Bill Afoot with Camera   Great artists paint self-portraits wry as running sores. This photo of me from a primal epoch seems too accidental to portray an actual human species. Upright and lean as a cardboard cutout, draped in that famous khaki suit I bought for my insurance job, I sport a necktie I still own: brilliant plastic stripes of red,   yellow, blue cascading down my flimsy chest to terminate exactly at belt-line. Dangling from my right hand, the Nikon that, like the tie, I still own. One leg bent as I stride with glance characteristically downcast, I’m crossing a barren heath possibly in Devon or Cornwall or in the Scottish Highlands where   stones whispered in brittle wind and black peaks probed so deeply I hardly slept for days. Note my hair: a tough reddish-brown mat of undergrowth nothing but insult could penetrate. The woman who took this photo intended neither good nor harm but lived in her own gray secrets like a badger in its den.   This isn’t a self-portrait but will serve as one until I learn to paint as crudely as van Gogh, my black-rimmed glasses heavy as structural steel, and my face narrow and pointed to conceal the landscapes I tried to absorb stone by stone to toughen me against lovers too unstudied and casual to account for me.   - William Doreski