January 2, 1973

Item Details

1973

Gelatin Silver Print. Handwritten title.
10h x 8w in (25.40h x 20.32w cm)

For 1 year spanning 1972 to 1973, Melissa Shook took a daily photo of herself, “to prove that I exist.” These deeply personal photos capture Shook in varying positions and activities, from clothed to unclothed, some with a friend and some with her daughter. An exercise centered around explorations into self-identity, these photographs are at the forefront of the conceptual ideas that fueled feminist artists in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

American photographer Melissa Shook (1939-2020) studied at Bard College and the Art Students League of New York. Shook taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Creative Photo Lab in 1974, and at the University of Massachusetts Boston from 1975 to 2005. Her subjects included her daughter, the important series of daily self-portraits, a shelter for homeless men and women, and a wheelchair basketball team. In recent years Shook's Daily Self-Portraits have garnered growing attention and appreciation, and in 2024 The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (who purchased a whole series of the portraits right before Shook's death in 2020) presented the pivotal Shook exhibition: “To Prove that I Exist”: Melissa Shook’s Daily Self-Portraits, 1972-1973. The exhibition was accompanied by a selection of self-portraits spanning the 19th–21st centuries and included works by Anne Noggle, John Coplans, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Lee Friedlander, Mike Mandel, Cindy Sherman, Annie Hsiao-Ching Wang, and Francesca Woodman, among many others.