December 1, 2008
melissa shook
Self Portraits (08-09)
About Self Portraits
A series of self portraits from 1972-73, 1992-93, 2002-03, and 2008-09
Self-Portraits 2008-09
It’s getting a bit risky to wait ten years between the daily self-portrait series, so here’s the start of another. Maybe I’ll never stop, just go on until I die, using my increasingly forlorn face in one image after another. The best part is capturing my friends, my daughter and the dogs, hers and mine. I’ve included two or three images taken on the same day with folks who tend to be elusive.
The December images were taken with a point-and-shoot Lumix that has a Leica lens and a very wide angle that hopefully accounts for some of my increasing homeliness. I miss the Rolei and the Leica, black-and-white images, but this seems more representative of the times and the new technologies I’ve learned.
December 2008 – Krissy; Krissy, Bogie and Happy; Lyn, my longtime dental hygenist; at Feet of Clay; Kevin Viens and Lillian Thibodeau at the Feet of Clay winter sale opening; Bogie; Museum of Fine Arts; Kevin Viens who I’ve worked with for years; Krissy, Bogie and Happy; Krissy at a memorial reading for Grace Paley; Target; Barbara Salisbury, (We have lived two blocks away from each other for almost thirty years and only met several months ago and neither of us use Depends); Starbucks; going with Joe to Boston Medical; Starbucks; Warren Perry and Lorna Hoover, a painter and my first friend in Chelsea; Dr. Vargas, my brand new dentist; Bloomingdale St., Kevin Viens; Krissy at the Chelsea Café; Bob Fata, who taught me a lot about printmaking, and Damien DiBona, who taught me about Finalcut Pro; Bogie; going with Joe to Boston Medical; Santa; George Kalogeris, poet, teacher and my poetry mentor; Bogie; Lorna’s favorite painter, Museum of Fine Arts; Starbucks; driving to visit Joyce and Orson; Best Buy.
January 2009 - Bogie in the backyard; Krissy with Bogie and Happy; the house; Krissy and me at the MFA, her choice of painting; taking Joe, my Cuban friend who is a Thoroughbred trainer, to pick up his laundry; Lolly; my old Corolla; hand puppet I bought with the idea that Krissy would do a monologue that I would videotape; Feet of Clay, Brookline; very occasionally I buy a bottle of Kahlua to pour on Weight Watchers ice cream; Krissy and the dogs; Bacall when the kitchen was repainted; Dr Vargas putting in my new crown with the help of his assistant; Target; Bogie; Panera; in front of the house; on the porch; The Inauguration. I never thought I’d live to see this day when an Afro-American became the President, I’m unimaginably happy; Panera; stirring glaze at Feet of Clay; breakfast on Shirley Avenue, Revere, with Joe after I drove him to a doctor appointment; Panera; part of cup series; Margaret Hart in the photolab; (2) T.J. Hellmann, who designed this website, and the lovely and seriously observant Gloria; Bacall desperately wants to be an outdoor cat; (3) with Bob Fata in the Slide Library. He won’t be pleased that I used most of the pictures I took with him, but they look, to me, like a dance; using oxide at Feet of Clay; Krissy before Krissy and I video tape “The Miami Dentist.”
February 2009 - With Paul Foley at the Boston Media Makers meeting, Doyles, Jamaica Plain; in front of the 8th Pole on the backside of Suffolk Downs; (2) with Kevin Viens in the photolab; text for lost in transmission; part of the cup series; Happy and Bogie; Starbucks; at the Coolidge movie house; in the parking garage after I’ve taken Joe to Boston Medical; some bathroom somewhere; Feet of Clay; part of cup series; I snuck this photo of my dear friend; Panera; the car series; with Krissy at the movies in Revere; Krissy and the dogs; Joe always buys me breakfast after I take him to see a doctor; an accidental flash on the 8th floor of Healey Library, UMass/Boston; back of house; (2) Margaret and Christopher at the Museum of Fine Arts; Bogie at Feet of Clay; in front of the 8th Pole at Suffolk Downs; in Government Center; again in the restaurant on Shirley Avenue after I drove Joe to another appointment; either the car series or the coffee cup series, depending on how you look at it; backyard; Panera.
March 2009 - It’s so remarkable not to have to develop film, to make contacts, to print photographs in a darkroom that I have worn the digital point-and-shoot camera around my neck and used it constantly. I take photographs at various times of the day. I have a lot to choose from after I transfer them to the computer. It’s easy to sit in daylight and decide what might have a better focus, be a more interesting composition, have the information I’d might like to convey.. In past series, I took photographs in one setting, had a few negatives from that day to look through. Now I revel in gluttony, as, I suppose, our economy so recently exemplified.
I’m sure that someone who has worked with color photographs won’t appreciate my careless regard for correctness, but I don’t much care. There’s a sheer pleasure in being able to see images immediately.
But it’s March, nearing the end of a very long winter. And I had to face that I’m not making much of a statement by just showing my forlorn, slightly distorted, face even when Krissy or friends are in the photograph. Times are perilous. Before the election, I avidly listened to NPR, read newspapers, followed politics. I have long been aware of what the ramifications of reckless decisions made over the last eight years. I marched in protest before the beginning of the Iraq war. But there’s been nothing in this series that would indicate just what comeuppance there has been since November caused by emphasis on big business, neglect in oversight and deregulation. The economy is in melt down, many people are out of work, have lost their houses. I felt obliged to stop just having fun and change direction to in some small way represent this time.
April through August, 2009 - And so it went, April through August. In May, Krissy decided that she would be in the photographs with me, but she went to New York, I went to New York. So, there are some substitutions. Then in June, she decided that we’d include Chris, her ex, who is living in the downstairs apartment, a nice, funny guy. I wish we’d done a month of these collective insanities, but she went to New York and forgot about this. I didn’t remind her when she got back, but started on inspection of the body. Many years ago, when my internist suggested that I take hormone replacement treatments, she mentioned that when I stopped, the layer of fat just under the skin would disappear. I couldn’t imagine what she was talking about. But that happened over the course of a year and was startling to watch. My grandmother and father had slowly wrinkled up as they got old, but I imagined that I’d bypass that particular change. I didn’t and these photographs continue on into a bit of July which, sort-of, completes a month. I think I could have done thousands of these unpleasant photographs which I happen to like a lot, but I didn’t. And so it went, more inclusive images that went on until the end of August when I became careless, skipping a day here and there.
All in all, I did a fairly good job of remembering that I exist and that I was engaged in this project. And it’s over for another five years? Perhaps by then I’ll have an SLR digital camera and take black-and-white images with a tripod. I’m not fond of color, though I like the very casual quality of these images, possible because of the little Lumix that even weathered being dropped into water trapped in my raincoat pocket. I am not sorry that this series exists.