Portraits of Ladies
heroine(s) with a thousand faces
I had new author photos taken last week.
It is strange to be photographed by another person these days. I have become a master selfie taker (as so many of us have, presumably). Even when I’m in groups I insist on selfies; a real time reflection in the screen that allows everyone to adjust to their most advantageous angle. Even the rats love it.
When the camera is in someone else’s hands I find I don’t necessarily look how I think I do. My eyes are smaller, my cheekbones disappeared. Who is this person. (The two bottles of wine and fries I shared with friends the night before the shoot probably did not help in this regard.) I see the flaws that my having the control of the camera seeks to eliminate.
When I was a child there were no digital cameras. Just film. Film was expensive, and cameras only came out on special occasions – holidays, trips, celebrations. The photos might not be developed for months. The person who emerged in the photos often felt like a stranger or some robotic impersonation: Same pose, same smile, different haircut. It was rarely good. How I saw myself for most of my childhood was based on a combination of the mirror and other people’s reactions to me. Which is how it likely was for a lot of human history.
The photographer who took my photos this time did a wonderful job and made the entire experience a delight (if you need photos, I highly recommend!). Author photos are weird; an attempt to occupy some strange middle ground of accessible and mysterious all at once. But the flip side of my not holding the camera is that in some instances, he captured possibly the most me that’s ever been put on film. Which is a delight. We are alive and beautiful in ways we can’t always capture on our own.
Because everything is obviously now digital, I initially received approximately two hundred photos of my face that I then had to go through and prune down. Fortunately, a very clear-eyed friend from Paris was staying with me and she helped me do the pruning. I’ve written before about the gap between being photographed and enjoying that photograph, and I went into the file determined to keep in mind that at some point these photos would be dazzling to me. It was enormously helpful to have someone I trust say yes, no, over and over. It reduced that enjoyment time to almost nil! A very good decision, as it were!
It was also a reminder that we bring our own ideas of flaws and strengths to every photo. Where I see a fuzzy jawline, someone sees a smooth forehead. Which is a bit of a metaphor for memoir writing. Something I’ve also been reminded of as the book gets closer to entering the world: Where I think a story is about sex and cheese, someone else sees extraordinary friendship and travel.
In the background of one of the photos is a small, framed photo of my grandmother sitting on the exact chair I was sitting on, beside the same couch I now have in my apartment (things really were made to last in those days). In a few photos you can just make her out over my shoulder. Slight and blonde and chic on Christmas morning. In a belted red dress, killer legs crossed at the ankles. She is probably in her mid-sixties.
My grandmother was born in 1920. The eldest of eight. Her youngest sibling was younger than her oldest child, not necessarily uncommon in large families in those days when people got married young but fascinating to me as a child of suburbia. She never finished high school, instead working in a chocolate shop to support her family. Every Christmas she would arrive with a box of chocolates from this shop. As a child I thought nothing could be more amazing than skipping school to work in a candy store. Nothing she said could convince me the thrill of bottomless chocolate was not what it was cracked up to be. She married my grandfather, a wealthy-ish American, shortly before her 21st birthday, and on their honeymoon Pearl Harbor happened and he was drafted immediately. She came home and spent the next four years walking down to the post-office (baby in tow after the first year) checking the casualty lists for his name
For their entire marriage, they lived in a smallish house in a smallish town in southwestern Ontario. Despite the fact they owned a huge shiny forest green Cadillac she never learned to drive. Once a week the local taxi service picked her up and took her to her hair appointment. She had a closet full of furs I used to stand in, trying to replicate the Lucy Pevensie experience. When we came over, my sister and I were each handed a can of coke and a container of Pringles and sent downstairs to watch TV until dinner. There was always a kiddy table. The living room with its white rug and carpet were always off limits except on Christmas Day. She read constantly. She taught us how to play solitaire. She remains one of the chicest women I’ve ever known. Chic being one way women could control how they were seen in the world that afforded them little authorship.
I love that she’s in some of these photos, even though she would not approve of this book one bit. (In the early seventies, my parents gave my grandparents the original London Broadway recording of Jesus Christ Superstar; it was promptly returned, considered too sacrilegious to even have in the house. It reappeared years later via my Fisher Price record player where I would play it repeatedly…so much better than Sunday mass.) Nor do I imagine she could ever have conceived of taking a selfie…something about vanity being a deadly sin.
But I like having her there nonetheless. A comforting reminder, and a portrait of another sort of woman who, with very little means, exposed me to importance of living well.
Speaking of portraits: Thank you and hello to all the new subscribers who found there way here from Ann Friedman’s newsletter. I hope turns out to be a good decision! Ann let me take over this past week; I wrote about touch and Georgia O’Keeffe.