“The I is not an object,” the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote.  As it happens, Wittgenstein was a photography buff, although I don’t think that really figured in his ruminations on the self.  For a photographer, self-portraits present some unique technical hurdles, since you can’t actually see what you shooting.  You can photograph your image in a mirror, which will give you the mirror-reverse of how you look to everyone else.  Or you can mount your camera on a tripod, and set the timer and automatic focus.  Either way, you are reminded that the face that is most familiar to you is the one you can never see directly.
 

Philosophers are faced with a similar problem in trying to understand the self.  Sometimes we think of the self as the subject and sometimes as the object of our awareness, which the 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer regarded as “the most monstrous contradiction ever thought of.”  It puts us in the awkward position of a photographer trying to peer at himself in the viewfinder of his camera.  Or as Wittgenstein put it, “I objectively confront every object. But not the I.” 
 

I tried to illustrate this conundrum with the self-portrait above of me holding a large oval mirror in which you could see a reflection of me crouched beside a camera on a tripod photographing me holding the mirror.  In reality, of course, there were two images of myself layered into a single photograph using Photoshop and various add-ons.  Neither image depicted the self as subject, the “I” that observes everything but leaves no trace of itself in the world as the object of its own awareness.
 

With Photoshop, I can place myself on both sides of the camera, but there can’t actually be two of us – so how do I resolve Schopenhauer’s “monstrous contradiction”?  The subjective self – the one that peers through the viewfinder of the camera – is essentially invisible.  As the designated photographer at many family events, I am apparently never present at the festivities because I am never in any of my own pictures.  My other self – the one that is the object of my awareness – is anything but invisible.  It has its strengths and weaknesses, its likes and dislikes, a sense of humor, a personality with some quirks thrown in.  I might even be tempted to say it is the ground of my being--except that it is not.  I am grounded in my awareness of the world, which is my subjective self.  So if I must choose between two selves, that is the real me.  The self that is the object of my awareness may be anything but invisible but it is still an illusion.