Faces

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Other

lost and found
by Jeneen R. Garcia
published in February 2004


In commemoration of the fourth year anniversary of lost & found, I am posting the eight essays that were published pre-Multiply. As it happens, these essays are also among my favorites so far :)


My photos often elicit one of two reactions from my viewers: narrowed eyes, because they’re trying to figure out what my subject is, or a quick flip to the next photo, because they don’t see anything worth their attention.

Though it bewildered me at first, I understand now why this happens, and have learned to forgive them—my photos have a distinct lack of human faces. What human images I have are of strangers, with their faces bowed, turned away, or obscured by shadows. A shrink would think I had a fear of people.

Honestly, all I want to do is capture beauty on film. Although based on my viewers’ reactions, beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder.

I started taking pictures out of fascination with the world. I wanted to freeze images that made me smile, to take out and look at whenever I wanted to. My first successful photo was a sunset at a beach, captured accidentally as I took a picture of something else. Since that serendipitous shot, I’ve had countless other sunsets and shorelines.

When I bought my own SLR camera a little more than a year ago, I also began shooting details of statues, churches, fish, goats…. Windows especially made me happy, a subject only 1 in 10 of my viewers recognize or care about. Photography for me was essentially about how light touched and transformed ordinary objects. A strip of orange metal, under the afternoon sun, became the most exquisite thing in the world.

I will admit now that I had a distinct aversion to having people in my pictures. Perhaps for the same reason I make friends faster with animals than with humans, I felt people were too arbitrary and only ruined my well-composed scenes. They moved too much, too fast, too slow, too WRONG. “People shots” were taken to document noteworthy events, but my “art shots” were taken for beauty’s sake. Sometimes people qualified as art, too, but only when they were anonymous figures strategically placed to represent “humanity”.

But when, after looking through my albums, people asked, “Don’t you have any pictures with you in it?”, I started having second thoughts. Having a totally manual SLR for art shots meant I couldn’t just call any random waiter and have him take pictures of me with my friends. Even though I of course love seeing myself in pictures, this was the price I had to pay for art, I said.

What finally got to me was a book by acclaimed photographer Nan Goldin. Inside were pictures of ordinary-looking people in ordinary poses—lying in bed, sitting down…. The typical titles of the photos were “So-and-so sleeping” or “So-and-so in the garden”, just like a family scrapbook. Many of the photos were taken with a run-of-the-mill instamatic with flash.

I couldn’t understand. What happened to the principles of composition, to light and shadow, to beauty? These people, all friends of Goldin, were just like any other person on the street. Except that many of them had already died of AIDS; the photos were Goldin’s only tangible memory left of them.

After that, I realized I didn’t have pictures of my family and friends. Yes, I had old pictures of them smiling at parties, or posing for a studio shot. But I hadn’t captured them in the way I SAW them—the most everyday, the most natural, the most human. When the people I love die, I don’t want to remember them as fully made-up, in togas and wearing forced smiles. It is the ordinary moments that make up the memory of a life, and it is in these moments that I come to see a person’s loveliness—the familiar gestures, the odd habits, the light in their loving eyes.

Now I trust waiters more. I hand them my SLR and don’t care if the image comes out blurred and less than perfect; I need to start appearing in my pictures before I forget who and where I’ve been. And I’m making sure, too, that for every shot of a fascinating landscape, I take two portraits of friends in their element. There is nothing so random, or so beautiful, as the face of a human being I love.