For my self-portrait series, #Lauren, I photograph my childhood nameplate necklace as my subject, allowing it to emerge from the past, possessed of a will and spirit all its own. As a teenager, the necklace’s cliché, gold scripted “Lauren” served as an assertion of my newly emerging identity, and years later, as I make steps towards forging a family of my own, it becomes a steady anchor tying me to my former self.
Paradoxically, there’s both a delicacy and a violence about the way I engage with the necklace. It wrestles with me, cuts into skin, pulls my body this way and that before becoming merely a shadow reflected on my limbs. In one frame, I am holding it my hands; in the next, it falls just out of reach. The necklace, it seems, is no longer my own, but even as it slips away, I hold fast to its memory.
The title of the series, #Lauren, is inspired by the prevalence of “selfies.” As a self-portraitist and storyteller, I have always used photography to probe inwards. Photographing myself was once an intimate rite, but as the landscape of photography shifts, what was once private domain, exists in the world so openly and abundantly.
In this way, the “Lauren” necklace also becomes a metaphor for photography itself. Both the necklace and self-portraiture once helped to define who I was, but they have since become unreliable, unhinged, and precarious.
#Lauren is an ode to the past, but it’s also about our perpetual obsession with possessing ourselves. As we age, our sense of self disintegrates and coalescences many times over, and still we have the need to hold onto something concrete and everlasting, perhaps even an object as seemingly banal as an old piece of jewelry.
I, Lauren, will metamorphose again and again, but the necklace will remain fixed, spelling out all the things I once was.