N
ot long after finishing art school, I spent a few years trailing across the country after my childhood friend Amanda Palmer with a camera, documenting her life and times. It was 1999 when I embarked on the project, and back then I could have accurately been described as a young woman at loose ends. After finishing college, I worked first as a VISTA volunteer and then as a salesgirl at a toy store, before settling into the vague position of “director of special projects” for a small nonprofit. I had a lot of ideas about what I wanted to do with my life, many of which were grand and none of which stuck. I applied to programs to teach English in both Indonesia and Mexico, then declined both after getting accepted. I decided I would open a home portrait studio but did nothing more than buy a giant roll of white paper and a huge piece of black felt. I had always wanted to be a singer, so I tried busking out on Sixth Street, but then quit that too after a few weeks, when a cop told me to move along. I was not alone—I was living in slacker-era Austin, Texas, where every other person was a musician/barista/actor/minotaur.
Then there were people who seemed to be composed of nothing but the slashes themselves, like my neighbors. Most of them were on the nine-year plan at Austin Community College, and all of them kept translucent candy-colored bongs on their windowsills for easy access. They were nice people, but they did not inspire me to greater heights. Rather, they inspired me to lie down. They inspired me to play a round of air hockey, then help myself to some shrooms while listening neverendlessly to Neutral Milk Hotel and staring at some tessellated wallpaper. I started to feel like a semi on the highway that had windmilled too far in one direction; my load was starting to wobble. It had been two years since I’d finished art school, yet I had nothing to show for it. I was in danger of becoming a perennial seeker. One of those wispy women I’d taken guitar lessons from in college, who were big into yoga, had their watercolors up for sale at a local coffee shop, and always looked as though they’d stopped crying about two seconds before I walked through the door.
It turned out that I was in need of a subject at the precise moment when Amanda was in need of an acolyte. She had just returned from Germany after abandoning a language fellowship and was looking for someone to chronicle her anticipated rise from obscurity to stardom. She wanted to be photographed, so I brought my cameras and tripod to Massachusetts when I returned home for Thanksgiving. But when Amanda greeted me at the door of her apartment in Somerville—a cheerless den of bare mattresses, dirty clothes, and candlewax—I felt a twang of doubt. With the lessons of my art school education still fresh in my mind, I couldn’t help but notice that she would not make an ideal subject. Unless I cut her in half and suspended her in formaldehyde, there would be no openings at White Cube. Her large-format portrait would never find its way onto the walls of a Tribeca loft or a renovated bomb shelter in Berlin. There was no chance, even, for a sidebar in
Art News
.
I knew this because I had spent much of my time in art school focused not so much on creating an original body of work as trying to puzzle out the underlying algorithm for art world success, which, as far as I could see, didn’t have much to do with either talent or aesthetics. I remember one year, the winner of the highly competitive school art show was a small square of ordinary cardboard with the number 69 scrawled on it in black paint. Two other pieces popular in the student galleries at the time were a color photograph of a vulva, blown up to the size of a screen door, and a dead rat in a ziplock bag. The rat, in particular, had a way of following one around the school. I would round the corner to the darkroom only to confront it hovering at face level stapled to the wall, or turn, one hand on the door to the girl’s bathroom, to feel its cloudy eyes fixed on me from some limp perch in the corner. Now, I was no Fra Angelico, but I truly believed the 69, the vulva, and the dead rat were all within safe pitching distance of even my modest talents. And yet, somehow, I knew I could never achieve the success of these innovators. There was some intrinsic quality I lacked that doomed me to my status as art school backbencher. Guts? Imagination? Self-importance? I wanted to know: What was that intangible quality that separated me from them? My portrait of Babushka cooking an egg from their dead rat?
