ALTHOUGH REASON TELLS ME the camera is not aimed like a gun barrel at my head, each time I pose for a photographic portrait I feel apprehensive. This is not the well-known fear, exhibited in many cultures, of being robbed of one’s soul or a layer of one’s personality. I do not imagine that the photographer, in order to bring the image-replica into the world, robs me of anything. But I do register that the way I ordinarily experience myself is turned around.
Ordinarily I feel coextensive with my body, in particular with the command station of the head, whose orientation to the world (that is, frontality)—and articulation—is my face, in which are set eyes that look out on, into, the world; and it is my fantasy, and my privilege, perhaps my professional bias, to feel that the world awaits my seeing. When I am photographed, this normally outgoing, fervent relation of consciousness to the world is jammed. I yield to another command station of consciousness, which “faces” me, if I have agreed to cooperate with the photographer (and, customarily, a photographic portrait is one that requires the subject’s cooperation). Stowed away, berthed, brought to heel, my consciousness has abdicated its normal function, which is to provide amplitude, to give me mobility. I don’t feel threatened. But I do feel disarmed, my consciousness reduced to an
embarrassed knot of self-consciousness striving for composure. Immobilized for the camera’s scrutiny, I feel the weight of my facial mask, the jut and fleshiness of my lips, the spread of my nostrils, the unruliness of my hair. I experience myself as behind my face, looking out through the windows of my eyes, like the prisoner in the iron mask in Dumas’s novel.
Being photographed, by which I mean posing for a photograph (at a session usually lasting several hours, in which many photographs are taken), I feel transfixed, trapped. In response to a look of desire I can look back, with desire. The looking can, ideally should, be reciprocal. But to the photographer’s look I cannot respond with anything equivalent, unless I were to decide to be photographed with my head behind my own camera. The photographer’s look is looking in a pure state; in looking at me, it desires what I am not—my image.
(Of course, the photographer may in fact desire the subject. It is obvious that many of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs record objects of his desire. Subjects may seem worth photographing because the photographer feels lust, or romantic attachment, or admiration—any of a myriad of positive feelings. But at the moment the picture is taken, the look trained upon the subject is sightless, generic: a look that discerns form. At that moment, it cannot be responded to in kind.)
I become the looked-at. Docilely, eagerly, I follow the photographer’s instructions, if she or he is willing to give any, as to how I may “look” more attractive. For as much as I am a professional see-er, I am a hopelessly amateurish see-ee. An eternal photographic virgin, I feel the same perplexity each time I’m photographed. I forget the makeup tricks I’ve been taught, what color blouse photographs well, which side of my face is the “good” side. My chin is too low. Too high. I don’t know what to do with my hands.
Considering that I have been browsing through the history of photography for decades, have been photographed professionally countless times, and spent five years writing six essays about the aesthetic and moral implications of photographic images, this blankness with which I face the camera can hardly be ascribed to inexperience or to lack of reflectiveness. Some deeper stubbornness on my own part is at
work: the refusal fully to take in the fact that I not only look but have a look, look good (or bad), look “like” that.
As I’ve never been photographed without feeling apprehensive, so I have never looked at the result of a photographic session without feeling embarrassment. Is it that I’m too powerfully an observer myself to be comfortable being observed? Is it a puritan anxiety about pretending, posing? Is it my moral narcissism, which has erected a taboo against whatever narcissism of the usual kind to which I might be prone? All of these, perhaps. But what I mainly feel is dismay. While some ninety percent of my consciousness thinks that I am in the world, that I am me, about ten percent thinks I am invisible. That part is always appalled whenever I see a photograph of myself. (Especially a photograph in which I look attractive.)
The photograph comes as a kind of reproof to the grandiosity of consciousness. Oh. So there “I” am.
I see my own photograph differently from the others in Mapplethorpe’s Certain People. I can’t look at my own photograph with longing, I can’t have a fantasy about the person in that photograph. The eros of photography, which identifies subject and surface, is suspended. What I feel is the difference between me and the image. To me, the expression in the photograph Mapplethorpe has taken of me is not really “my” look. It is a look fabricated for the camera: an unstable compromise between trying to be cooperative with a photographer I intensely admire (who is also a friend) and trying to preserve my own dignity, which is hinged to my anxiety. (When I look at my picture I read stubbornness, balked vanity, panic, vulnerability.) I doubt that I have ever looked exactly the way Mapplethorpe has photographed me—or that I will look exactly this way the next time he takes my picture.
At the same time that I recognize in this portrait another record of how I feel being photographed, Mapplethorpe’s photograph looks different to me from any other that has ever been taken of me. I cooperated as best I could, and he saw something that no one had ever seen. Being photographed by Mapplethorpe was different from being photographed by anyone else. He reassures differently, encourages differently, is permissive differently …
Taking pictures is an anthologizing impulse, and Mapplethorpe’s book offers no exception. This mix of subjects, the non-famous and the celebrated, the solemn and the lascivious, illustrates a characteristic spread of photographic interests. Nothing human is alien to me, the photographer is saying. By including a sexy self-portrait, Mapplethorpe is rejecting the typical photographer’s stance, in which, from a godlike distance, the photographer confers reality upon the world but declines to be a subject himself.
Most photography comes with a built-in cognitive claim: that the photograph conveys a truth about the subject, a truth that would not be known were it not captured in a photograph. In short, that photographing is a form of knowledge. Thus, some photographers have said they photograph best someone whom they don’t know, others that their best photographs are of subjects they know best. All such claims, however contradictory, are claims of power over the subject.
Mapplethorpe’s claims are more modest. He is not looking for the decisive moment. His photographs do not aspire to be revelatory. He is not in a predatory relation to his subjects. He is not voyeuristic. He is not trying to catch anyone off guard. The rules of the game of photography, as Mapplethorpe plays it, are that the subject must cooperate—must be lit. In the eloquence and subtlety of cropping, rendering of textures of clothing and skin, and variations on the color black, his photographs clearly proclaim their relation to an artistic, rather than documentarist, impulse. The photographer himself would probably prefer to say they are a record of his own avidity.
Mapplethorpe wants to photograph everything, that is, everything that can be made to pose. (However broad his subject matter, he could never become a war photographer or a photographer of accidents in the street.) What he looks for, which could be called Form, is the quiddity or isness of something. Not the truth about something, but the strongest version of it.
I once asked Mapplethorpe what he does with himself when he poses for the camera, and he replied that he tries to find that part of himself that is self-confident.
His answer suggests a double meaning in the title he has chosen for
his book: there is certain in the sense of some, and not others, and certain in the sense of self-confident, sure, clear. Certain People depicts, mostly, people found, coaxed, or arranged into a certainty about themselves. That is what seduces, that is what is disclosed in these bulletins of a great photographer’s observations and encounters.
[1985]