How do you see yourself? / How do you not want to be seen? / How do you want to be seen?

When I was eighteen, I came across a quote by Margaret Atwood: “Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy. […] Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy:[…] unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”

This quote is from the book The Robber Bride and it petrified my mind and broke my brain. I could not move past it for months, and it still makes me question everything from time to time. Later I read Ways of Seeing by John Berger, in which he writes about the position of women as both the surveyed and their own surveyor: “She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life.”

Yet I find both these conclusions very constrained by gender binaries and insubstantial in terms of intersectionality. Moreover, does any of this change when I am the one behind the camera? Is it different just because I am a woman? That seems too easy and limited. Does it change when you give people agency in the way they pose and hold themselves? Does it change enough? I don’t know.

How much of our life is a performance? Is that performance for ourselves, or for someone else? How aware or unaware am I, are you, of how we do or don’t want to be seen? And to what extent do we act accordingly? Which sides of ourselves do we choose to show? Which photo do we choose to represent us? How do we position ourselves in front of the camera? Is all of this active or passive? And finally, does any of this actually matter?

These are a lot of questions and not a lot of answers. Perhaps it is best to conclude as seminal filmmaker Agnès Varda does by saying: “OK, they’re looking at me. But I’m looking at them.” The act of deciding to look, of deciding that the world is not defined by how people see me, but how I see them.”

So how do you see yourself? And how do you see others?