The Blackstone Review

There is a picture in my cellphone of me as a child. The wood-paneled walls in the background say it was taken sometime between 1993 and 1995, which means I’m ten to twelve years old, in the living room of our home in Coventry Village—a complex of townhouses where my family lived during those years. In the picture, I’m wearing Washington Redskins sweatpants, that familiar burgundy background and gold lettering, and shirtless, showcasing with a smile my preadolescent chubby stomach and breasts, flexing what I thought to be muscles with my arms curled downward like a pair of open handcuffs. My mother recently texted me this memory—her manicured fingernail is framed in the foreground of the cellphone picture of a picture—and more recently, I rediscovered it while looking aimlessly through my saved images. I detest this picture. I detest it in not only the way I detest many childhood pictures of myself, but also with the hatred one holds for the embodiment of something deeper, for the object that represents an idea.

“[The] Photograph is the advent of myself as other,” writes Roland Barthes in his Camera Lucida, “a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity.”[1] The experience of looking at a picture of yourself—or better yet, of observing someone look at a picture of himself—affirms this notion. Through the picture the understood I becomes the alienated you or it: photography’s implied pretension of faithfully capturing the thing as it was necessarily begs the question what the thing is. And a childhood picture intensifies the dynamic of turning “subject into object,”[2] exposing the degree to which how we relate to ourselves, and our supposed past selves, can be a relatively unexplored country for everyone[3]—unexplored perhaps in the same sense that Columbus didn’t discover a new land, rather the limits of his existence.

Barthes argues that a photograph “can be the object of three practices … to do, to undergo, to look,” which correspond to the relationships one has to the photo: the Operator, or the photographer; the Spectator, viewers of the image; and the Spectrum, that is, the object photographed.[4] Because I cannot recall which of my parents was the Operator of my photograph, a necessary detail to my mind, and doing so feels an emotional degree removed from the somewhat limited meditation on the I without which there is no it, I’m drawn to the latter two. For Barthes, being in front of the lens initiates a process in which one transforms into an image by way of the pose, a process that is nevertheless laced with the need that your “(mobile) image” coincide with one’s “(profound) self,” in other words that the static production accord with the ever-shifting and hard-to-define you. A bodybuilder pose strikes me as commonplace from my childhood, this picture an exemplar of countless taken and untaken others. And from the perspective of adulthood, I more easily admit, and maybe project, the meaning of the act. Looking at this picture, I cannot escape the attempt to constitute a thing in the moment that was fleeting or nonexistent. After considering this picture, it does not take me long to think of the shame with which I’ve experienced bodiedness, for example, and how that must have informed my need to pose as something removed from myself. (I momentarily go back on my word here to note that one of my parents being the photographer adds to my attempt at creating a photographic reality different from the lived one a texture that I can taste.) Barthes, furthermore, says the person or thing that was photographed is “the target, the referent, a kind of simulacrum, any eidolon emitted by the object,” which he delineates the Spectrum. That word retains, according to Barthes, its relation to “spectacle” as well as adds the “rather terrible thing which there is in every photograph: the return of the dead.”[5] To look one’s childhood doppelganger in the eyes is to have questions asked of yourself that cannot be fully reasoned or returned in kind—the most perplexing of which is typically some variant of “Who is this person?”, inquisitor and interviewee undetermined. An answer, i.e., a description of phenomenon, also runs headlong into the limitations of description itself: of the photograph’s ability to capture or, more accurately, produce a fully comprehensible representation of experience on the one hand; and on the other, the possibility that language can thoroughly describe the phenomenon of perceiving the photo. Viewing then must inevitably be crosscurrents of recognition and misrecognition, of oneself and the relationship to oneself, crissing and crossing such that what the thing is can feel unlocatable, possibly even a fiction.

