self portrait as several clusters of stars was born when i started thinking about my core astrological placements and how they manifest in my life. having just read Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights, i felt the essayette form made the most sense for a chapbook told in anecdotes.
excerpt
since none of these essayettes were published prior to the chap’s release, i wanted to share one here to give you a feel for the book.
“selfies”
as a photographer, i am asked unsurprisingly often about my thoughts on cell phone photography. and i’ll be honest: i really don’t think phones represent some huge threat to the photographic medium. if your definition of photography hinges on gatekeeping, i’m going to point you to a goddamn dictionary and remind you that you will not die because things are now accessible.
but anyway, i’m reminded of a speech i gave senior year of high school, which is something we were all required to do in order to graduate because private schools really like imposing arbitrary requirements on their students. i talked for fifteen minutes about photography’s impact on my life, and at the end, when i asked the audience if there were any questions, i was asked how i felt about selfies. part of me is still a little mad that it was the first thought after hearing a fairly personal account of how art saved my life, but honestly, i’m historically pro-selfie.
my dad used to tell me i was vain for taking so many pictures of myself. this was before the advent of a front camera, when you had to flip your silver LG EnV backwards to take a photo of yourself with it. back then, my angle was simply not to look at the camera. (i was fairly shy still.) but i remained a steadfast defender of the selfie as an act of confidence, not vanity; i even carried it onward to 2017, when my new year’s resolution was simply More Selfies, and i reminded myself and my instagram followers with a matching hashtag. i still staunchly champion the selfie, particularly now that it doubles as a way to feed social media algorithms exactly what they want to see, which is tangentially a great way to make them boost your work: slap a selfie on it. milk ‘em for all they’ve got.
as a person whose brain seems to rarely occupy their body these days, seeing my face stare back at me from a screen is a strange way to remind myself i have flesh when my thoughts are miles away. it’s why you’ll see me get up just to go look at myself in the mirror; i need to remember that i’m here on earth. it’s sort of the same reason that as a photographer, i tend to follow nan goldin’s path of photographing the things i am afraid to lose in my memory.
praise
I have read a lot of nat raum's confessional work, even published some of it, and still self portrait as several clusters of stars struck from the start as nat fully laid bare. Absent the clever form and the masterfully nested complexity in sparse, this is nat sat screenless beside you. Door closed, grace given, secrets–and not so–all queued up and ready for air.
—Katharine Blair, kith books
self portrait as several clusters of stars can be purchased from Bottlecap Press in print and digital formats.