Camera Obscura: On Looking
Kristen Arnett on passing through lenses and the photography of Diane Arbus.
The windowless library basement where I wrote most of my novel housed thousands of back issues of journals, magazines, and musty newspapers. Six other full-time employees worked alongside me in that giant room, processing books and performing routine database maintenance for patrons. The space also held a giant mural of a Central Florida lakeside. Commissioned by library administration to make the basement look less depressing, the painting took up an entire wall of technical services. The section behind my desk featured a cloudless blue sky and a huge white gazebo surrounded by cattails. Perched atop its spire sat a fat brown squirrel, clutching an acorn.
I hated that damn mural.
When library patrons came in for reference consultations, I was embarrassed. It was the kind of cutesy thing you’d find in a preschool, full of cartoonish scribblings and primary colors. There was no ignoring the wild smears of paint, swaths of it streaked from floor to ceiling. Once when a friend came to visit, I jokingly referred to the mural as my “yellow wallpaper.” To counteract its negative effect, I began covering it with anything I could find: posters, screen caps from television shows, photos of my dogs, stickers from local businesses, embroidery I’d stitched of animals and knock-knock jokes, vintage book covers printed off the library’s color copier. I collaged in spirals, a hurricane of paper, forming an ever-expanding ode to the images that caught my eye.
Over the course of four years, I managed to cover half the mural. The work was satisfying on its own, but something else came from it too: covering the wall became an active part of my writing process. As the mural slowly disappeared, the pictures I’d chosen started to work their way into my novel. I was trying to explore taxidermy: distorted limbs, faces in rictus. Stuck in the middle of a chapter, I’d turn to the heap of broken images behind me and then back to the manuscript, ready to write again.
I saw the most of myself in the work of Diane Arbus.
If you search her name, hundreds of black and white photos flood the page. Her work has been described as grotesque. Beautiful. Haunting. Her subjects are caught mid-smirk, mid-grimace, mid-scream. They’re wildly contorted and outrageously manic. I loved them for the simple fact that they presented humanity without artifice, illuminating humor and strangeness. I obsessed over what she’d been able to capture, marveling at her ability to disorient. Her photography made me question what I thought I knew about bodies. I reconsidered legs, arms, hands. How limbs wrap; how we embrace each other. When I looked at her pictures, I reconsidered what it meant to really see someone.
A person I trust once told me I write too much about sight and not enough about touch, taste, smell, or sound. Now when I’m out in the world I make an effort to let those senses run wild. I walk late at night when everyone’s asleep and think about the characters I’m getting to know in my work. I run through their conversations in my head, sometimes aloud. What would they smell? I sniff. Alongside the mildewed odor of ditch water, there’s the sugar-sweet aroma of cheap laundry detergent heating up in a dryer. What I hear: someone’s TV spits the smeary murmur of a late night talk show through a cracked window. A single frog belts its rusty croak. They’d taste the sourness of beer left behind on my tongue if we kissed. I like to walk at night because I like the way things look when I’m the only one around to see them.
After bingeing on Diane Arbus for weeks, my brain floods with images of contorted limbs and mirrored bodies. There has to be a way to understand the interior lives of my characters, but I’m stuck thinking about the flesh again. I go home and write some more, and then I walk drunk, trying to see the world like Diane. Overhead there’s the eternal spastic lights of a distant theme park. Four beams cross and intersect, separate, then slide back to embrace again. That’s how her photographs work, the moment of interest. The spark. I chase that spotlight down three solid blocks. Don’t leave me, I wheeze, tripping after it, stumbling in my loafers. Don’t leave.
Diane Arbus took photographs and then took her own life at age forty-eight. Historians describe her personality as manic. She obsessed over her work. Though she was an involved mother, her art is what fulfilled her. In the final years of her life, she stalked the streets of New York and photographed hundreds of people. Looking through the camera lens, the world around her finally swam into focus. This is some of what I feel when I write, when I dig inside the heart of a thing. My whole life I’ve looked at other people and wondered what was really going on inside them. Part of that is the way I’m able to use my body to mask myself. Though I’m queer, I’m femme enough to pass for straight. My voice modulates to a higher pitch when I’m in a situation where I feel threatened. I smile when I don’t want to. If it’s that easy for me to hide, what the hell is everyone else doing? I’m looking for the moment the real self emerges. I say, Show me where you break open. Let me see the hidden body.
