Workin’ It: towards a theory of photographed performance. by risa
By Risa Dickens.
I have had the strange experience a few times this year of modeling for photographs- most recently for the cover of the brand new fashion journal Worn, which we’ll be launching on Monday Oct.3 at the Green Room in Montreal, and in 16 stores across Quebec, Ontario and New York. I have been a part of the dreaming and theorizing and writing that’s gone into this new publication- a journal “for anyone who is fascinated by fashion but frustrated by fashion magazines”- from the beginning. Worn is the product of a great deal of love, energy, organization and gumption on the part of an old and dear friend of mine named SerahMarie McMahon, and I was on the phone with her a few days before the thing was going to print when she decided that none of the options she had for the cover were quite right, and that she wanted to try something else. She had an idea for a shoot, and would I donate my legs for a few hours to try and make it happen? I said yes, and an hour later the idea had escalated. She had a photographer, and rented lights, and access to a personal collection of antique clothing and jewelery, and would I be available for a fitting on Friday and a proper shoot on Saturday? No problem.
The thing is, I used to be an actor. I don’t mean professionally, I mean, in my mind what I was, what I was going to be when I grew up, had everything to do with performance: with using my body and gestures and emotions and voice to communicate my own and other people’s texts. Over the years I veered a bit away from that route, at first because I wanted a solid academic undergirding before heading off into the often superficial and highly competitive waters of theatre and film. And then because I became fascinated with ideas about communication more generally.
I like to think about how software communicates, as much as I like to think about the expressiveness of clothing, narrative, facial expressions, advertizing, and government. As an academic you perform in writing, or website making, or in conversation, or class… But while swept up in all this theory and media-making I have, to be perfectly honest, missed acting. I missed the art of it, and the playfulness, and the raw emotion. And I equate modeling with acting in many ways. Even when you are not performing an action to be photographed, as I was for Worn, even when the process is a bit more utilitarian, I feel there is a relationship between this kind of performance and interpreting a text in a time-based medium like theatre, tv, or film. Maybe this indicates that I am overly subserviant to the desires of the public gaze, maybe I was missing attention when I was young and now I like a little extra approval. Maybe this means I am a poor feminist, willing to be looked at in ways that are beyond my control. I’m not sure what exactly it means, but I think the questions it raises are almost as interesting as the act of posing itself. Plus it’s fun.
So when a designer friend asks me to wear his clothes while he takes photos of them for his website, or when he then asks me to model all the designs that fit me for the Consistent Variable Project book, or when Serah asks me to come play at her house while she takes pictures for her magaizine, I delightedly say yes.
There is, of course, a lovely feeling of being pretty that obviously accompanies being asked to strut your stuff. There is also all kinds of lurking thought about the bodies not chosen for the cover, about how the shape of my body (which i didn’t really chose, although I do work out) becomes part of the message about fashion here. But this is only one brief instance of body imagery, there will be (are already) countless others, and mine is as worthy of inclusion in the wide wash of normal as any other.
And while I’m there, in the clothes and makeup, in the moment of being for the camera, and listening as carefully as possible to the photographer, I am very aware of being in the pocket of so much focus and so much mediation (although it’s best to not look right at that feeling, it can make you useless-ly shy). I am an object to be captured and viewed, but I am also telling a pretty funny story about the contortions involved in dressing up and running out the door. Or, in the case of the Consistent Variable Project, I am performing with a kind of stillness, because the story is about the already-rawkus unique-ness that was produced by the fifty designers with their fifty identical kits. Either way, when I’m up there in the bright light, I’m living life in slow motion, and repeating gestures again and again for the finicky and sticky combined effort of lighting, photographer and camera. I repeat, hold, move, repeat, hit my mark, wait and wait and wait, quietly, reminding myself that so much of the work being done around me is not about me, but about the more abstract thing we are all making together. I try to have patience, to conserve energy, and then, when everything is precariouly ready, to do a good job, hopefully without losing any spontanaity or genuine-ness. And it is a kind of labour. Holding your arms up, rushing in and out of high-heeled shoes, lifting a small coat up and around your bony shoulders once feels like nothing, but dozens of times later with chunks of holding still beneath the lights and waiting in between, your body is defintely humming, even achy and tired.
The feeling that comes over my brain is very much the same as in live, more complex acting. Performance, whether for a photographic camera or otherwise devides your brain. Part of you listens, silently translates input into commands, and thinks about what’s going on; and the other part of your brain denies that that first part exists, and gives itself over to believing whole-heartedly in the act. In a photo shoot, I’m interacting with a camera, and must think only about that one-to-one interaction, must open my posture and face up to it as though it is a person I know well if I’m going to help make a nice-looking photograph. I must, above all, not think much about all the people I know and don’t know who are going to see this and think things about me. Being photographed happily requires being able to trust the people involved in the photography- not just the photographer, but the stylist, the hair and makeup artists, and the editor (choice-maker) who will eventually decide which one of the hundreds of shots taken will be published. Because in photography, all of these other people stand in for your missing movement, thought and voice. You become just an instant of yourself, and in this way it is even easier to be detached from it then from a longer performance. And so, in a way, the photographed performance is more pure. It can be an idea or story or allegory untainted by all the messiness of the real me that leaks though in time-captured tone and movement.
This shot is one of the ones that made it into the final selections for the inaugeral cover of Worn, before being rejected. The one they went with is crazier, more messy, more energetic, and brighter. It says something different about fashion, I think, and something different- slightly less formal, funnier, sexier?- about how this publication will treat the wide world of wearing and making clothes. My face, my hair, my body are used to say something subtle, but I am not really the author of that statement. The image is me, but it says little about me.
And I’m quite happy to be a part of it all in this way.
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