yesterday I did my fourth photoshoot with Paul for his intimate portraits series. except this time, he was in New York. I am in Japan. we did the photoshoot across a distance of 10,849 km — making images mediated by two computer screens and a phone. we took 3000 photos over 3 hours, ending at 4 pm my time — and 3 am his time.

how many layers of reality were we swimming through? so many that it felt like a dream within a dream. (is this what a day dream feels like? is it just life unpeeled, life when you truly let go of the busy-ness?) it took place over a zoom video call. my computer captured my image. his computer showed him my image. then he took a photo of my image with his phone. and now I’ve put my image here — projected across to your screen.

*paul, i asked him, why are you in black and white?*

the room I’m staying in — in this Japanese library-house — is a tatami mat room with red walls. we did the shoot against the wall. when I saw the images, I felt like I was a woman from a 1960s Japanese noir film. why? what was it? the lighting? the black and white noir photo filter? his composition? or is my body language somehow taking on a Japanese consciousness? I’m not sure. all of the above.

there was very little he could do — when taking a still image of a video. he could frame the photo, and choose the angle at which he took it — producing a different warp effect of the screen. then he could edit the photo. and he can replay the three hours recorded on video — like a perfect recall of memory, and produce more images from the recording — as if the entire three hours were happening again.

(and should we be more grateful that our minds are not perfect recording machines, replaying back each conversation, each experience like a videotape? it would be torture. forgetting is such a gift.)

in the absence of physical presence and touch, all that we had was our conversation through our voices, our images, and the accumulated history of our friendship — forming our immediate sense of the other’s presence — mediated through three screens.

but what is this presence over these ten thousand kilometers, we wondered. what makes us “real” to the other? what if the other was only a sophisticated robot? and how much do you truly need — to make presence believable? a voice? a picture? a memory?

at times, I felt like I was alone — and he was nothing more than a projection of my mind, a figment of my imagination. and during this confinement, I am realizing more deeply how all conversations, relationships, experiences — ultimately can be distilled to this, to the event taking place in my mind.

the mind is the ultimate image-creator. the ultimate image-projector. the mind is like the internet — as rich and limited as I want it to be. so let’s google my mind. let’s sift through its files for half-memories, vague associations, collections of words, fake news, poetry, stories — to build a bridge to your mind. if that’s possible.

and what about this thorny subject of the female image? what about the fact that I modeled mostly nude for an older, white, male photographer — three times in person, and this time, virtually? what about the male gaze? Paul and I have discussions about this during nearly every shoot. and it’s a subject I have a lot of repressed, strong feelings about. I will only comment very briefly here.

in the age where women are constantly, carefully curating images of ourselves — at times, pandering to the male gaze that wants to consume, seduce, possess, or feeling the need to deliberately resist it, defy it, rebel against it — we cannot deny that we are all too aware of how we are seen by others, by society, by men. it is hard to escape this self-consciousness, this double consciousness. we want to control not simply our images, but how we are seen. and we cannot.

and in doing so, we become obsessed with the image — not images within the context of making art, images which accumulate from the journey of process — but image like the literal word of god. image, as ultimate story and message to dictate our identity. we become caught in the flattened, mono-theism of images — as fixed, “true” portrait of a woman, or of femininity.

but can one image represent me, let alone femininity? can one hundred? can three thousand? can a book of images — taken over a lifetime — represent me? can any image that anyone takes — regardless of gender, even if I am the photographer — represent the whole of me?

certainly not. and I don’t need it to.

and as for you, I cannot know — nor control — what you ultimately see — in the screen of your mind.

after my presence has been projected across two screens (my computer and Paul’s), captured on a third screen (Paul’s phone), then projected into a fourth screen (yours) — it lives now, inside this screen of your mind, affected by (and affecting) your relationship to me, your preexisting understanding of me, your preconceptions of all images that look similar to this, your gender biases, your awareness of our social conditioning and collective unconsciousness.

I can only tell you what these images mean to me. to me — and to Paul, I think — they are the accumulation of process and connection. we create images for the sake of making art, for beauty, and for truth. he captures, in frames, the changing subtleties of my emotions in that moment. I feel seen — not by a man, but by the moment, by time, by the process of making art itself. I become a part of art, and a part of its process.

I used to be hyper sensitive to how romantic partners saw me — constantly aware to what extent I wasn’t fulfilling their image of me, or, resentful of how those same images were limiting me. these images, which were handed down to them by culture and society, by the media, by religion. no matter how hard I tried, I adopted a constant double consciousness. and I resented it. I resented pinning myself down into shapes and forms. I longed to be formless: in multitudes, uncontainable, ever-changing.

only now am I slowly embodying the ultimate act of of seeing myself — an act of process — both in the image, and beyond the image. to see myself as art, to see all the infinite selves, changing and moving through time. that is the only projection I can control. I am the one who sees, and I am the one who is seen. my mind is the only screen. so is yours. this page is in my mind. and in yours.

my image across the screen