#87 — The Real Picture

Soft Narcissism and Family Photography

Staring at the photos, I can’t tell precisely what it is I detest. Did the shooter fail to adequately portray her subjects … or am I repulsed because she absolutely nailed it? The fireplace beneath them simmers as I reflect the conundrum.

I trace the patriarch. With his beady, dull eyes … and the JackNicholson forehead (but with an older man’s hat). I want to like him at least a little. I’d settle for feeling pity, since that’s an emotion with a tad bit of life. But he is cold for me. I wish I could even endure twenty seconds of keeping even one eye trained to him.

A mirror presents the same vex; it shows what you hate. But you return and return again.

And there’s my best cousin. Six foot three, a 20 percent smile, and yet all the sun’s warmth somehow makes it through those barely curved closed lips. Most people’s expensive pearlies could never pray for half that glow, on even their happiest moments. It’s quite unfair, all that evanescence, in just one place.

And then there’s the neighbor girl. I’d watched her shoot up from a child. The swingsets and mudcastles. All that innocence — a belief that the world could freshen once more. And she alights. Pure-flowing, but for two formidable, unfortunate stents: an overextended leg, sleeved in cartoonish tattoos, and her half-bare little developing chest, unafraid to hide itself, not caring who suffers the epiphany.

And then a woman I wanted to hate. A manipulative hag, speculative, conniving, incapable of an unselfish breath, yet a mother, I’ll grant her, but a plagued one at that. And somehow the Nikon eye has muffed all this up as well. Unexpectedly it has frozen the old bird in an offlight mirage, revealing her a creature that might be delicate and hopeful. By some strange magic it has even posed her somewhat childlike and afraid. What poppycrap!

I stub my foot on the fire poker, so engrossed in finding tale-flaws in this simpleton’s artform. And across the room I spy a mirror, that other vex-thing for mankind. A vex, for it too shows one what they hate, since all too many times a man despises his own coordinates in space.”

I look at the woman again. Now she is gaunt and pale, as if not long for the world. Did cameras lie or did they parlance with truth? Just when one feels that they have solved that riddle it all goes teats-side up. It’s why I hated these presentations that haunt the otherwise grand room. Was it the shotman’s fault though? That’s what I wanted to know. It mattered to me for some reason.

I asked another paparazzi (for that’s what they all are) “do you wait to take your shot until you know you’ve captured their spirit?”.

He’d looked at me like I was crazy (which clearly wasn’t the point) and said it wasn’t his job to paint the man, but theirs to bring to that location the persona they wished to facebook.

Unsatisfied, I’d asked another friend who fancied himself an artist, but who fiddled with cameras. “And don’t you review your snaplight prizes later, before portfolioing them? To discover which ones have a real-face as opposed to a pollutant disguise?” It was all jibberish to him. “I can’t know who they truly are”, he confessed. “Nobody’s hiring for those jobs.”

I was stymied. And my toes hurt. The more I asked life’s questions, the more folk treated me like I were the problem.

Didn’t anyone care to know the composition of all — or at least some — of what swum in the soul of those they bumped into? It hurt, and was mind-blowing, to be an intellectual, if that’s even what I was.

I looked also at my brother and his wife. He there, so stoic, presenting his confident outlook, with those hollywood cheekbones, forest eyebrows, staglike eyes. Her the consummate post-modern wife. Competing in masculinity but built for love all the same. Appearing to admire him, but ready to eat one of his testicles if he tested her too far.

I started to get sick to my stomach as the world swarmed with cool and warm air. The windows were open and the logs burned on time. I threw off my scarf, sat down to catch my equilibrium. I spotted another square depiction with children shadow-boxed upon it. I reached over for the examination.

Were these children, or were they sprites? Did this Arbus-wannabee technology (that was obviously traded with angels) somehow perceive how the modern-day little ones possessed neither conscience nor soul?, How somehow a century late, they were just automatrons with Walt Disney’s darkest demons inside?

