Self Portrait with Amalia

Amalia left yesterday for two weeks in Argentina, and I miss her dearly. I honor her absence with this photograph I took of us in September.

Stony Brook. September, 2010.

Older Photographs: A Decade of Me

Last fall I got to show my self-portrait work to my friend Stephen Jacobs Beginning Color Class at The New England School of Photography. He was giving out a self-portrait assignment and had several people come in and show their work and discuss the process and different ways/styles of executing self-portraits. I normally would just show my graduating portfolio from NESOP and talk about that process, but this time I wanted to do something a little different.

I gathered up every self-portrait that I had with me here in Boston and put them in a box. when I got to NESOP I had an hour to figure out the way I wanted to show them. I scattered them all about the tables and for the first time ever in my career I saw ten years worth of my self-portraits all at once. I had never really thought about doing that before, especially since the different groupings of self-portraits were done for different assignments or projects. Some of the ideas from one grouping may have led to ideas in other groupings but they never really crossed over in my mind.

I basically laid them out in chronological order and figured it would be best to describe the different stages of the work, and what each grouping meant for me at the time and what it means to me now. The work became more related to each other than I thought and it was quite amazing for me personally to see that progression, of not only maturing as an adult in the images, but also maturing within the work as a photographer.

These images here are selects from different parts of my life this past decade. Some were used in final portfolios for classes, some are out-takes, and some exist just by themselves. Please enjoy the progression as I do.

"Self-Portrait on Front Porch" 2000

"Dining Room Table" 2001


"Me as Bela Lugosi" 2000


"Dracula" 2005


"Sitting in Light" 2005


"Three Me's" 2005


"Creature Feature" 2005


"With Friends" 2005 (From the series Walk With Me)


"Untitled" 2006 (From the series Walk With Me)


"Recreating 1997" or at times "Most Content Hobo" 2006 (From the series Walk With Me)


"Untitled" 2006 (From the series Walk With Me)


"Self-Portrait At The Front Door" 2006 (From the series Was Home)


"At Filip's Mantle" 2007 Polaroid


"Changing: Two-Minute Exposure" 2008 (From a study of motion)


"Writing Filip An Email: One-Hour Exposure" 2008 (From a study of motion)


"Self-Portrait In Living Room" 2009 (From the series This Is Life)

Polaroids: Process of the Process.

These are older Polaroids taken in 2005-2006 for self-portraits I did for my graduating portfolio at the New England School of Photography. At the time I was doing this series, it was always very difficult for me to talk about the work and to really know what I wanted to say with it. I showed this series a few time within the last 2 years, either in classes I was a teacher assistant for or as a guest speaker for classes a friend of mine was teaching. It was through those showings that I was finally able to really understand the work myself, and to figure out what it meant for me.

In the end, it was simply just about being comfortable in my own skin. Whether through metaphors or the everyday mundane situations I went through, these images show the start of someone who was slowly becoming a man. There are a lot of images to this series but I thought it would be interesting to show the Polaroids for them, since these are a major part of the photographic process, I thought they would juxtapose nicely to the idea of my process as a person.

Studies in Movement: The Art of Sleeping

Six photographs of me sleeping. Started off as observations of my sleeping behaviors but turned into more of an abstract representation of that. These were taken in three different apartments over the span of two years. The exposures range from 2 to 8 hours.