"I was looking back to see if you were looking back to see."

*

I bought a thrift-store camera at the Salvation Army last week. Put batteries in it, loaded an expired roll of film.
Toward the end of the film -- and hankering to finish it quickly -- I took the camera to the bath with me.

The truth is that I shoot photos of myself in the bathroom and/or myself in the bathtub often.
And 90% of the time, it's because I'm attempting to finish a roll of film that seems endless.

Which means I end up taking a lot of these images:

early morning sleepy hair

toenails like Skittles

proofs that my face existed, almost interrupted by the light

This fairly small, reliable camera is nice because, well, it's small and reliable.
But it refuses to focus on anything that's less than five feet from the lens.

(I'm giving away why I got frustrated with it and set it aside after shooting only 15 or so images.)

BUT!
Ms. Smarty Pants that I am, it only took me a week and a half to realize I could set the timer and pretty much shoot as closely as I could possibly want, if I didn't mind the focus being oddly placed, which I decidedly don't.

In this moment of not-such-Genius, I conjured this shot:

fingers made up of too much flesh

Next, inclined to shoot a fairly matter-of-fact tourist self-portrait in the bathtub, I placed the camera on a stack of odds and ends that rose up on the back of my toilet. Seeing this image in positive print gave me a sense of the uncanny. Not because of any one special attribute. Except that maybe it's because it lacks any One Special Attribute. I generally rely on visual poetics to portray an intensely inner or intensely outer exchange, and seeing an image of myself (taken by me) that had no distracting accoutrements was abrupt to say the least.

But if you know anything about me, then you know that there's Nothing

Nothing

Nothing

I like more than an abrupt realization of the self, including the image-self.

that I was looking back at me...

The above photo was my second-to-last shot on the roll. Figuring I would finish my film with another similar shot, I pointed the camera lens at the stack of books etc. that worked as a make-shift tripod, focused the shot and then pressed the shutter -- only to realize I had not set the timer.

So below is an image of my tripod: new journal, a book on film apparatus, a collection of Bataille stories (with an introduction written by Mishima) and a clear box of mix-and-match bath salts:

navel-ish gazing