Oh, yes. A photograph. They want a black-and-white one, to accompany the article. Eye of the devil, spear to the heart.
But “Fine,” I say to the phone; “Certainly, ” I purr, as if I had a drawerful of them–entrancing head shots, penetrating yet glamorous. I answer as if we writing professionals took it quite in stride about the need for a photo. As if I were just another balanced mind with brisk business sense.
Inside, a manic little fever is brewing. This time, I think, I can will it to happen.
Our next-door neighbor, a film director, has offered to shoot two black-and-white rolls of me. I shower and comb and dress and mascara and lipstick. On goes the black blouse, the hairstyling mousse; now begins the futile primping. I look nice in the mirror. My partner thinks so. My friends think so. By heaven, I’m an attractive woman. And then I dwell in a prayerful nether world–the way you wait for test results–until the contacts, those sheets of little miniatures of the pictures themselves, are ready.
And they are horrible. Every one; terribly, horribly wrong. The late afternoon light may have been soft, the hair docile, the black blouse enhancing. But the face seems to have been shot through a fish-eye lens so that the nose is taking over. Some frames are blurry. Others have squinched-up eyes like a hostile inmate’s. Or eyes rolled back or half-closed, as if weeping or drunk. Or a mouth distorted in motion as if chewing, or dragged down at the corners, as if dead.
One word for it: despair.
Despair, because I’ve again lost the self-deluding gamble: I do not photograph well. Despair, because it is not the photographer’s fault (though he apologized), nor the conditions’ nor the equipment’s. It is the fault of my own odd features. And that feels somehow morally damnable.
They are not ugly features. They are symmetrical and unscarred. I like them fine until they betray me this way. The photo may be an aberration of how I am perceived, or it may not. But the photo wins, always. Its reality is durable. Mine is unstable, shifting.
My first photographer was my father, who so loved me that had I been a circus animal he would have crooned the same appreciation, posing me on the front lawn in the Phoenix sun, steadying his camera. I held my full Mexican skirt wide and took a balletic position to show my pink pumps with the buckling strap. The carefully brushed ponytail, freckled nose (smaller then) and gap-toothed smile radiated a little girl’s certainty that she was the loveliest and smartest thing to arrive on Earth–in her father’s gaze.
With pubescence came school pictures and prodding self-consciousness. The grin was shyer, the features coarsening, the skin and hair more unruly. But we young girls were (in those prehistoric days) still fairly innocent of the terrible trouble to come.
To come, of course, was pitiless judgment figured directly from our beauty, or lack of it. Unless we had the great strength or cunning to ignore them, photographs told us our prospects, our ratings in a ruthless world that–for the densest combination of reasons–was in thrall to appearances. As adults, even the smartest adults, little has changed. We may have begun to distrust wealth as a marker of wisdom–but never beauty. Despite every evidence that when a supermodel opens her mouth it sounds, according to a friend, like “junior high school in the Ozarks,” we believe she really does know all those nuanced, profoundly hip, existential things she appears to know.
But photographs, as another friend points out, are simply part of life. We need them for driver’s licenses, passports, clearance; to document our lives and those of friends and children. They tell us stories of who we are; minutiae of identity based on the supreme hard evidence. More mysteriously, photos augur, disclose, stimulate unspeakable depths. After a century of analysis, the riddle of their power still seems unplumbable. No surprise that tribal cultures decided the camera stole the soul.
Writers work mostly in seclusion; it’s one of the trade’s best advantages. But when the photo appears, it forces a low-grade expose to writing peers as well as readers. Here is the current state of her, the portrait seems to say. Here’s how she is holding up–or not. Likewise, when a book or article is published, people immediately want to see the owner of the mind of the page. What might they discern? Whether she is pretty, whether she is old, what wit or tragedy glitters in her eyes? Since we literally embody personality, not only does the flat image testify as proof of being–we read character there, and even destiny.
Thus, it deeply disheartens a woman who rarely looks good in a picture. Whatever your age, whatever you may truly know yourself to be, it is very hard to argue with the filmed version (“Oh, God, please throw that away!”). The devil’s in the implications. If the shot was good, vanity seizes hope. But if the prints are unkind, doubt infiltrates alongside a whisper of shame.
For we bind a certain personal liability to appearance, virtually from childhood–a diabolical transference: You are too clueless to look good or you have let an essential vigil lapse. You missed a boat; lack the magic, the right stuff. And if the photographs are repeatedly bad, you yourself begin to wonder. Had you imagined the pleasant aspect in the mirror, or were you fondly forgiving your oldest friend?
It’s lonely when photos fail you. Friends grow politely quiet for fear of wounding you. I showed the dismal contacts to my boyfriend, who glanced distractedly. “What’s wrong with them?”
“But they’re awful,” I wailed. “How can you not admit that?”
He shrugged. “I like to look at you, and that’s the way you look.” Impossible, I thought; he’s trying to save my sanity. But how can he lie so cavalierly?
Then I recalled that he has sometimes rejected photos of both of us that I admired, because–ah: They did not flatter him. “I look horrible,” he had insisted against my protests. Yet, to me, he had looked utterly himself in them. And I do love his looks.
It’s self-image that suffers in this shell game, the self’s fragile concept that is bashed. Say what you will about corrupt culture–yes, yes, but we were formed in it. Unless we live hermetically, the way we look matters. Not perhaps in the grand view, but to some delicate mechanism of belief, which in turn drives us. When the arched brows and widened eyes and sucked-in stomachs of full-length mirrors are not what the photo reports, shock arrives like that of hearing our voices on tape recorders. That is not your voice, your face–not as you have always known them. But to whom can we appeal? There is no regulatory agency for recurring cruelty by recording devices.
You will say, “In 10 years, the bad picture will look good.” Perhaps, but the editor wants it now. (I sadly chose the least revolting of the contacts, in which the nose resolutely sails out ahead like a drum majorette.)
You say, “Go to a studio. Go to several.” And I say I will. But I postpone it. Besides expenses and logistics, there is only so much dismay I can face. It is easy to understand people who simply refuse to appear in anyone’s lens, ever. They’ve learned.
