Owning it….maybe?

Faye Daniels is not my name but it has been my online alias for 17 years. 

I didn’t know what this would turn into when I started taking and posting photographs when I was 18 years old. All I knew is that back then people still thought of the internet as dangerous and almost everyone used some type of alias. We were told not to give out our real names, our addresses or our telephone numbers and we were just coming out of the phase where we all had email addresses like blackcat6969@hotmail.com. Honestly, I’m thankful I had enough sense to choose an alias that was a realistic name instead of being stuck with something like kittykaboom or dangerelf. 

At this point in my life the amount of people who call me Faye is equal to the number of people who call me by my birth name. If you search my government name on google I appear to hardly exist at all. Which in some ways is very nice, like when you’re applying for jobs or when you’re dating and the new person in your life can’t find any old dirt on you. 

However, recently as I’ve been coming more and more connected with my true self internally and reconnecting with my creativity I’ve had the idea to switch things up and use my birth name. I want to have more of a fine art presence online. I want to apply to group shows, artist residencies and be apart of the art community. 

I feel like it’s time. I feel like I’m ready.

I’ve gone through 17 years of self-discovery and experimentation through photography with this alias and it’s not that I want to forget any of it. There have been a lot of lessons and you can easily see my progression when looking back at old work while still seeing what I identify with stylistically. However, in the past if I lead with Courtney and people eventually found out about my work under Faye - there would be this “oh, so this is what you don’t what us to see” attitude when that wasn’t the case at all. Or maybe it was? Well, depending on who was looking.

In my past, I’ve worked a couple corporate jobs. One of which I was terminated from after the owner found out about my work stating that he “couldn’t have this”. Scared of what clients would think if they found my photos but also claiming that he had just heard about it and hadn’t looked at it himself. (So then you’re basing this decision on something you haven’t seen and therefore don’t understand or have even tried to understand?)

And later at another workplace my images were used without my knowledge on a fake blog put up by a team member where they wrote posts claiming to be me and speaking ill about my employees. Once they had enough posts to make it look legit they sent the blog to my superior and I was terminated. 

Originally back when I was a teenager like I mentioned before we didn’t use our real names on the internet because we were told it was dangerous. My alias was supposed to protect me from happenings like being fired for being naked on the internet only it didn’t. 

I’ve always been my truest self online. I have been oversharing my feelings and visual images of my body in connection to those feelings for 17 years. The people that I know from the internet are pretty much the best people in my life. They know my hopes, my dreams, they hear about my heartbreaks and they show up for me when I need them most. Like that time when I was living in the US and got raped. I ended up pregnant and had an abortion while living in Texas. I started a GoFundMe for financial help and over 300 people most of whom I had never met in person showed up for me. They helped me at a point in my life where I was my most broken and in the end they not only helped me financially but the number of messages I got from people telling me their own stories, and those who simply sent me private messages to check up on me made me feel not alone. That feeling of being understood and that there were people on my side helped me immensely. 

Obviously, the internet has grown as we have. It is a completely different environment than it was 17 years ago just as I am a completely different person. Given this maybe using my real name is just the next step both with my online presence as well as claiming my “true self” internally?

That and I have dreams of one day having a gallery show that I can invite my friends and family to where they walk in and see my name on the wall. Maybe we’re a little far away from that today but this is one step towards it. 

I am scared though. 

Today, I set up social media accounts under my real name for my art. I connected them all to a social media manager and even bought the domain for www.courtneytessier.com. And as I was posting my first blog (one that is already up here) I looked at the screen saw one of my photos beside my real name and panicked. 

I mean, right now things are great. I’m connected, I’m making things really consistently. I have a million ideas and am thinking about starting a business semi-related to this. I have a great job, one where the person that I work with knows fully what I do and doesn’t care. He respects and admires it but, what if I lose that job? What if I have to start back at zero and go job hunting again? What if a new potential employer does google me and sees my art? What if this is really shooting myself in the foot, in both feet! What if this ends my professional career completely?

I called two of my friends, Luis and Katie and ran it by them. At first, I think they were unsure about it but once I told them why and walked them through my thought process they both were really in love with the idea. 

And I mean, ultimately for better or worse this is who I am. This is such a big part of me and that’s never been denied. When I lost my corporate job because of it, I was given a warning. I remember the exact day my boss came to me and told me that he and the management team knew about my Tumblr. I said, “ok?” (as if to say, “and what’s wrong with it?”) and he proceeded to try to be as politically correct as possible but ultimately the ultimatum was my art or my job. The following day Katie West and I took a road trip to Ohio to work with Kate Sweeney for Babefest 2 and visit with Chip Willis. Even after that conversation, there was no way I wasn’t going on that trip. There was no way I wasn’t going to be apart of Babefest. There was no way that I was going to stop shooting. I couldn’t. Quitting photography (and being naked on the internet) was never an option that even entered my mind. How do I hide this so I can keep my job was lol…but that didn’t work out.

Maybe that’s my answer? 

I’ve had countless conversations with Katie about being 80 and still taking self-portraits. That’s not to say I’d be posting them on the internet for everyone to see but I feel like that would be such an amazing thing to have a body of work that spanned my entire “adult” life. 

Courtney Tessier, she was oversharing visually until her very last breath.