XIX - The Sun

What's Your Favorite Photo of Yourself?

What is your favorite photo of yourself? Take a second to think about it, maybe dig through your camera roll for a few minutes.

What photo first came to mind? How old were you? Do you look particularly happy? Healthy? Were you having a really good hair day? Was it taken at a special time in your life? A special day maybe? Perhaps your wedding day, or graduation, or your birthday. Did you know your picture was being taken? Did you take it yourself?

This question would have been a lot easier to answer fifty years ago, before digital photography led to the now thousands of personal photos we carry on us at all times. How many of those images are of ourselves? Maybe a few hundred? More? How many photos of you exist in the world? Passport photos, security camera footage, other people’s vacation snapshots you happen to be walking in the background of, mid-scream rollercoaster photos, etc. How strange that the answer is a finite number - one that none of us will ever know. In an ideal world I could lay them all out next to each other. Put all of them in one place and maybe get a complete view of who I actually am, what I really look like. And then narrow them down until I find the true favorite.

Having photos of ourselves has become incredibly accessible and independent. The invention of the front-facing phone camera has forever changed the way we picture ourselves, the way we interact with and relate to the world. Do you think we notice that every minute we spend on our phones, looking at other people, is a minute we spend with a camera pointed at us? It’s not like it’s on. It’s not like anyone’s watching. Are they? I suppose it’s possible, even if paranoid and unlikely. Are we so used to that camera that even our subconscious no longer cares? Or is a tiny part of us maybe performing even in the solitary moments we spend on our phones?

This is starting to feel a little overwhelming and black mirror-y, so I’ll end the question vomit there and show you what came to mind for me when I thought about my favorite photo of myself.

When I pictured it in my head, I thought my eyes were closed and I was smiling much bigger than I actually am. But I remembered the snow angel and the rainbow glove + hat combo perfectly. I’m surprised I landed on this image, because it’s not like I love the snow, at least not anymore. It’s not sunny, and in photos nowadays I generally only seek out good sunlight. I don’t remember being in this moment at all. For some reason though it’s the one image I kept coming back to in the few days I thought about this question.

I was laying down on my back deck - the old one, before we rebuilt it. The moment feels peaceful and playful. A child’s surrender to the big cloudy sky, and wonder at the mere centimeter of snow it gifted us. You can see how absorbed I was in the sensations of snow angeling. Who’s to say if I knew the camera was there or not. At this age, I didn’t seem to care about how the camera would render me.

Before I remembered this photo, I thought about more recent contenders I might choose. Between 2015 and 2017 this photo was probably my favorite, because my dad took it when I was too focused on changing my camera settings to notice, on a night where I made an exciting breakthrough as a photographer. I also thought my eyebrows and jawline looked really great.

Since December, my favorite ~current~ photo has probably been this selfie I took in my mom’s room after staying up late to crochet the balaclava I’m wearing out of yarn my aunt gave me over the summer. I like it because the yarn matches my eyes and the light reminds me of my favorite album cover.

That is until this Tuesday, when my friend sent me this film scan from our trip to the beach a few weeks ago. I mean look at that fit. So casual, so cool. Look at that LIGHT! The direct flash makes me look like a sticker somebody put over a picture of the beach. This is obviously a screenshot of a text of a scan of a piece of film, but the fact that this photo also exists as a physical negative - taking up real space and costing real money - makes it feel special as well.

However, overall, I think I’d look back at these photos in a few decades and discard them all at some point in the hypothetical narrowing down of my favorite photo ever taken of me. I imagine it’ll always come back to some childhood image. If not that one, maybe this one.

I’d like to take a second to acknowledge how especially narcissistic this newsletter has been (or at least felt) so far. Did I ask about your favorite photo of yourself just as an excuse to share some of mine? Maybe. I truly am interested in what everyone else’s answers might be, though. Did you also choose a picture of yourself as a child? Your “true self”? Did you change your mind after I shared some of mine?

If you didn’t give yourself enough time to think about it, I encourage you to try, and to share. Send me your image! Show me what you value most about yourself, what features you like the best, what state you feel the most beautiful or handsome or happy or genuine in.

This week’s card is The Sun, which represents warmth, charisma, core personality, clarity of sight and mind, your own inner light, your inner child. Sometimes it can refer to masculine energy, whereas the moon is traditionally associated with feminine energy. It’s an optimistic card, one that encourages you not to dream, but to hope and to play.

Notice the wall behind the child. As we grow older, we build new, “adult” personalities around the ones we were born with. The child-self becomes an inner-self, one we keep guarded.

I started thinking about this concept when researching my astrological birth chart. For a while, I had a hard time relating to many aspects of my gemini sun, but felt very understood by my virgo rising. I don’t consider myself talkative or gossipy. I don’t think I embody the “social butterfly” persona attributed to geminis. I am however very organized, practical, loyal, straight-forward - traits typically associated with virgos.

Except when I thought about it a little more, I remembered who I was as a child, and how different she feels from who I am today. I was a chatty kid. I believe I started talking well before I turned one, and for many years apparently didn’t shut up. On multiple occasions growing up my mom had to remind me to give other people some of the air time. I liked to be in charge - other kids and some adults called me bossy (yes, it hurt). I loved learning. I absolutely thirsted for knowledge. I was so messy - I didn’t care to be anything other than a tornado in every room I entered.

My virgo traits surfaced slowly with exposure to the world, as rising signs typically do. The wall rose so high though that it completely blocked out the sun for a while. Recently, I feel I’ve excavated a few of those bricks in favor of a window.

Happy Saturday, I hope you, too, see a bit of sun today.

Jordan