The Shameless Portrait Project
With this series I’m trying to provide a better understanding of what it’s like to overcome shame — showing images that allow us the opportunity to share ourselves openly, and to provide role models that break the negative stereotypes and help us to better understand and heal.
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. It gets its strength by living in the dark, hiding within us. It thrives there 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. After all, 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.
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.
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.
When sharing your stories, the authenticity of your voice is what’s most important, not style or grammar.
“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”
“In high school, I got the usual “faggot” remarks every now and again, once even by a teacher who, to gain favor with the class that hated him, called me, “you stupid little faggot.” But what brought the most shame to me? Ninth grade. Civics class. I sat two rows in front of three of the most popular, masculine, football-playing jocks in the grade. It started randomly, one throwing a small piece of paper at my head in October. I remember turning to see where it came from, and three sets of cold, mean eyes were staring back at me. I flushed. They saw. And that was the start.
Every day for the entire school year, I was pelted with pieces of paper. Hands clenched, shoulders hunched, I thought, “Maybe they won’t do it today.” But they did. Every day. For the entire school year. The shame that brought me (“they picked you because you’re a stupid little faggot”) was long lasting. Like, stuck in my being for 20+ years. At the time, I was frozen. I thought about suicide. I thought about murder. I thought, “how could people be so cruel?” I counted the days for that year to be over, and within each day, I counted the hours until I had to go to the class. When the class was over, I counted the hours until I had to go to it again. “I’ve got 23 hours before I have to be back in that room.”
I still think about that time. Those days. Those boys. That cruelty. I think of the Rodney that was—14 years old and small and timid and until that moment, only believed in goodness. Man, what I wouldn’t give to go back to him and hug him so hard.
I still fight shame. It’s there. It will always be there. But it’s not who I am. It’s just a part. And I try to take it as a positive. When shame pops up, I can say, “I see you. What’s up? What do you need?” Shame can be a reminder that, in that moment, you are feeling “less than.” And it’s an opportunity to take that and turn it around.”
“I thought I knew all the things that made a happy life — get a good education + a good paying job, buy a home, find a husband, have some kids & boom happiness. So I made sure to follow a recipe set out for me to live the “American Dream”:
1 part hard work & determination
2 parts access to resources &
3 parts luck
But I realized there was something very wrong with this equation. The math wasn’t working… what was I missing? Where was the error?
[It took a lot of living to figure out the new equation]
New recipe: 3 psych ward visits, 3 weeks in group therapy, 4 months in 1:1 therapy, & leaving a toxic work environment will/can lead you to living your most authentic life.”
“My childhood started off full of shame. I was reared from the age of a toddler, on the south side of Chicago, during the civil rights movement.
My foster mother, Ms. “Doe Doe,” would tell us that the United States government pays her every month to take care of us since our mother was “a whore with drug and alcohol problems.” She instilled fear and shame into us with her abusive tactics and extremely harsh language.
We got whippings daily even when we didn’t do anything wrong. Ms. “Doe Doe” was a street savvy spinster from Springfield, IL, who taught my twin brother Alfred and I how to work as her house servants.
I felt my shame grow as some children at school began to learn that my twin brother and I did not have real parents. They could tell there was something different about us and we were teased, especially during recess.
Alfred would sometimes imitate what he saw other kids do. He’d talk on the pay phone, pretending like he was talking to our real parents.
Years moved on, and High school was just as complicated of a journey for us. After transferring through four different Chicago area High Schools, we graduated in June of 1981, then our August birthday arrived. After surviving 18 years in the Illinois foster care system, that was the day that we were emancipated! We were now legally the age of an adult who could live anywhere they wanted, to go find independence. Our curse had been broken!”
“I took violin from age 11-14 and a half. My violin teacher was also a revered deacon at my church.
He was extremely stern and held high expectations for all his students. My mother begged him to take me on as his student so he did. I was not musically inclined.
He was so frustrated with my playing one day. He aggressively pulled me in between his legs as he sat at my mothers piano chair. He then proceeded to thrust his body into mine as he pulled up my skirt.
He raped me every Saturday morning for three years. He told me this was what love feels like. I believed him. My first experience of shame was in discovering by age 15 that I was not his beloved, but his discarded.
I’ve had to learn for the past thirty years how to not hate men and myself since that realization.
His careless discard led me to believe that I was worth no more than trash. Therefore, I treated myself as such. I deprived myself of food until my body began to fall apart. I cut myself so that I could manage the internal agony I experienced daily. It felt like a reasonable compromise. It appeased the voices I kept hearing that told me to kill myself. Instead, I cut deep enough to prove that I could hurt myself more than he hurt me.
It took me over 20 years to accept my fate and offer myself forgiveness before my mind could believe that I deserved kindness and compassion.
It was when I had my son, Ian Jerome Lee at age 36 that things changed. When I looked into his deep eyes, I knew that I was now obligated to find valid reasons to live vs merely stay alive. He and the homeless clients I’ve had the fortune of working with at Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program taught me that life can still be worth living, despite the desperate cruelty that exists in this world. That there is more beauty to be discovered within the rubble than in the pristine. ”
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 © 2000-2024 Omar Vega. All rights reserved.