Reality Hunger (25 page)

Usually I’m pretty honest. I say I’m doing a series of portraits of young women, and I want to do one of her. I explain that it’s about her, but it’s also about myself, and the tension this creates.
I look at her, seeing myself in her and also being really into the character that she is in real life—a character that’s based in truth, but a character that is also prompted by the fantasy the photographs project on her. I would rarely use an actress to play the role of a drifter. Nor would I go and find an actual homeless girl, but there are elements of these characters in the person I find that I’m really responding to and that I want to preserve through the photographs. I’ve never been completely straightforward; I like work that frustrates me. I don’t like things that are spelled out, and whenever I feel like I’m spelling things out too easily, I’ll back away and try to make it confusing for myself.

Because they live in a nation in which it’s virtually impossible for a novel to be both interesting and popular enough to create a scandal, American novelists are drawn to the work of succès de scandale photographers. Ann Beattie wrote the introduction to Sally Mann’s
At Twelve
, then produced a novel,
Picturing Will
, that contains unmistakable parallels to Mann’s life and work. Reynolds Price wrote the afterword to Mann’s
Immediate Family
, her book of photographs of her three children in various stages of undress and prepubescent sensuality. Jayne Anne Phillips’s essay “A Harvest of Light” prefaces Jock Sturges’s
The Last Day of Summer
, photographs that the FBI confiscated as “child pornography.” The epigraph to Kathryn Harrison’s novel
Exposure
is a Diane Arbus aphorism—“A photograph is a secret about a secret; the more it tells you, the less you know”—and the book concerns Ann Rogers, the thirty-three-year-old daughter of Edgar Rogers, a retrospective of whose photographs has been scheduled at the Museum of Modern Art. The photographs document Ann, as a child, in poses of “self-mutilation and sexual play.”

Photography: the prestige of art and the magic of the real.

Part of the American character is the urge to push at boundaries.

I can see why you’re a Miss Nude USA regional finalist. You have beautiful, long, silky blue-black hair, a perfect pout, and a gorgeous body. Please send me the color photos you mentioned of yourself in fur, leather, lingerie, garter belt, and heels. Thank you. Payment enclosed.

Biopic: spit-shined, streamlined narrative; caricature as character; hyper-fake as a way to get at essence of real—exactly reminiscent in all these ways of porn.

The lives in memoirs often have clean lines, like touched-up photographs. They glow in the dark. Does the pursuit of dramatic effects enhance the truth or bend it?

The Fun Effects feature included with Kodak’s EasyShare software can make people in photos appear at once lifelike and, somehow, larger than life—which is all we want from art: reality, mysteriously deepened.

What does it mean to set another person before the camera, trying to extract something of his or her soul? When are we
exploiting? When are we caressing? Are they the same? Maybe it’s impossible not to do both. Maybe that’s the truth of human relationships.

Do you promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?

I could go on about this forever.

now