After people die, my mother put it, all that remains are photographs, that’s why we take them. Then she said to me, more sharply, Your interest in the family photos is morbid, the photos, videos, you’re holding on to your childhood, it’s sick. I ignored her and still do, even though she’s dead. Often when people die, you reconsider their statements. I just look at their pictures.
Time goes on, your sacred films and tapes of weddings and communions are hidden away, everyone wants to have them, few look at them again, most are just kept images. I hardly knew so-and-so, there she is forever, but I don’t have to look at her, either. The matte or glossy snapshots, in a drawer or album, represent a past, stand as an implacable memory, stored away against time, and even if in time you recognize no one and nothing by them, even if you have the memory only because the photo exists, it’s a kind of elegy to a reality, a fact or document from the distant past, a memento mori. Or, as Claire’s ghost-brother Nate whispered to her in the finale of HBO’s Six Feet Under, when she was shooting their family before leaving home, “That’s already gone.”
When they die, even clowns sometimes morph into tragic heroes. Take Great Uncle Charley. I stare at his photos, ranging from when he was three, posing for a professional in town, sticking his finger up his nose in a high school graduation photograph, his eyes bugging out at a party after his college graduation, looking boisterous with the Not-So-Tall basketball team, or beaming as he cuts the cake with his bride, Margaret, and on and on. Three years before he died, there’s an arresting one of him with his head drooping to the side, a melancholy expression on his face. I want to peel away the emulsion, get under that sad-sack image, and find out his secret. It’s a primitive urge maybe, or a silly or naive feeling, but no matter what I might seem to know about the fiction and illusion of images, I’m also still that little boy rushing around, curious, trying to find out what’s what, and who, like Great Uncle Charley, is shocked at what I see that no one told me would be there. I want other pictures to efface what I do know, to show me another world, I want to kill images, burn them, like some of my brother. Photographs aren’t real that way.
In my next book, I’m broaching treacherous ground and taking up some cultural questions around images, specifically, a photographer’s disposition — the subject behind the camera — and the effects of family resemblance. When an artist pictures a family member, what’s the psychological impact of a family resemblance on the artist? Is the image also a self-portrait, when the shooter “resembles” the one who poses and so also sees himself or herself? How does the sociology of the American family — for instance, sibling order — affect images? Whose “I”/“eye” can be trusted, if trust is an issue in art, and why? From what I learned in my family, I don’t trust anyone in front of or behind a camera, but with a nod to its futility, I’ll try to keep my bias out of it.
The Original Impulse
He appeared in her sleep like a regular. Sometimes she saw the actual him on the street, then he appeared two, three nights in a row; on the street, because he remembered her vaguely or well enough, it was awkward.
Years ago they’d done a fast dance. Back then, when she studied photography, she believed artists were constitutionally honest; but his thrill had its own finish line. She missed classes, stayed out too late, ate too much, and dormant neuroses fired. She expected a man to love her the way her father did, explosively, devotedly. Months later, near where they’d first met, she ignored him; he rushed after her and apologized. Maybe he knew how bad it felt, but she never said anything. He phoned sometimes, they drove around, drank coffee, talked, not about lies, and two years passed like that, haplessly, when something obscene must have gone down, because he didn’t call again. What words were there for nothing. Nothing.
Her time was full, adequate, hollow, fine, and she felt content enough with love and work, but no one lives in the present except amnesiacs. Her history was a bracelet of holes around her wrist, not a charm bracelet like her mother had worn; that was gone. Someone had stolen it as her mother slipped away. It might be on that woman’s wrist now, the gold rectangular calendar hanging from it, a ruby studding her mother’s birthdate, a reminder she wouldn’t want. It would weigh even more with blanks filled in by anonymous dead people.
Insignificant coincidences — the actual him in a hotel lobby, a bookstore doorway, crossing a street — made loose days feel planned. She moved forward, a smart phone to her ear or its small screen to her face, and anything might happen. She read a story he’d written about an accidental meeting with a woman from his protagonist’s past. First he didn’t recognize her, she’d changed so much from how he remembered her; then he felt something again, maybe for the woman, mostly for himself.
When he spotted her, she wondered if he felt sick alarm too. One Saturday, she didn’t notice he was walking by, watching her, and when she looked up, aware of something, she half-smiled involuntarily. That could have meant anything, there was no true recognition from either of them. Without it, she couldn’t perform retrospective miracles, transform traitors into saviors. When ex-friends’ faces arose, stirred by the perfume of past time, they looked as they did back then. One of them, she heard, did look the same, because she’d already been lifted. But some things can’t be lifted.
Abysses and miseries called down their own last judgments upon themselves. Katherine could recite many of her bad acts; it would be easy to locate her putative wounded and apologize like someone in AA, but what substance had she abused. Love, probably. Most likely they’d claim they had moved on and forgotten her. Besides, they might say, you never really meant that much to me. Or, let’s be friends on Facebook. When the 20th-year reunion committee of her high school found her, she didn’t respond. Formal invitations, phone messages. They insisted her absence would destroy the entire reason for the event. The date approached. She wondered if showing up might help adjudicate the past, and curiosity arched its back. She caught a ride with a popular girl who’d gone steady with a future movie star who’d had a pathetic end. The woman wore the same makeup she’d worn then, her eyes lined slyly with black. Startling, what gets kept.
The reunion was held in the town’s best country club, and in front of the table with name badges, she sank, just the way she had growing up. Someone called to her, “Kat, Kat,” and another, “Kat,” while another fondly blasted “Kat” into her ear, someone whose name she didn’t recognize even looking at the name badge. Indignant, the girl/woman pronounced her unmarried name as if the tribe were extinct. “And I’m called Katherine now,” she answered. Throughout the night, they called her Kat as if she were still one of them.
Faces had been modified, some looked aged; all the boys looked older than the girls. Provincial, well-off, neither sex could believe she wasn’t married, and she encouraged their bewilderment, eventually admitting she lived with someone. But no, no, she wasn’t married. The girls especially looked at her pityingly, the boys lasciviously. One had been her sixth-grade boyfriend; he’d been pudgy but now his girth wasn’t boyish or expectant. During cocktails, she huddled with the black kids, the minority in town, and sat at their dinner table, still a minority. Days later, some of her former friends telephoned. One announced gravely, “I told my daughter to be like you, not me.” She didn’t ask why. Her pudgy sixth-grade boyfriend decided he’d ruined her life, that’s why she hadn’t married. He thought because she hadn’t married, she must be a tormented lesbian. Katherine remembered breaking up with him for a seventh-grader.