“I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them. ”
Susan Sontag
This ongoing self-portrait series explores conflicting anxieties around attention, validation and belonging.
In a culture saturated with new and ever more widespread forms of self-expression we all face challenges with how and where we might find a point of balance between our public and private selves; for me this challenge is amplified and mediated through my work as a visual artist.
Made within a landscape I once called home the images in pretend I’m not even here reflect the emotionally uncomfortable places found through creative work, and life in general: caught between a need to be seen and a fear of exposure, between a desire to be heard and an uncertain voice, between an impulse to connect and the sting of rejection.
Each image in this series is made working alone in secluded rural locations, using deceptively simple lighting and in-camera techniques. This solitary process requires a kind of choreography of two kinds of exposure: physical and photographic.
The images therefore represent a kind of ritual of personal vulnerability as well as a journey into nature in search of balance, or at least acceptance.
“Every image is in some way a “portrait,” not in the way that it would reproduce the traits of a person, but in that it pulls and draws (this is the semantic and etymological sense of the word), in that it extracts something, an intimacy, a force.”
Sally Mann