VIII. Interview with Nap Jamir II

Nap Jamir II made the Auto-retrato series in the early 1970s. They were some of his earliest exhibited works. The following description of them is excerpted and edited from an interview with curator Clarissa Chikiamco on 21 September 2021.

In 1974, ’75, I was really exploring photography. I kept jumping from one format to the other. I mean I would do sequential photography and after I discovered my grandmother’s yearbook, I started doing Xerox. And then after that I discovered mimeographing machines. And then I discovered Foto-Me [the automatic photo-booth] and so I was like all over the place. So OK, Foto-me is there. It’s a fixed position. You sit down. The camera’s there; gives you a warning when you’re supposed to have your picture taken and the flash goes off. Straightforward ID photo. I said, what can we do? What can I do? How can I challenge it? What if we introduce things that can change it? So I said, why don’t I bring a mirror so that it could photograph itself. Because if it photo me, I photo you! So it kind of took off from here. I played around with the mirror. Then I used a bigger piece of mirror and then I started angling it to look outside of the booth. And then I also said, what if I cover the flash? Once there was no light source, then I could introduce my own light source. So I’d bring a flashlight and play around with it. Then I brought a candle. I played around with different light sources. In the next years, I actually want to continue this. I want to bring in different backgrounds, like in the mountains and then I’m just sitting there in front. It becomes a precursor of Instagram.

Auto-retrato series was actually my experimentation. I wanted to do pictures that couldn’t be contained in one shot. So it became more a series of things. And at the time, I discovered the works of Duane Michaels and Arthur Tress. At the time, the only person that I could work with was myself so I said might as well do some self-portraits. I could just take a picture of myself, but I said no, there’s got to be something else. And it evolved into a series of three things, like literally suicide portraits. The first one was the knife series. It’s a shot of me in a small space. Usually that’s where I would work. There was also where I would eat, and so there was a knife there in front of me. I take it and then I stab myself, right? I used a slow shutter speed so you could see that blurring, which is also very important for me. Cinema, right? Movement. Cinema. So that was the approach I used. I used a very slow, like half a second, shutter speed. OK, so you stab yourself. So what? Why don’t we go like beyond the frame? I stab myself and then literally you jump out of the frame and say, OK, where’s the effect of that in a print? Yeah, what if I puncture the print so that it jumps out of the frame? There’s supposed to be blood; why don’t we just put blood out there? So I did that. I put a liquid—well, my blood—dripping down outside. And if it went beyond the print, it should go past that into the matboard and down the wall if it’s going to be exhibited. I would say that was one of the most productive periods of my life in terms of exploration.