A Year of Self-Portraits

A big part of why I take self-portraits (and encourage others to) is because they help us create a visual narrative of our lives, to tell the story of our adventures and to be able to document them. In each of the moments that I take them, my hope is just to document that moment but together they create a map of the year took us (but with us in the photos, not just behind the camera).

So in thinking about this past year, I started looking at the photos I took each month and pulled out a few selfies from each month and have gathered them up here to reflect on. Its hard to pick a favourite as they are all little pieces of the puzzle of 2012. Thats the thing about taking self-portraits. To me they aren’t about vanity…or which one did I look best in. They are all just little moments of creating space and witnessing ourselves. I think what becomes a favourite for me is one where I learned something new. Like the red boot photo where I almost deleted it. Or the February Shadow photo because its so playful and its always so good to get friends in on the silliness. As well, all of the August Whistler photos mean a whole lot for me as that was the first time I brought You are Your Own Muse into a live in-person workshop and it was a beautiful weekend for me.

Did you have a favourite self-portrait you took this year? One that meant the most?

So here’s my year in review, one year in the story of this adventure called life.

January