Self Portraits in the Garden
Last week, one of my female friends complimented me, telling me I had a nice butt.
My first question was, “wait, really? My butt? On me?” Which quickly gave way to “Is this new? Or have I always had a nice butt and were other people just too shy to mention it?”
This playful comment between friends opened up a moment of clarity— I’m not used to being complimented on my body. I often get compliments on my curled mustache, but that is something I wear, something resting on my face that can be removed (and regained) at will.
This high of being complimented lingered, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized how little men are conditioned to being seen. While our society makes young girls aware of their appearances, reinforced by “Disney Princesses” and later makeup advertisements, to say nothing of unwanted advances through their teens and adulthood, boys and men are very rarely expected to be actively looked at. We are given expectations of how to dress depending on our work or local culture, but that is more of a uniform. Men are very rarely ever looked at as sensual, sexual beings in a way that isn’t about some fantasy about power.
Unlike most men, I may have already had more experience with this, as I had a college side-job as a figure model for life drawing classes. But the feeling of that is more like being a statue. You make a pose, and try to hold it as faithfully as possible for minutes or hours at a time. You aren’t being drawn as a focused subject, as much as your body is being drawn as a regimen of regular practice for artists developing their skills.
Like many of my ideas, this one came to me when I’d rather be sleeping. One recent morning, I awoke before dawn, and lying in my warm bed I felt the whisper of intuition, nudging me to experiment with self portraits in my garden. Since inspiration is fickle, I acted on it immediately, working with a tripod and cable remote to trigger the shutter. Though it was cold, and frankly embarrassing as I fumbled through awkward poses, eventually I happened to make some photographs that I liked.
I am incredibly grateful to my friends with whom I have already shared these images. Your trust and words of enthusiasm for my inscrutable impulses mean the world, and the conversations that it sparked have nourished my soul in ways I can hardly put into words.
