beds

When I started this project I masked my true intentions and motivations from myself with theory, in particular I was interested in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the coextensive nature of self-awareness and other-awareness. The idea that we view ourselves from the perspective of the other, thus making ourselves the embodied and external other whilst simultaneously experiencing ourselves as ‘I’, ideas along similar lines have also been discussed by John Berger in his book, ‘Ways of Seeing’. I was interested in exploring this two way reciprocal process of recognition, the notion that I needed the position of an external other through which to identify myself as ‘I’, ‘me’.
In order to do this I placed adverts online and in local shops asking for people to help me see myself. I asked that they let me into their bedroom where I would remove my top and lie on their bed. I then asked the participants to stand above me holding my camera whilst I used a remote to take the photographs. The location and my semi-nudity I initially put down to wanting to create a certain degree of intimacy in the exchange, through allowing them to become my tripod, my eyes, I put the collaborators in what I saw as a position of power over me; I already felt like I was making myself vulnerable and needed some sort of physical sign of this vulnerability.
However as the project progressed and I began to be able to differentiate between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ shoots I came to realize that although the theory had informed and shaped what I was doing, I also had another agenda. Past experiences of being seen and related to as an external ‘other’ had left me angry and wanting to be related to as a thinking, feeling, subjective self rather than an unknowable and unknowing other. The framework I had set-up allowed me to test the reaction of others towards me, through placing myself in a potentially objectifying and vulnerable position I challenged my collaborators to respond to me as an other embodied self, to acknowledge the reality of my physical presence, my objecthood but to engage with me as a subjective entity. The better a shoot was, the more we talked, shared ideas and engaged with one another, the less important the photograph became. On the successful shoots I felt that I had entrusted my subjectivity to another and I came away with the impression that they had protected it for me, it was quite cathartic in the end, I finished the piece feeling happy to have met so many people as willing to relate to me on my own terms as I was them theirs.