WE ARE RARELY BEAUTIFUL
BY JEAN-DAVID N’DA
We usually think of photography as a means to convey beauty. We use words like beautiful, pretty or nice when referring to what we naturally feel is worthy of our tastes because, as human beings, beauty matters to us. And it should.
However, photography, in its basic form, is first and foremost a means to convey memory. Light particles become images through a magical optical process, and we’re able to reminisce over said images anytime we want because photography makes it possible. Which explains why, for example, fifty years after a photograph has been taken of, let’s say, a young lady, her great-grandchildren don’t initially rush to look at it to find out whether she was pretty. They look at it quite directly to find out if she was, to have proof of her existence. Then, they may want to find out how she was. And eventually who she was...
A few days ago, a friend of mine showed me a couple of pictures someone took of her mother when her mother was about 28 years old. Out of politeness, I took a couple of minutes to look at these slightly worn-out prints and I was about to hand them back to my friend when she started talking about the reasons why these photos were special to her. Which had nothing to do with how beautiful they were but everything to do with the simple fact that they were, that they existed as testimony of the lady’s life at 28 because my friend never quite met her own mother.
Her mother passed away, after a long bout not with sickness but with sadness, when she was 28, when her baby, my friend, was 4 years old. And decades later, these pictures of her 28-year-old mother are all my friend owns of her mother. They are all her mother ever was…
When I got into portrait photography a few months ago, I tried doing so in a bare bone home studio where I stressed over the spotless quality of the faces I was capturing while using one-sided semi-professional lighting alongside Kobe, my dear little camera. I wanted to take beautiful photos, meaning, crispy clean, well-arranged faces inside proper rectangles, regardless of the fact that these rectangles were or were not the truest representations of my models. Later on, I came to learn that most of these photos, although lovely, had very little chance to be the truest representations of my acquaintances. Why? Because they represented the manufactured, ready-to-shoot-in-a-studio-under-ideal-conditions versions of these people.
So the pictures I took were beautiful, albeit somewhat lifeless. With a few exceptions, they weren’t particularly memorable…
The fact is, no one, not a single one of us is always beautiful. We, as people, have downtimes (more times than not, if we care to admit), moments when we wake up or go to bed with crumpled, worn-out faces, moments when we feel sick, tired, stressed out, lonely, hurt, mad or just old, moments when our postures actually reveal every single one of these emotions. But rarely do we use photography to capture these moments. And whenever we do, we tend to hide or delete them as quickly as possible because they’re not, well, beautiful. So these moments tend to fade and disappear and what’s left of us are collages of our lives’ best of’s: favorite, pretty, IG-ready moments we love to share even though they only tell the most flattering parts of our lives and very little else.
Well, I have learned from my attempts of portrait photography that downtimes, times when we feel our most vulnerable, actually make for the more realistic, faithful and timeless pictures, because they showcase us as we are. Indeed, they rarely make for so-called beautiful photos. Instead, they make for honest photos. They represent who we truly are because they represent who we are most of the time in hiding or in plain sight: ourselves. And our selves, our true selves, not necessarily our best beautiful selves, are always memorable, just like my friend’s 28-year-old mother remains to her daughter: memorable.
Here is a snapshot of my personal downtime. I couldn’t find anyone to shoot (or willing to be shot) in these moments so I did what I never do, what I never enjoy doing: I shot myself. As a photographer, I don’t like shooting myself because I don’t like selfies, which I despise for what they say, specifically, of their compulsive takers. However, this photo, in my opinion, transcends a selfie. It is a self-portrait. It is a photographic expression of a carefree moment taken on a whim, with no artificial lights, no preparation, no dress code, no makeup, no forced smile or seductive posture, no willingness to appear as something other than what is. It’s also who I am more often than not, on my way to 50, and it has been taken for the simple photography of it all, with no real use of the little knowledge I have gathered, so far, of portraiture.
Do I like this photograph? Well, does it even matter? I know one thing: I like that it exists because it serves a purpose. A memory. A memory, possibly, for my great-grandkids to be...
