They Shoot Artists, Don’t They?

Featured images: Andrea Bigiarini, Raul Diaz, Leon Williams, Sarah Kent, Sally Ann Field, Clarisse Debout

There’s an age-old tradition in the art world: Artists use themselves as subjects. We don’t do it because we’re conceited or brave, bold or audacious. In fact, when you ask an artist to pose for you, you are likely to get an uncomfortable, self conscious, often unwilling subject.

(Lulú Elenes De Panbehchi, Gillian Brodie, Andrea Bigiarini, Mary Ann Habermeyer, Robin Cohen)

Artists create to reinvent reality. We do it to reimagine the world. And we do it to show you what we see through the murky, glorious, twisted, painfully beauteous filters which we wear on our sleeves. Oh, I’m not saying that every human doesn’t have these filters. We all do. But artists can’t filter out these filters. We didn’t learn how. Maybe we didn’t want to.

(Sarah Kent, Bill De Belin, Erik Elferink, Achille Malossari, Jo Sullivan, Debara Splendorio)

I’m an artist. I’m an artist completely hellbent on being an artist, embracing the quirks and kinks that form the filters which both allow me to create and cripple and overwhelm me from doing so. And some days I wake up unable to face creating with anything else other than the five foot radius that surrounds me. And so – as an artist who uses the medium of photography – on those days, I shoot myself.

(Siclaly M. Santiago-Leon, Michel Walther Crine, Linda Sbath, David Henry, Aldo Pacheco, Lisa Peters)

A few days ago, on the heels of creating this new group of anarchist visionaries, I decided to put a call out to my compadres for self portraits with camera gear. The results are bold and brave, glorious and beautiful. These are some of the amazing souls that walk this earth as artists, exposing their quirks and kinks, reimagining the world for us. These are artist in a place and time that views art is an oddity, a commodity, a monitizable service, and – let’s face it – an exploitable one at that. These are humans who transcend the box and blaze the trails, even on those days when it’s inconceivable to leave that five foot radius that surrounds them….and even on those days when another artist asks them specifically not to.