The Itch the Camera Never Quite Scratches

Sarah Nicole Harvey describes her process for this self-portrait series with an economy I appreciate: make a hot coffee, light a cigarette, take your clothes off. She’s twenty, based in Toronto, and has been working as a model and photographer for three years—bridal, beauty, editorial nudity, the full range. The self-portrait work is what happens when there’s nobody else around to shoot.

The series is called Bored Stiff, made for Sticks & Stones Agency, and the title is doing real work. She describes herself as always bored, always restless, always unsatisfied—which sounds like a complaint but in the photographs reads as a creative condition rather than a personal problem. The best self-portrait work tends to come from exactly that tension: you can’t leave yourself alone, so you turn the lens inward and try to get to the bottom of whatever is making you itch.

She’s appeared in Italian Vogue and Nakid Magazine among others—work that operates at a different scale and register than shooting yourself alone in a room. I find the alone-in-a-room stuff more interesting. There’s a quality of attention you get when the subject and the photographer are the same person, with no one else in the frame negotiating how to look. Just the question of what you’re willing to show yourself.