Today: Amy Chu, artist and publisher of Camoot.Journal; and Jennie Rose Halperin, digital strategist and librarian at NYU's Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy.

Issue No. 157

Uncle
Amy Chu

My Photo
Jennie Rose Halperin

Uncle

by Amy Chu

The sky is drawn in black and white; the text rendered like a film script. LUCAS (CONT'D) Art and life-- the edges do blur. EXT. MOVIE SET- DAY Lucas steadies the camera as the two actors prepare to enter the scene. Nadine watches the monitor. Uncle climbs into view. He waves to Niece. The wind whips wildly as they summit the hill. Uncle and Niece admire the view below and then above. Uncle stretches both hands up to the sky. Niece slowly reaches up. They are so close to the sky. Their fingertips brush the cloud-

A full drawing of a hill, clouds and sky. Nadine and her uncle stand at the top of the hill, talking. The film script appears behind them, partially obscured by the clouds: BACK TO: NADINE (CONT'D) My uncle's memories. INT. DINING ROOM- NIGHT Young Nadine laughs with her uncle. YOUNG NADINE It's impossible to touch a cloud! It disappears the closer you get to it!

FLAMING HYDRAS EVERYWHERE

Hydra Ana Marie Cox is at The New Republic with absorbing thoughts on celebrity political endorsements, Beto O’Rourke, and childless cat lady and Kamala Harris supporter Taylor Swift.

My Photo

by Jennie Rose Halperin

Cyanotype photo of the author, printed on canvas; she wears sunglasses, a bikini top and a pendant on a slender chain
Image: Ben Aleshire

My friend Ben has never been able to afford to pay models for his photography practice, so he mostly shoots street scenes, friends, fellow writers, girlfriends, and lovers in intimate settings. He often reprints the same images over time in different formats—naked women supine in the blurry outdoors, a well-known writer touching her hair, an ex-girlfriend laughing on a beach, a large papier-mâché puppet. Most of his recent work is in blue cyanotype on white fabric that he stretches on bars or hangs loose like flags. The last time I visited him, a large white sheet printed with a strikingly beautiful blue ex-girlfriend covered his window. He was wearing a t-shirt bearing the image of an elderly blue man playing the trumpet in extreme closeup: face, hands, instrument, and mouth.

Ten years ago, Ben took a portrait of me sitting by a lake in a forest in North Carolina. I had recently returned from a year in Europe, where I’d gained about twenty pounds, mostly from living above a baklava bakery. In the photo, I am wearing large sunglasses and a cheap bikini I bought from a lingerie shop in Paris. It was high-waisted and too big in the chest and I wore it until it fell apart six years later. I have looked at this photo hundreds of times— my face is round and young, my shoulders and clavicles are still bony and thrown back. I have an unflattering short haircut that shows my whole forehead, and I am slightly smirking. I look impetuous, mysterious, a little awkward. I was so hungry that afternoon. I obsessed about losing the weight when I got back to the States, dieting back down to my usual size within a few months.

I’m sure I’ve told Ben about my discomfort being photographed, about the disordered eating and dysmorphia that has followed me since my teens. There’s an internet saying that goes something like “If you are a millennial woman who escaped the early 2000s without an eating disorder, congratulations.” But the psychology of restriction has always been caught up in the ever-narrowing chasm between online and offline realities. Myspace became popular when I was 17, and we all posted digital photos with tilting chins or pouting lips pushed out to make them look bigger. My first profile picture was a grainy selfie taken in my bathroom with my bangs swept to the side and my already flat stomach sucked in under a cardigan, my chin down to make my eyes look bigger.

In most of the photos I’ve posted online, I am wearing a hat or sunglasses, photographed from far away, or looking at the camera at a weird angle. I hate taking professional headshots and was only recently forced to pay for one, so for several years I used an avatar drawn by a Toronto artist that looks passingly like I would if I was not Jewish, and had purple hair. I have been asked by multiple internet dates why my photos are so strange. When my mother died, my well-meaning but clueless in-laws surprised me with a composite watercolor portrait they commissioned based on our Facebook photos. Unable to find enough workable photos of my face or body, the artist painted me wearing sunglasses and a shawl.

Humans, particularly teens, have always fixated on self-presentation, but millennials were the first generation to broadcast to an audience of strangers beyond our peers. The internet beamed our lives to the world, our photos available for scrutiny and interpretation without our input or consent. While Myspace is gone, or nearly so, my generation created a digital archive of our youth available at our fingertips, and we’re still not sure of the consequences.

But I’ve always loved Ben’s photo, and he has printed it dozens of times in black and white, in scanned negative, in cyanotype. I have a small print of it in my living room decorated in glitter glue, glamorous and a little tacky. At an exhibition in Vermont a few years ago, I stood next to multiple copies of my own face, huge and blue all over the room. I’m not sure if anyone bought one, but I like to think that I am hanging over a couch or a bed in someone else’s home. 

I drove up to Vermont a few weeks ago to visit Ben at an artist’s residency. Before I left I took my clothes off in the middle of a field and he snapped my picture for the first time in ten years. The photos are wholesome and a little silly; they look like the photos from Our Bodies, Ourselves or softcore vintage pornography, a woman with long curls and unshaven armpits. The sun is bright and you can see moles, scars, imperfect teeth, and tan lines. I’m older now and I’ve become less critical; I like to be photographed sometimes, to see myself through someone else’s gaze. It helps me see myself as others might: comfortable, strong, and glowing almost gold in lush late summer flora. This time, my face is open and uncovered, my body is in full view, and I’m just smiling.

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