Ten

 I don’t know why I took so many self-portraits. Was I investigating myself? Was I investigating others? Often it seemed to me that the mirror was not the truest reflector, but rather the most tragic, for it merely reflected reality and gave it back to us to look back onto it, the whole world, but in reverse. When I look into the world I see it through my lens and what looks back at me is the world that I would have never known, the world that I could never love, the world that loved only itself, the world that found no place for me. My self-portraits are my own absences. I find a space in the world for myself despite the world’s self-involvement; I therefore have sought to kiss reality in these images. To french it, indelicately, in the face.

The face of the world does not know tragedy, only its underside; and yet we are told surfaces are all. Even the best of the philosophers across the ocean tell us that. But I know better. What is reflected, it is not the truth, nor is it what hides the truth. It just is. It’s just what’s there. And it isn’t even as though I like what’s there. Often I don’t like it. But it’s there, and that’s what counts—it’s present to me, to my eye, and I guess to the screen where it might be printed someday. But you see, once you project an image the image is lost and it’s only at this point when you can say that either truth hides or truth is revealed. But when the shutter activates, in that instant, and only in that instant, is where truth can neither hide nor be revealed. There’s no place to hide and there’s nowhere it can reveal itself. In that instant that’s where what is simply is and remains. And that’s what counts. The remains.

The world will never know me but I knew the world. And it found a place for me always, because I insisted on that place and if you insist hard enough it isn’t that you’ll find a place, or maybe that the world will find one for you, but it will be there nonetheless, waiting. The world’s always waiting. You just have to wait long enough so that your waiting and the world’s waiting are just one waiting. Yes of course that’s silly but then you click the shutter and there you have it, the remains. And what remains is a relationship with something that could have been but that never was yet which seems to have been. And that’s good enough for me.

It was neither in the shadows, nor round dark corners; nor at twilight nor even at dawn, when I could find myself in the world. Rather, it was in the brightest light that I found myself in the world, reflected there in my lens, in my eye, in the eyes of my subjects—objects of my love.

I needed no philosophy, no French discourse on the self; what I needed was a postcard from myself to the self I wanted to be and which, because of that wanting, I was. I therefore needed no words. I could have no words; and I would not have them.

I never announced myself to the world for I have no words to offer it, yet such a high price was paid for words, or for text. But this was not a generation, nor even an epoch, of words. No, it was a time of images and I sought to find the images in the only land which had ever produced the image properly … appropriately … Now the world turns back through text to images, to my images. But I have now vanished without a trace except in these lilting words, drifting, searching, yearning to be expressed in a thousand different ways, interpreted, curated, posted. I clear my throat, and when my mouth opens, it’s only the sound of the shutter that you hear. You will never know who I was, because I only left my images and the sound of my voice. Not even images of myself. And even that voice that I left is not myself. I left images. I left what was. Which to me was an is. To you, it is a print, a purchase, a gallery opening. I will never have known these things nor did I ever want to know them.

My mind was empty of such things. I filled it with the junk I collected, I filled it with the context of life, the life my images would never have known themselves. I gave my images my life, and they in turn yielded life for me.

So yes, I suppose those clever autobiographers are right in a sense, and all those clever museum curators are also right; but they’re right for the wrong reasons. Yes, my life is my images; when you look into those images and you try to see me, yes you do see me, but you do not see what you think you see; you see only the image, you see the surface because the image is already projected and you look at the projection and you don’t look at me. You see what you want to see; you do not see me. The shutter has fallen, and like a cat dashing from the shadows, when you look it is already gone; I am already gone. When you turn over the image you do not see any longer an image, you see a blank canvas upon which you can write a message for those who are looking at the image to interpret the image with. And that is all you’re left with.

There was a woman in one of my portraits, rising from a darkened side staircase. I saw her in my image and my image saw her; and then the shutter fell and she appeared, triumphant, in her daily work. And this is where I work, in daily work, and daily routine; in the rhythm of things that are simply there, with no fanfare, no drama. Here there are no dramatic outcomes or possibilities, no abysses, no precipices, no mountains except the mountain of my homebirth to which I ran out in sudden joy. Even in the most tragic and disturbing of events there are no abysses—so long as you give yourself to what’s there. Whatever is there has no powers of redemption, nor of explanation. I never could ask ‘why’. There was never a question. I could never ask questions. Questions found me, but I would never answer. I think that someone from the Continent once thought that life could be lived in a question—but I don’t know about that. I do know that something finds me, but only after the shutter has clicked. Even so, I always think it best not to pry into the privacy of the shutter and its work. Canisters upon canisters of unopened film are all that I can say about that.

That woman rising from that side staircase was a motivation of mine, I think. Just simply in taking one step after another, kerchief wrapped around her large fleshy head, not even staring up into the sky to greet the gray afternoon that hid the sun (perhaps her only joy for that day), she spoke to me of simply being there, doing something, not just a whatever mind you—but a something, a definite, concrete something. There was not even a suggestion of something else, a dilemma, or a heaviness surrounding her head like a philosophical nimbus. There was none of that. There was just that something, one step after another, and again, and again—not even a Sisyphus could have taken upon himself this task. No philosopher, no poet, no one at all could’ve taken those steps up and out into the gray, into the rain, into that something. And that was why I clicked. It just so happens that my own image got in the way.

