Monthly Archive for March, 2009

No Pictures Please by Akaky

When I was a young man, a time I like to think of as only yesterday and the calendar likes to tell me wasn’t, I had no suicidal tendencies.  Yes, I bumbled my way through the usual raft of silly foibles allotted to the young and hormonally overwhelmed male. There was the time, for example, when, in a fit of dubious self-confidence brought on by a prolonged reading of Mr. Hefner’s philosophy, I hit on our high school’s homecoming queen in the biology lab, not realizing that her boyfriend, a middle linebacker of moderately Brobdingnagian proportions and extremely choleric disposition, stood just around the corner conferring with his fellow jocks on a some matter of great import to them all. He heard my lame attempts to pick up his girlfriend and reacted, as you might imagine, badly. This, in turn, led to the one great athletic accomplishment of my high school years: running from the biology lab on the third floor to the front door and down the street to the bus stop in less than ten seconds despite the best efforts of students and faculty to get in my way. If you were in my path that day, let me take this opportunity to apologize again for knocking you on your ass; the cause was more than sufficient, or at least I thought so. But a foible now and again is one thing; a suicidal tendency is something very different.

I bring the matter up because now, in my near dotage, I have acquired a suicidal tendency.  I did not intend to acquire a suicidal tendency; it just arose out of the circumstances, the way that sunrises and syphilis do.  The breeding ground for this unwanted and unnatural tendency was photography. I realize that you may find this a bit unbelievable; photography seems such a harmless hobby, like phlebotomy or collecting Bronze Age Hittite harmonicas; but as Hemingway once pointed out, all truly wicked things begin in great innocence.  I may be getting that quote wrong, but the one thing of Hemingway’s I can quote accurately, that the rich are different from you and me, they have more money, he didn’t actually say, and since the point of gratuitously tossing in a quote from some great literary figure is to make me look more intelligent and well-read than I really am, I am not going to quote fake Hemingway when I can quote the real one.  Be that as it may, Hemingway was right. My grandmother took up quilting afghans late in life and became a fabric fanatic, spending weeks at a time quilting huge afghans with a grim determination that was somewhat unnerving to see. I suspect that she either couldn’t or wouldn’t stop, and so she kept at it, converting tons of wool into brightly colored afghans that no one in the family wanted. I have an attic full of these Afghans now; they are cheaper than fiberglass insulation and they are reasonably polite when they are not plotting jihad all night long. Frankly, I wish they wouldn’t do that; I’d prefer not to come home from work and find my house blasted to splinters by a drone-borne missile, but as they’ve been up there for years, I fear that I am obliged to put up with what I cannot get rid of.

I took up photography in a similar spirit of innocence. It was just a hobby, you see, a simple diversion to help while away what little free time I have. I didn’t expect anything to come of it at all. Yes, I was an innocent then, not knowing the difference between an f-stop and a bus stop, and if I’d given the matter any thought at all I’d probably think that an f-stop was a bus stop in a red light district (it could be—stranger things have happened, you know). In those halcyon days, a Leica was something Chico Marx said to express approval, a Canon was the sum total of the world’s literary masterpieces, and Nikon was the 17th century Russian Orthodox patriarch whose liturgical reforms sparked the religious schism between the Orthodox and the Old Believers. I was very foolish then, very foolish indeed. The camera companies do not tell you that this particular hobby is addictive; if you check carefully, you will note that they do not have to put the potential side effects of their products on the side of the box the way the tobacco companies do. They ought to, just so people will know what they are getting into.

Having acquired a camera, in this case a film point and shoot manufactured by a large Japanese camera company whose name I will not mention here unless they pay me for the endorsement, I immediately began photographing everything in sight, especially my mother’s lilies, a practice I would recommend to any beginner who asks (none has); if you can photograph flowers and pretty girls together then so much the better—the inherent interest of the subject matter will often compensate for any deficiencies in your compositional skills. Most of the photographs I took in this period went beyond the merely amateurish and roared off like a biker with a couple of quarts of Jim Beam under his belt into the realm of the surreally awful, but I kept at it, yes I did, and in time I bought an SLR, so that I could go on creating vast piles of unnecessary landfill at an ever-greater pace. After several years of photographing the local flora and fauna, and becoming bored with them both, I thought that I might change my subject matter, there being, as Fred Astaire tells Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face, no market for pictures of trees. Actually, there is such a market, but if you’re not Ansel Adams, nobody is interested in them.  And as Adams had sequoias and I don’t, it occurred to me that I might take pictures of people instead.

A fateful decision, that, for it has led directly to my developing the suicidal tendency (remember those? This piece started with my moaning and groaning about suicidal tendencies. Really, it did; you can go back to the beginning and check) of taking unflattering photographs of women.  I don’t mean to take unflattering photographs of women; the pictures just come out that way. I fear that fashion photography will be forever closed to me because of this. Take the photograph above as an example. Despite what you may think based on the evidence I’m presenting here, she is having a very good time, even if this picture makes her look as though I’d just hit her in the eye with a large glob of potato salad. Clearly, no fashionable young woman (and she is a fashionable young woman) wants people to see pictures of them looking as though they are wearing a large eyeful of potato salad as an accessory. It is difficult, at best, to do delicatessen chic properly, and so most women do not try. In short, women tend to object to someone taking really bad photographs of them and they will go to extraordinary lengths to make sure no such photograph ever sees the light of day, and the young woman pictured above will probably object violently if she ever finds out about this. I thought about asking our host here to not publish the photo at all, but in the end I decided to go ahead anyway, even if this means she will have my eyes gouged out with a red-hot fork for my temerity. While I am not looking forward to the inevitable eruption of feminine wrath, I am not prepared to give up photography, although once I am one with Oedipus, I suppose I’ll have to take up some more useful activity, like joining a cult or selling life insurance. I am not looking forward to this, but then, I won’t be looking forward at anything at that point. Such is life, I guess.

Photograph and Text: Akaky