In the photography department, this is how it went. We would gather together silently at crit to consider the glossy C print taped to the wall: a photograph of a bald man, completely naked save for a pair of bunny ears, attached to his head with duct tape, and a pair of aviator glasses. He is leaning across a credenza while a hand belonging to someone outside the frame jams what appears to be a candlestick, gently, up his ass. Light from a neon Budweiser sign on the wall gives the man’s face an almost religious cast and illuminates the casual mess on the bedroom floor.
“Now
what
is it that makes us want to look at this photograph?” a professor would ask, her voice giving nothing away as her eyes made an even sweep of the room.
Damn you, cipher!
we would think to ourselves. It was a Zen koan, not a question.
“What raises this above your everyday abject scene is that Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum wrapper stuck to the subject’s left foot,” someone would say after a respectful pause. “It’s a textbook example of what Barthes would call the ‘punctum’ of the scene.”
“The artist is, like, totally destabilizing the referent by doubling the signifiers through his interrogation of epistemologies of queerness,” another of us would offer, in a well-trained voice that betrayed no doubt in whatever had just been said.
“Ultimately,” a third voice would chime, “it’s political.”
We would discuss Lacan’s mirror stage, the investigation of the apparatus, photographic specificity. Someone would bring up “issues of surveillance,” or the Panopticon, or whatever. And someone else would suggest the artist was engaging in de(con)struction, using both hands to form air parentheses. A lively debate would ensue regarding whether the parentheses belonged around the (con) or the (de), but the one thing that no one would ever bring up was the fact that the man was naked, that his cock looked like the
Challenger
shuttle about to explode, and that someone was sticking something large and improbably cumbersome up his butt. And
THAT
, for the love of God,
THAT
was what made us want to look at this photograph.
After years of practicing these kinds of mental gymnastics, I figured it out. The thing that “made us want to look at this photograph” was that the subject fit into at least one of the Three Fundamental Categories. The categories weren’t a required component of semiotics or art history class, yet I was convinced they were essential, as foundational to art photography as Newton’s Laws were to physics, or the Four Noble Truths to Buddhism. It’s just that unlike those other principles, the categories were not
openly celebrated. Rather, they operated like a gnomic code, guiding us in ways we scarcely understood and dared not challenge even if we did. Of course, not everyone stayed the course. There were always exceptions, photographers so talented that they could take a picture of an orange safety cone lying on its side in an empty parking lot and it would still be worth looking at. But for the risk-averse or talent-challenged, for those of us who had no idea what we were doing in art school or were simply cynical enough to exploit the public’s endless appetite for exploitation, there would always be the Three Fundamental Categories.
1. Sex and naked people
It is unsurprising that few of us would turn down a lurid peep into the lives of sex workers and porn stars. More surprising is our interest in sex amateurs and ordinary naked people, given that we know so many of them, including, on occasion, ourselves. Quite a bit of aesthetic mileage could even be gotten out of a frumpy, fully clothed person sitting at a kitchen table, so long as a dildo and a jar of K-Y Jelly lurked somewhere within the frame. Ordinary naked people could be captured dithering about in their bedrooms, at a nudist colony, or in the hospital, but the most effective tactic was to catch one in an improbable setting, like picking mushrooms in the forest, or on line at Trader Joe’s. The trick was making it look natural.
2. Poor people
Poor people always make for good eye candy because their surroundings are colorfully discombobulated, shattered by some devastating war or famine, or because they are too busy dealing with the ravaging effects of drug addiction or debilitating illness to tidy up. With the exception of clean, healthy, sober poor people who nobody
wants to photograph anyway, photos of the destitute were reliably more interesting than photos of the nondestitute, not only because they had tattoos or track marks or tribal scars or missing limbs, but because the faces of the poor were etched with the deep lines caused by witnessing so many unspeakable things.
3. Fat people
This is an ingenious catch-all category. It turns out that so long as a person is very, very fat, they can be photographed doing any old boring thing and people will still find it interesting. Art cognoscenti will rhapsodize about the “sculptural qualities of the flesh,” or claim it has something to do with “hyperpersonal cartographies of the body” … but secretly? Their fetish for fat porn is just the same as everyone else’s, the reason we have reality shows like
Too Big to Walk?
