I’ve done something that my mom has been asking me to do for at least two years. I’ve entered an art contest. Usually, I “don’t have time”. It can be argued I didn’t really have time this time either, but who am I to keep my mom waiting this long?

The thing about self-portraiture in the age of the internet is that everyone does it. With the current popularity of 365 projects, you can almost bet that every other Flickr stream will have a self-portrait set. But, why not? In the end, ourselves is all we have. Our personas, our projections, how our hair looks when we wake up, our faces when we cry, the skin under our fingernails right after we’ve fucked someone’s brains out – all those transient memories of the meat can be crystallized forever. The temptation is too great. Raw emotion and experience, in endless supply. If photographers are already documentation addicts, then self-portraits are the ultimate poison.

In my work, I don’t go for grit, or for shock, and I certainly don’t go for the mundane. I try to pin down and preserve dream states, like the moment when you close your eyes and look at the warm sun through the red of your eyelids and drift. The ambiguous in-between minutes separating lucidity and sleep. The tricks our eyes play in dim light and then, the way we wonder if the world is quietly opening its shutters to grant us a peek at another side and then another. Often, the hours of friendly discourse over too much coffee on the subject of what might happen if every reflective surface was Lewis Caroll’s looking glass.

Without further ado, my submission portfolio on the Power of Self contest website: http://www.artistswanted.org/zoetica If you like what I make, please click five stars.

powerofself