Coda

Money's an illusion. The lack of it will kill you.
If centres are great then pity the edges.
Thinner than petals, the lives we lose.

The Instagram View

THE ORIGINAL

Which I like, is the complete instant: the woman is alert, curious, alive, listening to someone she knows. It’s a snapshot, but it has an extreme version of a snapshot’s qualities – the sense of life, character, arrested or potential movement. The downward drape of her bangs echoed and lengthened by the long fall of her necklace suggest being pressed upon by more weight than she can bear. The whole figure in itself suggests a sophisticated awareness, but a physical vulnerability.

The space around the figure gives the woman's eyes and the slope of her shoulders: isolation, an awareness of distance, a possible sadness. It leaves room for her to exist and think; it allows her an inner dimension, readable/unreadable as it may be.


THE FIRST CROP

The edit straigtens the image. The figure now has an air of diffidence and uncertainty. The glass of beer is still visible, still off-putting, still reminds the viewer of the setting and the world beyond the frame - the lines of trailing foam mean clearing up, washing up, drying, putting away, sweeping, dusting, the entire labour of maintaining the functions of a space. The glass is large, the standard size. It’s anyone’s glass. It is not particularly a woman's (stereotypically smaller) glass, let alone a beautiful woman's (sterotypically more elegant and expensive) glass.

If you look at the shadowed side of the woman’s face and read it upwards, past the eye and onto the forehead, there is something like the trace of an old scar or other slight damage. This woman is not flawless and without history. She’s not necessarily as young as she might have seemed at first glance.

Eliminating the space behind her left shoulder and back makes her seem physically stronger.

Like mine, one of her eyes takes everything in, unfiltered; the other eye judges. Behind her skin she is evaluating. She is listening, but both her arms are loosely folded near and across the core of her body. She is listening but not abandoning thought or defence. She seems curious, compassionate, gentle; but not a fool.


THE INSTAGRAM CROP

When I first saw this image I was stunned. It’s beautiful. (How could I have taken such a beautiful photo?) This beautiful skin, flawless, this balance of composition, this woman, who is beautiful, offering beauty, vulnerability, dependence?

An instant later: how many other beautiful photos are still hidden in images I thought were finished? (Had some part of my mind, which I should have been listening to all along, seen her this way?)

For a long time I was stunned by this seamless perfection. The photo reminded me of thousands of other photos I'd seen. (Somehow something I'd done achieved parity with the well-regarded. Somehow I'd finally learnt my lesson.)

(How? When?)

It was almost as though that was why I thought it was beautiful - that its agreement with so much I’d seen was its achievement. The beer glass has become Platonic!

The Instagram crop at the bottom of the photo is very, very clever.

That image wasn’t an image of my making. It was what Instagram had done with the interim version, the one I'd tried to post. I think I'd asked for "original" as the crop, but it's more than possible that I misremebered 4:5 (one of the other choices) as being "original".

In the Instagram edit there's no isolation in a pub booth, no glass needing washing after, no possible scar on the forehead, no loosely defensive body position. The woman's eyes aren’t considering so much as fastened on whoever is engaging her. They seem beseeching more than anything.

The photo is otherwise occupied with the woman’s flawless skin, her long necklace drawing attention down to the deep v-cut of her dress and up to her neck and face and eyes.

In this image there is no question of consent: there’s no distance, no evidence of thought, history, evaluation, mind, soul, personhood. The woman is wholly beseeching eyes and undefended skin, beauty and ornament. The image is all invitation.

With a small shock, not much more than a blink of the mind, I realized that the Instagram crop gives us the essence of the male gaze.

The Undertow - Jeff Sharlet

Jeff Sharlet’s The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War opens with an essay on Harry Belafonte. Describing the Civil Rights marches, Sharlet paraphrases Belafonte:

After that day in Montgomery, Klansmen murdered a mother of five who was driving back to Selma. “After every great victory, a great murder.”

Sharlet:

Then it clicks. The code. The murder is the blackface. It’s the cork. It’s the minstrel show, the act replayed, second time perverse. (p. 31)

I think Sharlet’s right to link the murders to blackface. It seems to me that blackface is a dramatization of the desire to obliterate. Under the black skin there is no Black person; there’s a White one.

That’s the Great Replacement in the white supremacist fever-dream.

Sharlet, Jeff, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, New York, Norton, 2023