Luis Fonseca’s Selfs Portrait hangs in the “So You Think You’re Too Old To…” at HVMoCA in Peekskill like a visual echo, a conversation across time conducted in light and shadow. The piece, which juxtaposes a self-portrait taken in his early 30s with another in his late 60s, is a striking meditation on time, self-perception, and the persistence of artistic practice.
Fonseca, now 68, has spent a lifetime behind the camera. Though he works in a variety of media, including cyanotypes and mixed media, Selfs Portrait is a return to the fundamentals: an image, a moment, a gaze held across decades.
The original portrait, taken in 1989, captures a younger Fonseca newly shaven, reacting to the inevitable encroachment of hair loss. “I just did not like the pattern of my hair, it was just driving me nuts,” Fonseca recalls. One evening, he simply shaved it all off and, with a photographer’s instinct, documented the transformation. Shot on film with a Petri, the print was developed in his own darkroom, a hallmark of his black-and-white work at the time.
Fast-forward nearly 40 years. Fonseca recreated the same pose in the same apartment he has called home for nearly four decades. The second image, digital and immediate, contrasts with the labor-intensive process of the first, yet the two remain eerily continuous. A simple Photoshop composite aligned the two portraits, uniting them into a single frame.
The power of Selfs Portrait lies not just in its technical execution but in its emotional resonance. The juxtaposition is not a lament of youth lost but an affirmation of selfhood retained. “It’s the same space, the same angle, same thing,” Fonseca notes, “except instead of that black-and-white film camera, it’s a cell phone.” In a world obsessed with impermanence and reinvention, Fonseca’s diptych insists on continuity—on the notion that we do not shed our younger selves, but carry them forward.
“So You Think You’re Too Old To…,” which features work by 68 artists, aged 62 to 94, makes a compelling case for the creative resurgence that can accompany aging. Artists like Louise Bourgeois and Phyllida Barlow found their most powerful voices in later years, freed from the constraints of expectation. Fonseca himself credits his recent surge in artistic output to this stage of life, coupled with the shifting perspective brought on by the Covid years. “It was a sequence of events,” he says, “where I started to make work that I would present to galleries, get feedback, and develop with more purpose.”
If Selfs Portrait has a lesson, it’s that the artistic self does not diminish—it accumulates. The eye that framed the shot in 1989 is the same one that framed it in 2023. The hands may have changed, the tools evolved, but the vision remains. In Fonseca’s work, time is not an adversary but an accomplice, bearing witness to a self both constant and ever-becoming.
“So You Think I’m Too Old To…” will be exhibited at HVMoCA in Peekskill through May 3.
[eventarchive-1]
HV MOCA
This article appears in February 2025.
