slides into you DMs – a photography bro who has actually slid into my DMs, who I am going to ignore, and a few more like that. Generic Wows! and emojis and shit from other brotographers. I get a lot of backhanded BS from them — a lot of came for that one selfie from three months ago, stayed because your photos are actually good? Like they’re in any position to judge who’s good and who isn’t.
You look hot AF, remember to crit my photos bitch x – Finch. Ugh. I reply.
For someone who’s supoosed to be a commubnist you’re really big on free work bb x
He replies very quickly. Haha. Supoosed. Will buy you a coffee. Crit me x
I’ll do it tomorrow. Nothing else jumping out from the comments, apart from one dude, in all caps. JUST NUTTED. I reply telling him I have a PayPal and a Ko-fi account so he can tip me if he liked it so much.
I have, like, five or six new DMs. Good hit rate. There’s a dude offering to pay for my nudes, and not offering anywhere near enough money for me to consider it. Like, selling your headless nudes for a couple of hundred quid is fine when you’re a student, but I’m about to have a comeback, and I have all these followers, and it’s just like… Not unless you offered me Mr B levels of scratch.
Nah m8, I reply.
I put my phone down and crack open the box.
I came back to third year with no work, but photos of Frank. I handed those in because she asked me not to, and my new tutor, this generic posh art man, takes them and he’s like: Hmm. Is this Frank Steel. Hmm. I don’t know if you should be showing me these. Hmm. These seem very personal. Hmm.
I tell him, this is what I do. I violate people’s privacy. It’s kind of my thing. And he’s like, Hmm. Interesting.
The word cruel is used again. He’s all like, I’m very aware of your work, and he tells me that if I want to progress, I need to look at making some more personal stuff. If I’m into revealing things about other people, I need to level the playing field.
We had a show at the start of third year where you’re encouraged to do something completely different. He told me to take photos of myself, to do work about myself.
At that point, I probably wasn’t doing so good. I was day drinking and taking drugs during the week, escalating the amount I was taking, what I was taking. During this period, I got chemical burns inside my mouth after swallowing GHB that wasn’t diluted; I broke one of my fingers after mixing acid and cocaine （which was probably mostly speed, upon reflection） and punching a shiny kettle because I didn’t want to look at my face, distorted on its surface. I got bored. I got very bored, very quickly.
I tried casual sex with women I didn’t know, a couple of times, in the hope that’d give me a bit of a thrill. But after Frank the novelty of being with women had properly worn off, and the girls I went with were all too nice: older butch women, artsy bisexuals, breakfast in the morning, conversations about mutual friends we didn’t realise we had, non-threatening offers of phone numbers and second dates. Low risk. Even with drugs thrown in, it was always low risk.
So, I went back to men. I remember going home with a strange man, whose name I didn’t know, not telling anyone where I was going, not being totally sure what was going to happen when I got back to his. Even though it was fine, I remember the way my heart was pounding. I remember the lurch in my stomach when he grabbed my wrist a little harder than I expected.
It got better when I got someone rough – when it felt like I really might get hurt, when I did get hurt.
But that just turned into Tuesdays, you know? You do anything enough, and you can get sick of it – particularly when you’re doing stuff to self-destruct, not because you actually like it. It took me a while to work out what I liked.
It is during this period of my life that I’m advised to level the playing field. And I think I did level it. I got the idea to build a self-portrait out of a bunch of self-portraits. Like a snapshot of Irina, at this moment in time, warts and all.
It didn’t go down well with the tutors. My work got pulled from the show, and I got referred to the uni’s counselling services.
First picture from this set, I have a bruised cheek, a bruised neck and a burnt mouth. It’s a portrait from the shoulders up. I’m not wearing a shirt, my hair is pulled back, and I’m wearing no makeup. No makeup, but some no-makeup tricks: the telltale glisten of Vaseline on my lips, eyelids and cheekbones, my lashes artificially tinted and extended and my eyebrows tinted. My skin is milk-white, the bruises on my neck are purple, the one on my cheek is yellowing. The burns are red and angry.
The next, a photograph of my hip, moments before cutting it; after a moment; then a while: with the blood messy, claggy on my thigh. My fingers are strapped up in these, and my knuckles are black.
I’d set up my camera on a tripod next to my toilet, go for a night out, drink myself sick, and get Flo to take pictures of me instead of holding my hair back like she usually did. And she just did it, too, no questions asked. There are a few of me in the same position, different outfits, throwing up – in one picture I’m throwing up blue, and I honestly have no idea what I’d been drinking. There’s one of me pissing in the street, looking wistfully into the distance （I assume Flo took this）; a photo of me in my underwear digging an ingrown hair out of the inside of my thigh （fingers still strapped up, it’s a close-up crotch shot）; a photo of a man I don’t remember feeding me a shot （angle’s awkward, I must have taken this without a tripod）。 There’s one of me taking what I assume is cocaine off a very big man’s chest, and then a photo of him choking me.
Honestly, I reckon if I’d dumped the cutting photo, I wouldn’t have had any faff. It’s a bit OTT, on reflection, a bit self-consciously edgy.
I only half-remember my presentation – when you do a crit, you have to explain your work to your group – because I was on this massive comedown, and I was just shaking, sweating, explaining each photo, and I snapped at the tutor, ‘You wanted me to level the fucking playing field, so here you go: it’s level!’
David French was the first person to say anything. Are you okay, Irina? And then I think someone said it was brave for me to be so candid about my mental health issues, and then the tutor sent everyone to get a cuppa, and held me back, telling me he had to inform someone.
Like nipples and swastikas are chill, but a bit of GHB and self-harm and it’s all ooo, u ok hun?
I pull out the one where I’m pissing, the blue vomit, the cut thigh and the bruisey-GHB face for the book.
I find a photo that doesn’t fit with the others. One I was fairly certain I’d burned. It’s me, somewhere green. Me by a dead old tree with a great hollow mouth. My arms are folded, and my hair is bobbed to my chin, face blank. Bobbed hair means it’s MA. And the tree means I should have burned this. I rip the photo in half, and into quarters, then eighths. I throw all the scraps in the bin, but eat the chunk with my face on it.
I do a sicky burp, so I call it a night.
Another nightmare. A boy is sitting on my chest, and I can’t move. He is a dead weight, and I can barely breathe. I think, for a moment, I’m dreaming about Eddie from Tesco. But I’m not. The boy’s face is too thin, he’s too long. His neck seems to crumple beneath an invisible hand. He coughs. He picks a piece of glass from his skull, and brings it to my eye.