This Is Running for Your Life (30 page)

The initial response to the Abu Ghraib images was pretty universal: revulsion. Revulsion derived in part from the fact that these were not secondhand stories leaked by a mole or an intrepid reporter, but crimes that American soldiers documented themselves, as they happened, like for fun. As Susan Sontag noted at the time, not even the Nazis—obsessive archivists of their own atrocities—were known to cram a thumbs-up into the frame.

Sontag also used the Abu Ghraib scandal to point out that the purpose of every digital image is tied to its own dissemination, something reconfirmed by every new viral cell-phone video of a dictator's grisly lynching, or violation of an anonymous young girl. My mind goes blank when I hear stories about kids who grew up in a digital camera culture documenting their felonies and uploading them to Facebook. The horror is demagnetizing. The only sense to be made is surely tied to our desperation for the crisp sting of reality in an increasingly padded, prismatic world. If we've reached the point where what is not photographed does not count as “real,” then in some situations the paradox may be that the camera is introduced to somehow complete or verify a moment that felt too surreal, as though it weren't really happening. And yet the most pervasive reality to emerge from camera culture meets only the most basic—which is to say legal—parameters. Pics, as they say, or it didn't happen.

*   *   *

In their respective 1970s meditations on photography, Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag ground certain of their arguments in the physical nature of the photograph. Barthes seemed to revel more in what photography—“a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed”—could do than what it might; Sontag contrasted photography favorably with the chaos of television, “a stream of underselected images, each of which cancels its predecessor.” Barthes preferred the still to the moving image because it asked and allowed for more of us—only subjectivity can develop, create, complete, the well-selected image. Sontag felt the physical fact of photographs was the source of both their power and their manageability, making them more given to a governing “ecology.”

Although that hope seems far off indeed thirty years and untold trillions of images later, a basic question behind it persists: Is there anything that should not be photographed?

Celebrity-photographer Eve Arnold has described the photographer's ecological responsibility as a matter of “gatekeeping.” The death of a famous subject—and the subsequent surge to their living image—tests the photographer. Arnold calls Bert Stern's incessant republication of the photographs he took of Marilyn Monroe (whom she also photographed), known as the Last Sitting, a betrayal, especially given evidence of the actress's attempt to destroy a whack of them. But there is no privacy for the dead, and perhaps only the simulacrum of it for the living.

“As everyone knows who has ever heard a piece of gossip,” wrote Janet Malcolm in “The Silent Woman,” her 1993
New Yorker
serial concerning the embattled literary estate of Sylvia Plath, the role of Plath's husband, Ted Hughes, in shaping her legacy, and the controversy surrounding the lengthening queue of Plath biographies, “we do not ‘own' the facts of our lives at all.

This ownership passes out of our hands at birth, at the moment we are first observed. The organs of publicity that have proliferated in our time are only an extension and a magnification of society's fundamental and incorrigible nosiness. Our business is everybody's business, should anybody wish to make it so. The concept of privacy is a sort of screen to hide the fact that almost none is possible in a social universe. In any struggle between the public's inviolable right to be diverted and an individual's wish to be left alone, the public almost always prevails. After we are dead, the pretense that we may somehow be protected against the world's careless malice is abandoned. The branch of the law that putatively protects our good name against libel and slander withdraws from us indifferently.

In this light, Anthony Summers's publication of a photo of Monroe's corpse in his 1996 biography appears inevitable; the public prevailed. It was, Arnold felt, “the ultimate in horror, to me, of what can happen to a picture.”

Today, it would seem, everything should be photographed, and everything that is photographed should be seen. It is a matter of maintaining our new social ecology; to resist is futile, as is the expectation of “privacy” as we have conceived of it since royal copulation as a spectator sport fell out of favor. What is it, we ask of the mother who complains about her child's photo being posted on another parent's social-media page, that you have to hide? What
exactly
are you worried about? Anyone who has badgered a stranger or even a good friend to stop posting his picture on the Internet has discovered the paradox of this new world of individuals living in a country of images: mutually assured solipsism means nothing is sacred. You'd think it would have created a kingdom of libertarians, stone-walled mini-fiefdoms as far as the eye can see. Instead we have chosen to believe that a self-interested society can run on the pretense of
sharing
and make a manicured production of living open and expansively represented lives online.

I take comfort, between dodging cameras and sending threatening e-mails to strangers, in the fact that Sontag was a reluctant subject herself. “Although reason tells me the camera is not aimed like a gun barrel at my head,” she wrote, “each time I pose for a photograph portrait I feel apprehensive.” Immobilized by the camera's scrutiny, she felt somehow hidden behind her face, “looking out through the windows of my eyes, like the prisoner in the iron mask in Dumas's novel.” After considering the reasons for this apprehension—puritan anxiety, moral narcissism, plain self-consciousness—she decides it is mainly the dismay of being seen: “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.)”

Maybe that 10 percent is the place where serial killers hang out while hacking up their victims. I tend to think it's the portion that keeps the other 90 percent spiritually solvent. It must be the part, anyway, that maintains our connection to the whole of human history prior to 1850, in which lives were lived and identities forged without the benefit or the interference of photo-reflection. Those eras we now think of in terms of their “costumes,” and an inherent suspicion of the dramatic fakery modern life has set right. All those hidden lives of Middlemarch, and their humble contributions to a continuum of social good.

But then, like the best novels, the best photographs remind the pure, invisible observer in me of the things I want to know, don't know, or have known, and the ways I want to be known myself. They remind me, in other words, of the world beyond images, and beyond me. But the rest—the vast majority—seep into me or slide by with the opposite effect, deflecting or confusing memory, canceling each other out, numbing my sense of the world beyond images, and beyond my own relentless consumption of them.