,
More to Love
, and
Flab to Fab
. Soon there will be a show called
Power Ass
that just puts power tools in the hands of obese contestants so that we can watch their flesh jiggle hypnotically as they compete to melt pounds away.
Of course, the Holy Grail was a subject who fit into two or more of these categories. The question was: Could you talk that obese friend of yours into a monokini? Then could you coax her into a room to pose against some mundane wallpaper, holding a poignantly commonplace object, say a watering can or maybe a desk lamp? Now let’s consider the Togolese prostitute whose trust you so painstakingly earned—might he also be a war-torn refugee? Has he considered selling his spleen for food? Would he be interested in having a visual record of that transaction?
From my perspective, though—and regardless of how ultimately lucrative it might be—going off in search of an impoverished
tribe of oversized horny people sounded very draining. True, Amanda did not fit into one of the Three Fundamental Categories, but I was lazy, and it was easier to just stay put and document the life of a friend I’d had since middle school. Plus, by doing so, I could adopt a conveniently sanctimonious attitude, turning up my nose at those who preyed on the fat, the unclothed, and the financially challenged, because I was not “imaging the other,” I was imaging someone just like me.
Which isn’t to say that Amanda was normal. She had purple hair, feigned a British accent, and liked to wander around Cambridge in a cape. In fair weather, she could reliably be found standing on a milk crate in Harvard Square dressed in an old wedding gown and black wig, her face shellacked behind a thick layer of Jack Stein Theatrical Pancake Stage Make-up. This was how she paid her rent, working as a street performer, a human statue she named “The Eight Foot Bride.” She would stand there motionless until someone dropped some money into the tin cup at her feet. Then the Bride would come to life, fluttering her eyes, gracefully rearranging her arms, blowing an air kiss in slow motion, like some ghostly drowned Ophelia.
But the singular characteristic that I found most fascinating about Amanda was her bald determination to become famous. It was an ambition I first observed in eighth grade, when Amanda cast me in the supporting role for a musical she’d written called
On Their Own
, an
Annie
-meets-
Les Miserables
mash-up about a gang of sixth-grade girls who run away to the Big City. Spurred on by their charismatic ringleader, Wanda, the girls take over an abandoned alleyway and build a fort out of plywood scraps where they spend a long time discussing how lonely and misunderstood they feel. Eventually they run out of provisions and come to realize there is no place like home, but unfortunately not before singing songs like “Build This House,” “Together Forever,” and the Are-You-There-God-It’s-Me-Margaret-ish “If You’re Up There.” There
were maybe five of us girls, and we would meet after school in the parlor of the sprawling Victorian where Amanda’s family lived. I remember struggling to follow along on my dense lyric sheet as Amanda led us through our numbers at the piano, feeling more than a bit dazzled, even then, by her seriousness and discipline.
The truth was, I always wanted what Amanda had, and thought that maybe by keeping close and watching carefully, I could get it too. I coveted her confidence, her clarity of purpose, her indifference to what everyone else thought, and her ability to voice her most grandiose desires with neither embarrassment nor self-doubt. I coveted those qualities of hers because secretly I had the same dreams of self-fulfillment, adventure, a life of my own making. I too wanted to be adored. But the difference was that, like most people, I wanted those things only from that safe perch on the ledge of my own imagination. I wasn’t interested in hustling for whatever opportunity might help get my foot in the door out in the real world. Not like Amanda. Amanda was more than willing to make the requisite sacrifices. She would happily drive her hard nail of talent into the soft underbelly of the music industry while the rest of us stood around polishing our turds, sucking our lattes, and cursing the minutes lost switching between Word and Internet Explorer. So if I couldn’t be her, I figured I could at least see how it was done, from the front row, with one eye to the viewfinder.