How did the babes of our internet era seem more cold and aloof than the already dark adults who preceded them? It was a tormentful musk and elucidation. And if we didn’t come out of the womb now, even semi-unstained, then what will the end of us be? How will we survive?

I turn the ceiling fan on now. To circulate the mixture of airs.

The truth is … I am an artist also. A “camera-man” with his own bent. Yet I take responsibility to shape the world in certain form. Sometimes I do it as it should be. Or other times as it could. Often, I reflect it back, in all it’s horrific ugly. But oh so very rarely would I hit click just as it is.

Or maybe that’ s not right either … And sometimes I might be a romantic.

But why do I burn against the author of this simpleton photography? For even I must sometimes splash life upon the slate, put sandwich bread around it, and call it “Voila!”. So what was it I opposed so vehemently about how this bloody “work it” monkey commoner had slapped things/us upon the wall in such array?

If pressed to mark a diagnose upon it, it was likely that he hadn’t taken the time to consider his subjects. To even at all know them. Not an iota.

To improve them where they unfortunatley needed it. To bring them down some notches, where their hot-air-balloon heads begged for the similar.

I looked again at Nicholson. He made me want to punch a goat. Then at his wife, and back at him.

Why was the fool just sitting there with his metaphorical adult diapers wrapped around his ankles? For being such a willful monster at times, he really had zero dignity to offer at all, and it made you want to run off a blooming cliff.

I should have taken the photos. But then I wouldn’t have been in them. And I was no good with the little sorcery box anyway, since I had no steady hand (I know, how am I an artist then? — that’s why I paint digitally). But would I have been pleased with my own shutter-collapsery?

To be consistent — for no true artist (or intellectual) has permission to fail at that — I had to finally gaze at my own damn doppelganger, to assess my objectivism. The “me” posing idiotically in there also, had to be considered. Perhaps I was my own problem.

It was not easy. If it weren’t part of my plan to rid the world of profanity, it would be all I could do to cuss-storm the hurricane down when looking at that “fool of a Took” who had my face upon him.

Truly I could not smile properly, not for all the bitcoin in the world. And of course neither could I do it for the cursed choreographer either. I never can.

I don’t even smile well when it’s natural.

But why can’t the freaking person behind the technology piece learn to do candids anyway (isn’t that the real sport)— to be the bloody photojournalist. Isn’t that what novel-authenticity calls for? Isn’t it obvious — a common yearn?

A smile is a dumb-ass thing anyway, to present to later viewers who are worth their stock. Do we really believe that they really play the dunce and believe that we’re all that happy, from sun-up to tuck-me-downs every day?

Plus, people look unintelligent when they tackle those artificial face pull-ups with their cheeks. It’s not natural. It insults the audience. It insults the world! It flips a finger at reality.

I’ve long argued that a wedding photographer should just be the video-guy anyway, pulling stills from his cinematic masterpiece, choosing the best from its litter. But those photographers just hiss at me. Like I’ve pulled the shades up, on a sunny day, with them all being vampires.

“How dare you be that naieve!”, one of them queried. “You’d have to have a hundred-thousand-dollar camera for such a thing. And that’s not the sport”!

The room is spinning and I’m done arguing. At the end of the day, the photograph is my mirror anyway.

I hate my hair. The wrinkles eternally on my forehead. The teeth that never met a dentist. The strange brown bumps on my hands.

But that’s not the nuclear problem. The real storm is that I know I’m bigger and better than all this. There’s a truer, more alluring person, buried beneath this ridiculous, homely shell. And so I swim, in hubris, and not just sewers of self-doubt. And probably not alone either.

Everyone else — the ones in the photos — somehow unnarcissistically — they’re just extensions of myself. They are my world. And thus my muse.

And somebody cast them pathetically all wrong. And it itches. Like Poison Ivy.

Or maybe I just need a brainectomy. And that might be the real picture.