I am a fan of films. There are two specific films that I was thinking about while I worked on this series of self-portraits: George Romero’s 1969 zombie classic Night of the Living Dead and Věra Chytilová’s 1966 Czech New Wave classic, Daisies. In Romero’s film, the dreaded zombies can only be stopped by killing the brain, which is most often accomplished by inflicting a gunshot to the head of a zombie. This got me thinking about the idea of “headshots” in the photographic sense, and the role of photography in defining a professional identity. With that in mind—and channeling the wacky sensibilities of the two female characters in Daisies—I gathered my props and got to work.
The resulting images are static illustrations of emotionally experienced and imagined character-states that explore the ambiguity of meaning that parallels the ambiguity of self-perception. The artist Sherrie Levine talks about being divided into two halves: her original (perhaps authentic) self is the one that maintains distance from the world, while the second self is the one that interacts with the world and is prepared for all its inherent absurdities and cruelties—the one that we crouch behind as though it were a shield. What happens when these two selves cross those self-defined boundaries?