To Be Photographed
By Zea Asis
Artwork by Danie Drankwalter
All my life I refused to be photographed because I couldn’t stomach seeing the girl staring right at me in the photos. There was a part of me that acknowledged that the problem might have been pathological, while the other simply believed it to be a diagnostic symptom of growing pains.
There was a time when my fear of my own body forced me to retreat to body neutrality—that is, I refused to assign value to my physical characteristics in the way I moved within my own world. My breasts didn’t exist (or so I tried painstakingly to deny their existence). Unsolicited remarks from friends touting my hourglass shape I immediately dismissed as hearsay to minimize its impression on my growing sense of self-consciousness. So, my silent aversion to being photographed was a consequence of this accumulated effort to withdraw from my own body. My body was a lonely house. I was not always home; I was often elsewhere. I think of Rebecca Solnit’s words every time I look back at this time.
I tried to zero in on and theorize why this was a job for my therapist, but it was an unassailable fact of my teenage years that I took great lengths to avoid confronting the very fact that I had a body undergoing transformations, which then became subjected to other people’s scrutiny. There was a part of me that already understood that if I played less of a role in rearing my body that I would no longer be accountable for it, therefore less bound to fail (even as somehow I believed that I already did) and fall short of standards that were somehow already fiercely etched in my mind. It was a kind of compartmentalization that I unconsciously devised for myself.
In literary history, women have retreated from themselves in more ways than one. In Jia Tolentino’s 2018 essay for The New Yorker, she discusses how the nymph Arethusa tells Ceres the story of how she was transformed into a spring to get away from her rapist, the river god Alpheus. Or how Daphne cried out, “Destroy the beauty that has injured me,” being chased by a lustful Apollo. Two years later, as if to respond to Jia, Rebecca Solnit writes in her 2020 memoir, “You are always somewhere else. You turn into trees and lakes and birds, you turn into muses, whores, mothers, the vessel for others’ desires and the screen for their projections, and in all that it can be hard to turn into yourself, for yourself.”
Was there a braver part of me—more mature and wise beyond my years—that resisted the narrative perpetuated by Greek myths and Nabokov’s Lolita of the sweet, innocent nymph whose blossoming limbs were considered irresistibly seductive and became the object of sexual obsession by older men? A part of me knows now that I was afraid of my own power, of being looked at and perceived as a thing of beauty because then it meant facing a consequence I couldn’t yet wrap my head around. The possibility sent shivers down my spine. For all too many narratives about women, what can be considered power oftentimes becomes a device for victimization, easily corrupted.
A few years later, more profoundly so in my early 20’s, I learned to acknowledge this undiminishable aspect of my womanhood and hardened it with a 3-ply narrative of empowerment. I quickly and uncomfortably realized that to gawk in fear was to deprive myself of the cathartic, often pleasurable exercise of what the writer Momtaza Mehri calls “glamour-work” in a 2017 essay in Real Life Magazine.
It was through the imperfect language of empowerment that I began to slowly dance with the idea of visibility not only as a pleasure in itself, but a responsibility. Visibility (in the way we choose) was a freedom denied to generations of women in history. To finally be given the opportunity to shape our own narratives—our image—away (although not entirely without) from fear of victimization and judgment was a realization that became the precursor for my own liberation.
A particular kind of liberation (although many argue exactly just how liberating) in the digital age happens within the rooms of young women like me. Because of social media, we’ve gained control of the image we project onto everyone else. In his book of photographs entitled Iconography: 25 Figures of Jeanne Damas, Vincent Ferrané compiles a series of intimate images of the French “it” girl as a self-made icon through the selective prism she distills through her social media. He also includes isolated close-ups of commonplace instruments of beauty—an eyelash curler, a napkin dabbed with lipstick—to altogether portray the “unspoken rules of beauty.”
Although the photos in the collection are all staged, it holds strong parallel to my own experience and harkens to the rituals prevalent in the age of self-presentation and the construction of your own image facilitated by social media platforms such as Instagram. Especially now in the midst of quarantine, I’ve rediscovered the art of photographing myself. And while I wrestle with constantly evolving definitions of beauty, I see it as a way to carve out my own space.
The self-portraits I create in my room using my iPhone camera are far from the self-portraits of Amrita Sher-Gil or Frida Kahlo, but whether depictions of the self are created in gouache or reflected light, there exists the same sense of self-observation. “There are bodies, or beauties, that the world does not make space for. We know and live this. To counter that, these bodies have created their own alternatives online,” Mehri wrote. I follow accounts of different women who are essentially unafraid to show parts of them that don’t fit the antiquated narratives of femininity or beauty. I follow women who look just like me and are more self-assured, because when have I considered myself beautiful until now, under their own prodding? When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her, Adrienne Rich said. Truth begets truth.
When I photograph myself, I choreograph the position of my body and choose how much skin I want to expose. And there are times when I wish to expose more, lay bare a sizable number of folding skin because I believe that to photograph oneself this way, to let it live within online spaces, is to take part in a ritual that can be characterized by some as a healing practice; of which luxuriating in your own reflection becomes part of the work that according to Mehri is a “widening of the imaginary. Not a complete reinvention of the suffocating ideals but a widening nonetheless.” It is an admittance of my desire to be seen and an act of undeniable self-will, a quest for interior pleasures.
For so long I had neglected my body; now, it seems to have stepped out of the shadows of my mind, where at present I have embraced an almost obsessive determination to love and respect it for the way that it is. The song of my own body type, facial features, skin color, sense of style come to a crescendo when I photograph myself. There, like an etch a sketch, I recover a sense of self that used to be hollow, empty and full of fear. And while we continue to live in a world that has retrospectively bombarded women with ways of how to be and belittled the ways we show up, this act is a welcome respite. I show up for myself and the many other women who choose to show up for themselves, and together in a sun-lit room we do the necessary work of affirming each other.