THE DISAPPEARING SOUL: SELF PORTRAITS IN THE TIME OF COVID
Lens Magazine|April 2022
I was fifty years old when I first exhibited a self-portrait. The image was part of a black and white portrait series of breast cancer survivors inspired by my own battle with the disease and the resulting mastectomy.
Jean Karotkin
THE DISAPPEARING SOUL: SELF PORTRAITS IN THE TIME OF COVID

My intent was to explore the counterintuitive nature of female beauty and the ways it can be enhanced by angry scars and indomitable courage.

Though the series, which I published as a monograph titled Body & Soul, featuring a self-portrait with my mother, also a breast cancer survivor, it would take another two decades and a global pandemic before I, once again, turned the camera on myself.

Since an early age, I’ve been disinclined toward self-exposure, far more comfortable seeing than being seen. When I was a teenager in Dallas, TX, I was diagnosed with Scoliosis, a sideways curvature of the spine that occurs just before puberty and, in my case, became more severe as I grew. This meant spending three years confined to a steel brace, relegated to the social periphery.

It was a profoundly isolating time, during which I became acutely aware of the complicated relationship between one’s physical circumstance and psychological state. The experience changed the way I viewed the people around me. How, I wondered, were they trying to be perceived? How did they perceive themselves? I realized that hidden truths could be revealed simply by taking a closer look and that when you’re invisible, as I felt I was, no one notices when you’re zooming in.

Diese Geschichte stammt aus der April 2022-Ausgabe von Lens Magazine.

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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der April 2022-Ausgabe von Lens Magazine.

Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.

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