Here I wanted to do something to abstract my body a little bit, to hang somewhere between a person and a decoration in the bare empty room.

I took a self-portrait class from Airyka Rockefeller this weekend, and it was fantastic. We spent a few hours talking about self-portraiture over the past 100 years and looking at several artists, and then had an hour to kill in a half-rebuilt historic mansion in Salem. Finally, she went through our shots with us, and we had a show-and-tell with the class at the end.

I loved a lot of things about this class — including the way Airyka was all ‘blah blah Claude Cahun blah blah Diane Arbus’ in conversation — but perhaps my favorite part was her love of what she called the ‘snapshot ethos’, and her distrust of highly technical photography. As someone who mostly totes around the same prime lens and never takes it off, hearing that was heavenly. On the other hand, nothing quite came out as I’d wanted. I’ll post a few here, but golly do I have a lot of work to do.

A good feeling.

Sometimes sitting on the sidelines is the best part.

Suddenly she’s trying to pick up all kinds of physical skills. It’s dizzying.

Playing with a golden bounce reflector.