On set of a commercial, Shari and I come up with this idea of doing a macabre photoshoot for her new dress, the mini-muu. The concept evolves over weeks, and texts and emails. Months later, we’re brainstorming with photographer Kelly June Mitchell, looking at a picture of some creepy twin girls when Kelly suggests that we edit a twin into the photos in post. I involuntarily blurt out my lifelong desire for twinship. I have always wanted to be a twin. An identical one. Not a clone like Calvin had. Not a triplet. Just another me. My hesitation in modeling dissipates, however fake and fleeting, I finally get to be my own twin.
Playing with these pictures is a new experience for me. I’ve long approached editing tools as technical means to create work for someone else, not for myself. Being able to manipulate these representations and versions of myself has me thinking about things that are buried pretty deep. One past me is bartender. It’s a job that taught me a lot, but it took a lot too. I learned about people, at the expense of my sense of self. Here, I rewrite my narrative: past me serves me our own blood at the basement bar. It gives us the sustenance we need to reinvent. To change. I finally feel like I’m turning into someone that I want to be. Turning back into myself. A relief since there’s no possibility of ever being anyone else.
It’s been years since I was in front of a camera so it’s familiar and foreign because I’m not the same person I was back then. There’s a freedom in photography that doesn’t often extend to film. A trick of the light is more coercive in a single moment. Things become however they’re framed. There’s an intuition to just follow – Kelly and Shari and I gently wheedle it out. We scurry around trying things. We don’t agonize over what we had in our heads, we work with what is here in front of us now.
And then, alone, at home on my computer, I get the same intuitive gut feeling when I finally figure out what the hell my face was saying or could’ve been saying – what that hand of mine was trying to convey. While I edit, I feel a flutter of twinship. There is the me, that was captured on camera and there’s me, now. In this moment we both exist.