Tag Archives: photography

Not Invisible

This will be a short(er) post. I know I’ve been writing a lot, lot lately, a lot that only I can probably keep up with. I enjoy myself. I do.

I forgot to mention that 6 of my poems are up in the Spring issue of Analog Press: http://analogpress.net/

Apparently I am now also a contributing editor to Analog Press. I’m not sure quite what that entails yet, but will know soon! It’s a volunteer position.

***

I was sharing a picture with one of my coworkers yesterday. Previous to the picture sharing, she had been talking about how she was grumpy. She was doing art the night previous and had to stop creating before she wanted to stop, because it was time to go to bed and then go to work. “It’s like when you have a special someone in your bed and they don’t do you the favor…”

I told her I was totally going to steal that analogy for my blog, how interrupting your creative flow is like not being pleasured in bed.

She asked me if I was going to share the picture I showed her (unrelated to this side conversation) on my blog. I figured I might as well, because I was talking a lot about homelessness this week.

After I went to the training on homelessness on Tuesday, I felt more in tune with the scope of the homeless issue again. That night, I went to Safeway, in El Cerrito, and ran into a very thin old man with few teeth (he kind of looked like a very old Snoop Dogg) panhandling on the garbage can outside. I know from my own experience that the worst thing is to be ignored. I said, “I don’t have anything extra to give.” He said, “Neither do I.”

He told me that the door I was about to enter to go into the store was closed. I thanked him, grateful he had told me before I tried to walk through it.

“Have a good night,” he said. “You too,” I said.

The following day I was in San Francisco. I saw a gentleman who had set up a sign for panhandling, rife with spelling mistakes, but the setup was artistic enough to give me pause and want to capture it somehow. I asked him if he would mind me taking his picture. “If you give me a dollar…” he bargained. I said sure, then, without thinking, went and sat down by him, put my arm around his shoulder and posed for the picture my husband took as if I were posing with a friend.

The smile on his face…I was probably much more happy than him, but that made my day. I am not sure why. I guess he reminded me of me in some strange way. A creative person, but down on his luck by choice or circumstance, who knows.

Image

I’m not sure why I look like a giant person in this picture, but that’s OK. I’ve accepted the fact that I am not very photogenic in 80% of the pictures other people take of me. Life goes on. I asked the guy his name and he told me it was Papa Smurf. I told him it was a pleasure to meet him, and when my husband and I were done eating lunch around the corner I gave him my leftover food, but only after asking if he wanted it. “I never turn down food,” he said.

***

I was walking through San Francisco a month or so ago with a friend, and we passed a bearded, dirty old man standing in a doorway with a shopping cart loaded with tarps and cans and other paraphernalia. The only thing you could see shine through the dirt of his face were his white and blue eyeballs. I made eye contact with him and he looked scared for a second, furtive. I smiled. In return, he gave me the warmest, most genuine smile I’ve ever seen. It was like he knew I didn’t have any change, that I wasn’t a stranger to his reality.

Or something.

***

We’re all human beings. It’s easy to forget, especially when I’m walking down the Haight and I get accosted on every single block for spare change (is there such a thing?), and I realize that those dirty, foul-mouthed kids sitting on the curb, the ones I don’t want to make eye contact with or give change to because I know they’re going to buy alcohol, are me over 15 years ago. And they can’t see that I was them. When I was sitting on those curbs, the people who walked by weren’t people. Often, they were cash machines. The ones who stood out were the ones who took the time to ask me about myself–sometimes it was the street photographers who took my picture and came back to give me a copy. I would keep that photograph in my worn Alice pack and pull it out every night to look at it, thinking, “There’s me. I’m real. I exist. Someone else has seen me.” I didn’t feel invisible.

The Modern Era of Photography.

The side-angle pose. The phenomena of the modern age. Taken with a digital camera angled slightly above and with one arm extended out so that the lens can capture ones face, and not much else.

Always, when you look at a photograph there is one part missing. The photographer. And we forget that we are looking at an image through not our eyes first, but the photographer’s eyes.

Because the mind wants to think that it was the first one looking through that lens.

Look at a picture. Now look at it through the person who you know took the pictures eyes. How does that change what you see? It’s not a rhetorical question.

So what does that say of the side-angle pose of the modern age? And no, it is not just an ode to Facebook. Perhaps with the advent of the disposable camera. So with the idea that this wasn’t a “real” photo that would cost more money to get developed, why not take a picture of our own face. We can just throw it away if it doesn’t turn out.

So we end up with photo boxes full of our own faces.

One thing we will be able to say about our modern age sometime in the future when it is not so modern is this: we were obsessed with our own image. Yet we knew little of ourselves. If the photographer is the one seeing the image, how is it that the side-angle pose is taken with no photographer at all looking through the lens?

One could say the picture is taken so that we can better see ourselves in it. We can’t see ourselves. We are endlessly searching to find out who we are.

So more than just a preoccupation with seeing our own faces, perhaps the side-angle pose goes deeper to reveal a lack. Therein lies the secret.

What can be said about us is that we don’t know our own image. We have no idea how we impact the world. We weren’t given a script that was blatant, just a script that invisibly runs in the background, sending us to this school or that job or that social heirarchy. But we don’t know where to go. Unlike our grandparents we have too many choices. How do we effect the world?

We can’t see. So we rely on the invisible photographer to tell us. But the invisible photographer is our own eyes. And we aren’t even looking.

The one thing that will always be true is that we can only see through our own eyes. The next is that we will never really know what we look like to other people. And maybe photographing ourselves is an attempt at detachment. Maybe it’s a visual representation of how modern technology distances us from each other. How alone we are that we can’t take pictures of us with other people half as much as we can take pictures of ourselves. Maybe a lot of us don’t have that option half as much anymore. The more technology brings us together the more it distances us from ourselves leaving us with an invisible photographer capturing our every expression. Nothing of sentiment. Nothing of empathy. Nothing of history but an image of the side of your face taken by you.

Whatever it means, it’s strange.