Self Portraits: interview with the artist.

Diary of living with chronic illness

If you’re not familiar with my work, I began Containment Diaries just around the time Covid started— hence the name. But it

has little else to do with the epidemic. It is a visual diary of living imprisoned with a debilitating illness which for over ten years has gone unexplained.

There is a written counterpart to it which I publish here in a serialised way.

The images were never meant to be sexual. In fact it is as true to how I really am on a daily basis as possible. More like reality photography. I was surprised when so many viewers saw them as sexual because I saw them as nothing but a representation of a pathetic, wretched body which is all that is left behind.

Yet as years have gone by, I cannot deny that the ‘body’ started playing a larger role in the series.

There is a sense of ego involved in taking self portraits— from controlling the camera, to the way the world sees you, to performing…because as real as it may be, all self portraits are a kind of performance.

Here is an int…