Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label teens; selfies; feminism

Self Portraiture and the Gift of a Face

  my bedroom faces, college 1999 My mother, who doesn’t know what a selfie or Facebook is (she asked me if Facebook was really a book of faces , which it kind of is now) acts more like a troubled teenager than a grown woman.  Since I was a kid, I've seen the self-portraits she photographed whenever she was incredibly sad or smashed.  These were bummer pictures to see, of course, as her daughter, but I also admired how unabashed she was about them; they weren't hidden away in a box somewhere.  The one I remember most clearly, probably because I own it (she sent it to me when I was away at college ) is a photo she took just after she'd cut off all her beautiful long hair.  I also regularly took self-portraits when I was crying or really sad, when I was a teenager.  I liked how these photos looked and the idea that I'd created a work of art of sorts just by capturing myself in the act of crying; even as a young person, i was aware...