Where the Stress Falls

by Susan Sontag

But entirely unfeigned.

  And without manipulation by the camera. Nothing is digitalized. Borland’s project depends on the photographs being—as of old—a trace or imprint of the real. There is an implicit contract: these are people who really are (part of the time) like this; they aren’t putting on a show for the photographer. Indeed, she had to spend long periods of time with them, win their confidence, become friends, in order to take these pictures.

  Imagine what we would feel if we learned that the men are actors, and that the pictures were taken in the course of an afternoon in one house rather than (as they were) over years and in several countries.

  The force of these pictures depends on our trusting the photographer that nothing was devised for the camera.

  That something is being revealed.

  7

  ARE THE BABIES really unattractive—like, say, the folk in Roger Ballen’s Platteland (1994)?

  In Ballen’s marvelous album of portraits of degenerate-looking whites in rural South Africa, the unattractiveness of his subjects and the rooms they inhabit delivers a moral, ultimately political, message. Here ugliness seems to attest to an appalling impoverishment of spirit as well as of material circumstances. In Borland’s album, the message of her subjects’ unattractiveness is harder to read. We might decide it is mainly one of scale: that is, of the mismatch between the enacted fantasy of smallness and feebleness and these hefty grownup bodies. But we might also suppose, perhaps wrongly, that only adults who look as they do would want to do “this” to themselves.

  What are the frontiers of attractiveness—and of unattractiveness? Images produced by cameras have more to tell us, in unpacking this question, than any other resource. Maybe we are no longer capable of thinking about the attractiveness of bodies and faces except in the ways we’ve learned through the camera’s presumptuous seeing. Enlarging, miniaturizing—the camera judges, the camera reveals. Looking at the world to which Borland has given us entry, we don’t know whether we’re in Lilliput or in Brobdingnag. Her brilliant achievement makes us realize that, when we see photographically, we’re living in both.

  [2001]

  Certain Mapplethorpes

  ALTHOUGH REASON TELLS ME the camera is not aimed like a gun barrel at my head, each time I pose for a photographic portrait I feel apprehensive. This is not the well-known fear, exhibited in many cultures, of being robbed of one’s soul or a layer of one’s personality. I do not imagine that the photographer, in order to bring the image-replica into the world, robs me of anything. But I do register that the way I ordinarily experience myself is turned around.

  Ordinarily I feel coextensive with my body, in particular with the command station of the head, whose orientation to the world (that is, frontality)—and articulation—is my face, in which are set eyes that look out on, into, the world; and it is my fantasy, and my privilege, perhaps my professional bias, to feel that the world awaits my seeing. When I am photographed, this normally outgoing, fervent relation of consciousness to the world is jammed. I yield to another command station of consciousness, which “faces” me, if I have agreed to cooperate with the photographer (and, customarily, a photographic portrait is one that requires the subject’s cooperation). Stowed away, berthed, brought to heel, my consciousness has abdicated its normal function, which is to provide amplitude, to give me mobility. I don’t feel threatened. But I do feel disarmed, my consciousness reduced to an embarrassed knot of self-consciousness striving for composure. Immobilized for the camera’s scrutiny, I feel the weight of my facial mask, the jut and fleshiness of my lips, the spread of my nostrils, the unruliness of my hair. I experience myself as behind my face, looking out through the windows of my eyes, like the prisoner in the iron mask in Dumas’s novel.

  Being photographed, by which I mean posing for a photograph (at a session usually lasting several hours, in which many photographs are taken), I feel transfixed, trapped. In response to a look of desire I can look back, with desire. The looking can, ideally should, be reciprocal. But to the photographer’s look I cannot respond with anything equivalent, unless I were to decide to be photographed with my head behind my own camera. The photographer’s look is looking in a pure state; in looking at me, it desires what I am not—my image.

  (Of course, the photographer may in fact desire the subject. It is obvious that many of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs record objects of his desire. Subjects may seem worth photographing because the photographer feels lust, or romantic attachment, or admiration—any of a myriad of positive feelings. But at the moment the picture is taken, the look trained upon the subject is sightless, generic: a look that discerns form. At that moment, it cannot be responded to in kind.)

  I become the looked-at. Docilely, eagerly, I follow the photographer’s instructions, if she or he is willing to give any, as to how I may “look” more attractive. For as much as I am a professional see-er, I am a hopelessly amateurish see-ee. An eternal photographic virgin, I feel the same perplexity each time I’m photographed. I forget the makeup tricks I’ve been taught, what color blouse photographs well, which side of my face is the “good” side. My chin is too low. Too high. I don’t know what to do with my hands.

  Considering that I have been browsing through the history of photography for decades, have been photographed professionally countless times, and spent five years writing six essays about the aesthetic and moral implications of photographic images, this blankness with which I face the camera can hardly be ascribed to inexperience or to lack of reflectiveness. Some deeper stubbornness on my own part is at work: the refusal fully to take in the fact that I not only look but have a look, look good (or bad), look “like” that.

