THE DISAPPEARING SOUL: SELF PORTRAITS IN THE TIME OF COVID

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

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.