Where the Stress Falls (26 page)
Read Where the Stress Falls Online
Authors: Susan Sontag
THE TITLE IS
The Babies
. More than one. A group. A fellowship, it appears. More than one such fellowship or band or coterie. A world.
The Babies
. More than one. A group. A fellowship, it appears. More than one such fellowship or band or coterie. A world.
A cunningly sequenced album of pictures inducts us into this world.
It would convey little to have only one photograph. Or two. Or three. To show a world calls for an abundance of photographs, and the photographs have to be arranged. First things first. The last for the last.
The sequence will be a tour of this world. A journey. An initiation.
First we see bits of decor. A small pink satin dress. A teddy bear. A colorful crib sheet printed with cuddly animals. Then, gradually, the presence of the human. A pair of shoes. Bunny slippers. A foot. A knee.
It will be a while before we see faces.
Something doesn’t fit. The accoutrements are those of the nursery. But the human presence is too large, ugly—Brobdingnagian.
We expect babies. These seem to be adult men. The skin of babies, real babies, is perfect. This skin is rough, blotchy, hairy (with here and there a tattoo), the bodies mostly flabby or scrawny—and Polly Borland’s camera scrutinizes them very closely.
Close is ugly. And adult is ugly, when compared with the perfection of the recently born.
As Gulliver observes after reaching a country whose inhabitants are over eighty feet tall: to see enlarged is to be taken aback by imperfections. He recalls that in the country from which he’s come, where
he
was a giant, the complexion of the diminutive Lilliputians had appeared to him “the fairest in the world,” while his tiny new friends found him ugly beyond imagining. One of them
he
was a giant, the complexion of the diminutive Lilliputians had appeared to him “the fairest in the world,” while his tiny new friends found him ugly beyond imagining. One of them
said that my face appeared much fairer and smoother when he looked on me from the ground, than it did upon a nearer view when I took him up in my hand and brought him close, which he confessed was at first a very shocking sight. He said he could discover great holes in my skin; that the stumps of my beard were ten times stronger than the bristles of a boar, and my complexion made up of several colors altogether disagreeable: although I must beg leave to say for myself, that I am as fair as most of my sex and country, and very little sunburnt by all my travels.
Stranded among the people of Brobdingnag, Part II of
Gulliver’s Travels
, where he’s the tiny person, Gulliver finds these mountainous bodies and faces repulsive in exactly the same way that he was, in close-up, to the people of Lilliput. But, even while recoiling from their gross imperfections, Gulliver reminds himself—good cultural relativist that he’s become—that the Brobdingnagians are no doubt just as handsome as any other people in the world.
Gulliver’s Travels
, where he’s the tiny person, Gulliver finds these mountainous bodies and faces repulsive in exactly the same way that he was, in close-up, to the people of Lilliput. But, even while recoiling from their gross imperfections, Gulliver reminds himself—good cultural relativist that he’s become—that the Brobdingnagians are no doubt just as handsome as any other people in the world.
A world, according to Jonathan Swift, and as depicted by Polly Borland, replete with disconcerting oddities.
By the standard of the baby, any adult is ugly, coarse. No beauty of skin can withstand the too intimate scrutiny of the camera.
Beauty, adorableness—and repulsiveness—are mainly a matter of favoring or disfavoring scale, and proximity. And that—scale, proximity—is what photographers deal with all the time.
OF COURSE, BEING “CLOSE”
is essential to the impact and the meaning of these photographs.
is essential to the impact and the meaning of these photographs.
Virtually all of them were taken in some generic, meanly furnished indoors. We may suppose Borland’s subjects to be hiding in these drab, wallpapered rooms which we never see most of, but which feel small. They may only be lying about. (Babies need a lot of rest.) As well as coming and going. We also seem to be offered glimpses of the convening of a boisterous clan. A party of tots. A children’s sleepover.
The photographer has penetrated a space where a secret identity unfolds. An intimate, private space whose banal activities—yowling, drooling, eating, sleeping, bathing, masturbating—here acquire the character of weird rituals, because they’re done by adult men dressed as, and carrying on like, babies.
It has to come as a surprise when, late in the book, there is a photograph of three of the babies in full regalia on a suburban street. (Australia? England?) Surprise that some of Borland’s subjects are willing to offer themselves to the gaze of casual passersby.
A PROGRESS OF PHOTOGRAPHS.
We are introduced to this world in the guise of parts of bodies, oddly framed and cropped. The initial withholding of faces, and the number of pictures taken from a high angle, bolster the relation of superiority that we, the consumers of Borland’s images, seem invited to have (at first) to these clandestine shenanigans.
We are introduced to this world in the guise of parts of bodies, oddly framed and cropped. The initial withholding of faces, and the number of pictures taken from a high angle, bolster the relation of superiority that we, the consumers of Borland’s images, seem invited to have (at first) to these clandestine shenanigans.
We look at them. They don’t look at us. We are rarely shown the babies seeing; when we are, it’s a baby-style gaze, wobbly focus and all, or a look of concentrated self-absorption.
