I can’t visualize people’s faces in my head. I try really hard sometimes, and can maybe get the shape of their mouth or the crinkle of one eye with fleeting accuracy. I can never put the pieces together. I can see the person’s essence, but not their face. I recognize and “remember” faces, of course, but I can’t recreate them in my head, and make them right. I can’t hold on to them on my own.
As I was thinking about these sad limits of my imagination, I realized maybe that’s the reason I became so drawn to photography. I can visualize still photographs with a little more concreteness and clarity. If I try to imagine my mom’s face, I’m really just picturing her face in a photograph I’ve taken (or seen) of her. Burning that bounded, static slice of time that I get to look at over and over into my brain is the only way I can get close to an accurate vision of someone’s eyes, their nose, their teeth, all together at once.
There are people I’ve almost lost, because I’ve never taken a photo of them, and there are people I can almost envision truly, because I’ve taken so many.
It frustrates me that that’s how I have to visualize people, because their face in a photograph is not the same as their face when I’m watching them talk to me, or observing the way they move and think and express in silence.
I’ve been slowly working through some Sontag essays, and she nails it when she says “There is something on people’s faces when they don’t know they are being observed that never appears when they do.” The best name I can give to that quality lost is “soul”, or “essence”.
In some cultures, there’s a belief that photographs actually steal your soul. It sounds a bit superstitious from a western perspective, especially considering the modern proliferation of images we each take, and have taken of us, but I think there’s something quite true about this belief.
Looking through the viewfinder, or at the screen on your phone as you aim it outward, you can tell the exact moment someone realizes they’re being photographed. It doesn’t matter if they’re a stranger - who, very reasonably, might take issue with being photographed - or a loved one you’ve photographed many times before. When they realize there’s a camera pointing at them, something stiffens, closes off. Even if they pretend not to notice, even if they’re very good at pretending, that essence is still lost to the photograph the moment they know.
It seems that if you want both the image and the essence, you have to be sneaky, deceitful, wrong. You have to steal it. As a kid, this theft was thrilling. The older I get, the worse it feels. I have to forgive myself every time I even attempt it now. Usually, I am unsuccessful anyways. And anyways #2, it’s virtually impossible to steal that piece of soul in a photograph of someone’s whole, unbroken face.
So, while I can feel someone’s essence as I imagine them in my head, I can’t piece together their face. And if I try to piece together their face by remembering a photograph that shows it, the essence is lost. I fear that these important pieces of evidence of a person’s existence in my life can never exist together in my head. This especially scares me when I think about the day when people I love start leaving this world, and I no longer have the physical ability to stand in front of them and witness their face and essence at once.
If writing (or any kind of editing) puts me in a flow state, photographing does something of the opposite. I write to leave a feeling or a thought behind. I photograph to stay in it, to cling to it. And so do you (but I’ll speak for myself here). When I take a picture, a snapshot, it’s really not much more than a desperate attempt to hold on to what I see and feel and love, knowing it’s an impossible endeavor. A photograph of something or someone is not the same as the something or someone themselves. “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” These flowers will die in a few days, and I will not be able to smell them anymore, and the feeling they give me when I pass by them now, sitting on my dining table, is not the same feeling I’ll have looking at these images later. But it’s as close as I’ve been able to get.
The Death card is not a bad omen. Rather, it describes the process of moving on, of letting go. It describes how we confront what is overwhelming to us, what we have a hard time accepting.
Each figure represents a different response to the character of Death (which represents change more often than literal death). I usually refer to all figures on the cards as genderless representations of people, but here, the figures’ identities are important for the role they play in this little tableau.
The Priest comes close to acceptance, but he still bargains. He says “I’ve been a devout man. Please, take me not to Hell but to Heaven.” The woman falls to her knees and turns away in denial - she can’t look Death in the eyes. The King falls completely, depressed, realizing that all the wealth and power in the world - everything he spent his life chasing - couldn’t protect him from the same ultimate fate as everyone else. The child alone accepts the arrival of Death with wonder. Because the child views life moment to moment, and isn’t yet concerned with holding on to everything they’ve built and everything they love, they view Death simply as what’s happening next.
I’ve noticed that we often participate in this card as the fifth stage of grieving: anger (a product of fear). We don’t want to see Death pop up in our readings. We don’t want to let go. But if you can accept change, the Death card is in fact quite hopeful. In the far horizon, you can see a sun rising in the East - the beginning of a new day.
To bring this letter home, here’s another Sontag quote for ya, about how photography impedes our confrontation with the divine, with the overpowering. In this instance, she’s talking about Americans on vacation.
“Most tourists feel compelled to put the camera between themselves and whatever is remarkable that they encounter. Unsure of other responses, they take a picture. [..] Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation.”
When I read that for the first time, I understood why I felt guilty for awkwardly raising my camera to my eye on every vacation I’ve ever been on since I was a child, only to look back on those images later and feel disappointed, and then never look at them again. Of course it’s not the same. And what a shame, to ruin a wonderful moment for a fractioned and false and framed memory.
When I get that urge now, I often still give in. It’s hardly ever worth it. It’s usually just something to do. But occasionally I’ll remember this phrase that’s become a little mantra for me, which I first heard in John Green’s essay, Auld Lang Syne, from his collection of essays, The Anthropocene Reviewed. To summarize (but seriously, listen to the essay), John recalls a conversation he had with his friend as she was dying. Overwhelmed with grief himself, he didn’t know what to do or say to comfort her in her time of need, and ended up saying something lame and awkward and, in hindsight, quite hilarious. He remembered, upon reflection, a piece of advice that he wished he would have taken in that moment,
“Don’t just do something. Stand there.”
In the face of what is scary and hard to bear, sometimes the bravest, or kindest, or most honoring, or most helpful thing we can do is just look it in the eyes.
What if we don’t have to participate, for fear of feeling awkward, or capture, for fear of forgetting? What if instead, we allowed ourselves to just witness?
It’s harder that it sounds, to stand still. At parties, at the edge of a sprawling canyon, at the bedside of someone you love as they pass, we avoid our discomfort by doing. It takes presence and courage to resist that reflex. To witness in stillness is to confront not just our own mortality, but the ephemerality of everything around us.
<3
Jordan