Self-Portrait, Every Year
In Self-Portrait, Every Year (1972–2021, 6 min. 58 sec.), McCafferty filmed himself shaving in front of a mirror once a year and reciting a similar line each time, “I shave in front of this mirror.” Repeating the same action annually for nearly five decades until his death, the work charts his physical transformation and aging. Reflecting in 2007, McCafferty said, “For me it’s a meditation. When I look at the still prints that I made from the video, it’s really interesting to see my whole life as one unit, with past and present going back and forth on each other.”
Robert L. Pincus wrote on Los Angeles Times in 1984, “It is an eerie piece, not because of what's dramatized but because of what isn't. An entire life is lived between this series of self-portraits in a prosaic mirror, but none of it is revealed. And this is just what McCafferty desires to do. "A story would be decoration, it would be beside the point; this is a record of me in real time and space." But in these fragments of him one can perceive change: The mirror is different, the face ages slightly. However, this is not autobiography, any more than the "Autobiography" [Autobiography, 1976–83] is. Instead, it is an acutely compressed record of a life.”
Glenn Phillips, interview with Jay McCafferty, in California Video: Artists and Histories, ed. Glenn Phillips (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2008), 166–69.
*Robert L. Pincus, “To see ourselves as others see us,” Los Angeles Times, February 19, 1984, p. 96, review.
GRI Special Collections. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2009.M.25). Gift of Jay McCafferty.
© Jay McCafferty
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