Unknowingly Bound by a Photograph
By Deborah Stokol
As I walked through the bluffs this Saturday dusk, I saw a single boat, gently gliding through the sunset. That is not a metaphor. The tiny thing (tiny, perhaps, only through perspective) was sailing on the path made by the falling sun.
I looked at it from miles away but saw that I was not alone in my spying. I had brought a camera. So had many others. Moreover, theirs were the huge lenses of the professionals or the serious aficionados. All of us had lined up against the white fence, taking turns at shots of the glistening water, still and sheet-like and the lone boat cutting into its quietitude.
It made me wonder. Is it not strange that we may end up the random stranger in another’s photograph? We can go through a lifetime seen by alien eyes and never know it. Those eyes would not care, but they’d be viewing our faces, and our faces would no longer belong solely to us. You could say that’s true when anyone sees you, but a sight does not a photo make. This is not really a conundrum a model experiences. She willingly surrenders her image to mass dissemination, to the gaze of those she may never know.
But what of the casual civilian, who stumbles into another’s life and is recorded there forever? That boat, and its inhabitants, whoever they are, are locked in my camera, in the pictures I shot and in my memory. They must have imagined that on such a beautiful day, folks would snap shots of the water and perhaps of them in it–perhaps because of the way their presence made the water look. But would it not be odd for me to meet them one day, show them a photo and have them venture a guess ‘My God! That’s my boat! All these years you had my likeness, and I did not know it.’ In a sense, do I not own a part of them; have they not surrendered a bit of themselves to me?’
I find a true connection in the shooter and the subject and the fact that even if they never meet, there exists between them some bond broken only by the destruction of the likeness–and perhaps not even then.
Many a novel has been written about that one picture, taken perhaps by a total stranger, in a crowded public place, which is the answer to the riddle of a crime committed. This comes to mind as I have just read Steig Larsson´s ¨The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo¨. Wonderfully written as always.