ONE SELF PORTRAIT EVERY DAY in 2020 : 91

On the first of January 2020 I decided to take one photo of myself every day for the whole year. I had just finished re-reading “On Photography” by Susan Sontag and was thinking about On Kawara’s Date Paintings.

I decided to call this project “I AM STILL ALIVE” as a reference to Susan Sontag and On Kawara: Susan Sontag writes about the link between photography and death and On Kawara’s series of telegrams he sent to people with the words “I AM STILL ALIVE”.

It feels quite … I can’t think of the right word … crazy, freaky, amazing, powerful, that part of this project (hopefully a small part) will be in “lock-down” because of this pandemic. Before isolation, many of my daily self-portraits were out and about in different places and with different people, now my photo of the day is “limited” to our family and our home. As with the writer writing a certain amount of words every day, some days will be more or less interesting than others, this definitely happens with my daily photographs but I am surprised that sometimes a photo of an object that could be not that interesting visually, becomes more interesting because of the stories and memories that go with it.

I know I’m not a writer but I am feeling more and more the urge to write, to write something to go with the photographs. I know that they (pictures) might be worth a thousand words but there is no harm adding a couple of hundred.

“And the camera shows, inexorably… that portraits in life are always, also, portraits in death.” Susan Sontag.

31.3.2020.

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