Intimation: On the Nature of Self-Portraiture
Intimation /ˌɪntəˈmeɪʃən/
1) The act of making something known, especially in an indirect way; intimating. 2) An obscure, indirect, usually subtle suggestion, indication, or hint.
The essence of self-portrait photography is performative. It is not a mere image of the self, but a residue of a performance—an action that takes place in solitude, under the watchful, indifferent eye of the camera. The photographer becomes performer and documentarian, exhibitionist and voyeur. Before the shutter clicks, the room is a stage, the frame a mirror, the lens a silent accomplice.
The immediate audience is the camera, and only the camera. Future viewers—the critics, the strangers, the lovers—exist merely as shadows in the mind. Their presence is theoretical, often irrelevant to the private intensity of the moment. There is no need to charm the lens. One must only face it.
This solitude grants a rare form of freedom: a space where the self can be examined, disassembled, reassembled.
To pose before one’s own camera is to ask, endlessly: Who am I, here, now? Who might I become if I shift my shoulder, if I avert my gaze? Every gesture, every tilt of the head, every concealment of flesh or exposure of skin is a form of argument—a suggestion, a provocation, an intimation.
Claude Cahun understood this game before most. Their self-portraits are not confessions, but codes—cryptic signals sent across time, disguised in costume and shadow. To photograph the self is not to explain, but to elude. Woodman, years later, let herself disappear. She blurred into doorframes, melted into wallpaper. Her work was a whisper: I was here—but only just.
To photograph oneself is not to reveal, but to construct. And construction, unlike confession, is active. It requires staging, choice, resistance. Friedl Kubelka’s Pin-Up series makes this tension explicit. Her self-portraits borrow the language of erotic display, but twist it inward—posing not for a male gaze, but for her own.
The result is neither parody nor indulgence. It is something stranger: desire turned reflexive, exhibitionism under self-surveillance. In these photographs, she controls both the fantasy and the frame.
Intimation is my argument for this mode of looking inward. I perform before the camera not to present a stable identity, but to gesture toward its complexity. In every image, I offer a version of how I see myself, how I wish to be seen, and perhaps even how I fear I am seen. My body becomes a site of projection—for gender, queerness, anxiety, longing. The space around me, whether intimate or unfamiliar, becomes part of this theater.
To make a self-portrait is to play with proximity. One is both too close and never close enough. The self, when photographed, is never the self—it is only a trace of its performance.
The photographic self is neither revelation nor lie. It is something subtler, more slippery: an intimation. Not what is, but what might be.
—Daniel Hill, 2022