On a Photo
A picture that tells a short story about me and my vexed relationship with being captured.
This was meant to be a different post. I was hoping to tell you that I had some professional headshots taken, and was indifferent to the outcome. The reality, I’m afraid to say, was not what I anticipated. I remain inexorably a work in progress in this respect, among every other.
True, I had resolved to fuss as little as possible. I decided to just wear my current favorite dress, a deep green stretchy tie-waist number with pink flowers. I paired it with comfortable black stretchy leggings, not shapewear, and my usual tan flat summer sandals, not platform shoes to make me look taller. Progress.
True, my makeup was minimal: just a swipe of concealer, eyebrow gel, blush, and mascara. No foundation. No eyeshadow. No eyeliner. No artifice, I told myself grandly.
But as the time for the photos drew near, I found myself fussing. A little highlighter for my browbone and collar bones found its way into my routine—designed, I knew but couldn’t quite admit to myself, to emphasize newfound bone structure. As someone who has recently lost quite a lot of weight, and who still lives in a fat (but no longer very fat) body, there feels like no good way to relate to my own physicality. I regret losing the weight, especially in the dangerously unhealthy way I did it. I am writing a book addressing this along with the fatphobia I’ve long regarded as a major site of injustice. And yet I find myself still doing things like this: dabbing a silvery serum on my skin to play up the reduced distance between my bones and my body’s surface.
It is silly. It is undignified. It is what I need to work through in therapy.
I had imagined myself breezing into the photo shoot (done outside for COVID safety reasons) and saying airily to the photographer, “Just make me look like myself.” In reality, I was shy and sheepish, and inquired as to whether he could photoshop out the chickenpox scar that haunts my left eyebrow.
The photographer himself was professional and courteous and made not one comment on my appearance—a baseline level of decency, to be sure, but one which I was grateful to him for meeting. The college News & Media Relations Manager I work with here was delightful and supportive as per usual.
And yet I was never comfortable. I was never at ease. It took 1.5 hours and afterward, I was exhausted. I came home and had Szechuan food delivered, and eschewed writing for the evening in favor of some good, bad television. It was just like in the old days, when I still lived in the world of Events, not of Zooms, which I unlike many others find much less sapping. Not having to be a body in public has saved me so much time and energy and willpower and has thus given me, ironically, the capacity and critical distance to write about it in a sustained way for the first time in my life. Strangely, it feels good to write about something that feels so terrible.
I waited two days for the photos to come back, obsessing over what they might look like, and more so my reactions to them.
When they did, I was surprised. These photos told no story. I look… fine. Totally ordinary. Like myself—ocasionally good, often bad, typically indifferent. Misogynists on the internet will always call me ugly. I have eyebags and scars and flyaway hairs and the beginnings of neck sagging. I had, I should admit, dyed away my many grey hairs for the occasion.
There was one photo I truly liked out of the 145 total. It pictures me during the brief interlude during which I’d donned my favorite jacket, which I stuffed into my tote on a whim. It didn’t really go with my headband, and it was too hot to wear it. But I didn’t mind. It made me feel a little bit tougher and more together. As a result of that, I think, my expression in that photo is rather different. It is very still, focused, and distant. My eyes are fixed on something beyond the shot, but not yet the horizon. I look self-conscious, but resigned to myself in being so.
Photo credit: Simon Wheeler
I looked like I felt, in other words. And to my surprise, I liked that.
Susan Sontag wrote, in her famous book On Photography, of the violation, even violence, wrought by still images:
To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.
She went on to call the act of photography a “soft murder”—a kind of substitute for hunting down and shooting and killing an animal on the prairie. Instead, we now stalk our prey with our cameras—or our smartphones.
I, temperamentally less inclined to hyperbole as a philosopher, would not go quite as far as Sontag. I would not say the camera is gun-like or necessarily possessive and acquisitive (though doubtless, it can be). But it is not as forgiving as a paintbrush. It is not designed to do us justice. In rendering our surfaces so precisely, it sometimes feels cruelly indifferent to the depths of our emotions in being captured instanteously and often in close succession.
Not soft murder, then, but a soft trapping is what I think of. We will be released. But we are caught, toyed with, handled.
I like the photo I like because it captures these feelings at being photographed so precisely: self-conscious, diffident, tense; slightly amused at myself for being so.
I can also see myself seeing that, in the end, it might just be OK for me—a feeling that is both an intense reflection of privilege, at this terrible political moment, and precious to me, as someone who has long struggled with depression. This feeling may well be fleeting, and I try to tap into it while I can, writing daily while I have the wherewithal and the energy and opportunity.
Until now, my favorite photos of me were of me looking down and sideways. But things, and I, am looking slightly upward.
Kate, I have never been aware of any of your supposed imperfections - you are wonderfully human - open, genuine, candid & just right.
Thank you for sharing yourself, once again, with the result that you touch and enlighten me.
Lovely writing as usual! I love this line ("“dabbing a silvery serum on my skin to play up the reduced distance between my bones and my body’s surface"), especially in connection with the Susan Sontag quote about photography and (self-)knowledge that you mentioned. It'd be interesting to play that out more?
I like this idea of skinniness (skin-ness?) as supposedly a form of transparency. If one is thin, one "shows" oneself, one's inner structure. One does not "hide." Fatness, on the other hand, is then a means of hiding oneself, hiding the body, hiding one's insides.
It’s thus not just that we demand fat people hide themselves, hide their bodies, but that—strangely—we view fatness itself as a form of hiding? Of refusing to appear in the form that one should?
This gets at the way––paradoxically––that fat bodies (like disabled bodies) are both *too* present, *too* visible, *too* physical, but also not physical enough, not present enough, not visible enough, not preoccupied with their appearance enough, and not available enough as objects of desire that are sexually available to our gaze/touch/etc.––(along the lines of your first book).
In that sense, the internet troll feels the need to tell you what you look like **as if you did not obviously already know**——as if fatness were not just a sign of a lack of self-mastery (as we generally tend to talk about it), but somehow itself also a sign of a lack of self-knowledge, a lack of self-awareness. The internet troll bizarrely insists, ‘You somehow forgot––or you seem not to know––what you look like. Your presence in the public sphere indicates to me that you lack this self-knowledge. Let me tell you.’ (As if this were some kind of favor?)
For the natural endpoint of this line of thinking about bones and bodies, your piece made me think about Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. Mann’s protagonist Hans Castorp fantasizes about the way that his love interest Madame Chauchat, like all the other tubercular patients in the sanatorium, wears an X-ray of her lungs folded up in an envelope around her neck: It's an image, he imagines, of her ribcage surrounded by ghostly wisps of flesh.
For Castorp, this X-ray becomes a kind of fetish object. It is as if the photographic apparatus (and science) permit a profound knowledge of her insides, along the lines of the Sontag quote you mentioned, that would allow Castorp to possess her more fully than he ever could in any other way.
But the X-ray serves for him as a means of fetishizing her tubercular-induced, “consumptive” wasting-away over the course of her illness and her impending death. (As it happens, Mann describes Madame Chauchat, perhaps not coincidentally,––the one Castorp wants to see X-rayed––as "schlaff" ("flabby").)
Really fascinating post! Thank you!