The Looking Glass Self
A book of Photographs and Poetry 
by Alaa Badr

The looking Glass Self 

       Artist’s statement (as you see it)

 

I heard a friend confess after watching a movie: ‘it was incredible to see people like me depicted on screen like that, with such dignity, with such subtlety’ Therein lies the power of representation.

 

Often translated as taswir and mistranslated as tamthil, to see your represented accurately is to feel seen, to be presented with proof of your existence and to have a witness to the corners of your soul where you thought no one was watching.

 

This project takes taswir (literally and figuratively) a step further and probes into its emancipatory potential as well as its clear limits. What happens when others’ representations of ourselves are not accurate? What if they feel less like a homecoming and more like estrangement (ghurbah?. What happens when their words and images of us are the only vocabulary we have to speak about ourselves?

 

There is a name for this human condition: the looking-glass self. I see myself as you see me, and in the process I lose my bearings.

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There is little technique involved in these images, only a tripod, a repurposed car rearview mirror and social expectations. The interaction between all three elements create loaded images.  This contrapuntal nightmare is recreated every single time two gazes meet but rarely exists as an object of its own. I am interested in this liminal space between the self and the Other. A space that can as stretched ad infitum or come so infinitly close (yet never touching, becoming  an asymptote - an existential loneliness, mathematically proven).

 

These images are my attempt to make sense of how others perceive me and how much over or under correction have resulted from it. Maybe I can finally explain why I rub my inner wrist anytime I’m feeling pre-nostalgic.

 

Ps: here are the chair, the mirror mask and the tripod, please feel free to confess your love, hatred, empathy, jealousy or tenderness to the mask wearer.

 

There Are Limits to Empathy

 

There are limits to empathy I learned, the hard way

It often felt too limiting my vantage point, this keyhole of my being

Maybe it’s the reason why photography is my medium of choice when loving someone through their eyes, or shedding my skin for their gaze

 

We leave our stance, to look through the looking glass

And find a world, perhaps more interesting, perhaps less so

But a world how they see it, a world their own, and in this shifting, in this trading of places, is empathy

 

Empathy unchecked is a double negative, cancelling the self

After all we are our tastes in sum, our values emanating, our final vocabularies (if) unchallenged

 

Empathy at its height is a phenomenology in reverse

I lost my bearings within you, my dear

Dance with me, my sweet, to end a contrapuntal nightmare,

Since no lens can capture a photograph both ways