I'LL BE YOUR MIRROR
Some thoughts on photography
and the narcissistic impulse
Photographers are wary of photography, and with
good reason. I take that famous self-portrait of Nan Goldin with a black
eye as a metaphor for a truth that all photographers know but only rarely
turn upon themselves: The image hits back. Taking a picture is not an act
of theft, but a kind of aggression. So photographers, rather than putting
themselves directly in front of their own lens, feel a need to deflect
their image, or refract it, turning what might be a rather straightforward
examination of their appearance or an exercise in narcissism into an act of
evasion, a Borgesian game of ontological hide-and-seek: I’m here but
not here. Sometimes all we’ll see is their shadow or a faint
reflection in a darkened window. If they show themselves clearly, it is
often as a visage in the mirror.
Of course, photographers do take pictures of
themselves directly. Think of Robert Mapplethorpe or Chuck Close, not to
mention Goldin. Most people want attention, as Diane Arbus noted, and a
photograph is “a reasonable kind of attention to be paid.” It
invites theatricality and indulges narcissism, and photographers are not
immune to the temptations they routinely offer others. Examples range from
the disappointed Hippolyte Bayard’s playacting of a drowned
man—Bayard felt cheated out of the credit for photography’s
invention—to the Countess de Castiglione’s staged
self-dramatizations. She made hundreds of them, including some that showed
the ravages of time on her own bloated body.
But the mirrored self-portrait is a distinct genre
because it epitomizes photography’s spectral nature. A painting
contains a physical trace of the artist, but the photograph does not. In
the taking of most photographs, the photographer is but an operator, an
extension of the machine, unable to insert into the descriptive space of
the image any trace of his or her selfhood, imagination, or spirit. (The
photographer is nothing but an all-seeing, transparent eye.) No wonder
transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson called the nineteenth
century the advent of an ocular age. Baudelaire thought that the
photograph’s separation of matter and spirit was an unmitigated
disaster that spelled the end of aesthetics and art; he sensed in
photography a negation of his own triumphant subjectivity.
As if to confirm the photographer’s ghostly
status, the history of photography is full of self-portraits in reflecting
surfaces. In an image from 1851, Gustave Le Gray pictured himself as a
passing shadow in a mirror whose ornateness seems to mock the
insubstantiality of photography. Somewhat later, the great Persian
photographer Antoin Sevruguin created a hall-of-mirrors portrait of himself
at work during a Tehran photo session. Robert A. Sobieszek featured such
images in his 1994 exhibition “The Camera i”: Ilse Bing doubly
imaged, the pregnant Diane Arbus, André Kertész in the corner
of one of his distortion photos, Dieter Appelt, partly obliterated in a
breath-fogged mirror. For photographers, who are always looking at
something else, the mirror provides the only way of picturing yourself with
your tools.
Self-reflection in photography isn’t limited to
self-portraiture, with or without mirrors. It pervades scientific and
documentary photography as well. Whenever the camera ventures out into the
sunlight, the shadows or reflections of photographers (and their tripods)
appear like thumbprints on their images. Over the years, they have marked
the plates of cartographers, travel photographers, anthropologists,
archaeologists, paleontologists, and even impressionist painters. We can
see the shadow of Monet’s bowler hat in his photo of the water lily
pond at Giverny, a reminder that it’s not God or a machine making the
image, but a person, a consciousness. This has its negative side, too. The
shadow or reflection is a stamp of possession. We see it in a spectacular
image by Harlan Smith, taken on an expedition for the American Museum of
Natural History at the turn of the last century. It is an extreme close-up
of a Northwest Coast Indian man, and in the pupil of his eye we see the
photographer reflected. The image is a succinct metaphor for
photography’s role in imperialism.
Today, the Internet is loaded with self-reflective
images. Typing “self-portrait” into the search engine on
www.flickr.com produces more than 350,000 results. Most of the ones with
mirrors strike me as psychological statements, laying bare the
photographer’s own ambivalence regarding the possibilities of
self-representation. Or they are examples of a kind of coy distancing, a
refusal of availability. In examples where equipment is prominent, the
image reinforces either a sense of professional competence or an
association with hobby. Their titles emphasize the prevalence of the trope
not just in professional photography, but in photography at large: Ubiquitous Mirror Self Portrait
and Obligatory Self Portrait in Mirror Holding
Camera. One image from the Internet shows a
photographer taking a picture of himself in a mirrored bathroom and clearly
enjoying the game as the mirror reflects his momentary self-capture to
infinity. He calls it Mirror Cliché.
And all those photographers who have participated in
the romantic desire for supreme subjectivity? The mirrored portrait is
pathos and game, a (reflected) candle to light up the heart of darkness and
banish photographers’ own inevitable sense of irrelevance. There is,
for all the humor, something incredibly claustrophobic about these images
in which the photographers look like trapped creatures emerging momentarily
from a cave. One of Kafka’s parables goes: “A cage went seeking
a bird.” Is this not a metaphor for photography to replace the
mirrors and windows?
