Chapter One – Surveillance and Self-Agency 

1.1 Girl Before a Mirror I 
 

girl before a mirror is a comprehensive body of work containing my explorations in photographic self-portraiture from 1993 to 1999. My works in self-portraiture have been circular and cumulative. Jean Grondin, in his Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, provides a description that elucidates a practice such as mine: "Behind what is literally said, something other, something more lies hidden; and discovering it requires all the more…effort when the immediate sense, the literal, is unintelligible."(1)  

In my cumulative processes of discovery, each series of self-portraits locates landmarks in my understanding of self and artmaking that lead to further visual and conceptual explorations. What becomes 'intelligible', however, is invariably relocated as 'literal', thus setting up the dynamics for a renewed effort, making my processes circular. 

I have come to understand my self-portraiture as a visual means of self-conscious probing into my experiences as a self-conscious person who worries. My worries manifest themselves in activities geared toward achieving personal control and, conversely, my feelings of personal control and self-control manifest and express themselves through active worrying. This quandary – where worry leads to control and where control leads to worry – is the basis for my artwork, and is underlined by "making sense of things…a fundamental aspect of existence for a being that understands itself in time, and whose own being is concerned with being."(2)  

I first began to photograph myself when I first picked up a camera, and this was long before I decided to make photographs with art in mind. Only after a few years of photographing with the intent to make art did I become aware that I turned the camera toward myself, and had done so even as a child. Sometimes, when looking through my parents' or friends' family albums, I discover photographs of myself in mirrors or holding the camera at arm's length. These are rare finds, and they present themselves to me almost like omens in retrospect. Yet, these photographs are not included in the archive girl before a mirror – they pre-date some moment in time where the line is drawn between what is included and what is excluded. 

I have been photographing myself specifically and self-consciously for about four years. From 1993 until about 1995, I photographed myself with not so much the final images in mind as the act of taking the photographs – though this distinction did not become clear to me until much later. In fits of worry, I found consolation in the direct, physical experience of setting up my equipment in a location and choosing to act a particular way while photographing. I was not always aware of the way I was 'acting' insofar as being able to articulate a persona – it was never so contrived. My sessions were motivated simply by my need to feel in control of myself through this particular activity, with nobody around to watch (as in a performance), and with a mostly unconscious determination to act decisively. 

At the time when I began to photograph myself intentionally, (i.e. exclusively and with artistic practice in mind), I was engaged with the formal and technical aspects of the medium. I read voraciously about photography and became excited by the ideas surrounding the medium since its inception. Being involved in this manner, and viewing photography as the only medium available for me to express myself visually, my practice revolved around shooting, processing, editing, printing and, finally, framing and wall-hanging. 

I have always been concerned with feelings of belonging, legitimacy, value, creativity, intellect and deserving (or lack thereof). I have always been a worrier, repeating scenarios through my mind, swinging from self-doubt to self-affirmation. My worry takes shape in activities, or sets of emotional states accompanied by a tremendous range of physical manifestations. I am often in a state of lack over not knowing, missing something, searching for answers, and this leads to a second degree of worry that has to do with me worrying, above and beyond whatever I may worry about. 

I have outlets for my worry. Nervous habits. Some are recent, some go as far back as I can remember: flexing two leg muscles when in a car to mark the before and after passing points with light poles; pulling lint and rolling it between my fingers; playing with my fingers; wringing my hands; fiddling with lighters, pens, and hair bands; counting beats in my head as if to set a meter to myself; grinding my teeth; organizing; cleaning; doodling; journaling; fretting; listing nervous habits. And creating and cataloguing self-portraits. I understand all of these practices as essential coping strategies. 
 

In 1997, I was a volunteer in the photo-archives office of the Vancouver Art Gallery. My job was to order and arrange the several slide binders used to keep track of the art collection. I arranged the binders in such a way as to create space for one slide of each accessioned piece of art the gallery owned, making it easier for the manager of the archives to locate documentation of works and to determine what works had not yet been documented. I had known many photographers who had some form of filing system or another for their thousands of negatives, but had never been moved to do the same. Working with the slide binders and the lists of accessioned art works at the VAG, however, led me to create a cataloguing system for my self-portraits. In this case, I was motivated not by practicality, but by my attraction to the systematic effort required to pull it off. 

