The Beginning

I have decided to start writing this blog today. Why today? Maybe because it is spring and a time for new beginnings. That is what it felt like when I first begun using my camera to express myself; like a new beginning in the ways I let the world see me. Allowing myself to uninhibitedly offer myself to the lens, (and the eyes beyond my lens), and reveal what had been previously hidden. Maybe not so much hidden as temporarily put to rest. Something that had been dormant woke up in me when I began taking pictures of myself. It wasn’t exactly a new side of me, but one I had lived in as a little girl.

My parents told me many times that I was born an artist. That I used to decorate their walls with life size, colorful murals of myself: self portraits that, perhaps, seemed to scream “I am alive, I exist, look at me!”. I made a habit out of doing this when we would move from one place to the next. I would leave my art on the walls, as evidence that this place had known my presence. That I had moved, and cried, and laughed, and breathed inside it’s walls, inside that space. I wanted the space to contain me even after my physical self had exited it. I think it was my way of reaching for immortality.

As a child I wished to leave permanent traces of my identity. Not little carvings of my name on wooden banisters, or trees in the back yard, but large, vivid portraits of my activities, my feelings, my thoughts. Somehow, I needed others to know. To know about me. Not just the pretty parts but the dark ones as well. And my messages were delivered in poems or stories, paintings or drawings, dances or plays, pieces I made up on the piano and played with great feeling. Ever since I can remember I have suffered from an overwhelming urge to express myself, and share my expressions with others. I believe I longed for some kind of dialogue with the observers. I wanted to know how my art affected them, if it even affected them at all, and for how long. I was a very precocious child.

Today these expressions of mine have found a way out of me via the lens of my camera. This blog will be my attempt to share my journey into photography, as a means to both conceal and reveal my identity, with whomsoever wishes to follow it. I hope this means you.