Sydney, August 2006
From one of my very first sessions with Melissa, shot on film and hand-developed. Mid-morning, sleep-deprived, I was wearing typical weekend gear: soft jeans, a t-shirt from AMUNC 2006, a light jacket to ward off the outdoor winter chill. Melissa's assignment from her teachers called for honesty, a set of portraits that could reveal the character of the subject, and so I presented my barest, truest and most curmudgeonly face to the world.
Between shots, I was sipping my first coffee of the day from a steaming Deadwood crew mug that I'd won off an internet competition, and I imagined myself trading insults with Charlie Utter, sharing tots of whiskey with Calamity Jane, before we all rode off on new (and smelly) adventures in the Black Hills. Yet even that is partly play-acting; the black scarf-beanie, which seems to suck in all the light from the picture, was not merely covering my unwashed and messy hair, but seemed to hint at a shyness, a willingness to disappear that cut against my direct gaze and tough-gal exterior.
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Sydney, August 2009
The year before Wolf, my family's German Shepherd, passed away, he was going deaf, half-blind, and contending daily with pain in his hips, yet still the sweetest and most intelligent of creatures. There are few human beings toward whom I hold the depth of unreserved affection that I give my dogs, and fewer still that I am comfortable with demonstrating that affection with. The love of dogs is uncomplicated, undemanding, incapable of dishonesty; the love of adults anything but.
Hunter Valley, December 2010
Right after Christmas, six months after I had finished my MPolEc and started working full-time, Melissa, a friend visiting from Germany, and I went on a day-trip to the local wine region, about 2.5 hours drive away from Sydney. We lunched outdoors, sitting on benches and lying on giant beanbags strewn across the lawn. The aggressive asexuality of my early twenties had mellowed somewhat. I was relaxed, slightly buzzed from wine tastings, enjoying my first real holiday in over a year.
I wore a minimalist echo of the outfit from 2006: black skinny jeans (UNIQLO), a grey linen t-shirt with a slouchy fit (Country Road), black Converse, and sunglasses (Jac + Jack). The difference now being that I was wearing the clothes, the clothes weren't wearing me.
All photographs were taken by Melissa Graf.
These shots are fascinating. They show different facets of your character throughout time, facets that appear to radically differ but all seem essentially you, like turning a kaleidoscope. Together, they reveal you in all your complexity.
ReplyDeleteAnd kudos to Ms. Graf for capturing each moment so deftly. Melissa, if you're reading this, I totally have a girl crush on you :)
I read a very interesting book on art theory and Asian aesthetics a couple of years ago. The author's (François Jullien) theory was that Chinese culture had a view of identity, personhood, and the place of humans in the environment that was very different from that held by the Western world, and this was strongly reflected in the prominence of landscapes in Chinese painting. Most characteristically, it was manifest in the near non-existence of "the nude" (a staple in Western art, as early as the Greco-Roman period) as a genre of visual art, since Chinese traditional philosophy saw the human body as a continuum, and not as a fixed point in time that can be captured and its truth "revealed".
ReplyDeleteI certainly hold to that notion myself. I don't believe that there is any absolute "me" there (and the same is true for all persons). Who I am is eternally in flux, ever contradictory. Portraiture can never show but an aspect.
I bet you are making the exact same face as Wolf, there.
ReplyDeleteKissy faces. :)
ReplyDeleteWhich reminds me, I need to update that DVD of photos. I'm trying to go through and just put on every (good or memorable) photograph of you, that I have.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Anne; it also helps to have such a willing subject. :)
I was just thinking, you are the only person I would trust to photograph me in the nude. There is a difference between willingness and narcissism. :)
ReplyDelete