Jones’ article was a little hard for me to understand completely, but there was one point she made that really stuck out for me and made me consider my relationship to images of people. On p. 148 (in the reader) she states, “…we project ourselves into  the screen, becoming the person …whose image we engage or making her over in our own…image.” I’ve noticed over the course of my life (and I have considered this many times before) that after watching films I sometimes leave the theater or the living room with a weird sense that I am the main character I have been watching, or have taken on aspects of his/her personality. I almost feel as if I have participated in a life, that is my own, through them, and that somehow we are the same person. I wonder if other people get this same sort of sense, which I’m guessing they might. This feeling can linger for days, where I may think about actions of mine differently as if I were acting them through the mindset of that character, even though the action may not have changed at all. I don’t recognize this identification often, but when I do, I feel lost within it, as if I’m still stuck in the world created by the film. I think this is the reason why I have such an interest in image and in making films; I am reaching for the desire to eventually transfer myself completely into that world of my multiple selves. This realization is new for me as I think about this now, and it makes perfect sense when I remember the fact that I so desperately wanted to be an actor or a singer as a child, wanting to actually become that part of me that was created by the projection of myself onto images of people. I had only thought of these ideas before in relation to moving images, but it rings true for still images as well. Every time that I look at an image of another person, I relate to it by thinking of how I might feel if I were the person depicted. It opens a big door for me to realize this fact. I honestly feel that I get a strange sense of being a specific person or people in the situation in which they are depicted as if it were a picture of me. I can even feel my facial expression change so slightly to resemble that of the person in the frame; which must be the case with most people. This seems to be related to the mirror, literally. Because we have the ability to constantly see ourselves in mirrors, it is only natural that recognizable images of other human beings exist subconsciously to us as mirrors of ourselves. Going back to my first blog post about the overwhelming amount of digital images, and my uneasy with photographs of my friends, it makes sense to me. The other does not exist in the way that I previously thought; the term “other” refers to the double of ourselves, not something separate. This is why I dislike pictures of myself so much, unless they don’t look like me in the way that I see me. They don’t look like me in the way that I see myself in the mirror, and this bothers me to a great extent. The only pictures I have liked of myself are the ones that look the most like me as I see myself in the mirror or that look nothing like me. I took a drawing class one summer and had to create a self-portrait. This picture I drew I copied directly from what I saw in the mirror. I photographed this self-portrait and it is one of the few images I have of myself that I think actually looks like me, even though it is not a photograph in itself. 

        I have two selves, the self I know through the mirror and the self that everyone else sees, and pictures of myself remind me of this duality, making me uneasy. Because I in a sense perform what the person in the picture is performing, it gives me the uncanny feeling that I think Barthes was discussing when I try to perform what I was performing in a picture of myself. There is a recognition there that I’m reinterpreting my actions instead of reliving them. I think Jones gets at this idea in the paragraph surrounding her quote above.

            Carlson states, “Performance is always performance for someone” even when the audience may be the self. My performance in photographs is for someone (that is not myself because I am not physically taking the picture) but I feel doubled when I look at them because I become part of the audience that is not myself, and therefore am forced to consider myself as not myself. I imagine this must subconsciously affect everyone. This is why I feel better with an image of myself in the mirror that is not actually a photograph. It is an account of myself actually performing for myself alone, with no device mediating, such as a camera.