Several years ago I was given a final photography assignment: a faceless self portrait.
What?
A faceless self portrait.
This, in the excruciating growth and misunderstanding of my early twenties.
Who am I without face?
Who are you without face?
Like every assignment in college, I started it just a few days before it was due and I spontaneously drove 45 miles southeast from my apartment in Salt Lake City into the Heber Valley. It was spring, late April, so I dressed in my favorite long, green summer dress and I let my hair down. I did not consider why the assignment was compelling me to this area, I only knew I wanted to find a country road. The morning was quiet and the sun positioned perfectly at my back when I finally set up my tri-pod at the start of a dirt road. Still not certain of what I was trying to capture, I took several shots of the road and the fields and the cattle in the fields and then became frustrated as I was trying to realize myself through cows. Just walk. After setting the timer on my pre-digital Canon 300, I walked. I walked down the dirt road and continued to walk even after I heard the camera take the shot. 2 weeks later I moved from Salt Lake to Heber.
Naturally much has changed over the last 11 years and I think about how the faceless self portraits would have changed, too, had I taken one annually. They probably would have included elements of restlessness and travel and an urgency of experiencing something new, always. Surely there would be elements of loneliness and isolation and personal strength and fears of becoming the crazy dog lady by the end of winter. There would be the un-authentic portraits portraying me as a cowgirl or a slight red-neck, ha ha ha, hiding my city roots, as well as some very authentic portraits of an embrace and adjustment to small town life, activities, and people. One faceless self portrait would include a silence that is so loud it terrifies, and a good half-dozen would include a broken heart. As 2010 begins its end, I imagine this year's: Unlike the first photo that captured the back of a young woman walking down a dirt road toward her new life, this year's image shows her feet on the ground, not bare-foot and whimsical and ready to run....instead they are settled into the shoes of her roots on the landscape of her essence.
I hold onto the idea that if you allow it, life will just kind of lead you in the direction of your heart. That final photography assignment may have just been that, an assignment. But for me, it was God taking my hand.
See what you discover.
What is your image?
Who are you without face?
