“There is a white hole in the wall, a mirror. It is a trap. I know I am going to let myself be caught in it. I have. The grey thing appears in the mirror. I go over and look at it, I can no longer get away.
It is the reflection of my face. Often in these lost days I study it. I can understand nothing of this face. The faces of others have some sense, some direction. Not mine. I cannot even decide whether it is handsome or ugly.”
Jean-Paul Sartre, “Nausea”
The mirror is a symbol of mystery and vanity. In the literature the mirror and it’s reflection has been present since the myth of Narcissus, the famous magic mirror of the tale of Snow White , or in Lewis Carol’s "Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There". In each of these stories, the mirror plays a magical or even perverse role.
Just like a mirror, photographic portrait allows to look at ourselves, but with the benefit of capturing and freezing a moment to an image and enableing to be displayed repeatedly and shared to others. Photographing a mirror is an overlap of this specular perspective.
Unlike another person’s portrait, a self-portrait is always a very controversial issue. First, because even unconsciously there is always staged. Them, the difficulty of defining our own identity, when we are constantly changing, depending on our experiences or our mood. It is a quest where there are no answers to be found, because nothing is more abstract, ambiguous and subjective than our perspective on our own identity. Photographer and artist Duane Michals, who includes regularly the mirror in his works, during an interview when asked him if he recognized himself in the mirror, answered: “I begin to realize that I don’t know who I am anymore. I don’t know speaking right now... and I don’t identify speccialy with my face. As I become more specific as a ‘photo-personality’ I personally become more and more invisible to myself”. Who am I? I am me, but I'm not the same when I was young and single, nor the same person I was five minutes ago. Thus, consider my self-portrait is like looking in a mirror to the past, seeing the reflection of another, a person I once was.
This process of self-analysis and reflection led to the project "The Fairest of Them All" that presents a calm and disturbing approach to a woman’s reflection and the way she sees herself. Each image is a diptych, portraying at the same time the woman’s pursuit of beauty, and inner frailty. Being a self representation, each picture shares my own infinite loop of self voyeurism.
