For days I’ve been ruminating on the experience of taking a photo of myself that has altered me--or exposed me--in some powerful way I haven’t been able to reconcile. This short essay is an attempt to understand what happened and why it turned out to be so important.

The thing is, I’ve never been interested in self-portraiture. Photography has always been a way for me to explore worlds I’d like to visit and create the characters who inhabit them. I never had any intention of being the subject of my own work except by proxy as the narrator. I want to be behind the pen and the camera creating and directing, giving birth to the picture in my head.

In a very real way, what I create now is an expression of the little girl who searched the woods for fairies, barefoot and pretending to be a magical princess. Which is a fine thing for a little girl to do, but I also spent my teenage years with my nose in books, daydreaming about magic and being profoundly uncool

But both wonder and magic are much harder to find as an adult when there are bills to pay and kids to feed.

So I make the magic real by building concepts, finding subjects, creating props, lighting, capturing, and editing my creations. Sometimes I create it by writing about it, but whether I’m shooting or writing, the characters are always not me.

At least they were, until Covid came along, anyway.

The inability to work with models who could bring my ideas to life meant that I had three options: wait to create things till the world went back to normal, shelf my ideas, or use myself as the subject. I spent close to an entire year in quarantine before I broke down and decided to become my own subject.

I had a picture in my head that needed making, something magical and right out of a storybook, but I had always seen a different face in my head when I imagined the final piece. So, I bought myself a wig and determined I would just edit my face in photoshop until the final image looked nothing like me.

I transformed a corner of my living room into a set, dragged my husband in for some light testing, set the focus, took a deep breath, and climbed in front of the camera. I felt like I was trying to put a puzzle together with a blindfold on. What did the light look like on my face? Was the pose okay? Did the angle work? Were my hands okay, my expression? How could I be sure the final image would look anything like what was in my head?

The experience seemed to confirm the reason I always stay behind the camera. Modeling is not for me.

Then I sat down to cull the images.

Initially I was uncomfortable looking at myself, but the longer I stared at the images and the more I edited, the more I found myself intrigued. I couldn’t seem to stop looking at the image, and I couldn’t even bring myself to turn my image into a picture of “not-me” by altering my face in post production. I sat there staring at not-me, recognizable but not the same person, and what I saw was nothing I’d ever thought to go looking for.

There sat the feminine, magical, regal woman a little girl dreamed about being, glowing in the candlelight, unaware of me watching her, unaware of my mind looking out of her eyes.

It suddenly became very important that this person was me.

I’ve spent the last almost 18 years being a mom, a wife, a photographer, an author, a rock climber, a hiker, and all those things are wonderful and important parts of me. But the little girl with bare feet and dirty knees who spent her days in trees, the teenager who spent more time with fictional characters than she did with her friends, would never have grown into a fairy princess. The mom wearing sweats with unwashed hair who spends half of her day trying to keep legos off the floor is certainly not a lovely creature out of some fable.

Except...apparently...she is.

Somewhere beneath the sweats, the self doubt, the extra 15 pounds and the sensible sedan, is a fairy-fucking-princess, guys.
I never knew how important that would be to me.

I’ve spent the last couple of days thinking about why this experience, one I was not looking for and had no intention of creating for myself, should become so suddenly--not life altering, but ME altering.

And it strikes me as I write that it’s because the photo has done for me what I always aim to do for other people when I make art of any kind: it reminded me that there is more to me than I dare to dream of.

Somehow along the way, despite all the twists and turns my life has taken, I ended up fulfilling the wishes of a wild little girl and became a magical creature. I never left the wild little girl behind, but apparently both people can exist in the same body, share the same spirit.

No matter what happens now, I will always be able to see myself the way 8 year old me--15 year old me--wished she could be. It makes me want to cry a little bit. For once, I used my magic on myself.

I am what I dreamed of.

The Self Portrait That Changed Everything