Letting my unconscious, rather than my intellect, dictate the progression was important. For reasons I don’t entirely understand, being nude became part of the project early on. And working against that white wall near the two front windows in the so-called living room became a central point.
—Melissa Shook
I might’ve mistakenly read Sally Stein’s essay in the back of the book, or at least half of it, before I had to set it down to look at Melissa’s pictures. It has foreshadowed a bit of how I think of Melissa Shook’s work and has done so in opposition, which may or may not have the net benefit of being complimentary for the correct (in my view) reasons. Without trying to be overly argumentative, I would like to explain. Whereas Stein’s essay is clearly written and is drawn from what seems like a long relationship with Melissa Shook, one is given the impression that the portraits throughout this book and that of the photographic selfie were pretty much unknown at the point of this work being created in the early 1970s, which is a slightly strange assertion from a writer and former professor from Irvine.
The inclusion of Josiah Hawes’ self-portrait and Robert Cornelius’s early 1840s self-portrait in the text as (at the point) relatively unknown examples of self-portrait belittles a significant history of self-portraiture from Hippolyte Bayard and the invention of the medium forward. Instead, it is suggested that what Melissa was doing at this time was revolutionary. It was not. And that is not a problem. The whole history of the medium and art itself exists with genuine examples of this type of work, and they were well-known and documented by the time this work was created. Melissa was a product of her time, and that is absolutely fine. And it is enough. Her photographs, in their aggregate, are fun, unassuming, and performative, and the resulting book Daily Self-Portraits 1972-1973 is an excellent monument to Shook, who sadly passed away in 2020.
What grips me most about the portraits in this posthumous volume of Shook’s work is the relative naivety in her self-portraits. They are without much artifice, although there is no lack of theater. Instead, they insinuate small actions trapped in the locus of the banal. Unlike later artists employing self-portraits to self-mythologize, such as Francesca Woodman, Hannah Wilke, Gina Pain, and Cindy Sherman, Shook’s self-portraits are strengthened through their relative purity and lack of artificial posturing. Whereas they resonate with photography, performance, the first wave of American feminism, and all the transgression that implies, they are much less daring, despite Stein suggesting differently.
Given the environment of the times, from Warhol to the Vienna Actionists and back to the more aggressive feminist uses of the body, Shook’s images read as mercurial, inward, and without the flare associated with either raging desperation or a political movement/moment with which to cling to. This makes them much less of a knockoff than her contemporaries, but I surmise that it is precisely that her self-portraits were not groundbreaking that makes them human, direct, and special.
Sequential photographs are markers of decay. In 2024, the photograph-myself-for one-year-trick has been staged to the point of fatigue. Still, in fairness, Shook’s sequential imagery, though hardly unique, was early in using this straightforward idea to mark the changes to the body over time. A single mother of a daughter, Shook processed herself and her body through self-portraiture as a marker of something essential, if not visceral, conversational, if not avant-garde. Her aspirations are in many ways simple and are drawn from a history of the nude and the self-portrait throughout art history. Stein claims that self-portraiture is thought of as a feminine act, brazenly equating it as such for the apocryphal link to women’s vanity.
Whereas we might agree that the pursuit is apocryphal, I don’t think in 2024; I can reason with Stein that I or many others think of self-portraiture as a female pursuit, nor do her references of Lee Friedlander and other men used in her opening gambit seem to track with that notion. I don’t want to spend too much time on Stein’s essay. I prefer to focus on what makes this book great. Shook’s work is not an exact epiphany, a trailblazer, or a series of firsts. We have become accustomed, no, enslaved to the notion of creating a mythical context around artists and art production, especially in hindsight. Though it is easy to understand why we do this, emphasis, the genius quotient, and its iterations limit work like Shooks and cast it as something it is not, namely monolithic or an absolute original.
What I love about Shook is knowing that she made these images in the early 70s from the confines of her tiny New York apartment where she was raising her daughter (on her own), who is in the book as an imagined continuation of Shook herself in the sequence. People, plants, and furniture come into the frame. Melissa was not afraid to move her camera around-an, an act of typological sabotage in which we cannot precisely read the images as simply about her or her sequential aging, eschewing the need to play out the action where we forensically look at her face to see if new wrinkles have become lodged in her furrowed brow, to see if unwieldy gray hairs have formed over the year or to see perhaps if she has had a hair cut. Instead, we follow Melissa around the apartment. We see other people come into the frame, notably her daughter, and we know the goings-on of her life stapled to the interior of her flat.
In the end, Melissa becomes more performative for the camera, almost as if she is bored by the constant need to check-in. She even misses days, or some images do not turn out (the explanation is likely in the second half of the unread essay). They are left white in the book, belying the exact human quality that makes her absence sincere, that of the single working parent unable to cope with everything all at once, and some things give, and we forgive that. The white squares, delicate, begging to be pinned to an assertion about death, are simply reminders of the whole viscosity of life, with the parabolic elixir sometimes drawing from the cup lip spilled into an indeterminate location, things and people left unfixed. As far as metaphors are concerned, Melissa reminds us of the reality of life and that inconsistency is one of its finest consistencies. She also reminds us that not everything be so damn monumental and that small gestures are also essential. This is an excellent book of Shook’s work. It doesn’t need to be monumental; it simply needs to remind us that work is made in the most cramped of quarters and that there is something humble in work, not trying to carry too much water.
Apart from the large volume of pictures found in the book, what I like about Self-Portraits 1972-1973 is the work’s refined order and the book’s minimal design. It is not begging to do anything that has not been done before. It is not trying to reinvent the wheel. Other artists have done this project differently, some even more consistent than Shook. Francesca Woodman and the familial myth built over her will certainly overshadow work like Shook’s when people reach for similarities, and again, that is fine. And yes, some of the work looks comparatively close to Hannah Wilke’s S.O.S. Starification Object Series from a few years later. Conversely, Shook’s book is not imbued with fantasy, politics, or other things. Shook’s work is unusual because it is usual and ordinary and betrays every reality of most artists making work for the sake of an overwhelming ego covering up deep insecurities. It’s a pretty honest book that should merit your attention.
