Like many people, including many photographers, I hate being photographed. Until recently, there were almost no photos of me anywhere, now I see images of me all the time, thanks to digital camera technology and social media. In our time, more and more people have cameras – video, cellphones, digital cameras – and no longer hesitate to photograph me or ask me if I am all right with it. This is, of course, a test of identity. I am reading a new book I got for Maria – the self-portraits of Vivian Maier, the brilliant photographer who hid her work from public view.

More than 100,000 of her street photographs from New York and Chicago were found after her death. Not even her closest friends knew she was a photographer at all, and she was a great one.

Curiously, a good number of her photos were self-portraits, they are a powerful statement about identity from a gifted artist who hid hers her whole life. I can no longer avoid being photographed. We have two Open Houses a year, friends and visitors whip out their cameras all the time and take pictures of me. I am photographed constantly and see my image all over Facebook and many blogs online. And really, even if I dislike it, how can I complain? I take photos of all kinds of people all the time – this is simply a reflection of our time, everyone’s images are everywhere, the very idea of privacy or boundary has vanished.

I understand that I have personal issues about this. I have never found myself attractive, the less so as I grow older and especially a few weeks after my heart surgery. Open heart surgery does not leave one feeling photogenic, but still, the problem is older and deeper than that my own sense of self, my own identify.

I do not only take photos of beautiful people, I most often do not. I do not care what people look like, and need not to care what I look like. I want to be comfortable with me, Maier turned to self-portraits in a perhaps heroic effort to affirm her own identity in a world where she did not feel comfortable enough to share a single one of her great pictures with another human being.

So, inspired by Vivian Maier, and by my own search for authenticity, I have decided to do a series of self-portraits, another creative challenge, another step on the road to being honest and learning to love me as well as my life.  I have nothing to hide, nothing to be ashamed of. Beauty is about spirit, not looks, I know that.

My face and my body have taken me far, I do not wish to think ill of either. I don’t want to be narcissistic about it, I don’t love me enough to get into a bathing suit and take a photo of that, and I don’t want to take too many photos of me at all. But if everyone else is going to do it, I realize I have the need to consider my own image, and the way I feel about my own identity. So I’m going to take some images of me until I get used to it and maybe, even like it.

This photo was taken in a mirror at a flea market in Stephentown, N.Y., I just held the camera up to my chest and pointed it at the mirror. The color is from a bulb reflected in the mirror.