I’ve started a cicle of therapeutic photography in January, while going thru a ruff patch, and as that process is now coming to an end, I finally decided to share something about what I’ve been doing. Back in January I felt depressed and was afraid I might be falling into another rabbit hole. Some prior events had led me to that place, making me feel like I had no clue how to turn things around. But I’ve learned a lot from my previous depressions, one of the most important things being not to be too hard on myself regarding how slow recovery may be, because it always is. So as my body failed to have enough energy to get thru the day and my mind struggled with the necessary discipline to keep going, I, again, turned to photography and began doing self-portraits.

In therapeutic photography, praxis and discipline play a major role, empowering us with the necessary skills to reinvent memories, change perspective and build new emotional realities. In this process, it is important to understand how the photographic image comes to be, in order to have the ability to interfere with archetypes and, above all, break with what we have internalized as an ideal and/or social image. Thru the process of self-portraiture, I find that the multitude of bodies can come together and heal.

In my particular case, the choice of camera and format used for each cycle also plays a major role. Because a big part of my sanity depends on being able to walk and wander every day thru nature, and photographing during those walks helps me keep the discipline (when energy isn’t in tune with that routine), I chose to pick a camera I could bring along without worrying about it breaking. So all the process has been shot with a small Pentax Espio I’ve had for some years and is still nice to be, despite all the tape holding her together. Also, I shot the first two months with expired film left in an old film loader and had to do some lab work in order to match my camera with the film and the right use of the developer in order to get the results I wanted.

Despite having been thru several cycles of therapeutic photography, they’re always different. Sometimes I know what I need to see to strengthen the transformations that needs to be internalize, others I let photography show me what needs to be done. This was the case this time. As always, the first self-portrait was a mix of a confirmation and a surprise. The material body portrayed in that first photograph was one of a depressed and angry individual. I recognized that part of me, but was surprised by how much that part engulfed everything else. The following portraits kept showing the same. Between January and February, though I lack the strength to do the necessary photo-therapy exercises, I kept the compromise and made at least one self-portrait a day, trusting those photographs would let me know what was really happening and what needed to be done. As I kept photographing and trying to balance my energy with other resources (walking, food, etc.), things started to change.

My own process coincided with the preparation of a course dedicated to self-portrait as a therapeutic tool. While I went thru my former works and prepared the material for that course, I was reminded of methodologies and exercises that have previously worked successfully, so as I put that into practice, things started to work better, but only once the course started and I began verbalizing my experience and sharing those methodologies, did my process accelerate tremendously.

Although the course is going well and everyone is now working thru their own processes, bringing shadows to light and engaging in transformative aspects of the Self, I still find it extremely difficult to communicate how therapeutic photography works for me. Showing images of past and present works helps. However, the truth regarding those processes lies in therapeutic diaries, reuniting text, image and other graphic material, and those I’m still unable to share.

Four months after the process started, I finally saw a portrait that eased my mind, heart and soul. As I processed the negative and had a quick look at it on the scanner, I had one of those aha moments: this is it, this is me, I’m finally put together, all there, all in one body, connected. I’d been feeling much better and had the sense this cycle was coming to an end. Pleasure was back, I marveled at the world thru photography and was excited to be alive, but that photograph was necessary, as a confirmation that I’m back. It’s quite impossible to let others now what is relevant about that image. Part of the difficulty of communicating about this processes is exactly that: the inability to verbalize, beyond redundancies, how photography can manifest things in ways that no other mean can.

The technological mechanisms of identification and recognition we have available today strengthen the certainty that the Self is not only invisible, but also unspeakable. From identification cards to social networks, we are building multiple identities that, although related to our physiological matter, can, in fact, say little to nothing about our identities. Immediacy imposes a formal and communicative rigidity on visual language that leaves no room for wandering. Our legal personality imposes a series of analogies and consequences that continue to bear trace of this gap that unites and separates our identity from our mask. Increasingly, the traces of analog photography appear to rescue a certain idea of untainted truth that resists the apparatus of the system that frames us.

If we expect photography to answer existential questions like who am I? or what am I doing here? she will fail. To be clear: photography, as a technology and a phenomenon, will not deliver on that. However, a more focused questioning opens up space for certain images to reveal to us something that, without photographic reality, would either not exist or take a long time to appear. One of the phenomena that often occurs through the practice of self-portraiture is the deconstruction of the ideal image. Although we’re familiar with our mirror-images and let those images set ground as REAL, our psyche integrates other types of mirror-images with more generous boundaries. The shadow and the silhouette, for example, as projections of our body matter, offer a type of distortion that is friendlier to the imagination. Time and space circumvent gravity and another sphere (perhaps spiritual, perhaps metaphysical, perhaps holotropic, etc.) opens up. Even in a set of self-portraits where staging and technical control are reduced to the essentials and the photographic image resembles a mirror-image, we will find several structural differences that arise from the potential of self-representation through photographic means. Let’s look at some of them: the dislocation of the moment in which thing and reflection meet; the immortalization of an image that no longer imitates our movements; the feeling of unheimliche, that is, that something is strangely familiar to us, at once analogous and alienated; as well as the ability to create images that are internalized as memories and, in the process, replace others, transforming our reality.

A full spectrum of strange things occurs when we see ourselves represented photographically, a phenomenon complexified by the act of creating that representation. We stare at the image and are be able to go back to the moment of its execution. We know when and how it was made, perhaps we can even remember what that moment felt like. However, what the photographic image reveals looks nothing like any of that. Instead, that image presents us with a person who, although similar to us, is another, as if that photographic portrait was a vessel and a portal, an object framed by a device whose language we are forced to decipher. Even though the code of this symbolic construction is created by us, a large part of it is projected from the unconscious, catching us by surprise.


Leave a comment