Snapshots

When I think of photographers, I think of clairvoyants.

Image via Pinterest.

One of my earliest memories is of my mother trying to coax me to smile.

It was my communion day and I was sitting in front of one of those pop-up backdrops in the living room, donned in white and feeling overwhelmed as a photographer snapped photos, the obnoxious flash rendering me half-blind at three-second intervals.

In the run-up to my communion I had been worried. An overthinker from birth, I remember continually asking my parents why I had to promise to love god forever. Anxious-avoidant at a young age (and undiagnosed neurodivergent), while my peers were excited, I felt so fucking stressed. How—how?!—could I love someone I didn’t believe existed? It felt crazy to me. But I grew up in an Irish Catholic home, so belief or not, my promise to god was already predetermined by the fact of my birth.

The result of those pictures is a photograph that is all kinds of awkward. Rather than looking happy as I pose with a prayer book and rosary beads, I have a serial killer type of smile on my face. It doesn’t reach my eyes. My eyes, on closer inspection, are filled with terror. My mother loves displaying photographs and over the years, that photo has been gradually pushed to the shady wall in the living room, so it doesn’t upset people or require an explanation. It is my least favourite photograph of myself.

In stark contrast, I do have photographs of myself that I love. They have two things in common:

1. None of them were taken while my undeveloped brain was trying to grapple with intense ontological questions.

2. They have all been taken by people I loved and who loved me in return.

Maybe it’s something more solid, something that revolves around the technicality of perspective, but I think when you’re in love with the subject of your art, it changes your sight. You take better pictures. I both do—and do not—look like myself in these photos of myself that I love so much. I mean, yes, it’s me, but there’s something else shimmering and unseen—something magic. There is a tired quote about writing that goes along the lines of: “To love a writer is to become immortal,” but the same can be said of any artist who loves you, really. Love becomes an eternal spring.

Over the course of my life, I have known and loved several photographers. Which is weird, because photography is a means of expression that I’ve never been able to use to translate my own experience. I mean, I’ve tried. When I was a teenager I had a brief, but intense fling with black and white photography (the gloomier, the better). I inherited a crappy digital camera from a relative, and I spent hours trying to interpret the world as I saw it via the medium of lens. It never felt accurate to me and I always fared better with words, so at some point the camera was discarded and I wrote because I didn’t know how else I was supposed to make sense of things.

Photography left a bad taste in my mouth. It became something that, while beautiful, was pointless and frustrating—a dead language of expression.

But then I fell in love with my first photographer.

I met her at a gig in the city. She took photographs of bands. She told about her awful childhood, yelling about her trauma over blaring guitars as she pulled down her jeans in a grimy cubicle (with me, a stranger she had just met five seconds ago) and removed the naggin of vodka she had secured to her upper thigh with duct tape. The music drowned out every second word, but I got the gist and I liked her immediately because who uses duct tape to smuggle booze into a venue?! —and she was lost, just like me.

We became instant friends, but the type of friendship where there’s always a charge in the air and something unspoken that moves between you. We spent a summer travelling back and forth (from country to city and back again) to hang out, and it all came to a head one night when, at the end of another gig, she pressed a letter into my hand and disappeared into the crowd. The letter was full of confessions and promises of something more between us if, and only if, I felt the same way. She dumped her boyfriend that night while I was sequestered somewhere, frantically reading, trying to decipher her handwriting, and, the following day, she took a photo of me (half-dazed, nerves ringing) directly after she kissed me.

I’ve lost the physical copy of the photograph, but I can see the expression on my face: exalted, relieved, jubilant. It still makes me smile now when I think about it. And even though its edges have worn slightly in my memory, it remains my favourite photograph of my younger self.

A few years later, I fell in love with a man who took photos as a hobby. He was a few years older than me and, in retrospect, love-bombed me to within an inch of my life. We had truly insane, batshit crazy arguments, but would always reconcile via mattress when one of us conceded. I liked him because he could hold his own in philosophical debate and he loved buying me books, introducing me to writers and thinkers I had never heard of. He called me “kid,” ironically and smoked like a chimney. He got my initial (a lowercase ‘a’) tattooed on his hand, keeping me small because, as I later realised, his ego was fragile as glass. I sometimes wonder if that tattoo is still there winking every time he takes a photo or sees my name in print. He’s the reason why, for years, I’d purposely put my by-lines in all caps—my name a declaration, not a small, minimised character.

We brought out the worst in each other but deluded ourselves into thinking we saw our best reflected back. We didn’t realise what we were capable of, I guess.

On a rare, sunny day (some drowned April), he dragged me out of the city to the sea and told me to stand, arms out-stretched, chest pointed towards the shore, like I had cast my heart out over the ocean. Like I was self-acclaimed, just like the waves. He took a photo of me, arms wide, looking back towards the lens, my mouth forming words I can still hear in my head: “Would you ever just fuck off?”

Then came the professional—editorial mostly, although there was something magic about the portraits she took. She had the uncanny ability to really see people, to cut straight down to the essence of them within seconds of placing them in her lens. She was accomplished and had her shit together. She was far, far cooler than I could ever hope to be. I was hungover at an art exhibition, trying not to puke as I nursed a glass of shitty red wine and I noticed her immediately. Not because she was loud, but because she had a gravity about her—effortlessly pulling people towards her without saying a single word, like everyone in the place was a wayward planet, existing only in the orbit of her, the universe of her. She was wearing YSL tributes and had her hair pulled back off her face, held up like magic by a single silver chopstick. Her hair ran through my fingers like silk in the back of a taxi later, red lipstick everywhere. I realised very quickly that I would do anything for her. That I would suffer for her if that’s what she wanted. Anything.

It was complicated, but all good, wild things are.

She took incredible pictures of me. Pictures where I look like myself, but improved somehow, skin brand new beneath her gaze. She saw me in a way that I could never see myself. She wasn’t just an artist, she was a channel for a version of myself I could barely taste, but somehow she knew it existed and translated it back to me via light and shadow.

We left it, for a variety of reasons. Life got in the way. She had commitments. Love is great and can achieve great things, but sometimes it’s still not enough. She called me her red thread, I called her my nine of cups. She still takes exquisite photographs. She sends them, sometimes, always sealed with a kiss.

I’m at the stage in my life where I think that photographers are blessed in some way.

When I think of photographers, I think of clairvoyants touched by the divine—people who can see the future before it happens. Creatives who look at you and not only perceive who you have been and who you are, but visionaries who are capable of reaching beyond space, time and present tense to give you a glimpse of who you could possibly be and become. They operate on a higher frequency. They bring forth a seed of yourself and help ground it inside you so you can, if you so choose, become.

I realise now that photography has never been a dead language—it has always just been one I don’t know to speak.