Despite having begun cataloguing the self-portraits in 1997, it has taken me until very recently to recognize the fundamental aspect of control that has motivated not only the archive, but the very practice of making the photographs to begin with. Questions put to me regarding the representation of women and my limited methods of presenting the images (i.e. printing, framing, and wall-hanging) challenged me to question myself and to find out what exactly is it that I'm trying to communicate through self-portraiture. Only through discovering and accepting my rituals of anxiety and allowing myself to act these out in my artmaking could I pinpoint the basis for them as stemming from my sense of being constantly on view. 

1.2 The Watchful Eye 

There is an old Yiddish expression my paternal grandmother used to say when she heard good news, an expression I have come to associate with my sense of being watched. Kayn ayin hore (pronounced 'kah'n-ayin-ah-horah') is an invocation against the 'evil eye', that superstitious stare where the object of the gaze is struck by a curse or with bad luck. I do not go so far as to define feeling watched as a superstitious curse, but I do call it the 'watchful eye' and have seen myself, so to speak, in retrospect, acting out against it.  

In Downcast Eyes: the Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, Martin Jay states: "One of the most extraordinary aspects of vision…is being the object of the look. Here the range of possibilities is exceptionally wide, extending from the paranoid's fantasy of being under constant hostile surveillance to the exhibitionist's narcissistic thrill at being the cynosure of all eyes."(3)  

As a teenager, the 'watchful eye' existed on two levels: the social and the private. On the social level, I felt watched by the people in my life: my parents, teachers and peers. On the private level, the 'watchful eye' revealed itself only insofar as I was aware of it at any given moment. The social watchful eye made me aware of expectations placed on me by my parents (to be a 'good' girl, a mensch(4), my teachers (to be a 'good' student, to attend classes diligently but to keep quiet all the same), and by my peers (to look and act cool, interesting, outlandish and witty). The private 'watchful eye' is that which I sense when I am all by myself. 

For example, one night when I was a teenager I was alone washing. I became aware, in an instant, of the possibility that I was being watched from beyond the window. I found myself taking extra care not to drop a glass, folding the dishtowel meticulously, allowing a calm and contented expression to cross my face. For a moment, I felt like the stereotypical image of a housewife.(5)  

Being watched has always given me an uneasy feeling – I'm biting my lips as I write – and the only occasion I feel comfortable with it is when I am not aware of it. 

Laura Mulvey's ideas about the male gaze are interesting, and I identify most with what she describes as 'to-be-looked-at-ness': "In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness."(6)  
 

Although unable to deny the codes of femininity as conventionally present in my life and in my art, I feel less a sense of my to-be-looked-at-ness as gender-based than I do from simply being in a world of sight. Indeed, I could list a range of expectations associated with being to-be-looked-at: 
· woman (thin, demure, quiet, pleasant, always as beautiful as she can be) 
· Jew (loud-mouthed pushy Jewish (+ woman), rich and greedy) 
· artist (sublime, talented and skilled, authentic, crazy, poor) 
· intellectual (sharp-witted, well-read, erudite) 
· young person (naïve, unknowing, must be taught and therefore be malleable) 
· teacher (professional, mature, authoritative) 
· friend (supportive, accepting, similar) 
· lover (voracious yet passive) 
· productive member of society (working toward success) 

I could go on, but I think my list sufficiently identifies a range of complex and, often, opposing social expectations that come with being present in the world. It often feels as though I live in a world where Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon(7)  is pan-extant – except I am the one visible from all aspects. 

I identify with Mulvey's assertion that Freud "associated scopophilia with taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze"(8)  Mulvey's position is very persuasive, since I feel controlled by 'watchful eyes' and objectified (in fact, pushed around) by the expectations associated with them. 

Being subject to the 'watchful eye' fills me with uneasiness, be the eye an actual, physical eye-of-the-other or a figment of my imagination. One of the main sources of feeling controlled and objectified by the gaze is the notion that, whether social or private, "the externality of sight allows the observer to avoid direct engagement with the object of his gaze."(9)  A case in point might be a time when you meet the eye of someone who was already looking at you. In fact, there is no practical difference between social and private 'eyes' insofar as they are each apprehended as from a position of privilege, and each gives me a personal sense of powerlessness. 

As Jean-Paul Sartre said, "to apprehend a look is to be conscious of being looked at."(10)  And to be conscious of being looked at is to become self-conscious.(11)  It is to become ensnared by a feeling of being caught off-guard. It is to become uncertain, as object/subject, about what is seen. "The nonreciprocity between the look and eye, between being the subject and the object of the gaze, is…related to a fundamental struggle for power."(12)  And this struggle for power, for me, has to do with my sense of uncertainty over how I am perceived, who perceives me, and, most importantly, how I perceive myself. 

