(Oakland, 2006. Image copyright Hamish Reid).

If you look like Tina McLelland, you can do a whole series of self-portraits (warning for Americans: nudity!), and it doesn't even come across as narcissistic, just, well, fascinating and (sometimes) amusing (to me at least). Or if you're Cindy Sherman, you can do a whole bunch of tableaux and disguises where no one's ever in any doubt that it's you, and in some sense the whole exercise becomes self-portraiture (and simultaneously transcends the whole idea of self-portraiture, but never mind).

But if you look like me, you don't do self-portraits. At least not directly. You're forced to do it by indirection. So here's the first in a series of self-portraits in which I don't appear…