I believe that looking at your own picture is like figuring out who you are. Again and again, since when do we ever have an answer to this difficult question? It’s that looking-glass effect that gives us a glimpse of how others see us, a perspective we will never be able to claim.
I remember a scene from my childhood, I think I was four or five. My parents and I were driving through a street next to a field of banana trees in Cyprus and we stopped to have a look at the bananas. I wanted to have a picture of myself with the bananas so so much, but my father said no and put me back in the car. Oh, I turned the journey into hell: Crying so much till he decided to make a turn and drive back to the field to take that picture. I can’t recall him cursing, but I guess at least in his thoughts he must have. I still have the picture of course.
Maybe this was a key moment for something that became important in my life: I like to be in pictures. As mundane as it sounds, I just like to be the picture girl, not just since the beginning of the selfie culture, but since I was born. Actually, I don’t enjoy selfies as much as one would think. My thing is rather to have a picture that is a world between four edges, that is perfect in all its details but still has a certain intimacy. A picture of the world I imagine with me in it: Colourful, beautiful and bold.
What is this fascination about the camera I sometimes ask myself? Why does it fill me with joy to see moments I have imagined frozen in time, clothes in action, another version of myself I haven’t seen before? Do I become the more me the more times the pixel form my face? Why do other people feel like the camera seems to steal their identity and I feel like it helps me to claim my own identity?
Once I read a quote somebody said about Ladi Di, it said that she needed to see herself in the magazines and it was like she only existed when her picture was printed. Am I like that too and if is it a bad or a good thing? Maybe it’s not for anybody to judge including me!
Pictures: Philipp Mueller
