In this image, I used a handmade pinhole camera to create a direct positive self-portrait. The slow exposure time (5 minutes) produces motion blur and a spectral doubling of the face and hands, evoking the physical manifestation of existential anxiety. The gesture, hands clutching the throat, suggests both suffocation and awakening, a moment suspended between terror and revelation.
This self-portrait emerged from an experiment in stillness that became an encounter with fear. Working with a pinhole camera, I submitted to the long exposure, the waiting, the trembling, and the inability to hold still, and allowed the camera to witness that threshold. The resulting image is not a performance of death, but a moment of confrontation with it.
The blurred face and uncertain outline of the body register what Becker called the “trembling creature,” the human awareness of its own finitude. Here, the blur becomes a residue of that awareness: a trace of movement within stillness, of life struggling against its own disappearance. The gesture of choking is both literal and symbolic: a confrontation with the impossibility of speaking about death and an insistence on making that silence visible.
In this way, the image serves as a through line of rupture: a visual record of death anxiety that has been changed by the creative process. It is not meant to resolve terror but to give it form—to hold it long enough to see what meaning might arise from the void.
I’m beginning to work in art-based research (ABR). This approach brings creativity into the realm of academia. What is practice-led (or practice-based) research? How does it work? Stay tuned; I’ll show some examples as I write about it a lot in the coming months. It involves my ABR journal—affect fuels the inquiry; exegesis translates it. The arts-based research journal is the site where the two meet, where feeling becomes knowing and knowing becomes art. ;-)