*   *   *

On a winter weekend several years ago, after heading to the Brooklyn Museum, I drifted from the usual panoply of impressionists to a retrospective of Annie Leibovitz's photographs. In making this transition I was reminded that the pleasure of looking at a painting combines the beauty of the image with the feeling that something of the artist lingers within the work itself: you are standing where the artist stood, and every brushstroke is tangible evidence of her life; the part of her memory embedded there seeks a place in yours. With photographic exhibits, the pleasure feels more purely aesthetic: the image was captured and in some sense abandoned by the artist. You look where she looked, literally, and try to place yourself where she stood, perhaps, but the emphasis is on what can be seen—on the image itself. I always laughed when a Dutch friend of mine referred to “making” a photo—a translation glitch he couldn't keep straight. I just thought it sounded funny, but there is something strange about the one art form we talk about in terms of taking, and not making.

Many of the Leibovitz photos were already well known from magazine covers and portfolios: celebrities and luminaries, each transformed by the photographer's signature, statued postures and bloodless pallor. Demi Moore, Arnold Schwarzenegger, John and Yoko arranged into a melancholy paragraphus. Then, at the far end of the exhibit, as the glossy photos ceded to personal snaps, there were a few shots of Susan Sontag, Leibovitz's partner of some years. Here Sontag appeared vital, that defiant glint of white hair taken up in her eyes; there she was stretched out on a couch, spent by sickness, as we had come to know. Then, arranged in the exhibit to punctuate those that came before, was a framed photograph of Sontag's corpse. The end of the story.

My first reaction was the basic one: here is another thing I did not care to see that I have now seen anyway. Here now my own memory of this woman—the feeling of having shared some space in her mind—would forever be presided upon by this bully, this empty body, which had nothing to tell me about its subject, though it spoke of some other loss, to be sure. It clarified the extent to which the modern image feels
taken
, representative mostly of its own theft. It didn't have to be digital to feel that way.

In my memory, anyway, Sontag seemed to shiver at the idea of images turning reality into a shadow. But my memory is overlaid with the compost work of time and distortions of perspective; it's what makes it mine. She might bristle at being thought anything but stoical and dispassionate about her own theories and conclusions. She might point out that it's highly unlikely that the tumbling, drunken toddler footsteps my father recorded in Super 8 during the years when she was coming to those conclusions were the first ones I took. The very first steps probably happened earlier that morning, or maybe the day before, and were re-created in the nicest room in the house, with my brother standing dutifully by. I don't have a memory to consult on that score and never heard the story. The images, being all that remain, have asserted their privilege. I'm grateful for it too. It seems close enough to a truth I wouldn't otherwise have.

It seems obvious, as well, that it was I who shivered reading Susan Sontag, standing where she stood and feeling her there with me. Because she was more right than she could have known when she said images are more real than anyone imagined. Reality itself now requires the gatekeeper, something to protect it from light-starved stagnation. Because a world mastered by images makes a conduit of human experience; we exist to serve the image, not the other way around. Anyone who has seen a camera's screen bobbing superfluously in a crowd, or realized that a subject's enigmatic smile was not directed at someone behind the lens because there was no one behind the lens, or imagined our millions of satellites and surveillance cameras carrying on long after we've all been evaporated, by the asteroid or the dino virus or some combination of the two, knows it would appear images can already take themselves. We take them in as automatically, ever turning to the next one and the one after that, scanning and scavenging, as though gripped by a hunger we don't understand.

More than our faces, our follies, or our plates of gourmet fries, the images reflect that famishment, seeming to tear through each other; it's a food chain in chaos, at the point of consuming itself. And so I wonder, Susan, and how I wish for your reply: If images have begun to eat their own, what might they do to us?

 

Do I Know You?

And Other Impossible Questions

A friend was grieving and had been gone. On the evening he returned to town I appeared at his door with a six-pack, some sweets, and a recently pilfered movie screener. It would be my second time watching Lynn Shelton's
My Effortless Brilliance
, having enjoyed it the first time with that particular zealousness that compels one to bypass recommendation and go straight to recruitment, chaperoned viewings staged as a most intimate gift. This was at least a place to begin, and the screening was a success: We laughed, we cringed, we were quietly moved. Most important, some time passed, and painlessly.

When it was over, my friend turned to me with a funny look. “That guy, the main character,” he said. “Do you know who he reminded me of?” I did, but I didn't. It had bothered me all the way through the first time, this free-ranging recognition, so when my friend named its elusive source—a mutual acquaintance—the satisfaction was sonar deep. I'd only met this person once; there were no logical grounds for how fully I felt the justice of the comparison, which was physical, but not only. It just jived, it was yar—you knew it. It was also as if, simply by virtue of making the match, my friend and I had become the proprietors of a secret about this person, and a wicked one at that.

Turnabout, let's call it. Secret for secret, anyway. I seem to have one of those faces, see. Perhaps you do too, and you know what I'm talking about. The kind of face people think they know, or have seen before, or can easily conflate with those they have studied more intimately in two dimensions than we can ever hope to in three. Perhaps this isn't uncommon at all. In fact, in considering the phenomenon, I have imagined most of you reading these words and thinking,
Yeah, I get that all the time
. Indeed, the majority of participants in a recent, random polling on the matter affirmed that, yeah, they get that all the time. The possibility soon presented itself that on some level and to some degree we all somehow suspect we've encountered one another before.

So I—like you, apparently—get this a lot. Only occasionally do people suggest that we went to summer camp together, or that I played on their volleyball team; too rarely have I come to them in a dream. Most often it turns out I am someone, or remind them of someone, they have seen on the big screen, someone whose image or affect or ineffable essence, having refracted and settled into a murky, primordial quadrant of their memory, I have stirred and called to the fore. With strangers the conviction that attends the culmination of this process is especially tough to overturn.