I’ve never really thought of myself as narcissistic.  Self deprecating, sure, but I do have a lot of self portraits.  Many of them are fairly informal and impromptu.  A handful are more staged and thought out.  Self portraiture is a long standing tradition among artists, and I am not sure where the trend started.  For me the images are often done to accomplish a technique and make an interesting image in the process.  I don’t often have a willing model on hand. Certainly it would be easier to direct someone and worry about composition and lighting without breaking character to chimp the screen.

I look at self portraiture as a way to explore my own role in a space and to see how others might see me. On an average day, we encounter a lot of people in a lot of contexts.  It’s strange how encountering an image of one’s own self in a familiar setting can be more unsettling than encountering a stranger.  Perhaps self awareness was not supposed to happen in third person.  Personally, I always feel weird making an image that is all about me and the space I am in, but walking forward to the future I appreciate the way they reference a time and a particular train of thought.  I may not make a career of playing characters in my own images like Cindy Sherman.  Still, over time, I see a catalog of interesting images developing that have an obvious common thread.