These self portraits are from 2014. I remember the night I took them. My apartment on the ground floor of our family brownstone. My parents and little brother were long asleep. And I was bored.
I am always bored.
I was in the midst of applying to medical schools, and all I wanted to do was take photos, write, read, and feel… free?
My apartment was artistically decorated. I spent so much energy and time making the space mine. I didn’t have my own room growing up, always needing to share it with my big sister. Then I had roommates all four years of boarding school. In college I never had roommates, thankfully. However, I still had to move out of the dorm room every year. I always craved my own space, something that was mine and could feel consistent.
My apartment was that.
My parents allowed me to live there for free. It was empty anyway, as long as I shared all my home-cooked recipes and made other concessions as a daughter. It felt worth it.
This was the bedroom, my favorite spot in my apartment. Right in front of the fireplace. I always fantasized at night about what it would be like to fall asleep to a wood-burning fire. I would go online and read about ways we could open the fireplace and restore it.
This night, it was almost 4 a.m. Sleep wouldn’t come, and I looked around my apartment to entertain myself. I remember seeing the camera, the blue table I used as a chair, then the Africa clock hanging on my wall. It seemed like the best props for something. I was likely in the nude, which I typically am at home, and found this skirt that I got secondhand from my boyfriend’s sister and just set the self-timer.
I remember feeling proud of the photos, wanting to post them on my Tumblr, yet worrying about what medical school admissions officers would think.I asked someone close to me if I should. Would it look bad?
They said, “Well… it might not help. Also, I’m unsure if I should be concerned about you. Why did you take them?”
It was enough to flatten my already weak confidence in sharing my art. So I buried them away. I always wondered if I would ever share them. If I would ever feel burdened less by social expectations to do so.
Apparently, this is the moment I am. There are some nice things that come with age and growth and experience. You care less. Or at least I do. But that question… “Why did you take them?”
I always ask myself why I gravitate toward portrait photography. It is what feels most natural, and the style I practice the most.
I bought my first DSLR in 2010. It was the first big purchase I ever made for myself. I worked at Harlem Children’s Zone as a camp counselor and bought my first Canon Rebel. I automatically had an affinity for self-portraits. It was something about capturing myself the way I wanted. It was something about capturing a moment, a feeling, a period in time.
That’s the power of photographs. They save the moment, bookmark it, and allow you to revisit it.
I have an obsession with asking people how old they feel, inside and out. The responses always vary. I always feel like my younger self. Like this part of me can’t grow up. Some of it is that I am caught up in the past, that I am stuck in nostalgia, and that life seems to move at a pace faster than I would like.
When I look at this 24-year-old Nagela, I feel like I am still her.
So when I look at this photo, I feel like the same girl. Seeking perpetual freedom, craving passion, curious, relentless in her pursuit of knowledge, sensitive, bad at sustaining friendships, hopeful but equally pessimistic, scared of making mistakes but always trying, loving a good laugh, and always open to change.
Then reality hits, and I remember how much has changed. Or I want to warn her about what the next decade of her life will be. The tough things that will come.
Leaving medicine. Becoming a yoga teacher. The stresses of a consulting career. The ups and downs of living abroad with her soulmate. Losing touch with many of her high school friendships. Her father will die. The brownstone will be sold. Multiple health challenges. The looming feeling of societal failure.
It won’t be easy.
But she will survive.
And she will have some nice photos in between.
Leave a Reply