The Remote Island by Bryan Christian Please, Drew Barrymore, don't do a dating reality show! Plus: Christmas at 30 Rock, another Gossip Girl couple, and since when is Elisha Cuthbert 'sloppy seconds'?
I fell in love with my face hidden behind a camera. I met my first girlfriend when I was a sophomore at Barnard; we were together four years. She looked like a boy, so did I. She lived below in the same dorm as me Plimpton Hall (she was on the second floor, and I lived six floors up, with the best light I've ever had in New York City.) Our relationship was so much about me looking and her being looked at, feeling desired I think, understood maybe, a black clicking machine between us. When you're holding the camera you get a clear view, though slightly rearranged by lens and viewfinder. Taking pictures it's hard to remember that I am not seen as clearly as I'm seeing; that what she saw when she looked back at me was my chin and my forehead and my hands and not my eyes meeting hers. I feel obscured when I'm photographing; blocked slightly from my subject; blocked enough to feel a kind of power in my hiding.
It had been a year and a half since we met and we had finally gone from being semi-friends to lovers. Maybe we had been sleeping together and falling for each other a week when I took this picture on the right. I sat across from her and she looked back at me, looked back at the camera and me holding it. I think this was my first photograph that meant something about its subject, and about me. The shape of her in this picture reminds me of a small mountain, monumental, only softer. Her body, still mysterious to me, was hidden by that giant sweater. It gave me the feeling of wanting to crawl under it, that there was space enough for both of us. I learned to take pictures by falling in love and loving while doing it. I figured out how much of the picture I could make and how much she did. I think the photograph is better when it is a cooperation of a kind, not a burglary. Taking pictures of my lover was usually a loving act, but a loving act mixed with the possibility of layering my own emotions on top of hers. The product is not a picture of the discreet feelings of the subject so much as the combination resulting from the exchange.
When we broke up I squinted at piles of contact sheets. On my stomach on my bedroom floor, surrounded by curling and stiff pages, I searched. I wanted to look at her again, to figure out if there was anything I'd forgotten. I thought there might be clues in the pictures I picked and those I'd left out elisions that would explain what we were to each other. There were no explicit answers, but I found patterns. There were times she'd look at me and times she wouldn't, periods with many nudes and periods where she was only dressed. Sometimes her body was missing and sometimes the only thing present was a hand or a foot or her ass (my favorite part). When we were still in that backsliding cuddling phase I showed them to her. I didn't realize until she mentioned it that I had never before let her see my contact sheets. There were so many times things were so tenuous and it was nice to be at the very least in charge of the images I made of her.
In the end our relationship shifted, we both became restless and worried about our early devotion to each other. We were nineteen when we met too soon, we worried, to find the person we'd be with for the rest of our lives (an idea we both believed in). We had to live separately in the world and see how it was. When she shrank back, I reached the balance we had always worked for was disappearing. She stopped looking at the camera when I photographed her. She began to close her eyes instead of meeting my gaze; she seemed to submit rather than to fight or engage. Maybe she was giving me a last chance to look, and mark the time.
A week before it ended, we took the day trip we had been meaning to take all summer (August was ending) to Woodstock. But we left too late on Sunday; it started to rain, and by seven o'clock we had only gotten as far as New Paltz. We were starving and ready to turn back; we tried an over-priced Italian place full of old people chewing without teeth. We ate their crust-less bread and left for a wood-lined pub down the street for steak and potatoes. It was dark and wet and late and we realized we would call in sick to work the next day. We were fifteen minutes at the 87 Motel before we thought about the tiny lock and thin walls and left its kitsch value for the Super 8 across the street. So we had the last and best sex of our relationship and that morning I took this picture of her. It's like the others on those rolls; she's disappearing in all of them, not looking at me, her face hidden.
We had a working myth between us that the camera was a kind of caressing love machine, not an instrument of my power. In the end it was like a long hook trying to hold her. I wanted our connection back; so many times my camera had linked us and I had used it to keep her. When I looked without the camera, she couldn't stand it; I'd watch her while she watched a movie and she'd turn my face away. But when I photographed she gave herself to me. I don't think she ever once told me to stop.
After we broke up, I had Debbie-as-Degas fantasies a harem of lovers wasted by my camera. I tried it out a new project since the loss of my favorite subject and an excuse to get laid for my art. I never left for a bar without my camera. But it was strange; the others didn't submit in the same way; in our brief encounters they resisted. Was it the people I picked? Did I seem ravenous with my eyes and my instrument? They all fought back and I gave up. Maybe it was my bad intentions.
Since then my favorite subjects have been objects.
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