Properly, the book ends with a straight-on portrait of one of the babies, looking adult, even handsome, gazing intently at the camera, at us. Staring back. At last.
FOR A LONG TIME
the camera has been bringing us news about zanies and pariahs, their miseries and their quirks. Showing the banality of the non-normal. Making voyeurs out of us all.
the camera has been bringing us news about zanies and pariahs, their miseries and their quirks. Showing the banality of the non-normal. Making voyeurs out of us all.
But this is particularly gifted, authoritative work. Borland’s pictures seem very knowing, compassionate; and too close, too
familiar
, to suggest common or mere curiosity. There is nothing of the ingenuous stare of a Diane Arbus picture. (I don’t doubt that Arbus would have felt invited by these subjects, but surely she would have photographed them very differently.)
familiar
, to suggest common or mere curiosity. There is nothing of the ingenuous stare of a Diane Arbus picture. (I don’t doubt that Arbus would have felt invited by these subjects, but surely she would have photographed them very differently.)
Zeal in colonizing new, especially transgressive, subject matter is one of the main traditions of photographic practice.
Here—says this book—is a specimen of behavior that has a legitimate claim on our interest and attention. The pictures register a truth about human nature which seems almost too obvious to spell out—the temptation of regression? the pleasures of regression?—but which has never received so keen, so direct a depiction. They invite our identification (“nothing human is alien to me”)—daring us to admit that we, too, can imagine such feelings, even if we are astonished that some people actually go to the trouble, and assume the shame, of acting them out.
ARE THESE PICTURES
shocking?
shocking?
Some people apparently find them so. Probably not the same people made indignant by the sex-pictures of Robert Mapplethorpe. Here the shock is produced by scenes from the intimate life of adult men who appear to have all but completely renounced their sexuality.
I, for one, don’t find these pictures shocking or even upsetting. (What shocks me is cruelty, not sadness.)
Shock—which then dilates into aggressive disapproval—seems to me a somewhat pointless reaction to adults who have so dramatically embraced the role of being helpless.
In most of the pictures, the subjects are sitting, lying down, crawling. They are often on beds or close to the floor. They are rarely vertical.
They
want
to look small. But of course they’re not. So, instead, they look mortified.
want
to look small. But of course they’re not. So, instead, they look mortified.
There is a presumption, when picture-taking assumes an anthropological or ethnographic function, that the subjects—who happen to look the way they do—don’t really see themselves.
What these pictures suggest—what some may find is disturbing about them—is that not only do Borland’s subjects want to look like this but they relish being seen.
MOST OF THE
sexual acting-out understood as deviant is theatre. It requires dressing up. It relies on props. And the world created by these adults must be counted as a sexual fantasy, even if, most of them being “baby purists,” they don’t have sex.
sexual acting-out understood as deviant is theatre. It requires dressing up. It relies on props. And the world created by these adults must be counted as a sexual fantasy, even if, most of them being “baby purists,” they don’t have sex.
What goes on in these depressing rooms is a kind of theatre. Playtime.
But entirely unfeigned.
And without manipulation by the camera. Nothing is digitalized. Borland’s project depends on the photographs being—as of old—a trace or imprint of the real. There is an implicit contract: these are people who really are (part of the time) like this; they aren’t putting on a show for the photographer. Indeed, she had to spend long periods of time with them, win their confidence, become friends, in order to take these pictures.
Imagine what we would feel if we learned that the men are actors, and that the pictures were taken in the course of an afternoon in one house rather than (as they were) over years and in several countries.
The force of these pictures depends on our trusting the photographer that nothing was devised
for
the camera.
for
the camera.
That something is being revealed.
ARE THE BABIES
really unattractive—like, say, the folk in Roger Ballen’s
Platteland
(1994)?
really unattractive—like, say, the folk in Roger Ballen’s
Platteland
(1994)?
In Ballen’s marvelous album of portraits of degenerate-looking whites in rural South Africa, the unattractiveness of his subjects and the rooms they inhabit delivers a moral, ultimately political, message. Here ugliness seems to attest to an appalling impoverishment of spirit as well as of material circumstances. In Borland’s album, the message of her subjects’ unattractiveness is harder to read. We might decide it is mainly one of scale: that is, of the mismatch between the enacted fantasy of smallness and feebleness and these hefty grownup bodies. But we might also suppose, perhaps wrongly, that only adults who look as they do would want to do “this” to themselves.
What are the frontiers of attractiveness—and of unattractiveness? Images produced by cameras have more to tell us, in unpacking this question, than any other resource. Maybe we are no longer capable of thinking about the attractiveness of bodies and faces except in the ways we’ve learned through the camera’s presumptuous seeing. Enlarging, miniaturizing—the camera judges, the camera reveals. Looking at the world to which Borland has given us entry, we don’t know whether we’re in Lilliput or in Brobdingnag. Her brilliant achievement makes us realize that, when we see photographically, we’re living in both.
[2001]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
is
ness of something. Not the truth about something, but the strongest version of it.
is
ness 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.
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]
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