Roland Barthes, in "Right in the Eyes," explains that "the gaze informs…gazes are exchanged…by the gaze, I touch, I attain, I seize, I am seized…the gaze seeks: something, someone. It is an anxious sign…its power overflows it."(13)  It is within the embrace of this anxiously overflowing sign where being watched becomes an activity of watching myself – an activity where I watch myself watching myself.  

Involved in such self-watching, Jean Starobinski's encouragement to "look, so that you may be looked at in return,"(14)  is transformed into looking carefully at myself, my actions, my thoughts and appearances, in order to feel aware, at the very least, of how I am seen. 

1.3 The Watchful Self  

In the previous sections, I introduced my sense of feeling on view and the nuanced ways that I have found myself responding to being watched – including becoming exceedingly self-watchful. I have described how being visible in the world has led to self-monitoring, and how I consider my art practice circular, where end-points become starting-points ad infinitum. 

It would, I often imagine, be nice if becoming self-conscious was a true end-point, but one of the most interesting aspects of hermeneutic form is that there is always something more. Being wrapped in a web of introspection automatically presents something more to look at. 

The next degree of looking, or, as I described earlier (and make analogous here), of worrying, derives from those moments when I catch myself behaving in response to the 'watchful eye' – as in the housewife example given earlier. In other words, my worry derives from my recognition and awareness of my own subjectivity. Michael Freid describes "subjects [who are] represented as caught in the world of sight [as] divided, broken, in their habitation there: they see and they are seen, and how they see is distorted, violated, by how they are seen.(15)  

In this state of violation, I become torn by the fear of becoming my perception of how I am seen, and question if I have already. In this state, "being the object of the…look create[s] a theatre of resentment in which being seen [is] less a mark of glory than of shame."(16)  In this state, not only do I feel watched and watch myself, but I also begin to question my truth to self, the truth of self, and how much in control of myself I am or can be [or, of self one is or can be]. My theatre of resentment involves shame over feeling a confusing sense of self, while at the same time feeling a constant need to assert my individuality. 

Michel Foucault, in "The Subject and Power," explains an aspect of individual/social subjectivity, which seemed very familiar to me when I first came upon it: "Struggles which question the status of the individual...on the one hand, they assert the right to be different…on the other hand, they attack everything which separates the individual, breaks his links with others…force the individual back on himself, and ties him to his own identity in a constraining way."(17)  
 

The struggles Foucault describes above are ones I feel palpably. Being obliged to attend classes diligently in high-school, for example, while keeping quiet all the same, contradicted everything I believed in about learning.(18)  I frequently bump into people who remember me from first year undergraduate classes (enrollment: 300). I don't remember them, but they all remember me as the one who always asked questions. So, while I cannot help myself from asking questions – from being vocal – I am simultaneously ashamed and embarrassed by having made myself so visible.(19)  

These two opposing aspects of my personality have directly entered my art practice through a performance where I made two videotapes of myself. In the first, appearing in right-profile, I repeat the word 'shut-up'. In the second, in left-profile, I repeat the softer 'shhhhhh'. During the performance, I stood between my two selves (two television monitors) while systematically attempting to communicate with each audience member, only to fail in a stammer – leaving me alone in front of the viewers, wringing my hands, heart racing. 

This piece, in addition to others that will be described later, is demonstrative of the types of self-imposed controls I experience in feeling my own subjectivity through being visible. My desire to communicate, to make contact with the audience members is transparent. Yet, my sense of feeling incapacitated by being visible is re-enacted by intentionally placing myself into a situation where I am stopped short – by both the presence and eyes of the audience, and by the conflicting advice of my alter-egos. This performance reflects feeling "subject to someone else by control and dependence; and tied to [my] own identity by a conscience of self-knowledge. Both…suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to."(20)  In the same instant, I am subject to social expectations and am bound to myself and my own self-knowledge. 

1.4 Self-Agency 

At this moment, I am interested in aspects of individuation and self-agency that Celia Lury investigates in her book entitled Prosthetic Culture, in relation to the manner in which I began to photograph myself with the unconscious desire to take control of how I felt I was viewed. I am interested in Lury's proposal that "individuation has been complicated by the ways in which the individual has come to apply it to him- or herself through the adoption of techniques of self-surveillance in relation to prescribed norms of behavior,"(21)  and how my work relates to these ideas. 

