It is what it is.

 

  

photos © Danielle Scruggs

You know what's untenable? Not being honest with yourself. And not asking yourself enough questions. About a year ago,  I wrote here that I don't ask myself "Why?" often enough. "Why photography?" "Why do I photograph what I photograph?"

Being able to intelligently and cogently articulate what you do and why is a crucial part of one's development as a creative person. I've always had a difficult time with this and I think now I know why.



I haven't been entirely honest with myself. In a way, this self-portrait experiment---which started almost on a lark and is deepening into something I hadn't really anticipated---has revealed that. It was easier to turn to street and documentary photography because I was afraid of exploring what it was I really wanted to explore: myself. Actually, I started this self-portrait experiment in a way with the Palimpsest series I completed in graduate school. It is a meditation on solitude but it was also an expression of how adrift I felt during that period in my life.

And part of the reason why I was so afraid to admit to myself and others that I wanted to create self-portraits was because I didn't want to seem trite or unoriginal. Like, "oh, here we go, another black female photographer being introspective and wants to take self-portraits."

"Be different!", I told myself. "Don't include race or sex or gender or sensuality or anything like that in your photos!" "Subvert expectations!"

But where does that really get you? Except annoyed and frustrated and wondering why your photos look like third-rate versions of someone else's vision and not your own? Who wants to spend their life trying to re-create someone else's version of "success"? Not I. Not anymore.

The thing is, creating anything---be it a poem, a short story, a novel, a music suite, a photograph, a painting, a drawing, a sculpture, etc.---puts you in an extremely vulnerable position. You feel completely exposed. I liken it to how I feel when someone sees me without my glasses. They see you in a way you didn't fully intend them to see you.

But the thing is, these experiments have shown me what it is I want to keep exploring photographically, and it is actually a theme I've written about several times before---the need to see black people, black women in particular, just be.

I don't want to be anyone's saint or sinner. I don't want to be a Queen or a Jezebel. I don't want to be The Strong Black Woman ® archetype nor do I want to be the victim that needs constant saving. I don't want to be put into a binary role ("we either n***as or kings/we either b*tches or queens"). I want to just be. And I feel by continuing to create these self-portraits, I can show that things like solitude, melancholy, beauty, sensuality, sexuality, joy, tension, anger, tenderness, sadness and everything in between all exist within black women. We contain multitudes like everyone else and deserve to be treated as such. Not simply as problems that need to be solved.

Now, do I feel my photographs have reached that level as of now? Of course not. But the process of trying to get there is just as important as actually getting there. That process includes continuing to shoot, of course. But it also includes being a lot more disciplined, a lot more focused. It means studying more art history. It means studying more about photography history specifically. It means finding journal articles about portraiture throughout the history of photography and other art forms. It means looking at more monographs. It means reading more about politics, feminism, American history, African history, European history. It means going to all the (completely totally free!) art museums around here more often than I do now.

It means being committed. It means holding myself accountable. It means really digging deep and asking myself what it is I'm trying to accomplish. It means (to borrow from Zora Neale Hurston) jumping at the sun. It's daunting. And it also means that exploring these themes isn't something I'll be finished with in a year or ten or twenty. This means being on a 50-year plan and executing it slowly and steadily, as one of my friends wrote to me a couple of years ago.

I'm pretty sure I'm ready. I think I was always ready. I just needed to let myself know that.