John Michael Swartz

Taken 4-28-2025 in a small waterfall that is gently modified by the locals with a series of basins that are covered in delightfully damp moss. I suppose I'm using "underwater" somewhat imprecisely here, as there are all sorts of variations for photographing with water that I've explored. These are mostly through water, though the water is mainly moving vertically in sheets/fingers/drops. I would like to know whether there is an established lexicon for the æsthetic properties of water.

I suspect there's an "Underwater Selfies Part I" somewhere, but I'm not sure if it's on this blog yet. Some years ago, I did in fact do another selfie in this exact spot, except it was a more traditional 4x5 and it was I who was in the clawfoot tub. I reckon the temperature was between 50 and 55 degrees F.

In retrospect, I'm somewhat disappointed that I worked so hard to maintain a neutral facial expression despite the shocking conditions. I suppose 4x5 makes one a bit precious and pretentious by default. But I hope that if I ever return to the format, I'll be able to be a bit more daring with it. One of the great things about going digital — and especially with a cheap, rugged digital camera — is that I'm freer to do the types of "action photography" experiments I've dreamed about since at least 2009.

In any case, I know which photos I have in mind and I'll post them up here at some point.

A word about the word "selfie": I'm using this word instead of "self portrait" because it's a fun and funny neologism that came about during my time as a young adult (and so it's not quite so "new" anymore, is it?). It's also a serious matter to try to accurately express a sensibility when describing this work. Photography is relatively new technology. But the specifics of the technology, from its physical properties, to its accessibility, application, and reception, the cultural registers it occupies, have multiplied and shifted.

I think one of the most charged, chilling, complicated selfies I've seen is the one that was taken by Dzhokhar Tsarnaev but as it was printed on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine — paywalled, but the cover image is widely distributed elsehwere — following the Boston Marathon bombing of 2013. I could and should do a more thorough write-up of the controversy over this selfie-turned-magazine-cover, but I think the TL;DR is that most people don't want to do the work of separating desire, beauty, or constellations of identity from a shockingly cruel, morally reprehensible act. (We have all the stories about vampires to do that for us.)

There is a lot to confront and that confonts us when we regard other people, and even more so when we regard them as images on surfaces besides their own flesh. I'm a gay man who came of age learning mainly how to see and be seen as digital images on the internet. It's not so fun or easy for me to feel good about it. I'm really careful about how and why I do it, if at all.

At times it feels as though my explorations with these underwater selfies is to obscure or obliterate my own face. And this would not be entirely untrue: as a teenager, I came to hate my own face so much that for many years, I would automatically remove my glasses when entering a bathroom so that I wouldn't have to look at it in a mirror if I didn't have to. I still have my off days with it, but the situation is a lot better, even as I enter middle age (which I seem to be doing with some grace, at least physically).

In these pictures, at least, I'm having fun. Any obliteration is in the psychedelic sense: a sort of merging with the rest of the world around me.

More on this later, I guess? I have a therapy appointment in 30 minutes.