
Little by little, unconsciously, I understood me more and more. Or at least I was feeling at peace with myself. I was discovering me, and accepting me. Not as a process that I had decided to start, but as something that was happening in me without me premeditating it. and without being able to reestablish anything. BECOMING I was discovering my emotions better, finding me in my body, my mind, my ideas. And while I was changing, I changed my way of seeing and understanding my surroundings. My photos stopped being black and white, and I found before my eyes the beauty of the colors.
Even so, nostalgia was still a part of my photos. I kept growing and changing. Feeling I began to become more interested in the emotional expressiveness of the naked body, of my own naked body. And my body, the skin, the parts became more present in my self-portraits. Moment in which the photos had an absence of face and a marked tendency in the shade. That I relate that symbolically to the fact of HIDING. Since these photos were hidden from my family, from my mother, because I knew they would not agree, but I did not know how to defend it either. I was scared. Then it was a new stage of light on the one hand but a lot of anguish on the other. It's horrible to have to hide what you love. (or who you love too, who had also happened to me)
These colors captivated me in a delicate and beautiful way. Self-portraying helped me to better understand my sexuality, I found sensory responses to my existential problems. The power to self-portray myself in the way I perceived myself, reconciled me with my own body and my sexuality in general. I felt, at last, part of myself. In communion with my ideas and the way of expressing myself.
But never in complete harmony. I think that we, the humans, are in an attempt of constant equilibrium. Once an aunt said that she did not believe in happiness, that people do not become happy, but that we only get to have happy moments. That is, there is no absolute happiness, but you can become happy on several occasions. I did not think at that moment. But now I think she may be right.
I self-portrayed without identification. As if my face was, in fact, the heaven.
Or leaning against the wall of an alien room.
There was a time when I stopped taking pictures for almost a whole year. My parents saw some pictures with which they did not agree, and it was a big problem, all that made me feel very bad, and fall into a hole of no feeling to create. What I had feared, it was fulfilled. Actually I did not stop taking pictures, but I was taking pictures that did not come from deep within me. They did not move me, they did not tell me anything. And therefore, I did not take them into account.
After a while, I went back to self-portraits. But this time, I felt that something had changed. I did not feel the same doing photos. At that time I had moved with my dad, I had started classes at the university, it was easier to live with my dad because my mom's economic situation had deteriorated drastically, due to the crisis in Venezuela. I no longer felt nostalgic as before, and I associated that with not being able to do the photos I did, with those whose aesthetics I felt full.
I tried to evoke past emotions. And one day I went to my mom's house, and I took this picture below. I thought that going back to that house, where I had felt and lived so many things, would make me recover those images. In short: I was refused to accept the change. I did not assimilate it, and I could not understand it; I had changed
I gave myself my time. I made many other photos, several sessions with friends. I began to explore other themes and ways of creating that interested me. Search in other spaces: new images. I know I did some self-portraits, always trying to find something *** following a philosophy like Picasso's.
"I do not search, I find" - Pablo Picasso
Which also said that if the muse came, so find him working. Likewise I behave. And of course it was useful.
It was a transit time. Of yellow light. Standby. I started a medical process, for a surgical intervention. I had a ganglion removed and they studied it, that's when they diagnosed me with cancer. I would not want to dwell too much on that, since it's a process that I'm still living on, since last year. And that is difficult for me to digest it well yet. But irremediably it is a process that is part of my life, and self-portraits do not hide anything.
This ↑ and this ↓ were the first self-portraits I did after the diagnosis, I think I shoot them a month later. When the chemotherapy treatment had not started yet. Self-portraits that I now look at and I feel that they document the tremor of those days within me.
Then the chemotherapy process began. And my body also began to change. Suddenly; tiredness, pain, lack of appetite ... My spirit, my mind, and my body began to transform without remedy. It's strange, but all the bodily changes, from the outside, came to change the most ethereal parts of me inside; the soul, the mind, the spirit. I began to question a lot of other things, to understand many things about myself, my fears, my desires, my body, my relationship with others, about truth, the word, death ... like a sort of deepening, because I already considered many things of that, but I never stopped to deepen the deepest. It also opened my eyes in a more direct way with a social reality and the deep wound that such reality has left in each individual of Venezuela.
In a way, my self-portraits began to take more complex forms, of diverse and changing aesthetics. This time I was in a cycle of continuous metamorphosis and that still does not stop. I feel the change like the shore of a beach.
I decided not to resist to myself, but to resist. Be the resistance. But never resist myself. The still images (and moving), have taught me things. My body has taught me things. The images that I make are my mind. My mind has taught me things. My mind is in everything me. I am my mind. I am my images.
Go to this photo with explanatory post
Before, the fact of not coherence and aesthetic connection between each photo I made, caused an incredible conflict. It irritated me and made me want to leave photography. That was to resist myself. I was so unconsciously afraid that things would change, and move (as is inevitable), I wanted to mantain , and I believed that it was by always staying in the same place. And there is the beginning of all frustration. In not accepting the becoming.
But now I have understood that each time is different. That each era owns itself. That I change and with me the things that I believe. If I remain faithful to that inner voice of creation, the essence will remain, in eternity. In that multiplicity and disorder that can exist between creation and creation, there is a guiding thread, which is the creative essence, the essence of the creator. The act of creating is mystical.
I understood that while I am ONE, I am many. There are so many in me, and all of them are me. To my images, my photography sometimes documents me, and sometimes creates me. Sometimes I am myself, sometimes a character that comes from me. I live in my own documentary and my auto-fiction.
I have tried to document my body and the external changes it has had due to chemotherapy, and I can compare the bodies and see that this external body of mine now has many wounds and marks. My skin is different, stained, with peps. But that's how it is at this moment, and I accept it. Although I try to cure it, because it is necessary.
Art has made me generate the self love that each person needs. I treat myself with greater respect, with greater truth, with greater honesty. And above all with empathy and understanding.
I have achieved, or well ... I am managing to achive a reconciliation with time and to go slowly, with breaks. Before I did not stop to think about my position in this time and this unique space that gives me existence. And I was afraid of time, of the future, of change. Maybe I still have, sometimes it's even inevitable. But going deeper into that, and by thinking about time very calmly one creates a kind of truce in that tension. And then the flow of things is appreciated.
I have also learned to value my sexuality, and my pleasure. To understand me inside this piece of world, inside this piece of body. To respect my intuition. To understand, in the flesh, that phrase of Frida Kahlo.
And not to lie to myself ... above all; do not lie to myself.
"Know yourself" - Socrates (Athens, 470-ib., 399 BC)
If you got till here, THANK YOU FAM! I look forward to your comment.
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