SELF PORTRAIT AS PHOTOS FROM MY PHONE
Process Notes:
This video-poem began with another poem of this same title, first created in words and itself inspired by the disorganized collection of photos stored on my phone—screenshots, gifs, food shots, book pages, photos of photos.
When I started to pull in the pictures to accompany the text, the images took on their own associative meanings in color, lines, and composition, and when I added a timeline it enabled them to interact in a way that enriched transitions and multiplied the visual throughlines—which isn’t so different from the poetic leaps and logic of written poems.
While this image-based iteration is in conversation with the written version, it exists here as its own visual vernacular.
Credits and Inspiration:
The self portrait poem was the parting assignment from Marwa Helal’s Brooklyn Poets workshop Poetics of I-mage, where discussions of form, format, visual language, and image provided a place to explore and engage with various techniques whose function—according to M. NourbeSe Philip in her essay “The Absence of Writing or How I Almost Became a Spy”—is always the same: “that of enabling the artist to translate the i-mage into meaningful language for her audience.”
A recurring image in this piece is a digital collage that combines three works: a photograph from Nadirah Zakariya’s “Girlhood” exhibition, a photograph from the series “Home” by Gohar Dashti, and a detail from the mixed-media work “funerals and birthdays” by Patrick Martinez.
The artwork on the Eight of Cups tarot card is by Pamela Colman Smith, artist of the Smith-Raider-Waite deck.
The photo of birds in murmuration and the gif of the frog and venus flytrap are from the internets (Pixabay and 4gifs.com, respectively).
The lunar calendar screenshot is from stardate.org.
The drawing of the fish with an umbrella is from The Book of Embraces by Eduardo Galeano.
The design with the double moon and pink hills was coded using p5.js as part of the workshop Weaving to Code, Coding to Weave.
All other photos are by me, taken in San Francisco and Colma, CA; Queens and Millerton, NY; Oaxaca, Mexico; and Bohol, Philippines.
Some Self-Portrait Poems:
Self-Portrait as So Much Potential by Chen Chen
Self-Portrait with Tumbling and Lasso by Eduardo C. Corral
Self-Portrait with Profanity by Safia Elhillo
Self-Portrait by Erika L. Sánchez
Self-Portrait as War Museum Captions by Monica Sok
Self-Portrait as Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong