COVID Self-Portraits (2020)

In the early days it wasn’t clear what we were dealing with. COVID was spreading, the hospitals clogged, people dying, I brought my daughters back home to Montara, the one taking a gap year after college, the other set to graduate that May. I vowed to make no mistakes.

The photos, displayed here as a view slide show, are “selfies” I made on my iPhone as an Instagram project starting the day the governor of California ordered the lockdown and continued each day until the day the federal government signed the contract for the vaccine. I chose one from each day to post, though I show them all here.

You can’t tell what is going on in someone’s head from looking at their portrait—that’s a myth. Looking at just these images can you tell when it was I felt that virus was not invincible? Can you tell by looking at just these photographs when my father died, the virus preventing me from going home to Ohio for the funeral? I looked just now and I picked the wrong day.

I wasn’t shooting self-portraits to share the inner me. I was shooting self-portraits to say that I was still here, still alive.