Photography byJoseph Barker

I am a visual artist and photographer that focuses heavily on nude self-portraiture, but my relationship with nudity wasn’t always this casual. I was raised in settings that attached shame to the human form. Additionally, I was not in environments that accepted or appreciated queerness.

Because of this, my relationship to nudity was always rooted in taboo. My appreciation of the male form as both aesthetic and sexual were formed in secret and I carried it with me like a weight. It wasn’t until my late 20s that I acknowledged how unhealthy my conditioning on nudity was. It took years for me to change my perception of my own nudity and even longer to find power in being exposed to others and allowing others to expose themselves to me.

Now it is finally something that feels very natural. Having gone from the person who didn’t even want to be shirtless in front of people to now being known as the first one in the friend group that will get naked in the pool — it’s definitely been a journey.

Initially, I wanted to learn the theory of photography without the weight of external expectation. When you photograph a model or a client, there is a transaction that occurs where the person in front of the lens allows the photographer to expose them (literally or emotionally) in exchange for a good or service rendered.

So having another person in front of my lens immediately creates a dynamic where I owe someone a finished product that they are also pleased with. An artist’s journey to proficiency (and hopeful mastery) is a messy process with many trials and errors. I wanted to cultivate a creative space that I felt safe to fail. With self-portraits, my opinion of success or failure is the only thing that matters and, thereby, I am prioritizing my own fulfillment in my art instead of bending my work to what I think someone else would want.

I think it’s important as an artist to have a clear understanding of why you create and what you want the consumption of your art to impart on the viewer. To me, silencing external voices by focusing solely on self-portraiture in the beginning allowed me the solitude that was necessary to know what message I am trying to convey in my art.

For me, self-portraiture is a safe space. When I am alone with my camera, there is no masking. There is no code switching. There is no catering to another person’s expectation of who I am supposed to be. Because of the safety I feel in that space, it is honestly one of the only times in my life that I feel capable of bringing every part of who I am to the surface. At first, I thought I was solely using nudity as a form of body acceptance after years of struggling with self-consciousness and dysmorphia.

As a queer man, I am constantly bombarded on social media with what my body “should” look like, and it makes it hard to remember that my body is perfect exactly how it is in the present. So, I wanted to expose myself in the images to prove to myself that my body is beautiful right now instead of falling for the narrative that it would be beautiful if I changed it. As I have gone further into this exploration of myself through self-portraiture, I realize that this process has actually been less about accepting myself as I am on the outside and more about accepting myself as I am on the inside. My self-portraits give me permission to be raw, emotional, messy, imperfect. They have become a vessel for me to finally learn that I don’t deserve to be loved despite those aspects of myself, but instead I deserve to be loved because of those parts of me.

One of the first sets of images I created was a series I called “The Color of Darkness.” They were very simple — just shoulders up in the dark with various colors of light illuminating my face. It was a study on how a single image’s tone and meaning could change simply by changing the color of the light on my face. With the same pose I could show that in yellow my face looked soft and somber, but if I changed the color of the light to red that same face would look menacing and twisted. It was a major “aha” moment for me in my photographic style.

I find power in the fact that my choice of colors has the power to warp the reality of the photographic evidence I am presenting to the world. With this power, I am able to not only impart on the viewer proof that something occurred, but I am also able to overlay that proof with the emotion behind the image through the use of color. Almost like the anecdote that you “see red” when you’re angry. In reality you don’t see red, but in photography I can alter the reality of the scene through lighting or editing to color the scene with emotion. With this ability, you are transforming a 2D image into a 3D piece of art by adding an emotional dimension.

Through my art, the greatest lesson that I have learned is that you are allowed to love yourself through the entire process and not just once a goal is reached. That the greatest form of self-care is to be gentle to yourself and release yourself from external expectation. That sometimes the greatest act of rebellion is to accept that peace can be found even under imperfect conditions if you allow yourself to feel it. That the only validation and approval that will ever satisfy you is if they come from your own lips.