The Shameless Portrait Project
People who live with shame face a difficult emotional and mental battle every day. Depression. Anxiety. Anger. Low self-esteem. Worthlessness. Shame feeds these feelings and can shape a person’s path in life. I want to shine a light on shame and show a different side of it, so we might heal ourselves and each other.
PROJECT GOAL: To help de-stigmatize shame — to remove the kind of shame and disgrace that causes us harm and keeps us from moving freely and productively through our lives and in this world. To chip away at the power that shame lords over us when we keep it hidden within ourselves.
METHOD: This project is two-fold, pairing photographs of subjects with their own stories of what shamed them. helping them unburden themselves while inspiring others. Shame doesn’t care about our feelings.
Shame gets its strength by living in the dark, hiding within us. We give it that ability, until we begin the process of stripping it of its power and exposing it to the light.
Despite the negative connotations of the word shameless, I want to elevate it as a strength of character—and show that strength (power, defiance, joy, triumph) through the lens of the camera. It was in those shame-filled marginal spaces that we developed a sense of identity. However painful that might have been it was also affirming and transformational.
I believe that to be “shameless" is to free yourself and rise above the stifling weight of undeserved shame.
PROCESS: This will be a multi-step endeavor that is likely to be different for each person. Generally there will be a first meeting where I’ll get to know each subject, unless we already know each other — either way we’ll chat and discuss the stories they wish to share. This will be followed by one or more meetings to settle on a suitable location(s) for the photos that is relevant to the subject and their story. This is intended to be a collaborative process from the start, before we even snap the first photograph.
As a potential subject, here’s what you should know:
One persons story is not more or less worthy than another’s. We’ve been through different things and we’ve lived different lives. Our journey’s are at various stages, but the shame is essentially the same.
I understand that people will be entrusting me with deeply personal stories about themselves. I intend to photograph subjects with the respect that deserves.
There is power in our shared pain — growth. Instead of the stagnation of avoidance.
My intention with these photographs is to capture the strength in the subjects. I don’t want to portray them as victims. I need to show them as survivors — struggles, triumphs and all. These are not representations of the broken and the harmed, but instead of people working through the harm done.
If I’m reaching out to you it’s because you already show a strength of character and the openness to share your stories.
Here are a few questions to get your thoughts flowing. The authenticity of your voice is what’s most important, not style or grammar. You can answer them directly, or just be inspired by them to write whatever you want to share. A couple of lines will do, or feel free to fill a page
When do you remember first feeling shame? Or, when did someone else first make you feel ashamed?
How did that shame affect or change you, and how did you cope?
At what point did you say, “enough is enough.” What did you do to find the strength to turn it around?
What you write in answer to these questions will become a key component to this project.
Work in progress
The following photos and accompanying quotes illustrate the concept for Shameless. Images and words that when combined tell our stories.
Project statement
Shame entered our lives early. The burden of it put on us as children and young people — before we had a chance to learn what it meant, where it came from, and that we had nothing to do with it.
The types of shame we face are boundless. There is shame born from the pain of not fitting norms and social constructs surrounding identity. There is the shame we inherit from our families. There is shame in our struggles with mental health. The varieties of shame go on and on.
Because of them we are made to feel guilty for merely being ourselves. Shame on us.
I know firsthand the self-doubts shame brings with it. For being from an immigrant Latino family, growing up poor most of my childhood, and being gay. I started out life feeling not good enough for it, inadequate. A set-back far too many of us are familiar with, and for which there are a multitude of reasons.
Some of the shame that made its way to me was likely carried by others in my family before me. Intergenerational trauma passed along bloodlines, like an unwanted heirloom. It too made the journey from Cuba to the United States, where it became compounded by the “immigrant experience.”
Shame gets the strength it lords over us by living in the dark, staying hidden within us. We give it that ability, until we begin the process of stripping it of its power by exposing it to the light. Therein lies the potential in sharing our stories and in inspiring each other.
Shameless seeks to project a humanity that needs to be seen and understood as part of the broader human experience. Using the photographic portrait genre to communicate concern both social and personal — transforming it into acts of political engagement.
Identity is mercurial and creative, but the social constructs that govern us resist this kind of fluidity. An honest sense of self becomes even more elusive, often further muddled by abuses collected along the way. Through these photographs I’m asking viewers to question their own perceptions of self and other.
Despite the negative connotations of the word shameless, I want to elevate it as a strength of character. It was in those shame-filled marginal spaces that we developed a sense of identity. However painful that might have been it was also affirming and transformational.
I believe that to be “shameless" is to free yourself and rise above the stifling weight of undeserved shame.
Process & Inspiration
In order to do justice to this project I chose to challenge myself. I had not photographed using film in over 20 years, and this was my very first time using a medium format camera.
My goal was to free myself from the immediacy of digital photography, so that I might make more intentional and creative choices. Photographing with film slows the process down, every frame captured is filled with intention. With film we embrace the “flaw" in the frame. In the same way that this project embraces, and celebrates, the subjects with whom I collaborated.
The choice of color film is intentional. A huge influence on me, photographer Dawoud Bey wrote, “Color adds a degree of material specificity to the description of a subject that makes the experience of the person more palpable and immediate.”
Many rolls of test photos were made. These failed experiments helped to clarify my vision. They brought me closer to my goals for these portraits. As famed portrait photographer Richard Avedon once said, “when you see what’s wrong with an attempt, you can also see the promise of what could be right.”
Further inspiration for this body of work came by way of a book I brought back with me from the Prado Museum in Madrid. Spanish masters, Francisco De Goya and Diego Velásquez, became teachers in my study of gesture and light. My photos take their inspiration from European art history and portrait traditions. The subject, dramatically lit, evokes a similar stoic pose as many historic European monarchs did in their court portraits. Rather than elaborate costumes that would be typical of someone maintaining this stance, the sitter is in an environment that reflects their inner/outer stories.
In an essay published in a book of portraits by Richard Avedon, writer and art critic Harold Rosenberg wrote of the “Split Man.” Rosenberg said, “With the elimination of the difference between inner and outer reality, nineteenth century literature conceived the Split Man, an individual in whom the previously concealed alter ego (Lago’s “I am not what I am") rose to the surface and assumed a tangibility equal to that of the original person.”
For this project I have considered the concept of the Split Man as a by-product of shame, as a coping mechanism. The outer life that masks our inner selves, and the line that is blurred between the two. This concept is what lead to the use of mixed lighting in these photographs. The push and pull of natural and artificial light sources subtly conveys tension. It gives a heightened sense of the physical and the psychological — hinting at the mental space the subjects occupy. interior and exterior; what we show, what we hide protectively. The warm, natural background light and the monumental position of the subject, dramatically illuminated by the artificial light, are a result of this premise.
In his influential book, The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man's World, clinical psychologist Alan Downs poses the question, “If you hold the fundamental assumption of shame that you are critically and mortally flawed, how would you cope with this?” One of the ways, he writes, is to “compensate for shame by striving for validation from others.”
Although written by a gay man, about and for gay men, The Velvet Rage poses questions and answers regarding shame that are illuminating for many people. He goes on to write, “when you confront your crisis of identity and face the truth of who you really are, life begins to take on an entirely new look.”
Shameless demonstrates what facing the truth looks like.
All images © 2000-2023 Omar Vega. All rights reserved.