Self-portrait
A still shot of our lives. It may be deliberately chosen to have on record or simply occur independently of our resolve. A gesture equally prompted by instinct and guided by reason. Whether such a shot is snapped on the spur-of-the-moment or mulled over, the act of freezing an image or even a fleeting instance in which we may be involved, a personally or professionally special event, may prove an effective tool for heightening our self-awareness, for looking at ourselves from the outside in, for seeing ourselves as others see us.
Such a shot is generally associated with the self-timer mode in photography. The click triggered by the ever-so-light pressure of our finger on the shutter button of increasingly digital cameras, lets us catch an instant glimpse of how others see us. Good-looking, ugly, young, not so young, anyway more often than not different from how we think of ourselves, different, that is, from our self-fostered image. Objectifying what till then is a more or less fanciful self-fabricated image triggers a process of self-awareness. The feedback we get allows us to make good what we may discover to be out of synch with that image, or we may even be induced to want to change it altogether. If, for instance, we catch ourselves looking sour, we might want to correct this image and decide to wear a smile, look more radiant and agreeable. If we jump at that podgy guy staring back at us from the picture that looks so much like us, we might decide the time has come to draw the line and start on that diet we’d always put off to tomorrow.
Moving away from a strictly photographic context and speaking metaphorically, it may be said that the self-timer mode is a way of “playing with oneself”, or of self-stock taking, even. It takes some nerve to pull the wool up from over our eyes and look at our personal, professional and social achievements squarely in the face. There comes a time when we can’t help stopping and assessing our performance so far. It’s a time slot, lasting perhaps the span of an hour, a day, a year, an instance even, that we need to stop and brood over. It’s a break we need to take to be able to evaluate things, casting our gaze back over our shoulders to see how far we’ve come since the last time we stopped to ponder, so as to better gauge where we stand in the here and now.
If it’s a corporate business organisation doing such metaphorical stock-taking, then a number of elements characterising it, such as consumer brand awareness, its profit margins, its market standing, and so forth may be foregrounded and better focused. Stringing together all these stills allows management to monitor the business’s economic fitness and viability over time. The same applies to professional as well as to artistic performance and creativity. A statement that the reader will come across in this issue is worth quoting here: “the underlying concept in self-timer photography is essentially that of stopping for a moment to take one’s bearings and seek one’s direction before starting out again. The individual who knows how to pause and take a deep look at herself, also knows how to make changes”.
Images of this issue: Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn