Self-portrait

Being yourself means acting according to your feelings and beliefs. However, what happens when your own self is not conceived for life in society, but for solitude? What happens when being yourself means not interacting with other people, not leaving the safe space, but retreating in music, literature, art?

To live in the present society, you have to adapt and respect the norms that are transmitted to you. Therefore, you have to create a strong “you”, ready to deal with the challenges of day-to-day life, maybe even a “you” totally different from the true you.

This self-portrait illustrates the search for the original – the most authentic reflection of one’s personality – after the dissociation between the personality’s faces and the loss of identity. The amnesia that made the true one be lost between fighting “yous” is caused by the lack of time spent going back to one’s roots – giving up comfort in favor of validation in society.

According to a Japanese belief, each person has three faces: you show the first one to the world, the second to family and close friends, and the third one is not shown to anybody, this being the most real reflection of the person.

Self portrait of the author, black and white, in which the lost self is hiding and the other self is looking for her.

Through the association of “yous” with the three parts of Sigmund’s theory of personality, we can interpret the image at another level. The processes involved in modeling the personality (id, ego, superego) work together to create a balanced self. However, when one of the processes stops functioning correctly, the personality suffers – this imbalance is considered by some experts the principal cause of the appearance of mental illness.

The almost naked bodies symbolize the personality’s vulnerability in the journey of self-reunification, and the “orphan” faces, the loss of purpose – that of helping the sensible personality to adapt in the society of the millennial generation – a generation concentrated on egocentrism, from which the altruism gradually disappears – without being corrupted by it. The personality’s fists, not tightened, not open are the reservations with which she starts the journey towards the self, the hesitation of taking action thanks to the fear of making mistakes. “Hiding” the faces of the characters acts as a mask and has the role of not provoking mercy. The wood brings the idea of femininity into the image thanks to the relationship created between the voluptuousness of the female body and the wood’s curves, and the lack of color helps create an atmosphere that denotes sensibility and mystery. The position of the character on the right brings a plus of oddness, the viewer is left to guess what it’ll do.

This photograph represents a visual metaphor that explores the theme of self-knowledge – of discovering my own capabilities of communicating through visual language – through using different things like body position, atmosphere, framing, and using the available space in a more creative way.