PHOTOGRAPHERS AND ME
I look in my glass, dear reader, and what do I see? Nothing sofrightfully hot, believe me. The face is slablike, the ears are largeand fastened on at right-angles. Above the eyebrows comes a stagnantsea of bald forehead, stretching away into the distance with nothingto relieve it but a few wisps of lonely hair. The nose is blobby, theeyes dull, like those of a fish not in the best of health. A face, inshort, taking it for all in all, which should be reserved for the gazeof my nearest and dearest who, through long habit, have got used to itand can see through to the pure white soul beneath. At any rate, aface not to be scattered about at random and come upon suddenly bynervous people and invalids.
And yet, just because I am an author, I have to keep on beingphotographed. It is the fault of publishers and editors, of course,really, but it is the photographer who comes in for the author's hate.
Something has got to be done about this practice of publishingauthors' photographs. We have to submit to it, because editors andpublishers insist. They have an extraordinary superstition that ithelps an author's sales. The idea is that the public sees thephotograph, pauses spell-bound for an instant, and then with a cry ofecstasy rushes off to the book-shop and buys copy after copy of thegargoyle's latest novel.
Of course, in practice, it works out just the other way. People read areview of an author's book and are told that it throbs with a passionso intense as almost to be painful, and are on the point of diggingseven-and-sixpence out of their child's money-box to secure a copy,when their eyes fall on the man's photograph at the side of thereview, and they find that he has a face like a rabbit and wearsspectacles and a low collar. And this man is the man who is said tohave laid bare the soul of a woman as with a scalpel.
Naturally their faith is shaken. They feel that a man like that cannotpossibly know anything about Woman or any other subject except whereto go for a vegetarian lunch, and the next moment they have put downthe hair-pin and the child is seven-and-six in hand and the author histen per cent., or whatever it is, to the bad. And all because of aphotograph.
For the ordinary man, the recent introduction of high-art methods intophotography has done much to diminish the unpleasantness of theoperation. In the old days of crude and direct posing, there was noescape for the sitter. He had to stand up, backed by a rustic stileand a flabby canvas sheet covered with exotic trees, glaring straightinto the camera. To prevent any eleventh-hour retreat, a sort of spikything was shoved firmly into the back of his head leaving him with thechoice of being taken as he stood or having an inch of steel jabbedinto his skull. Modern methods have changed all that.
There are no photographs nowadays. Only "camera portraits" and "lensimpressions." The full face has been abolished. The ideal of thepresent-day photographer is to eliminate the sitter as far as possibleand concentrate on a general cloudy effect. I have in my possessiontwo studies of my Uncle Theodore--one taken in the early 'nineties,the other in the present year. The first shows him, evidently in pain,staring before him with a fixed expression. In his right hand hegrasps a scroll. His left rests on a moss-covered wall. Two sea-gullsare flying against a stormy sky.
As a likeness, it is almost brutally exact. My uncle stands forevercondemned as the wearer of a made-up tie.
The second is different in every respect. Not only has the sitter beentaken in the popular modern "one-twentieth face," showing only theback of the head, the left ear and what is either a pimple or a flawin the print, but the whole thing is plunged in the deepest shadow. Itis as if my uncle had been surprised by the camera while chasing ablack cat in his coal-cellar on a moonlight night. There is noquestion as to which of the two makes the more attractive picture. Myfamily resemble me in that respect. The less you see of us, the betterwe look.