Welcome to the Selfseum of Digital Selfography:

Enough about me? Not by a mile! This museum is being taken over by Narcissist Number One! What had been a place for stimulating work across many genres of subject-matter is now a one-station-nation-of-self-perseveration! Sure…other exhibits on this website still showcase thought-provoking international content…poignant street imagery of the aftermath of the American dream in the streets of LA…artistic hopes of lost angels bound in the vibrant colors of their head-ware…scenes of recuperated twisties and rubber bands from a kitchen drawer…cigarettes extinguished in the half-shell of an oyster… sure, this museum courts the images that document life writ small and LIFE in all caps…wants to give visual voice to as many shades of the existentium as possible… and that’s all well and good… but if you want to take a break from the epic panorama of us and our book of changes, then get ready for some me followed by more me and then a third act of me!

Two Years Before the Lens…about Selfying and Sui Imaginem:

There’s no better way to introduce a portfolio of selfies than by looking the camera straight in the lens and stating (and disabusing) some truths that you might hold to be selfie-evident: yes, I always wanted a paparazzi; of course, I am a Narcissist; TikTok and Instagram forever! Okay, those are actually quantum truths, spinning equally true and false depending on who observes them and under what circumstances. A Quantum Constitution would be no type of document to run a country on or found a justice system on; in the fluxus of us, lowercase us, and US, uppercase United States us, we need fixed and rigid lengths of legal filament…haystacks made up of jurisprudential needles…we need to know that 54 is under the limit and 56 begets you a ticket.

But the 20th century philosopher, Sammy Hagar, was speaking an artistic truth when he said he couldn’t drive 55. There is a time and a place where people need to break barriers…not laws, but bulwarks of tradition…norms of expression…forms of the familiar. Sui Imaginem is a portfolio in the spirit of norm-bending artists everywhere. Nearing the end of its second year, the project showcases a rare camera…the Sigma Merrill DP3 (a 50mm fixed lens 75mm equivalent Foveon Sensor camera producing 46mb equivalent images)…and an even more rare subject. That’s not narcissism; not counting the multi-verse, the selfographer is one of a kind. But then again, most of us are!

The project started out innocently enough: take 10 pictures a day with a camera that wasn’t getting used…or sell the camera. And shoot something different: no more urban patterns, decaying walls, solo gloves floating in green water, etc. Try, at last, to photograph people. But who could I shoot? Well, Chris Burden did some projects that I definitely can’t condone…but Shoot was brilliant. And he did this less than a mile or two from where I live…so, why not replicated/deviate from his art in a sustained session of self-expression? Instead of a rifle, however, I will use a camera. And speaking of adjacent neighbors, Phillip K. Dick lived two blocks away in an apartment with the same number as the one I live in. That was the top floor of his building…he was a kind of man in a high castle. Perhaps most artists-qua-curators are as they select the images or build the worlds they wish others to see as alternatives to their own. I have always considered secret-sharers as a kind of omen…I think we have an invisible faculty of advisors whom we both learn from and swerve from.

For me, selfying was and is many things. First, an aesthetic act. A way to learn some techniques about how light falls on the complex topography of a face…the effects of tone-on-tone vs. starkly contrasting color choices vis-a-vis the self and the background…and more. Second, a therapeutic act. A way to get to know people…third-person plural…and a way to get to know myself, first-person…plural, as well. Oddly, I soon lost interest in myself the way one might expect when taking the occasional or functional selfie. I was free to not look good or successful or like a business visionary. No. I had no future audience in mind…if anything, a past audience. Why had I been the self I had been with the people I had known? Could I mend tears in the social fabric like darning the sock-like-heel-cup of the universe I had damaged? Could art make it better?

It’s not what you think it is. That’s perhaps the best way to send you on your way with your own projects of the self. The shape of life…our self-portraits in convex mirrors are themselves subject to entropy and disintegration: we eventually pixilate and lose ourselves in portraits on the surface of a disco-ball…the still surface at the lake’s edge…the mirror on the wall…the halls of mirrors…the ways we seek to see ourselves allow us to lose sight of a single self and in place of that perfect beard profile we see a mosaic of everyone…we lose, as we always do, the particle for the field. It is a wonderful thing to go through this tunnel of selfie-making and come out much, much less self-absorbed. But who would have thought?

Self-Introducing the Selfographer:

How many cameras does it take to make a great photographer? Just one. The camera of the mind. But to make image after satisfying image, you need a backup camera…for this artist, it was a trusty Sigma DP3. And the proprietary Sigma Software loathed by so many, but loved by this artist. The images take up a lot of space and therefore take up a lot of time in processing. It must be similar to chemically rendering images in the darkrooms of days gone by. There is something special about learning how to slow down. Images mean more…have more weight…that avoirdupois…that gravitas…that importance that is an effect of an inconvenient process. This photographer has come to a slower place…a more distilled and thoughtful workflow…an eye in the storm of life…moments of stillness and waiting and then the emergence of images that may often fail but when they succeed, exceed the expectations of the artist, overcome his objections of the unimportance of his work, transcend his recriminations of self-indulgence, and sublimate the image so narrowly calibrated and indexed to the self with the expansive vastness of that museum-ultima…that ur-museum…that cosmic collection of all purposeful energy that we have sent via beam, transmission, hope, prayer, and commitment to creative work…that museum in the sky that will one day hold the radiation signatures of all we have done and been…perhaps long after we are no longer here to send up content.

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