Looking at Pictures

Look at this old photograph. We sense its age from the texture of the patina on the platinum. In it, a girl reclines on a divan. She is just eight years old. Her eyes are closed. Her left arm falls limply across her stomach, her hand resting just below her waist, in the folds of a loose-fitting silky satin dress or nightgown that has come off at one shoulder, exposing the upper part of her chest, but not quite her nipple. A loose strand of hair tumbles over the other shoulder. Her legs are bare.

Like the girl, the picture itself is charmingly beautiful. Its composition is informed by the trials and errors and triumphs of five centuries of European painting. Textured fabric is set off against skin. Rich sepias contrast with ivory whites. The arms of the divan gently embrace the girl, who, we naturally assume, must be fully aware of our gaze because she is so obviously posing for the photographer.

We stare at her uncomfortably, through the disquiet of a century of now discredited but still potent, Freudian analysis, our understanding of which has come to us through the self-effacing, sardonic wit of the early Woody Allan films. At the time of course, Freudians had a field day interpreting Wonderland’s rabbit holes and tiny keys and the bit about Alice growing and shrinking.

Here’s another photograph, contemporary, high-definition, glossy, colour. She looks fourteen or so. Aside from a long blue frond that hangs over her right eye, her hair is cut brutally short into black spiky tufts that give her an angelic, yet deviant sexuality. Lips slightly parted in flashbulb surprise, she wears multiple ear rings and a discrete tattoo.

On the edge of right now, she fills her blue-jeans-with-the-knees-ripped-out like a surgical glove. Her tiny breasts beckon for gentle caresses through the t-shirt with Just Do It! printed across the front. The intermittence of skin flashing between these two articles of clothing, between t-shirt and jeans, this is the flash that seduces. Through her eyes and in the very gesture of her stance, she implores, and this impels us to purchase.