Daily Self-Portraits (2025-6)
In this ongoing project, I take daily self-portraits as a way of documenting and exploring my body and age.
In late 2025, I saw the work of both Carla J. Williams (Tender) and Melissa Shook (Daily Self-Portraits 1972-3) exhibited. I became enamored with how these two women were able to look at themselves with their cameras. Their projects, while different, both presented confident and accepting inquisitions into each woman’s body and age. Alongside these inquiries, too, I saw the joys of experimentation and self-discovery. By the time I encountered the projects, both of which had been published several decades after being made, each had become archive of the woman’s body at a specific, earlier time in her life.
I returned home determined to explore and capture myself, still a relatively young age (32), the way that Williams and Shook had. I wanted to create an archive of a different body — a male body that didn’t feel, or even want to feel, particularly “masculine” — my body. And I had questions that Shook’s and Williams’ projects could not address simply by nature of the authors’ inherent identities; questions about what it means to exist and age in a male body, for example, and about what results from the tension between social pressures to be traditionally “masculine” and my own natural physical and emotional qualities.
I began making self-portraits on December 15, 2025, and plan to make one per day for one year. The images here are hand-dated 4.75x4.75” gelatin silver prints, regularly updated as I produce new prints from the project.
