WE HAVE SCRIBBLED MUCHLY in this humble gazette over the years about the seemingly insurmountable challenge of the self-portrait, or, more precisely, the difficulty in balancing the arts of awareness and artifice to produce one that is essentially honest. We know ourselves, but with limits; we know how to technically present ourselves, but within limits; and while we logically stipulate that any good selfie should strive be a compromise between commentary and performance, achieving that balance is something else again.
This week, I continued with a birthday ritual I began a while back in posing for the one formally planned selfie that I do per year. There are other, quicker self-snaps, some of them accidentally adequate, but I only have one day a year that I purposefully set up lighting, a specific setting, a shutter release and a tripod, spending several hours snapping dozens of frames in search of an expression that approximates my true inner mind as I’m crossing from one year to another. Each year, I take into account the images that preceded the present year, trying to vary my poses to show some other side of myself that may not have been present in the earlier editions. This year, I was definitely out to strike a contrast.
Last year, just ahead of my birthday, I experiences a week of excruciating back pain that had me bed-ridden and nearly crazed for lack of sleep. I was just emerging from that semi-hallucinatory state when I dragged myself in front of a camera for The Birthday Shoot. What emerged staggered me a bit. I was trying so hard to muster a hopeful smile, some clue that I was trying desperately to reboot my body and spirit. However, what I actually captured was about the most honest portrayal of myself as I’ve ever managed, albeit an honest portrayal of faith vainly trying to burst through a cloud cover of anguish and anxiety. It was, beyond play-acting or performance, the real me, and it scared me a bit. Even a year later, it hurts to look at it.
This year, I am in better shape physically, mentally, even geographically, having undergone a transformative re-location to California during 2024. I have a lot of actual reasons to want to answer last year’s picture with an expression of hope. And yet the world around me, which I must react to in order to maintain any pretense at art, is convulsing, twisting itself into the same pattern of pain I myself wore last year. And so you see the result here. An expression of mild amusement, as if I’m a math professor trying to decipher a tricky equation. Not real joy, but perhaps the willingness to take on the problem, as well as gratitude for being able to still be in the game. This Portrait Of The Artist As Eternal Optimist may be a “plausible fib” at best. But it’s the face I, and perhaps all of us, need right now.
thenormaleye 
A PLAUSIBLE FIB
Birthday self-portrait, 2/8/25.
By MICHAEL PERKINS
WE HAVE SCRIBBLED MUCHLY in this humble gazette over the years about the seemingly insurmountable challenge of the self-portrait, or, more precisely, the difficulty in balancing the arts of awareness and artifice to produce one that is essentially honest. We know ourselves, but with limits; we know how to technically present ourselves, but within limits; and while we logically stipulate that any good selfie should strive be a compromise between commentary and performance, achieving that balance is something else again.
This week, I continued with a birthday ritual I began a while back in posing for the one formally planned selfie that I do per year. There are other, quicker self-snaps, some of them accidentally adequate, but I only have one day a year that I purposefully set up lighting, a specific setting, a shutter release and a tripod, spending several hours snapping dozens of frames in search of an expression that approximates my true inner mind as I’m crossing from one year to another. Each year, I take into account the images that preceded the present year, trying to vary my poses to show some other side of myself that may not have been present in the earlier editions. This year, I was definitely out to strike a contrast.
Last year, just ahead of my birthday, I experiences a week of excruciating back pain that had me bed-ridden and nearly crazed for lack of sleep. I was just emerging from that semi-hallucinatory state when I dragged myself in front of a camera for The Birthday Shoot. What emerged staggered me a bit. I was trying so hard to muster a hopeful smile, some clue that I was trying desperately to reboot my body and spirit. However, what I actually captured was about the most honest portrayal of myself as I’ve ever managed, albeit an honest portrayal of faith vainly trying to burst through a cloud cover of anguish and anxiety. It was, beyond play-acting or performance, the real me, and it scared me a bit. Even a year later, it hurts to look at it.
This year, I am in better shape physically, mentally, even geographically, having undergone a transformative re-location to California during 2024. I have a lot of actual reasons to want to answer last year’s picture with an expression of hope. And yet the world around me, which I must react to in order to maintain any pretense at art, is convulsing, twisting itself into the same pattern of pain I myself wore last year. And so you see the result here. An expression of mild amusement, as if I’m a math professor trying to decipher a tricky equation. Not real joy, but perhaps the willingness to take on the problem, as well as gratitude for being able to still be in the game. This Portrait Of The Artist As Eternal Optimist may be a “plausible fib” at best. But it’s the face I, and perhaps all of us, need right now.
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