I do not remember the day this picture was taken. I do, however, remember the times. Fifth grade was Graceland Elementary School and Mrs. Diana Bell—a tall and large black woman who pinched my cheeks with a vigor that revealed she did not know her own strength, and who doled out my only experience with corporal punishment (she also moonlighted at a Kroger near the home of my paternal aunt where we occasionally saw her). Sixth grade was Graves Elementary School and Mrs. Peggy Jones—a white lady, smaller and older than Mrs. Bell, who I recall once saying she feared having emphysema. I and my family—mother, father, and one-year-younger sister—must have moved into that townhouse shortly before the start of or shortly after the beginning of my fifth-grade year. A related memory from this time is updating my address with Mrs. Bell sometime during the school year and having to acknowledge that, gulp, I no longer lived in the appropriate school district, which would have meant transferring midyear to another school (this was luckily and inexplicably avoided). I high-stepped through that living room with my father’s old, mostly lace-less football, wearing a bandana on my head in imitation of Deion Sanders. Our breaths were exhaled into the dank and polluted air of broken vows. In this living room, too, I first contemplated suicide. It was a blue ink pen I thought of placing into a vein of my left arm, allowing, I imagined, the liquid to poison me to death (the writer can now appreciate the tender poetry of the pen as a tool of erasure). And in this living room I also revealed my musing on self-immolation to my parents: they believed it a transient and generally not concerning notion. There were friends—Brent, originally from Kenosha, Wisconsin, and my best friend, Joseph; [6] and apparently requited crushes—Katrina, whose full lips, big nose, and glasses I see as clearly as though I were a boy again and trying to daydream her into reality; and Abigail, bespectacled, chubby, and oval-faced Abigail, who I last recall seeing in a department store wearing matching dark blue sweatpants and sweatshirt, and whose resemblance to my paternal aunt is now keen.

I recall sitting in a real estate agency’s office with a forced smile on my face when it was announced that we had gotten the house while my parents and sister and real estate agent cheered (now a moment of false expression resonates from a decade and a half later, like a church bell’s echo—another story for another time). We left for a three-bedroom house in August or September of 1995. I changed schools a month into my seventh-grade year. And it, whatever it was or is, was not the same thereafter. Those were some of the better days of my life.

That the photograph produces a re-acquaintance is irrefutable. Where a poem or song, for instance, may call forth a memory or memories, each shaped by the palimpsest relationship of memories to memories, the photo evidences the lived instant in an apparently objective manner. Mistruth of this perception aside, the dynamics underpinning how one experiences a photograph, and the accompanying “return,” are obvious. Though the repulsion I feel is not a product of Barthes’s “return of the dead”—inasmuch as “the dead” must in some way, shape, or form be a matter of conclusion. Moreover, for me, death is a nonexistent category—there is only memory and loss[7]—because in remembrance everything and everyone is quite alive. Death as finality, death, at the risk of glibness, as irreversible so long as people populate Earth, is a debunked myth in the continually retrievable past. The photograph’s, my photograph’s, intensity and poignancy reside in its ability to reintroduce one to the thing that is not gone—it is the return of that which is believed to be overcome. When I look at this picture, and think of this picture, I encounter all that I falsely tell myself was left behind. I am reacquainted with the repressed.

Freud, to whom all roads consciously and unconsciously seem to lead, writes in his essay, “The ‘Uncanny’”:

[If] psycho-analytic theory is correct in maintaining that every affect belonging to an emotional impulse, whatever its kind, is transformed, if it is repressed, into anxiety, then among instances of frightening things there must be one class in which the frightening element can be shown to be something repressed which recurs. This class of frightening things would then constitute the uncanny; and it must be a matter of indifference whether what is uncanny was itself originally frightening or whether it carried some other affect.[8]

I mobilize the language and ideas of Freud here somewhat literarily, as a means of contextualizing my relationship to this picture, because I’ve encountered no other way to understand my reaction. Considering that younger self—the smile, the baby afro, the pose, the time and place—I see the unseen and hear the unsaid, I experience the uncanny. In this picture is an incomplete truth. Beneath the surface of the image it creates is someone who sometimes wished to escape, in some instances by any means necessary, from home, from himself. Freud, in his essay, recounts a walk through an Italian town during which he arrives in an area he wants to leave. But after two attempts via different paths, he finds himself in the same quarter of town and experiencing something that “I can only describe as uncanny.”[9] Searching for some way to conclude this essay, I found myself wondering if the uncanny can be eliminated, if there could be some day when I see this picture, or any other of myself, and not feel this aversion. In the past five years, I’ve moved from my hometown and lived in four apartments. Yet, none of it is enough. All these years later something fundamental has not changed and perhaps never will: I am the object from which there is no escape.