I've done a lot of self portraits over the years. As I was learning to draw and paint, I was an available model and I felt a need to explore my thoughts on a personal level, so I experimented with paint and line and trying to find expression on paper and canvas. I've probably taken less photographic self portraits, serious ones anyway. I'll jokingly hold up the camera and shoot a few frames for a funny picture now and then, but serious self portraits, not really that many. Recently I've been struggling with my artwork, feeling it lacks who I am, more of it seems to be what I see or what I think about external things, but less about what I feel. My earliest work was about feeling, about how I felt about life and the world around me. It was all about inner expression and not technique or some political or social commentary. I somewhere lost this and even though I think some of me shows up in my photographs done for stories, these are still external in large part. The photograph below was one of those holding up the camera and snapping a picture - shots done with a point and shoot film camera back in the late 1990's. It was not a serious self portrait at all at the time, but became one years later when I started a series I called Re-Shoots where I began re-photographing old photos in different ways and holding them up to lights. This picture seemed to be me more than any of the others, I'm not entirely sure why, but it did. The other day I decided to begin exploring self portraits again and I ended up taking a similar angle and thought about the connection of past and present and felt it was a fitting portrait of me at this time. Though I'm generally a happy guy, moments of reflection do creep in on us from time to time. This is one of those times. Photographs by Richard Sayer