I'm Eating Cake

05/03/20

by Sarah Joyce

There’s never a “good time” for a pandemic; everyone I know is frustrated (at least!) for totally different but equally important reasons. I’m a professional photographer, and I’d already spent the naturally slow January and February time recovering from burn-out after working non-stop for the last few years (and a whole lot of the years before those). While recovering, I thought a lot about what parts of work I like and don’t like, and who I even am without a stack of schedules and lists. I never really came up with an answer. I tend to be slow to figure those things out, and I’ve always figured them out through working, anyway. 

Then March came, and I was ready to work, but there was no work for me. As an “inessential worker,” I stayed home. My personal unknowns became wrapped up in the bigger and immediate worldwide unknowns drowning us all. This time, I wasn’t going to be able to bury myself in making photos for other people to get away from my existential crisis.

Feeling lost and boundaryless, I had the idea to take some self portraits. Self portraits are my favorite genre of picture, and I haven’t taken any in many, many years (and, like, you can be sure those weren’t very interesting). I love seeing an artist’s face looking back at me. I love seeing someone the way they want to be seen. It’s the way I try to take photos of other people, and I haven’t turned that on myself since I was young and in college and still trying to make myself look like I thought other people thought I should.

The other day I talked to a friend who said she was happy to be working on some paintings, because they remind her who she is. I was totally stunned. I was working on these self-portraits for the opposite reason: I have no idea who I am or where I’m going. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing with my life and art and “career.” And it went deeper: I’m in a particularly intense moment of a long-term reassessment of my sexuality and what I want that to mean, and how I want to express that. I’m feeling freer than ever, but also adrift and terrified, faced with an expanse of empty newness. I’m always in my head too much about all of this, and everything else, so I thought I’d do the most basic thing: take some pictures of myself, to try and sort it from the outside-in, for once. 

Before this, I was taking photos of other people, for other people. I spent hours looking at hundreds of photos and thinking: if this were me, would I love this photo? Would I want to share it? Is this a flattering angle of this person’s face? Are they making a weird expression, and if so, is it like, BAD-weird? Or weird in a way that’s cool, that shows they’re having fun? Is the person who’s paying me for this going to like this photo? I have that conversation with myself about every photo that gets through the editing process. 

It’s been such a relief to put all of that down and only make photos that please me. I quit making work for myself for a long time in my 20s, and only re-started by letting myself make pretty pictures without thinking about anything deeper, or getting caught up in why and what it all means. (That always comes later anyway, for me.) I’m not really worried about looking attractive in a gaze-y way, but also I think about attraction constantly, because I don’t think any photo is really outside of that framework.  

Some of the clothes I’m wearing are for aesthetics, and some are just because I like them, and maybe some are costumes, and all of them are really all three of those, because isn’t everything we wear? 

I started with the photo in the face mask. I wanted to cover my face, and I wanted it to be all white, and I thought of the selfies folks post when “practicing self care,” because I thought it was funny to take a more “formal” version of those. 

Then I had the idea to be eating cake and was obsessed with the idea of a bright red velvet slice and how that would look perfectly luxurious with the gold and black shirt that was a prized find at a Palm Springs thrift shop. It took me a week to track down the cake, between not being able to borrow a cake pan and after that, planning my less-frequent grocery runs to a store I was reasonably sure would sell me one slice. My cat showed interest in that shoot for the first time, and brought my super-serious cake posing a lot more down to earth. 

Wherever I started, this is now also about me being at home all alone (with the cat, of course), and wondering what that looks like, and what I look like, and what even matters at all. 

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Sarah Joyce is a photographer in Chicago. She specializes in portraits and event photography and has shot for places like Bandcamp and the Chicago Reader. She has otherwise been documenting the cultures, subcultures, and countercultures of Chicago for the last 10 years or so as a co-founder of GlitterGuts.

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Editor Mairead Case is a writer, teacher, and editor in Denver and Chicago. She publishes widely, and wrote the novels TINY and SEE YOU IN THE MORNING (featherproof, 2020 and 2015). Mairead holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a PhD from the University of Denver. She teaches English: full-time to eighth graders, and part-time in the Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics MFA and the Denver Women’s Jail. Mairead is Poetry Editor at Maggot Brain and has been a Legal Observer with the NLG for over a decade.