Riley Reid 2011 — Signed Jim Camp Archival Pigment Photograph Edition of 5

Description

I made this portrait of Riley Reid on September 26, 2011, very early in her career. Around that time, I had become fascinated by something I was seeing everywhere: as cell-phone cameras got better, people suddenly seemed obsessed with turning the camera on themselves. I saw it constantly among the actors and actresses I photographed. It wasn’t something I thought was “good” or “bad” —it was simply something new. I was struck by how quickly the camera had gone from something you pointed at the world to something people pointed at themselves. I started photographing people photographing themselves. That fascination eventually became Various Self-Portraits, a series made entirely from photographs of people photographing themselves.

This photograph later became the cover image for my photo zine Various Self-Portraits, published by These Days in conjunction with my photography exhibition Sexual Fictions. I’ve now returned to the original digital photograph to make this edition of five prints myself at the synaesthesia press. Each is printed with pigment inks on Canon Premium Matte paper, then titled, dated, numbered, stamped, and signed by me. For me, it’s both an early portrait of Riley and a photograph about photography itself—who controls the image, who is looking at whom, and what happens when the subject brings her own camera into the picture.

An early Riley Reid portrait by Jim Camp, later selected as the cover image of Various Self-Portraits, printed and signed by the photographer in an edition of five.