The 100 Day Project #26
Invisible City - The Handprints We Carry
Tucson, Arizona, USA, 2008
The 100 Day Project, Day 26
This is a rare self-portrait. I don't often turn the lens on myself — not out of discomfort, but because I am far more fascinated by other people. By the details in a scene, a moment, that I alone notice. The particular way light falls across the mist of a waterfall. The joy or sorrow in a person's shoulders. The world is endlessly more interesting to me than my own reflection that I see every day.
The chalk handprint on my shoulder was placed there by a dancer — a fellow participant in The Invisible City. A moment of connection, brief and physical, leaving its mark. I have always loved what a handprint represents. A remnant of a person, a moment of connection. Proof that someone was there, that they reached out, that they touched you and moved on. A memory made visible.
We are all covered in handprints we cannot see.
The people who shaped our foundations. Who handed us our first real belief in ourselves. Who said the right thing at the right moment and changed our trajectory. Their handprints are on us — in the way we carry ourselves, the courage we contain within us, the work we choose to do in the world.
And then there are the other handprints. The ones left by people who took more than they gave. Who marked us with their fear, their cruelty, their indifference. I carry those too. A biological father incapable of another person's needs above his own and used his hands to create physical harm. Relationships that eroded rather than built. Moments where I handed my trust to someone who treated it carelessly.
I love this self-portrait. It captures me in a moment of pause, of reflection, of absorption. A moment of growth and awe. I was in deep therapy at the time it was taken, recovering from a disastrous breakup in which a former fiancé destroyed nearly my entire photo archive. The cruelty is so inconceivable, the event so indefensible, I rarely speak about it. Words simply fail to convey the price I paid for loving a man who wasn't worthy of me. The handprint he left is one I carry quietly, and alone because so few people can relate to a life event like that.
Time gives perspective, but not absolution. The negative handprints don't fade — they become part of the architecture. The wounds showed me where I was strong. The losses taught me what I valued. But I won't pretend the healing is complete or the story is tidy. Some prints carry a heavier imprint.
When I look at this photograph I see myself as I was during the hardest work of my life — and doing it anyway. The therapy. The excavation. The slow and unglamorous work of rebuilding. The daily choice to invest in myself with no guarantee of what I would find on the other side. In this self-portrait I see the seed of who I am today. The stability, the compassion, the patience. A new creative path to building a new archive. I am grateful for the love I poured into myself during those years. I truly earned everything that followed.
I made this photograph during The Invisible City — a five-week, site-specific experimental arts lab exploring public space in downtown Tucson. Co-directed by Lisa Bowden, the project was a collaboration between NEW ARTiculations Dance Theatre and Kore Press, a Tucson-based feminist press. More than 20 women artists came together to create texts, dances, sound pieces, film, photographs, and drawings within the urban core — envisioning and activating new workspaces out of vacant parking lots, city plazas, and sidewalks.
About the 100 Day Project: A global creative challenge where thousands of artists share a piece of their practice every single day for 100 days. I'm joining creatives around the world, and I'm excited to bring you along. Each day I'll be sharing one of my photos — some recent, some old, and some from my current project — along with the story behind it: where I was, who I was with, and why I love it.