Photographing myself has been a manner of taking ownership over being seen through controlling being looked at and when, coupled with the sometimes naïve belief that I could come to know myself better through that activity. On one hand, I had a sense that the mirror-effect of the self-portrait would "disabuse [me] of the mistake of identifying with the other's gaze."(22)  On the other hand, I can say in retrospect that I approached self-portraiture as, "a way of considering transformations in the constitution of the possessive individual, including changes in the relations between memory, embodiment, and the relation between the individual and presentations of self including (auto)biography, character and personality, and understandings of human nature."(23)  

The "First Toronto Series of Self-Portraits" came about because I was bored and became engaged with overcoming the technical difficulties of metering, focus and framing. It did not, however, take me long to discover the important distinction between making self-portraits and what happens later, when looking at them and considering them. The activity, as I have already described, became an opportunity to act decisively. The consideration of the photographs transformed self-watching into looking at a detached self: the same self, but different, since I had the externality of the image to focus on. 

What follows is an excerpt from a short essay I wrote in 1994 entitled "All Dressed Up and No Place to Go." The essay describes my "principle activity…of the voyeuristic spectator…indentif[ying] with and adopt[ing] the position of the camera lens,"(24)  and the paradoxical space I came to inhabit as a self-portraitist. 
  
 

In 1994, when the excerpt above was written, the dilemma I encountered specifically pertained to issues surrounding the cropping of an image and the myths of self and image that I identified in the process of considering the activities of making the image, producing the print, and considering the personal and philosophical effects of both. In Camera Lucida, Barthes expressed that "what [others] have done as operators I myself want to do as spectator: I decompose, I enlarge, and, so to speak, I retard, in order to have time to know at last. The photograph justifies this desire, even if it doesn't not satisfy it."(27)  Add to this desire to get to know myself the tension of trying to not identify with the other's gaze, (or my perception of it), and I find myself involved in a "long love affair/despair between image and self-image."(28)  

Throughout the seven years of photographing myself, my responses to the images varied from being pleasantly surprised that I could produce such interesting images (see "Eighth French-River," "Second Windsor," or "Eighteenth Saskatoon" series) to being incredibly embarrassed that I could make myself appear so, well, stereotypical (see "First Toronto," "Fourth French-River," or "Fifth," "Sixth," and "Seventh Saskatoon" series). While resisting urges to photograph myself in ways that would induce such responses to the images as 'vain', 'silly', or evoke comments such as 'you must be very proud of your body,' I have felt assured that it is the photographs that viewers respond to (i.e. look at), not me, and, after all, this was the point. Most importantly, these responses have been extremely useful in pushing me toward clarifying my intentions, and contributed to the transformation of my self-portraiture into an archive. 

The photograph allowed me to create a paradigmatic self, open to being viewed, which is different from the space of being watched I inhabit outside of the photograph. In this manner, I feel a connection with Claude Cahun, who  "created a distance between [herself] and the overdetermined image of the [place stereotypical persona here]…by enabling her to control her self-image…Cahun deploys her body as spectacle – but a spectacle of her own creation, a spectacle of distortion.(29)  
 

Throughout this chapter, I have discussed two levels of control that relate to my awareness of self. The first is the control over being seen that I exert through providing a self-paradigm to-be-looked-at: the photographic self-portrait. The second is the control I exert through the specific activity of making the photographs: in acting decisively in response to worry. These two levels of control correspond to the outwardly oriented barrier the photograph provides for me, and the inward conversation I have with myself about myself. 

Similar to the way the photographic practice of cropping undermined an effort towards self-knowledge, described in "All Dressed Up…," I have often found myself, particularly in my experience as a graduate student working toward artistic resolution, confused by the outwardly and inwardly oriented as defined in the above paragraph. Jacques Derrida's words are helpful in describing this confusion as,  "the place where spectator, presenting himself as spectacle, will no longer be either seer or voyeur, will efface within himself the difference between the actor and the spectator, the represented and the presented, the object seen and the seeing object."(30)  
 

Insofar as I have used the mirror as an analogue for the self-portrait, it has been through consistent effort to overcome reception of the images as self-definitive. "These are mirrors that do not reflect a mimetic double…the picture they reflect is not comforting, but reveals the subject's identity as alienated and unintegrated in the world."(31)  Instead, my processes of individuation have been complicated by techniques of self-surveillance, as Lury suggests(32) . Like the "Girl before a mirror" in Picasso's painting of that name, the figure before the mirror is as distorted as the figure reflected back on her. "For [women]…visuality consists in being the blinded object of another's sight; the observed of all observers…" states Norman Bryson in his Tradition and Desire, "and for them equally vision is the experience of Being becoming Representation."(33)   This notion of "Being becoming Representation" clarifies a point in my understanding of my self-portraiture: the point upon which my practice shifted from making photographs toward managing them.  

