DISAPPEARING SOUL: SELF PORTRAITS IN THE TIME OF COVID

Since an early age, I’ve been disinclined toward self-exposure, far more comfortable seeing than being seen. As a result, it wasn’t until I was fifty-years old that I first exhibited a self-portrait. The image was part of a of black and white series of breast cancer survivors that was inspired by my own battle with the disease. And it was meant to be the exception. Throughout the next two decades of my career, I remained where I felt safest—behind the camera. And then Covid happened.

Weeks into the city’s lockdown, leaving my Manhattan apartment only for walks and to get groceries, I felt as though I were disappearing. My Covid-related anxiety was compounded by the abstraction of time. Days started and ended as usual. I’d wake up, get dressed, and put on makeup, as though about to set out for a full day. My nighttime routine was equally predictable. But the in-between hours – filled with attempts at productivity and positivity, imagined dinner parties and conversations – blurred into a lonely surreality. It was clear that I needed to be making work to maintain my equilibrium. In terms of subjects, I was my only and, therefore, best option.

The psychological repercussions of the pandemic, which were as novel as the pandemic itself, presented a new creative challenge: how could I clearly portray a hazy reality that increasingly felt like a very bad dream? Ultimately, it was long exposures that allowed me to fully capture the emotional and temporal flux I endured from March to June 2020. The resulting transparency conveys both the transitory nature of existence and the nagging the sensation, at the time, that my physical self was as tenuous as a cloud – a visual happenstance that would, at any moment, disappear into the ether. My hope is that the resulting images will offer viewers still processing the effects of isolation – Covid-related or otherwise – a visual catharsis, reassurance that, though it may feel otherwise, they are not alone.