Sahara M. Borja

First there is the image Man Ray took in 1929. This one is supreme. It is abstracted just enough. Then there is the one my father took of himself at 24 walking through the hallways of his new job in Toronto after having just arrived in Canada from Colombia as a young man. More of his body is visible but so goes the low-flying-35mm-self-portrait-in-motion from the 1970s. Then I took this one, some sweaty summer in Brooklyn. It took me maybe 50 rolls of film to realize I wasn’t going to get anywhere wearing any kind of fabric. It was a slow, painful, wonderful disrobing of the self. Skin and flesh – because at some point we are just skeletons of ourselves. This we know. I am interested in how I came to take this photograph never having seen Man Ray’s or the one my father took, prior. Or perhaps I had seen my father’s when I was a child? And maybe he showed me the one Man Ray had taken? At this point I cannot distinguish between what was shown to me on a contact sheet and memories, that I lived in reality, in this body. It is all a continuum, I find, and I am either doing as I am compelled to, driven by a force I cannot see and by referents I don’t remember, or going through the unwritten markers of creatives past, until I finally come into my own and choose a shape.