Self Portrait 1
Painted with the icy precision of photorealism, Self Portrait 1 depicts a toddler in a high chair, mouth slightly smeared, caught mid-bite. The expression is unreadable — alert, detached, almost watchful. What appears at first glance to be sentimental is instead unsettling in its stillness. This is not a snapshot of innocence but a self-conscious staging of it.
Part of a series of six paintings, the work predates the smartphone era but feels eerily prescient: a time before the compulsive documentation of childhood became cultural reflex. Here, Alexander turns the lens on himself, but from a vantage point no child could possess — adult, distanced, and already archived.
Shortly after the series was completed, the academic Malcolm Bull visited the studio. He stood before the paintings for some time, then pointed to the eyes. The light, he suggested, had been retouched in the negatives. In commercial studio portraits, if a child appeared dull or unfocused, brightness was sometimes added directly into the pupils. He traced the small shape of the tool used — its mark still visible in the catchlight.
The observation altered the work. These were photographs Alexander had known since early childhood, images that had quietly shaped an emerging sense of self. If the light had been inserted, then the aliveness they seemed to prove was already constructed. Even the earliest version of the self may have been adjusted.
The result is less a portrait than a reconstruction. A meditation on memory, image-making, and the uneasy realisation that identity may begin not with experience, but with retouching.
Self Portrait II is in the permanent collection of the Pompidou Centre, Paris
Exhibited: Pompidou Centre 2016.
Further reading:
Collected by Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner: Whitney Museum, New York