  As I’ve never been photographed without feeling apprehensive, so I have never looked at the result of a photographic session without feeling embarrassment. Is it that I’m too powerfully an observer myself to be comfortable being observed? Is it a puritan anxiety about pretending, posing? Is it my moral narcissism, which has erected a taboo against whatever narcissism of the usual kind to which I might be prone? All of these, perhaps. But what I mainly feel is dismay. 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.)

  The photograph comes as a kind of reproof to the grandiosity of consciousness. Oh. So there “I” am.

  I see my own photograph differently from the others in Mapplethorpe’s Certain People. I can’t look at my own photograph with longing, I can’t have a fantasy about the person in that photograph. The eros of photography, which identifies subject and surface, is suspended. What I feel is the difference between me and the image. To me, the expression in the photograph Mapplethorpe has taken of me is not really “my” look. It is a look fabricated for the camera: an unstable compromise between trying to be cooperative with a photographer I intensely admire (who is also a friend) and trying to preserve my own dignity, which is hinged to my anxiety. (When I look at my picture I read stubbornness, balked vanity, panic, vulnerability.) I doubt that I have ever looked exactly the way Mapplethorpe has photographed me—or that I will look exactly this way the next time he takes my picture.

  At the same time that I recognize in this portrait another record of how I feel being photographed, Mapplethorpe’s photograph looks different to me from any other that has ever been taken of me. I cooperated as best I could, and he saw something that no one had ever seen. Being photographed by Mapplethorpe was different from being photographed by anyone else. He reassures differently, encourages differently, is permissive differently …

  Taking pictures is an anthologizing impulse, and Mapplethorpe’s book offers no exception. This mix of subjects, the non-famous and the celebrated, the solemn and the lascivious, illustrates a characteristic spread of photographic interests. Nothing human is alien to me, the photographer is saying. By including a sexy self-portrait, Mapp
lethorpe is rejecting the typical photographer’s stance, in which, from a godlike distance, the photographer confers reality upon the world but declines to be a subject himself.

  Most photography comes with a built-in cognitive claim: that the photograph conveys a truth about the subject, a truth that would not be known were it not captured in a photograph. In short, that photographing is a form of knowledge. Thus, some photographers have said they photograph best someone whom they don’t know, others that their best photographs are of subjects they know best. All such claims, however contradictory, are claims of power over the subject.

  Mapplethorpe’s claims are more modest. He is not looking for the decisive moment. His photographs do not aspire to be revelatory. He is not in a predatory relation to his subjects. He is not voyeuristic. He is not trying to catch anyone off guard. The rules of the game of photography, as Mapplethorpe plays it, are that the subject must cooperate—must be lit. In the eloquence and subtlety of cropping, rendering of textures of clothing and skin, and variations on the color black, his photographs clearly proclaim their relation to an artistic, rather than documentarist, impulse. The photographer himself would probably prefer to say they are a record of his own avidity.

  Mapplethorpe wants to photograph everything, that is, everything that can be made to pose. (However broad his subject matter, he could never become a war photographer or a photographer of accidents in the street.) What he looks for, which could be called Form, is the quiddity or isness of something. Not the truth about something, but the strongest version of it.

  I once asked Mapplethorpe what he does with himself when he poses for the camera, and he replied that he tries to find that part of himself that is self-confident.

  His answer suggests a double meaning in the title he has chosen for his book: there is certain in the sense of some, and not others, and certain in the sense of self-confident, sure, clear. Certain People depicts, mostly, people found, coaxed, or arranged into a certainty about themselves. That is what seduces, that is what is disclosed in these bulletins of a great photographer’s observations and encounters.

  [1985]

  A Photograph Is Not an Opinion. Or Is It?

  UNDERTAKE TO DO a book of photographs of people with nothing more in common than that they are women (and living in America at the end of the twentieth century), all—well, almost all—fully clothed, therefore not the other kind of all-women picture book …

  Start with no more than a commanding notion of the sheer interestingness of the subject, especially in view of the unprecedented changes in the consciousness of many women in these last decades, and a resolve to stay open to whim and opportunity …

  Sample, explore, revisit, choose, arrange, without claiming to have brought to the page a representative miscellany …

  Even so, a large number of pictures of what is, nominally, a single subject will inevitably be felt to be representative in some sense. How much more so with this subject, with this book, an anthology of destinies and disabilities and new possibilities; a book that invites the sympathetic responses we bring to the depiction of a minority (for that is what women are, by every criterion except the numerical), featuring

  This essay was written to accompany a book of photographs. Women, by Annie Leibovitz (Random House, 1999).

  many portraits of those who are a credit to their sex. Such a book has to feel instructive, even if it tells us what we think we already know about the overcoming of perennial impediments and prejudices and cultural handicaps, the conquest of new zones of achievement. Of course, such a book would be misleading if it did not touch on the bad news as well: the continuing authority of demeaning stereotypes, the continuing violence (domestic assault is the leading cause of injuries to American women). Any large-scale picturing of women belongs to the ongoing story of how women are presented, and how they are invited to think of themselves. A book of photographs of women must, whether it intends to or not, raise the question of women—there is no equivalent “question of men.” Men, unlike women, are not a work in progress.