While the individual images are quite different, any one of them is synechdocal within the greater framework of the archive girl before a mirror. The images are not merely representations or expressions, as I had for so long imagined, but encapsulations of the much more self-reflexive notion of the work as evidence of my experience.(34)  
 
 
 

(1)Jean Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. Joel Weinsheimer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994) 24. 
(2)Grondin, 20. 
(3)Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) 11. 
(4)To be a 'mench' in Yiddish vernacular means to be a fine upstanding person based, it often seems, more on appearances than on actions - not simply a 'person', as the German translation stands. 
(5)According to my word-processor, we now see 'homemakers' in this role. I have used the word 'housewife' here to draw attention to that stereotype, rather than the more contemporary (and politically correct) stereotype of the 'homemaker.' 
(6)Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Visual and Other Pleasures (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1989) 19. 
(7)"Bentham envisioned a circular arrangement of cells visible to a jailor in a tower at its center, who was himself hidden by a system of shutters from their returning gaze." Jay, 381. (8)Mulvey, 16. 
(9)Jay quoting Hans Jonas, 25. 
(10)quoted in Jay, 288. 
(11)I am reminded of the opening reception of Tara Polataiko's "Scotoma" at the Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina, in November 1998. The exhibition consisted of life-size paintings of the artist's eyes, inset into false walls. The artist wandered behind the walls removing the paintings at random, looking through the wall at the viewers instead. It did not take long for the viewers to amass outside of the gallery proper, since the paranoia of being watched grew too strong. 
(12)Jay, 288. 
(13)quoted in Jay, 441. 
(14)quoted in Jay, 87. 
(15)Jay, 104. 
(16) Jay, 89. 
(17)Michel Foucault "The Subject and Power," Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, ed. Brian Wallace (New York: the New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984) 420. 
(18)This experience has been confounded by my university experience, which has been a combination of my high-school experience, the experience of a true learning dynamic based on dialogue, and the experience of something in between. 
(19) Please refer to my earlier list of social expectations/stereotypes, specifically the description of Jew. Culturally, issues surrounding Jewish visibility and assimilation have been long-standing sites of fear of discrimination and violence. I am not able to articulate a definite correlation between my sense of being visible and my being Jewish, although I have an intuitive feeling that they are, somehow, related. 
(20) Foucault, 420. 
(21)Celia Lury, Prosthetic Culture: Photography, Memory and Identity (London: Routledge, 1995) 10. 
(22)Jay, 280. 
(23)Lury, 36. 
(24)Robert Graham, "Here's Me! or The Subject in the Picture," Thirteen Essays on Photography, Raymonde April et al. (Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, 1990) 13. 
(1*)"Not to take pictures of one's children, particularly when they are small, is a sign of parental indifference, just as not turning up for one's graduate picture is a gesture of adolescent rebellion." Susan Sontag, "In Plato's Cave," On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977), 8. 
(2*)Ibid. 16. 
(3*)Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: The Noonday Press, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981) 9. 
(25)Note that when I wrote "to gain control of myself" in 1994, I had not yet developed, whatsoever, a consciousness of the 'watchful eye'. Rather, the statement in 1994 had more to do with jumping on the theoretical bandwagon of photography as an undergraduate. 
(4*)Sontag, On Photography, 4. 
(5*)Who is better than I, with respect to Plato's "Doctrine of Imitation" from Part 5, Book 10 of his Republic. 
 (26)See T.03.05.05.94, archive item 42.  
(6*) Barthes, Camera Lucida, 10/11.  
(7*)Ibid. 13.  
(8*)Ibid. 11/12.  
(9*)Ibid. 12.  
(27)Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: The Noonday Press, 1981) 99.  
(28)Mulvey, 17.  
(29)Heron, Liz and Val Williams, Illuminations: Women Writing on Photography from the 1850's to the Present (New York: I.B. Tauris, 1996) 95.  
(30)quoted in Jay, 93.  
(31)Heron, 95.  
(32)Please refer back to page 18, above.  
(33)quoted in Jay, 105.  
(34)Kathleen Pirrie Adams "Lady in the Lake: Fluid Forms of Self in Performance Video," Promise curated by Deirdre Logue (Toronto: YYZ, 1999) 8.