Portrait of a Woman
I had an emergency summit meeting with my friend Alexandra. What could I do for money that I had not already thought of? Not, what could somebody else do. What could I, with my own brain and my own skill set, do.
She proposed that I become a Boudoir Photographer. I groaned. That was the opposite of everything I stood for. Posing women and make them “look sexy,” whatever that meant. The idea grated. Fake photos of women faking stuff they didn’t feel in fake poses to appeal to some fake society’s notion of fake sexuality. I, who was struggling in a lifelong judo-lock with the Truth, felt like I was the worst possible person for the job.
But I needed money.
“Who is my market for these photos?” I wondered. In today’s image-glutted era of omnipresent scantily clad or naked female bodies, all a click away, for free, who paid for this stuff? If this were 1963 I could sell photos to Playboy. But the internet had destroyed what had once been many women’s most-desperate-case-scenario for earning food and rent. Now that a Fate Worse than Death and all its Handmaidens were going for free, what did women have left as a final resource?
Andreea said I would sell the photos to the women themselves. “What?” I said. Someone else paraphrased: I would find rich middle-aged housewives wondering where their sexy had gone, and make them feel good about themselves again. I wondered why it would make women feel good about themselves to force themselves into arbitrary tableaux designed to appeal to men, not to themselves. Why women over the age of sixteen still determined their worth as human beings based on what men thought of them, thus disempowering them by giving the determining vote away to someone else. What middle-aged woman would want that? The gift of turning into an old fart is that I no longer have to please you. I have to please me. (And, to a lesser, extent, you have to please me.) What woman would throw that gift away?
Plus whomever heard of anyone liking a photo of themselves?
Why would anyone want a photo of themselves in their underwear? Why would anyone care? And to find a plurality of people who cared enough to pay…I had no idea how that would work. But I was willing to give it my best shot.
I took a few boring nudie pix of myself and thought, “if I’m bored, how will I spark interest in others.” I dug deep and found a glimmer of interest in viewing the human body as a landscape of light and shadow. I could get behind that, a little bit, in an Ansel Adams kind of way. It was a start, if this was something that would make money. It wasn’t my top choice of projects but if it would pay for food….
As often happens, women I knew were thrilled on an abstract level when they heard of the project but when I asked them if they’d be in it, suddenly there was lots of hemming and hawing and back-pedaling.
An out-of-work whore who needed photos came to my studio. Sweet Dolly from London, with her thin body in cotton underwear, her hair buzzed short like a baby chick…she was the least sexy thing in all of Berlin. But she showed me a superpower I hadn’t realized I possessed: I made her comfortable! I said, “I’m not going to pose you. That’s fake. This is about you, and how you feel. I’m just an external support to remind you that whatever you feel is good. Listen to your body and what it wants. If you want to hold still, hold still. If you want to move, move, but only in the way that’s right for you.” She said no one had said that to her before and that was the best advice any photographer could give a model.
I realized that I might have stumbled on to the coolest thing to happen for naked women since Lilith. I was creating an environment that was about Dolly, not about the viewer! It was about her, not about making her into a comestible for some man.
I saw no other way life could possibly be, and yet her delight reminded me that this is still an unusual stance.
So then I took more photos of more women, for free, to build my portfolio. They all said the same thing. They didn’t have to Be Anyone in my presence, they didn’t have Please Anyone, they could open up, and best of all, my presence silenced the Inner Critic that hounded them when they were alone.
This sounded like a useful and fabulously feminist gift I could give to society (provided society was willing to pay for it). The Lord works in mysterious ways. Plus the women liked my photos of themselves.
The project morphed. I was desperately bored by the idea of taking pictures of women in their skivvies. It was so boring I thought I might die. And that’s not a vibe one wants to project in such a milieu. I knew I could only take photos I wanted to take, otherwise the work would be DOA. So I let the women leave their clothes on, or take them off, as they themselves chose. That, I could get behind. How to hear women and to help them inhabit themselves as they wanted to be, that I could do.
But there’s no money in that in Bankrupt Berlin, no matter what the women are or are not wearing. After acquiring enough portfolio, I advertised, but it was pointless. The market had been destroyed by too many people willing to work for free, on both ends of the camera. Maybe in wealthy Munich, or our solvent neighbour Hamburg…I advertised on the Hamburg Craigslist, to no avail. I didn’t know what else to do.
I didn’t even have a camera; I had taken these photos with my iPad, and the image quality is poor. But why throw money I didn’t have into something that was not a likely money-maker?
Meanwhile I investigated the galleries in Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, and Munich. I investigated German photography community websites. I investigated cafés that accepted work for their walls. I tried out for some magazines and for some group shows. I tried to join the board of a co-op photo gallery. I was looking for some way of getting seen, so that people would know I existed, so that they would buy my work. I had been seeking since the winter, and I wasn’t finding — because I couldn’t just throw my work at any old exhibition venue or site. There had to be an iota of harmony between they and I. They wouldn’t want me if I didn’t match their aesthetic…and I wouldn’t want them either! So here I was, water water everywhere and not a drop to drink. Art and photography opportunities at every hand, yet none were right for me.
Berlin was a riot of art-loving maniacs, it was a supportive and snuggly incubator of living artists, it was an artist’s wet dream…provided one made one specific kind of art and not any other kind.
Sorry, Berlin; sorry, Germany. Your entire onanistic art scene looks exactly the same to me, although I love that you have an art scene. I can’t tell the difference between anyone’s work, and I loathe it all.
(“Because it’s all crap,” muffled cough….)
I get warm snugglies out of knowing there’s these women out there now who have a new sense of self-worth and human validation because of me, women who have a new understanding of themselves as entities deserving of space and resources and happiness just for being themselves and not because of some arbitrary judgment passed on them by men. That’s nice. But I need money…so if this isn’t going to lead to anything, I’ll do something else until I find something that does.
Portrait of a Woman
