Without Cover
The First Time I Took a Nude Self-Portrait
The first time I ever thought about the idea of a nude self-portrait was the result of an assignment in a photography class at Columbia College, known for its visual arts programs, located in downtown Chicago. It was the 1970s and I was taking night and weekend courses while working full-time during the day.
My fellow students and I were instructed to photograph ourselves. I used my (Canon) 35mm camera with black and white film. After arranging the environment and lighting in my room, I set the timer on the camera and ran to my preconceived spot. I posed until I heard the shutter click after ten seconds. I repeated this a few times. Later, I developed the film, chose an image and printed an 8 x 10 photograph.
On the day when the assignment was due, I wondered if I had gone too far with the image I had selected for presentation. What would be the reaction? Still, I never really wavered in my choice. It might shake things up a bit, for me as well as my classmates, but I wanted to do something different. I reasoned that my photograph wasn’t all that daring. Maybe someone else had come up with a similar idea. That would be ironically comforting. Yet I also hoped no one had thought of my vision. I wanted it to be unique. I was a young photographer, testing myself and my small audience of maybe 10 students and the instructor.
As I watched the other students present their work, I saw a mixture of worthy photographs of my classmates depicting themselves, as well as a few more interesting and thoughtful results. Nothing quite stood out among the pack. As the class wore on and my turn approached, I wondered if my selection would be interpreted as perhaps too calculated or showy. I hoped not.
When the instructor turned to me, my classmates seemed to be curious. What had Marc brought? I walked up to the front of the class and displayed my submission to all. They looked at it closely and the instructor began to talk about it. I felt some relief. There were compliments and no serious criticisms at all. A couple of students had questions. My instructor made strong and supportive comments. One thing for sure: my self-portrait stood out among all those presented that day because of the pose and the lighting, and especially because of a singular feature. In the photograph, I was nude.
1974
Even though it was a comparatively liberal time and most people had begun to think in an open minded manner about the human body, many did not act as freely they spoke. My classmates were no different. No other student brought in a nude image of themselves for the self-portrait assignment.
My photograph was actually quite discreet. My body was on a dark gray blanket against a black background and I was enveloped in shadows. I was kneeling with my arms and legs visible but my right hand crossed down in front of my body to hold my lower left leg and my left hand held my right shoulder. My face could not be seen because my head was bent down and my Afro hair rendered the top of the image mostly black. I was skin and limbs but otherwise quite mysterious and my male parts were hidden.
In casual discussions after class ended, I learned that my photo was genuinely liked. In another photo evaluation session a couple of years later, a different instructor praised the image, saying it reminded him of the style of, or at least an image by, Edward Steichen, who was born in 1879 and considered an important figure in the history of photography (at the time I had no idea who Steichen was, but I sensed it was a compliment).
Yet my first nude photograph was only the beginning of many self-portraits, often in the nude, that I would take during my life. The overwhelming majority of my photographs are of other people and places/things. However, I understood the special characteristics, technical difficulties and creative rewards of self-portraits. As my first instructor pointed out, a self-portrait is the only type of image that forces a person to be photographer and subject at the same time (of course, in those years no one envisioned the billions upon billions of cell phone “selfies” that are now a ubiquitous part of our culture). A serious self-visualization was expected to result from extra care, preparation and a prearranged idea, with the technical challenge that one could not witness the moment of creation through a 1970s viewfinder while being in front of the camera some distance away.
I was very much into recording and preserving the times and scenes of others’ lives and my own life. I never saw self-imaging as narcissistic or ego-driven although it can easily have those qualities. To me, the self was another subject, no less and no more worthy than any other subject. Self-portraits were simply another opportunity for creativity and documentation. I found artistic self-portraits to be a vehicle to explore aesthetic ideas and themes.
I continued experimenting with self-portraits of all types throughout my career. In 1978, I moved to New York City permanently. As before, ideas would pop into my head when I was in my living space or photo studio, often on a weekend when I had spare time. If I didn’t have another person to model nude for me, I would use my own body. I photographed myself as “tests” of ideas that I later used with other nude models, some of whom were just friends who desired artistic images of themselves. I became well informed of what models must endure by being a model myself.
1984
One theme that fascinated me was the contradiction between revealing oneself (at least the external self) while at the same time concealing one's identity (the window to the internal self) by masking or eliminating visibility of the face. Nakedness in a public manner is seemingly an inherently daring act in the U.S., opening a person in the most forceful way to the world, offering one’s physical secrets and especially often exposing one’s genitalia and therefore a part of a person's usually private sexuality. What if I was, in the midst of explicit bodily revelation (beyond the pictures on this page), more anonymous and hidden than ever? Not including the face cheats the viewer out of the complete identification of the person in the photograph but also forces the photograph to stand on its own without such information. Through the choices I made when creating self-images, I experimented with pictures that contained those opposing concepts. I have taken many self-portraits with and without my face showing which provide me with a basis for comparison.
Most of the time, I simply wanted to play with lighting, poses and moods. The “feel” of an image, the concepts it conveyed, whether it was classical or rebellious, vague or blunt, and any other aspects always fascinated me.
I now have a large number of self-portraits taken over a span of many years. My only regret is that when I was in my twenties, I did not take dozens more of them.
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