Photoshoots are funny

2011-04-16T10:55:52+00:00

Recently I’ve gotten my picture taken much more than usual. No great mystery why: the Nebula nomination. I think most of us are rendered uncomfortable and self-conscious by having photos taken, especially ones we know “matter” — no matter how many candids are taken of us as children by snap-happy parents, as adults most of us are anxious about the process.

My recent adventures in digital gaze actually began a year before the Nebula nomination, when I roped my dad into trying to take an author headshot for me. The light wasn’t great and I didn’t choose my clothes all that well, but we got something I can use and currently do. The big revelation, however, was that I am horrible at posing, and even at judging my own shots. Ryan says just about every shot of me looking “serious” makes me look bored — and he has a lot more experience with my expressions than I do.

I suppose posing is like anything else where your body has to produce an effect your mind doesn’t fully understand: you have to learn to trick yourself, and without a toolbag of tricks, you’re flailing around with little hope.

A few weeks ago I went to my first ever professional photoshoot: Portland Monthly Magazine wanted a photograph to go along with a column on local Nebula nominees M.K. Hobson, Mary Robinette Kowal, and me. This was incredibly fun: there were floating antique typewriters (converted from floatless models in Mary Robinette’s collection) and flying pieces of paper and cups of free coffee from one of my favorite Portland coffeehouses, Case Study. But at several points I was asked to look “angry”, intense, like I hated the camera. And I say at several points because the other two subjects only had to be asked once.

This is actually quite funny to me, because I think I play angry reasonably well — in motion and speech. I scared a fellow student once when we did the “kill Claudio” speech from Much Ado About Nothing for class (I was Beatrice, natch.) A fellow roleplayer in my first LARP went out-of-character to make sure his buffoonish character’s chauvinistic comments weren’t actually bothering me — he said I seemed actually livid. But in stillness, apparently, my hating the camera has little effect.

It was Mary Hobson who saved the day by saying “think about Marla from Fight Club!” How could she have known I had just rewatched Fight Club — and just lost my longstanding distaste for Helena Bonham Carter thanks to The King’s Speech? I tried Marla. She hates the camera with world-weary ennui, and has complete contempt for it. The reminders to look angry ceased and the fun continued.

The other day I had a solo portrait shot by a professional photographer for my high school alma mater‘s alumni magazine (I’m trying to keep this a secret from my mom, but if she’s reading my blog this regularly she deserves to find out!) After a few different sorts of smiles and some “serious” expressions (will I look bored in those?), the photographer told me to do angry. I summoned my Marla impression at once, and he shook his head. “Whoa! Too much.”

I’m learning!

Beauty and erasure

2008-12-14T00:37:07+00:00

I recently finished the meaty nonfiction tome The Bounty, by Caroline Alexander. It led me to reflect on youth and responsibility, the totally different worlds that coexist within a given culture and time period, and many other things. One line of thought was inspired by a throw-away line and a series of illustration plates.

A surviving, highly stylized portrait shows Nessy [Heywood, sister of a mutinous young gentleman] as the ideal young woman of her time, with large, limpid eyes and a small ‘rosebud’ mouth, her slim, pale face framed by a mane of soft curls – a portrait that does not accord entirely with Peter’s own fond and forgiving description. His sister’s features, he allowed, ‘were by no means regular’, although her long-lashed eyes ‘redeemed the whole face’.

The portrait, seen here, is reproduced in a plates section further on in the text. It is, in fact, pretty but insipid, a sharp contrast to the portrait of Rear Admiral Sir Thomas Pasley on the facing page. Pasley’s portrait is more detailed and by a noted portraitist, so perhaps it’s natural that his face shows hints of cunning and perhaps a twist of humor, where Nessy’s portrait gives no real insight on her character.

But turning the page again, I find character after character. The officers at Peter Heywood’s court martial appear in different media, by different artists, and most of them are strikingly individual. I could very easily label each with an adjective: self-absorbed, stodgy, idealist, bold; or use each picture as the jumping-off point for a character in a story. I turn the page again, and here are more portraits, few of them detailed oil portraits, but most of them, again, with that indefinable spark that speaks, if not of likeness, then of humanity, perhaps of essence. Take a look at Rear Admiral John Knight, small tho’ he be here, and then look at Nessy again. Isn’t she amazingly devoid of character?

Another woman I find myself unable to envision as real from her portrait is Tahitian noblewoman Poedua (WARNING: exposed breasts). On the other hand, Elizabeth Bligh, Captain Bligh’s wife, seemed very real to me. But when I turned the page to her portrait, I felt a sting of embarrassment on her behalf. Despite the intellect I know from the text she possessed, there is something weak, perhaps a desire to please, in her face. She would seem puppyish even without the accompanying dog. And there is something unprepossessing in her mouth and teeth. More than Poedua, she seems naked to me. Naked because she is real, unbeautiful.

In our perturbation over before and after airbrushing photos, perhaps we forget this earlier precedent. When likeness was a matter both of the skill and of the tact of the portraitist, these flattering lies were rampant (whither Marie-Antoinette’s Hapsburg chin, Mme. Vigée-Le Brun?). There’s no reason to suppose that the men’s portraits are immune – some of these men may have a more dashing set of the head or stronger set of the jaw than they did in life. But those envied physiognomies of manly virtus are not so demanding and distorting as the fickle ideal of beauty.

I remember arguing once with someone who argued that we shouldn’t have a Sacagawea coin because we don’t have any contemporary portrait of her, and can’t be sure our coin is accurate. I pointed out that before photography, only rich, ruling class/race men (and a few women) could have their likeness preserved for posterity – insisting on a likeness before a stamp or coin could be produced would mean perpetuating the effacement of poor people and people of color throughout the ages. And now I realize that there is another effacement here, that of personality and individuality (and occasionally ethnicity) in many of the portraits that were painted. Perhaps Marie-Antoinette was mortified to be sketched on her way to the Guillotine by Revolutionnaire Jacques-Louis David. Under the circumstances, more mortified than most celebrities enduring the paparazzi’s flashes can possibly be. But I feel this picture, stark and incomplete as it is, shows more of Marie-Antoinette’s personality than the many posed and prettified portraits of her I have seen. Her jaw is set and her back is straight. That seems both real and admirable. To be without the veil of beauty is to be exposed, for good or ill.

The beauty ideal isn’t weakening. Rather than allowing a less restrictive and more attainable range of female appearance to be celebrated, our culture is upping the pressure on men to perfect, pore-minimize, depilate and smooth. When you can open a magazine and find Clive Owen in the uncanny valley almost as easily as Beyoncé, perhaps it’s time to celebrate the fragmentary, distorted truth-telling the camera can provide. Perhaps next time we look at a photograph of ourselves, we can look, not for the bulge or the pimple or the wrinkle, but the spark of humanity, the essence that has been preserved and transmitted. Something that says, “I was there.”

Posts tagged with "photography" - Faerye Net

Photoshoots are funny

Beauty and erasure