December 1, 2002
melissa shook
Self Portraits (02-03)
About Self Portraits
A series of self portraits from 1972-73, 1992-93, 2002-03, and 2008-09
Self-Portraits, 2002-03
By this time, I was well into my most important relationship with a doctor who I loved deeply and still dream about. Many images are taken in his house where I was then living. I’d bought a puppy to take with me when I moved into his dowager Victorian that he termed ‘the male dormitory’ because it also accommodated his three beloved sons. His nature is that of a well-read, buoyant self-soother who has developed comfortable routines within his domain. Though I’m actually quite content, I look as if I’ve lost my lunch money, with my chronically mournful expression. I also resist any semblance of a schedule and can create a state of chaos in a remarkably short time.
It’s nice to see Damien DiBona and Kevin Viens in this set of images, too. And I’m happy to find Lorna Hoover, my painter friend in Chelsea who I met by good fortune when we were both sharing a 6 am cab to the airport. And there’s the photographers, Karl Baden, who has taken daily self-portraits of his face for many years. These pictures of me seem are pretty grim. I could stare into space when I was thirty-two and still appear attractive, but the same expression thirty years later makes me look dilapidated. Actually I had a much stronger sense of myself in 2002. Instead of burying feelings until I became bitter and drifted away, I had learned to articulate what I needed. I had had a fulfilling career teaching photography, was writing seriously and just beginning to work with video, a medium I would have chosen much earlier had I had money and confidence.
I scanned and printed quite a few of the images because Sally Stein, then a fellow at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, was holding the occasional Sunday salon for artists. She wanted to show the comparison of the ’72,’73 images to ’02, ’03 series. It’s interesting how the technology has changed over the years. I shudder when I remember endless hours spent in the darkroom, perfecting exhibition prints. I’d never do that again.
I’m in spitting distance of seventy, strange as that seems, and young I feel. My work is just developing. It’s time to take another set of daily images, at a more realistic five-year interval.