This photo series was originally made for a topic called "The Oblique Selfies" from Intermediate Photography class in spring 2018, and was later named "I Repeat Myselves".

 ​The reason I use the plural form of "self" is because I believe that based on different situations, our ways of reacting to the world are all different; there is more than one “me”. This is can be shown by nine photos of a different but same “me”. “Different”, is because each of the photos are of a different pose, which indicates in different situations we show the different self; “same”, is because it’s the same body making these poses and reactions.

 ​The “more than one me” idea creates the uncertainty of “the self”, and this is why there is no face in any of these photos. The person in these photos is me, and is also you. This indeterminacy of self and identity is also shown by these photos being out of focus. We are forever seeking “who we are”, and it’s not clear.

 ​The out of focus also shows my sometimes confused and vague personality. Professor Laura Burns had asked students to write ten nouns and adjectives to best describe ourselves before we started the project, these two words were on the top of my list.

 ​From left to right, my poses are almost symmetrical. And that is the way to show “repeat”. We do the same things, but just the variations make them seem different. History repeats itself, time repeats itself, and we repeat ourselves in every single day. Myself, and many other people are in similar situations, which could be understood as “repeats”, but since each of us have different variations, this makes our own lives unique.

 ​The whole series was inspired by an oil painting called The Lovers, II, by Rene Magritte, and the pose of the middle photo mimics that painting. I love that painting because of the uncertain identities of the two people, since their faces were not shown. Instead, Magritte used two heads covered by veils to create the emotionlessness, apartness, and it draws my strong curiosity of wondering about the relationship and identities of the two people in the painting, just like my relationship to this world. In my photo, the two hands were mimicking the veils. This photo has the strongest feeling among these photos, so I choose to "lift it up" to emphasize that image.

 ​My expectation of the series was to create the feeling of confusion, absurdity, and mystery that I experience in myself. This series is also the distance between me and this world. All the photos are "muted", because when I cannot find the words to express myself and the distance, the only way I can do this is to be silent.