face
From a friend's writing (about me & my website):
To my knowledge yone.house doesn’t contain a single photo of them. It’s a portrait without a face, a memoir with an obscured author. It’s kind of exactly what we had talked about at the bar: I can only write things directly, and they can only articulate themself through a perfect description of what they’re looking at. Maybe they can’t talk about their brain, but they can create a model of it to present to the world. An exterior. Imperfect and incomplete. Bare, but accurate.
She's referring to the 3D model of my brain contained in my cabinet.
Honestly, I forgot that piece of our conversation about writing, and reading her account of it reconstructs it in the third person. I am pretty sure I was referring to things like this old email excerpt of a list of things in the old Rittenhouse Barnes & Noble cafe when I said I "can only articulate myself through a perfect description of what I'm looking at." This feels not entirely accurate, but pretty close. Perhaps it has something to do with how I'm remembering this moment she's describing, of seeing and hearing it in the third person. My memory issues are getting worse, and I have been thinking about that a lot lately. Hmm.
She missed something on my site: my alt text portrait. It is both contained in a draggable image, and in plain text sneakily hidden behind the draggable (which, honestly, I was reluctant to do). I wonder what she would think of that in the context of me not having a photo of myself. What do you think of that?
Here is the actual alt text of the image:
Framed photograph of a person in their late 20's, whose gender is a mystery and whose race might also be to you (it is white and east asian). They are standing beneath a brilliant flame-red japanese maple which filters red gems onto their body and engulfs the frizz on their curly hair that is longer than they'd like. They are wearing pink sunglasses and their favorite blue sleeveless dress printed with illustrated flowers, and their face makes it obvious that they love the person taking the photo. This text is repeated visibly underneath this image, except for this part: the wooden frame is the one in their grandparents house that contains the last image of their grandmother before her mental breakdown.
I think the text description of myself is the closest representation I can create of myself in the context of my website. As a trans person in early transition I still feel rather disconnected from photographs of myself (though that is slowly changing). Describing the look of love I present, the opinion of my hair's length, the flame-ness of the tree in the background. To assert that my gender and race is a mystery, beyond subjective assumptions viewers apply to a visual photograph. The context of the frame.
It is a more honest depiction of myself than a simple photograph could capture. It is also a depiction of myself that a larger number of people can access. I disagree that my site is "a memoir with an obscured author."
I just made an EPUB for Alt Text Selfies. Which my portrait is clearly inspired by. From their website:
Selfies and self-descriptions are often visually focused, but, to us, an alt text selfie doesn't need to center around visuals, or literally describe an image. As the selfies gathered on this website exemplify, alt text selfies can blend smell, taste, touch, sound, and more. At their core, alt text selfies are an access practice, tools for connecting across sensory experiences and distance.
Maybe I will add more sensory information to my portrait. It currently lacks this.
Beyond this brief description on the project website, I found it interesting that some of the submitted selfies are clearly describing non-selfie photos, i.e. ones taken by others. But in this context, they are all selfies. That makes sense to me: when writing your own image description of a photo someone else took you have the same (or more) agency than when you are taking the photo yourself.
I think that alt text selfies add more subjectivity than just sensory information. It's clear that I do that in mine. I think my exterior appearance is very well represented on my website, thank you very much :-).