Note: When we began Walking the Wire, one of the things Katy and I discussed was our desire to write “in dialogue”—to create correspondence around an idea or predisposition that sits deeply within one of us, and to invite the other to respond. So this is the first of what I hope will be many such interactions. I am grateful to Katy, and to you, for your indulgence, and I welcome your responses and thoughts, along with hers. ~Dd.
1.
I had always heard that native people believe that photographs steal their souls, and here I learned that in Kayapo, “akaron kaba” not only means “to take a photo” but that it also means “to steal a soul.”
- Ricardo Moraes, “Capturing Souls”
René Magritte was thirty years old when he painted his famous canvas, Ceci n‘est pas une pipe (This is Not a Pipe). Only he did not call it This is Not a Pipe. Instead, Magritte titled the painting The Treachery of Images. Only in fact Magritte did not call it that. He actually called it La Trahison des images.
Trahison is an interesting word. In particular, it is an interesting word to consider here, in this moment, when I am avoiding writing about my sexuality—about its awakening, which coincides with its burial, and all that follows (for good and for ill). I have conceived this entire section, in fact, as a feint (another French word, to make a deceptive or distracting movement; but also, lightly-stroked lines on the page to guide handwriting).
I am particularly interested in Trahison here, during this momentary distraction, because it raises issues in its translation into the English, at least where Magritte is concerned. See, the title is not “This is Not a Pipe,” the title is “The Treachery of Images,” only (and here I defer to my reader, to her translator’s keen eye) as I understand it, Trahison is not “Treachery”; It is selling out. It is treason. It is betrayal.
The treason, the betrayal of the image is that it always is something that it is not. This was Magritte’s conceit: he made a pipe you could not stuff with tobacco, a pipe you cannot smoke. But if you cannot smoke it, what good is it? It fails its very telos (a Greek word, “ultimate object or aim”). Therefore it fails to be the thing you would wish for a pipe to be, and therefore it is no pipe, QED.
2.
To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge — and, therefore, like power.
- Susan Sontag, “In Plato’s Cave”
Because I know my audience, I am being very careful (during the present exercise) to pay attention to usage rights regarding the imagery that accompanies these reflections. There are invisible chains of property and propriety that haunt the images you see around my words. Some of them have been given, like a grace from a deity. Others, you see, have been paid for, in some cases, quite dearly.
We cannot go around; we must go through the fact that Susan Sontag writes “On Photography” on photography. Therefore any attempt to write on photography in a serious way must engage the fact of “On Photography.” But this means talking about what Sontag talked about in “On Photography,” which was not exclusively on photography, or about photography.
Rather it was not on or about photography, but rather through photography, that Sontag talked about power. Photography is not the thing you see; it is the thing you want to see. Photography is a framed gaze. It is not the thing you desire, the photograph is a focus on the thing you desire.
Long after what you seek is dead or gone, the photograph remains.
I have seen photographs of entities that are now extinct. I have seen photographs of items I have lost. I have seen photographs of the interiors of nuclear weapons plants that I will never be able to explore with my physical body. I have seen photographs of forbidden things, of hidden things, of evil things.
The existence of a photograph is itself a usage right. It bridges this chasm—not to what we desire, but to desire itself. In the moment of my gaze, I command, I control, I own.
I know.
3.
This means, for example, that if you share a photo on Facebook, you give us permission to store, copy, and share it with others (again, consistent with your settings) such as service providers that support our service or other Facebook Products you use. This license will end when your content is deleted from our systems.
Facebook, “Terms of Service”
I am aware when it began, and where.
I awoke in the morning, and went to the living room. I was seven, maybe eight. Nothing was good in my house, even then. My parents’ marriage was in a death spiral, and when they were not fighting, they were pulling any stop they could to put the ship aright. Their instincts were not healthy.
I crawled up on the couch and there, under the coffee table, was a magazine.
It was what at the time one would call a dirty magazine. It had a disrobed woman on the cover, and inside (yes I looked inside) it left nothing to the imagination.
Only my imagination was on fire. Why was it there? (One of my parents left it) Did they want me to see it? (Of course not. Or maybe? No one was sane. Who knows)
Were there more like it?
Aha.
And here we have not simply the image of desire, but now desire for the image. The desire to land upon an unknown continent and plunder its treasures. To search for El Dorado, but to know it by its original name: El Hombre Dorado, the Golden Man.
My desire became a desire for a body. No, not quite that—for the image of a body.
That morning, my relationship to my home changed. It was no longer what I knew of its surface. Rather, my home became a house of secrets. I knew there were treasures now hidden, and I hid the fact that this was what I knew.
That magazine is long gone. It has no physical meaning anymore in the world that you and I share. But it exists, and has weight and heft, in the world that I know. The world that I inhabit is marked by it, even in its absence.
I have spent forty years in the desire of the desire it created.
4.
This is just a perpendicular line to the grain
(This is not a photograph)
This wants to be outside the cage of the age
(This is not a photograph)- Roger Miller, “This is not a Photograph”
There is another memory, from around the same time.
In 1980, a photographer named Waring Abbot took a photo of the young actress, Kristy McNichol, and licensed it through Getty Images. Over the next few months, their distribution chain made the photograph available to magazines and poster companies.
I would have been around eight, maybe nine, when I first saw it.
There is a very clear memory I have of how the image affected me. I know, because I felt anew it when I saw the image again, a few days ago.
When I discovered the magazine underneath the coffee table, I was a child playing with adult things. But this, this photograph, is an artifact on my landscape. It is the location of the first adult stirrings I ever recall. They are with me to this day.
The image is powerful. Is she girl or woman? She is both (I felt her as both). Is she girl or boy? She is both (I felt her as both). Is her smile encouragement or mockery? It is both (I felt it as both).
Is her gaze for me, or for another? It is both (and I felt it as both).
Looking at this photograph now, I realize how many of my paths (and mis-steps) have been an exploration of the complex coded puzzle it presented to me. I see the rubric of so many desires I have sought in others, physically with me in the world.
She was the girl I wanted. She was the boy I wanted.
These are difficult words to write, even now.
But they are true.
But they are also treason. They are betrayal.
5.
“You won’t find any subversive literature or pornography here. Don’t touch that! That’s my pornograph… my phonograph player.”
- Josef K., Orson Welles’s The Trial (1962)
Ludwig Wittgenstein was reading a Parisienne newspaper about a recent practice that had developed in French courtrooms for cases involving automobile accidents. The attorneys would introduce models of the street, the cars, the people, and they would re-enact the incident in question, each presenting a narrative of events that may (or may not) correspond to the reality of the incident itself.
The practice grew out of a desire to make some unknown reality present to the judge and the jury, to evoke the scene and make them participants.
(There’s a song by a band from Cleveland about a pair of star-crossed lovers told through the metaphor of a car wreck in Kansas on July 5th, 1904)
When Wittgenstein wrote his first work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, this idea of the courtroom reenactment became the model for how he believed language worked. He called it the picture theory of meaning.
In short, he said our language does not show us reality, it shows us a picture of reality, and that this is enough for us to understand the world.
We look at the word pipe, and understand that the word is not a pipe. And yet, here we are, using the word.
(Wittgenstein eventually threw the book away, gave up philosophy entirely. Years later, he tried again.)
La Trahison des images.
I had meant for this essay to be something else. I had meant for it to be a clear manifesto of why I do not trust pictures, of how I can find no natural barrier between the photographic and the pornographic.
I do believe that, and perhaps an essay in the future will find me finding the words to say it better, more clearly.
No matter the reality, that is the image of what I wanted to say.
My words betrayed me.
I mean it - I’d love to hear your comments. Thanks