But the truth was there like I said, neither hiding nor waiting to be revealed. It was simply there, and her steps, and that kerchief, and her eyeglasses, and in that whole day, even in that worker’s working to put that mirror in its place, all of it just there, and I am in the middle of it all, looking off to the side, to see that woman rising from the side staircase into the day, into the gray, into a sunshine she would not know that day, out into that something which I would never pry into trying to find out (which is why the canister held not the secret but the is of this woman’s effort).

Once I take the image, the image leaves me, I leave it. Alone. There’s nothing else. There’s nothing more. That’s it. It’s done. And so I guess you could say to that poet from the Continent that I live in an endless series of endings. It’s not that the picture starts when you click the shutter and it shuts and the light is let in and leaves its remains behind. I don't start anything, and I don’t even end anything, but the moment the shutter shuts I guess it’s all over. And I move on. And in that movement when I pack up and move on that’s the beginning of an ending. But my life is only suspended in that moment. It really lives inside of that shutter, but only when it’s open, wide open. That’s when I look in. And that’s when that woman leapt from the side staircase into that something, and that’s where I went in, with her. And this is why I don’t need to develop anything. This is why I can leave thousands of canisters unopened, film coiled back into its metallic cylinder hidden from the world outside, holding something from the world which the world will never get back ever again. That’s why I wanted them closed. Forever.

Every time I hear the term ‘street photographer’ I never see myself. I don’t even know what a ‘street photographer’ is. That’s a term for the curator. That’s not my term. I carry a camera. That’s what I am. Yes it has long become a cliché to renounce labels and such; and when I took most of my pictures that kind of stuff was in the air. Well I guess I’m just a product of my time (which should be no surprise to any of you) and I am saying that I don’t even believe in labels, that labels should not be labeled as labels. Yeah that’s playing around, I suppose. But on the more serious side what I’m saying is that a label kills. But I like my murder plain as day, right up there on the headlines, displayed prominently on the newspaper salesman’s rack, or even better, in a trashcan, crumpled up, with coffee stains and mustard droppings. That’s where I like to see my murder, the killing, the rape, the torturous place we call our world or whatever you want to call it. So I like labels to come second. You see, it’s not just that I hate labels, it’s just that the labels come first and I don’t want the labels to come first. What I want to come first is the image. After the images a thousand labels can be applied, and I don’t care thereafter. Labels are an afterthought. Street photographers are an afterthought. I’m not an afterthought. I’m an image. And that’s where I’d like to live. Not in the question, not in an explanation, not in any ‘why’, just in that thing that hits me—the image.

And that’s why I place myself in those pictures, right in the middle, right in the image. I’m there stealing something, something that was stolen from me, maybe even from you. I’m a thief; but I don’t come in the night, I’m right out in the daylight, and I’m not even searching for anything. I know exactly what to take and I take it. I take it from you. I take it from them. And I take it from the world. When I steal it is forever. It is not a moment that I take, I take a hole out of the world. I take a gap, I take an abyss from the world because it doesn’t have an abyss there for you to see or to look into or to tremble before. I have to find its place, I have to take it, and I have to give it to you. You will never fear and you will never tremble before an image—wasn’t that even a Commandment? But what you will tremble before is what you can’t ever find in my images, and what you cannot find in my images is yourself because what you find in my images is only the world’s own self-importance. And that is the most frightening and cold thing there is—beyond all the murders, the rapes, the death, the tragic loss, the wailing, the lamentations in sacred books, the poems, the philosophies of existence and all that stuff. It’s this narcissism of just plain being there that is so frightening. And I am a documentarist of that narcissism.

You see, with the world it is a gentle kind of narcissism, one that always beckons to you, comforts you in all of the tragedies, is a warm comforting blanket that surrounds you forever and ever and promises you eternal this or that (love and so forth). But my camera sees through all of that narcissism and it takes away the blanket and what it leaves behind is just, well, the world—a nakedly tragic, profoundly exposed, shuddering, even empty world just there, with no significance, with plainness, with everything just there. And that’s why I press the button, that’s why the shutter comes down, that’s why the light comes in to the camera and exposes itself. It’s really just public indecency. And then the curators come along, after the film is developed, and they comment, and they add the words, the thoughts and so forth—and what comes rushing back is that blanket, the narcissism of the world. That’s the real purpose of humanity, really: the world’s own self-deception. That’s why I hide the pictures in those thousands of canisters. Yes it is about protection. But I’m protecting you from the narcissism of the world which you rightly refuse to see, but which my images protect and display. So you do not want to see my images, you do not want to see the world’s narcissism. You want to see yourself through the world’s narcissism. But that’s not how narcissism works. The world robs you of yourself and you can never find yourself.