Self-portrait as Someone Unseen is not a self-portrait in the traditional sense of the word. Hagler worked from the image of Nathaniel, a perpetrator of a mass shooting in Los Angeles, choosing to make a self-portrait that wasn’t in his own likeness. Instead he continued his method for creating self-portraits which merges a sense of personal artistic feeling with the image of someone undesirable, as a kind of gesture toward living in the skin of those who are feared or ostracised. In Hagler’s mind this is a strategy for staying close to the subject and understanding it.