The focal point of the middle section of Autobiography is a photograph of Rauschenberg as a two-year-old boy, boating with his parents, Ernest and Dora Rauschenberg, on the bayou near their home in Port Arthur, Texas. The family snapshot is encircled by a text that summarizes major events in the artist’s life and career. Superimposed over the image (and again in the bottom panel of Autobiography) is a volumetric cube that appears throughout Rauschenberg’s series of silkscreen paintings made between 1962 and 1964; the box makes reference to Rauschenberg’s longstanding embrace of illusionism and representation at a time when the art world favored abstraction and flatness of the picture plane. 

On the bottom panel of Autobiography is a still of the artist in his performance piece Pelican (1963), the first work he choreographed. In the print, Rauschenberg appears to be propelling himself forward over the surface of a box and into the viewer’s space. With parachute strapped to his back, critic Erica Abeel described Rauschenberg as a “human combine.” Where the Combines had brought painting “off the wall,” in the words of art critic Calvin Tomkins, Pelican and his other theater works brought Rauschenberg’s art into motion and into the arena of life. Also included in the bottom panel of Autobiography are silkscreened images that refer to places of personal significance to Rauschenberg: a navigational chart of the Gulf of Mexico near his hometown of Port Arthur, Texas, and a photograph of the water towers as viewed from his studio in New York.

Rauschenberg frequently used a transfer drawing technique to create self-portraits. Autobiography, a drawing from 1960, includes transferred images of the artist’s face and reversed lettering, including his initial “R” and the initials of his hometown, “P.A.”(Port Arthur), combined with the word “Texas” and fine art reproductions. Rauschenberg’s four-panel White Painting (1951) and one of his most famous Combines, Monogram (1955–59), is coupled with reproductions of Leonardo da Vinci’s  Mona Lisa. The concept of showing his own works within another work (reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise [1935–41]) is something Rauschenberg had already done in Self-Made Retrospective, a no-longer-extant Combine from 1954 that comprised six small works made by the artist between 1951 and 1954.