  Each of these pictures must stand on its own. But the ensemble says, So this is what women are now—as different, as varied, as heroic, as forlorn, as conventional, as unconventional as this. Nobody scrutinizing the book will fail to note the confirmation of stereotypes of what women are like and the challenge to those stereotypes. Whether well known or obscure, each of the nearly one hundred and seventy women in this album will be looked at (especially by other women) as models: models of beauty, models of self-esteem, models of strength, models of transgressiveness, models of victimhood, models of false consciousness, models of successful aging.

  No book of photographs of men would be interrogated in the same way.

  But then a book of photographs of men would not be undertaken in the same spirit. How could there be any interest in asserting that a man can be a stockbroker or a farmer or an astronaut or a miner? A book of photographs of men with sundry occupations, men only (without any additional label), would probably be a book about the beauty of men, men as objects of lustful imaginings to women and to other men.

  But when men are viewed as sex objects, that is not their primary identity. The traditions of regarding men as, at least potentially, the creators and curators of their own destinies and women as objects of male emotions and fantasies (lust, tenderness, fear, condescension, scorn, dependence), of regarding an individual man as an instance of humankind and an individual woman as an instance of women, are still largely intact, deeply rooted in language, narrative, group arrangements, and family customs. In no language does the pronoun “she” stand for human beings of both sexes. Women and men are differently weighted, physically and culturally, with different contours of selfhood, all presumptively favoring those born male.

  I do this, I endure this, I want this … because I am a woman. I do that, endure that, I want that … even though I’m a woman. Because of the mandated inferiority of women, their condition as a cultural minority, there continues to be a debate about what women are, can be, should want to be. Freud is famously supposed to have asked, “Lord, what do women want?” Imagine a world in which it seems normal to inquire, “Lord, what do men want?” But who can imagine such a world?

  No one thinks the Great Duality is symmetrical—even in America, noted since the nineteenth century by foreign travelers as a paradise for uppity women. Feminine and masculine are a tilted polarity. Equal rights for men has never inspired a march or a hunger strike. In no country are men legal minors, as women were until well into the twentieth century in many European countries, and are still in many Muslim countries, from Morocco to Afghanistan. No country gave women the right to vote before giving it to men. Nobody ever thought of men as the second sex.

  AND YET, AND YET: there is something new in the world, starting with the revoking of age-old legal shackles regarding suffrage, divorce, property rights. It seems almost inconceivable now that the enfranchisement of women happened as recently as it did—that, for instance, women in France and Italy had to wait until 1945 and 1946 to be able to vote. There have been tremendous changes in women’s consciousness, transforming the inner life of everyone: the sallying forth of women from women’s worlds into the world at large, the arrival of women’s ambitions. Ambition is what women have been schooled to stifle in themselves, and what is celebrated in a book of photographs that emphasizes the variety of women’s lives today.

  Such a book, however much it attends to women’s activeness, is also about women’s attractiveness.

  Nobody looks through a book of pictures of women without noticing whether the women are attractive or not.

  To be feminine, in one commonly felt definition, is to be attractive, or to do one’s best to be attractive, to attract. (As being masculine is being strong.) While it is perfectly possible to defy this imperative, it is not possible for any woman to be unaware of it. As it is thought a weakness in a man to care a great deal about how he looks, it is a moral fault in a woman not t
o care enough. Women are judged by their appearance as men are not, and women punished more by the changes brought about by aging. Ideals of appearance such as youthfulness and slimness are in large part now created and enforced by photographic images. And, of course, a primary interest in having photographs of well-known beauties to look at over the years is seeing just how well or badly they negotiate the shame of aging.

  In advanced consumer societies, it is said, these “narcissistic” values are more and more the concern of men as well. But male primping never loosens the male lock on initiative taking. Indeed, glorying in one’s appearance is an ancient warrior’s pleasure, an expression of power, an instrument of dominance. Anxiety about personal attractiveness could never be thought defining of a man: a man is, first of all, seen. Women are looked at.

  We assume a world with a boundless appetite for images, in which people, women and men, are eager to surrender themselves to the camera. But it is worth recalling that there are many parts of the world where being photographed is off-limits to women. In a few countries, where men have been mobilized for a veritable war against women, women scarcely appear at all. The imperial rights of the camera—to gaze at, to record, to exhibit anyone, anything—are an exemplary feature of modern life, as is the emancipation of women. And just as the granting of more and more rights and choices to women is a measure of a society’s embrace of modernity, so the revolt against modernity initiates a rush to rescind the meager gains toward equal participation in society won by women, mostly urban, educated women, in previous decades. In many countries struggling with failed or discredited attempts to modernize, there are more and more covered women.

  THE TRADITIONAL UNITY of a book of photographs of women is some ideal of female essence: women gaily displaying their sexual charms, women veiling themselves behind a look of soulfulness or primness.