Self-portrait, aged 47 C-type prints mounted onto museum board. 1/3. 66 x 49 cm, 2001 I made this underwater self-portrait in the azure seas of Trellis Bay in the British Virgin Islands. Thanks to Jud and Betsy. The idea was to use an enclosed environment‚ as an equivalent to the confines and restrictions of the photo-booth. Under the surface, within the water, using the automatic fixed focus of a simple hand held camera within a waterproof casing. The element of chance was important, and of not looking through the viewfinder, but rather viewing myself as any fish would in those circumstances. Four pairs of photographs are printed as mirror images and then collaged together making up a picture that reads initially as a skull and exists also as a memento mori. Underwater isolation, blurred vision and muffled sound recall Eliot and The Wasteland. "…the drowned Phoenician Sailor, (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)" It is sinister, and I am almost drowning under pressure. The central 'box' within the image, acts as a kind of viewfinder into eternity, like those endless reflected spaces you find when mirrors are placed opposite one another. The notion of eternity and the suggestion of death affirm the fact of the self-portrait being a permanent record of a moment in time, and in my case, aged forty-seven. The work relates to other self-portrait work, in 1985, photographed in the guise of a mermaid attempting to swim in the booth, and to the Rainbow Portraits of 1992, seven coloured backdrops to wildly tossed hair. See http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/rideal/text_1.html << back