As I wrote my novel, I tried thinking about Diane Arbus and her relationship to the camera as an extension of herself. Images blinked from her own eyes. I was looking for the thing that would make my vision stick, locating my relationship to humanity by staring at other people. One iconic shot, A Young Man and His Girlfriend with Hot Dogs in the Park, NYC, 1971, features a couple standing side by side, unknowingly imitating each other’s body language. Matching haircuts, jackets, posture, and facial expressions. One hand holds a hot dog, the other two clenched together at their middle, connecting them like paper dolls. Is that what love is, I wondered. How does affection cause us to pick up mannerisms, flavored by another person like we’re mushrooms?
Arbus’ photography often involved subjects who shared features, clothing styles, stances, or expressions. She photographed families, twins, and triplets, but even the people who weren’t related model similar poses. Her photography makes you want to lean close and try to spot the differences.
Those mirrored bodies bled into my writing. I looked at a photograph of women huddled on a park bench and considered the many iterations of female intimacy, saw pictures of kids posed in homemade Halloween costumes and dissected what it means to grow up. One photo in particular stuck with me when it came to understanding sibling rivalry. Girl in a Watch Cap, NYC, 1965 features a younger brother and an older sister. The girl stands in the background, hair flying, staring ferociously at the camera. The boy, smaller, pops up in front. The mimicry was startling, a moment that captured the essence of an entire relationship. Look at me too, that boy yelled without saying a word. There was family structure in those poses. Hierarchy. Analyzing those bodies-in-stasis allowed me to understand how relationships form: single moments stacked on top of each other until a whole damn life is built.
Where am I in all of it? How do I look to other people? Here is me seeing you, seeing me, seeing you. I wanted to write the way Diane Arbus saw herself in others. I turned over memories of long ago interactions with strangers. Their eyes on me, determining my worth. The lady in the shopping mall who told my mother I should brush my hair, grimacing at my windblown knots. An elderly woman who steadied herself on my arm in a doorway at church, eyes wet and confused. The man who pulled over beside the mailbox I checked as a child and tried to coax me inside his car. He stared at me with eyes like black holes. No, I’m not there, I thought, watching his eyes, staring at me, staring back at him. No one is there, I thought before running back inside the house.
Am I there? Am I here if I’m not there? Maybe part of me. Here’s what I know about any story that involves a woman and someone who violated her: years afterwards you’re still scrambling for the things you left behind, like chasing stuff you accidentally dumped out of your purse.
Portraits taken of Arbus show a wide-eyed woman with a pixie cut holding a camera in front of her like a shield. All that time spent photographing other people, but when the camera’s pointed her way she closes up. When she selected her subjects, she chose ones that sang out and provoked further questions. Our bodies, mysterious as sealed envelopes. Beautiful and grotesque. I pry my characters apart like nesting dolls, uncovering previous iterations, formative moments captured like snapshots. A face that picks up a smile from its neighbor. Laughs that follow each other down the hall. How the sound of someone you love sobbing can make your own eyes well with tears.
In her photography, you see a variety of bodies and poses, but you also see Diane Arbus. There’s a conversation happening in those images, a dialogue that allows the viewer to see what’s happening behind the camera. To write vulnerability means I need to address that too. To uncover hidden things I don’t want to see, I unstick pieces from my mural and let myself bleed through.
How do I know you, I ask those staring faces, but I am asking it of myself. I am asking me of my characters.
I finished the draft of the novel and got a new job at a different library. On my last day working in the windowless basement, I stayed late and removed my collaged pictures from the wall. The mural I’d worked so hard to hide revealed itself again, slips of green and blue water peeping through the sudden gaps. It still wasn’t beautiful to me, but I no longer hated it. Chunks of bright paint came off with the adhesive. I folded up those portraits and took them away, paint chips folded neatly inside the paper envelopes.
Yes, I kept it all. I carry it with me still.
Kristen Arnett is a queer fiction and essay writer. She won the 2017 Coil Book Award for her debut short fiction collection, Felt in the Jaw, and was awarded Ninth Letter’s 2015 Literary Award in Fiction. She is a blogger for Ploughshares and her work has appeared or is upcoming at North American Review, The Normal School, Guernica, TriQuarterly, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, Bennington Review, Portland Review, TinHouse Flash Fridays/The Guardian, Salon, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her debut novel, Mostly Dead Things, will be published by Tin House Books in Summer 2019.
