On Being Photographed

Outside a photographic studio in South London, the famous Avedon backdrop of bright white paper awaits, looking oddly like an absence: a blank space in the world. In Avedon's portrait gallery, his subjects are asked to occupy, and define, a void. Somebody once told me that a frog on a lily pad keeps its eyes (which see by relative motion) so still that they see nothing at all, until an insect flies across their field of vision and becomes literally the only thing there, captured without escape on the white canvas of the frog's artificial, temporary blindness. Then snap, and it's gone.

There is something predatory about all photography. The portrait is the portraitist's food. In a real-life incident I fictionalized in Midnight's Children, my grandmother once brained an acquaintance with his own camera for daring to point it at her, because she believed that if he could capture some part of her essence in his box, then she would necessarily be deprived of it. What the photographer gained, the subject lost; cameras, like fear, ate the soul.

If you believe the language-and the language itself never lies, though liars often have the sweetest tongues-then the camera is a weapon: a photograph is a shot, and a session is a shoot, and a portrait may therefore be the trophy the hunter brings home from his shikar. A stuffed head for his wall.

It may be gathered from the above that I do not much enjoy having my picture taken, do not enjoy becoming, rather than exploring, a subject. These days writers are endlessly photographed, but for the most part these aren't true portraits-they are publicity pix, and every newspaper, every magazine, must have its own. Mostly the photographers who work with writers are kind. They make us look our best, which isn't always easy. They compliment us on being interesting. They ask our opinions. They may even read our books.

Richard Avedon is the author of some of the most striking portrait photographs of our day, but he is not, in the sense I have used the term, kind. He looks like an American eagle, and he sees his subjects, against white, with a bleak unblinking eye, whether they are writers or the mighty of the earth or anonymous folks or his own dying father. Perhaps, for Avedon, the stripped-down, head-on technique of his portraiture is a necessary alternative to the high-gloss fantasy world of his other life as a fashion photographer. In these portraits he is not selling but telling. And perhaps he is excited, too, by the fact that the people he is looking at are not members of that new tribe created by the camera: the tribe of professional subjects.

If the camera is a stealer of souls, is there not something Faustian about the contract between photographer and model, between the Mephistophilis of the camera and the beautiful young men and women who come to life, hoping for eternity (or at least celebrity), before its one-eyed stare? Models know how to look, the good ones know what the camera sees. They are performers of the surface, manipulators and presenters of their own extraordinary outsides. But finally the model's look is an artificiality, it is a look about how to look. Off-duty models photograph one another ceaselessly, defining each passing moment of their lives-a lunch, a stroll, a meeting-by committing it to film. Garry Winogrand, quoted in Susan Sontag's On Photography, says that he takes photographs "to find out what something will look like photographed," and these professional subjects are similarly trapped - they can never step outside the frame. They become quotations of themselves. Until the camera loses interest, and they fade away. The story of Faust does not have a happy ending.

Avedon's glamour photography has often touched on the theme of beauty and its passing. In a recent sequence the supermodel Nadja Auermann is seen in a series of surreal high-fashion clinches with an animated skeleton who is, of course, a photographer. Death and the maiden, a spectacular, with costumes by the great designers of the world. Perhaps Avedon is making a joke at his own expense, the skeleton as grand old man; perhaps he is hinting at the passing of the supermodel phenomenon. Equally relevant, however, is his wholehearted willingness to enter into the high-budget, high-gloss elaboration of this type of mega-commercial rag trade extravaganza. This is no ivory tower artist.

The contrast with his portraiture could not be greater. The portrait photograph is Avedon's naked stage, his blasted heath. Is it, I wonder, that one has to do something to exceptional beauties-cover their faces in icicles, make them dance with skeletons-to make them interesting to photograph; whereas unbeauties, the faces of real life, are rewarding even (only) when unadorned?

A great portrait photograph is about insides. Cartier-Bresson and Elliott Erwitt catch their people on the wing, as it were: often, their work is revealing because the subjects have been caught off guard. Avedon is more formal: the white sheet, the majestic old plate camera on its tripod. In this setup it is the insect that must be perfectly still, not the frog.

I have seen a lot of photographers work. I remember Barry Lategan in a natty beret snapping away during an interview, nodding every time I said something he liked. I began to watch him carefully, becoming dependent on his nods, growing addicted to his approval: performing for him. I remember Sally Soames persuading me to stretch out on a sofa and more or less lying on top of me to get the shot she wanted, a shot in which, unsurprisingly, I have a rather dreamy expression in my eyes. I remember Lord Snowdon rearranging all the furniture in my house, gathering bits of "Indianness" around me: a picture, a hookah. The resulting picture is one I have never cared for: the writer as exotic. Sometimes photographers come to you with a picture already in their heads, and then you're done for.

I have seen a lot of photographers work, but I never saw anyone take as few pictures in a session as Avedon does with his big plate camera. Is it that he knows exactly what he wants, or that he is content to take what he gets, I wondered: for Mr. Avedon is a man on a tight schedule. Some people will give him more than others-so does the onus of becoming a good photograph rest with us, his non-professional subjects, who know rather more about our insides than our outsides? Must we reveal ourselves, or will his sorcery unveil us anyhow?

He positions me just as he wants me. I am not to sway, even by a millimeter, as I may go out of focus: it's that critical. I must hold my expression for what seems an eternity. I find myself thinking: this is how I look when I am being made to look like this. This will be a photograph of a man doing something awkward to which he is not accustomed. Then, shrugging inwardly, I surrender to the great man. This is Richard Avedon, I tell myself. Just let him take the damn picture and don't argue.

Two setups, one indoors in a long black raincoat and one indoors, very close up, in a pin-striped black shirt. I saw the results of the close-up first, and to tell the truth it shocked and depressed me. It looked, well, satanic. A part of me blamed the photographer; another, larger part blamed my face. The next time I met Avedon, his opening words were "So, did you hate it?" I was unable to grin and say, it's great. "It's very dark," I said. "Oh, but the other picture's much friendlier," he comforted me. The other picture is the one accompanying this piece. Fortunately, I really like it. I'm not sure if "friendly" is the word for it (actually, I am sure, and "friendly" is not the word for it; I have a cheery, even chirpy way of looking at times, and this is definitely not one of those times), but I am, as they say, "comfortable" with the way it makes me look. The head is a good shape-my head is not always a good shape in photographs-and the beard is tidy and the face has a certain lived-in melancholy that I can't deny I recognize from my mirror. The black Japanese raincoat looks great.

The way the subject of a photograph looks at the photograph is unlike the way anyone else will ever see it. You hope your worst bits haven't been emphasized too much. You hope not to look like a bag person. You hope not to scare people who come across the picture by chance.

Let me try to see this picture as if I were not its subject. Richard Avedon was not interested in making a picture of a cheery novelist without a care in the world. I think he wanted to make a portrait of a writer to whom a number of bad things had happened. I think the picture shows some of that pain, but also, I hope, it shows something of resistance and endurance. It is a strong picture, and I am grateful to Avedon, for his solidarity, for his picture's clarity, and for its strength.

November 1995

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