I have been told that I am one of those people that need to be watched but never actually seen. Sometimes it seems as though people are staring at me, waiting for me to make eye contact or acknowledge them. Or maybe I am just not good at putting on the right type of face in front of them. But that is what I have been told.
I am not one of those people.
If you are not yet a Patken, please do yourself a favor. Take a moment to just look in the mirror. See yourself in the eyes of your mind. See yourself as you are. Then look in the mirror again. You will, you will, you will.
The thing is, I don’t often have to look in the mirror, and I am usually pretty quick to do it. I look at myself in the mirror every day (and every night, too) and I am always amazed by my transformation from a young, vibrant, and athletic kid to a man in his early thirties. I look at myself and I am the same person I was years ago.
It’s funny how you can be in the same physical space and see the same thing. Your brain is pretty good at tracking the details of the image you are seeing. As you look in the mirror, you are instantly reminded of all the things you have seen and done in your life, and you see yourself in those moments as well. That is also why you can look at yourself in the mirror or in your own mind and still have the same image.
A lot of us have a lot of photos that we took in our past, but we never really looked at them. We only ever thought about them. In that sense it is like looking at photos of yourself in a mirror or through a glass and seeing them as a reflection. This is why I am so fascinated with the idea of going back to childhood and reliving things that you haven’t experienced yourself in any detail.
By the time you get to that age you are going to have experienced many things, and so you might not even know what to write about. But there is something about looking back and thinking about yourself before you were born that is so powerful and beautiful. I think about how I used to be happy and so on. I think about how I was afraid of my mother, and so on.
In patken photography, you start with an image of yourself in some detail and then look at it in all its different forms (whether it is your face in a picture or a mask). It seems to me that if you are able to look at yourself in so many ways, it gives you a sense of being a different person. When you relive that time you were a baby, and what you were to be, it gives you a sense of yourself as a grown-up.
Patken photo is what I like to call “selfie photography.” The idea is to capture a moment of yourself in so many different ways that you are able to look back on it in a way that you never could before. I think being able to look at yourself in so many ways gives you a sense of being a different person.
That’s why it’s important to have so many different ways to look at yourself. It allows you to be more than a one-dimensional object. It allows you to have so many different sides to you that you can be more than just the person you were yesterday and tomorrow.