I’m sitting on a small patch of sickly grass in the backyard of an aunt who lived in North Philadelphia. The endlessness of the blue sky, the scratchy ground, the tickly abrasive autumn air—I remember all that. I’m a toddler, bundled in a puffy snowsuit, chromium blue and crinkled, unlike the sky, whose wrinkle-free blueness is terrifically far. But I don’t remember this as an actual experience. The subjectivity I feel for it— primal, alive in my skin, as real as that snowsuit and as unreal as that sky—derives from a photograph. There I am, on a small patch of backyard grass in a photo album my parents kept, long gone like them. It’s a black-and-white image. How can the suit be blue? So much of life is camera-bound. I’ve come to believe, by some molecular pressure in my psyche, that my father took the picture. He loved making snapshots with his Brownie box camera. He died when I was a teenager, and in one of the few mental images I have of him, he leans over his little picture-making box, cupping the view finder to curb glare and squinting-even in fall’s dimmest outdoor light he squinted as if on a sunny summer beach-down through it at me.
In “Portrait of Toddler in Backyard” I’m squinting in the autumn light, as I still do as a middle-aged man even on overcast days, my father and I looking for something in our squinty way, as if all actions were happening at once: pose, exposure, print, album setting, these words. I long ago internalized the photo as mortar in the construction site of self. It testifies to the reality of a childhood, to a subjectivity bulked out into space and time. But the fact is, I’m not even sure the photo existed: the image I have in mind may have developed as the kind of composite that neural networks create when we remember an image. I play with the notion that the photo was responsible for bringing me into existence. We sometimes sense a momentary resolution or dissolution of self in images. We come into being, or fade from it, in a picture. Or the ghost in the meat is taken hostage. (The Sioux called the camera a “shadow-catcher.”) Any image will serve: a movie still, an album photo, a hyperventilated TV moment. It can catch us when we’re vulnerable and dynamite the station of subjectivity where we negotiate the separation of inner and outer.
A photo portrait isn’t as much an act of finding as a painting is. In painting, we sense the hand probing an imitation of what’s given, the entire process rattled by the artist’s feeling. Photographs are evidentiary but possess an insinuating, queasy-making mystery. Certain good ones propose conditions in extremis. In one of Duane Michals’ pictures of Joseph Cornell, the figure (so stark, he’s hardly there) stands before a mirror with no reflection, half his profile scraped away by light blasting through a window behind him. When, as a child, I first watched someone peel the glossy paper from a Polaroid-Land shadow-catcher and saw an image swoon into form, it was like witnessing an originating act, a technological genesis myth, something truly and entirely our modern own. There we are, my family and I: instead of ants or children emerging from a hole in the earth or sky, we’re vapors materializing into dimensioned tints, forms just this side of vagueness, unstable, a little muddled, a little mortal. As for “Portrait of Toddler in Backyard” by Joseph Di Piero, I haven’t seen it for at least forty years, if I ever did see it.
It’s all one mirror, that barren backyard containing me and my snowsuit. Looking into it, I see myself looking into it, now, me being a history (or pile-up) of images. What do I look like? I look like: 1) the unshaven petty thief in a T-shirt laminated on my driver’s license; 2) the moody brooder on a book’s dust jacket with plummy-shadowed, sanded-down skin; 3) the dopey-eyed, smirking Dago with pocked cheeks, wearing a black leather coat, “exiting an unidentified Thai restaurant somewhere in San Francisco”; 4) the tubby toddler in a gray snowsuit turning in the developer to icy, crinkled blue beneath a cream-into-azure ether. Our mirrors are absolutists of the real that can’t be trusted. They make such a perfect simulacrum of life that they drain life from us. They curtail the hide-and-seek encounters that primitive mirrors of polished metal offered, where the reality of physical being depended as much on spiritual conviction. In a museum, in a Mayan mirror of polished iron ores (plated of tesserae to resemble a turtle’s shell), I’m looking to find the proximate image of myself. The Maya believed mirrors had potent mojo and could divine the future. A mirror buried with a king was safe conduct to rebirth. This particular stone seems haunted by my head. It’s easier to believe in this image than the one the few mirrors in my apartment flash at me. I own a saucer-sized shaving mirror and two wall mirrors much smaller than the framed photos of Bologna (by Ben E. Watkins) that hang near them. I don’t want to catch glimpses of myself walking past. I don’t want to haunt myself. I like to feel, not see, myself coming and going.
What do we expect of portraits? To be alarmed by a hard-angled strangeness, by the recognition that a painting or photograph makes manifest, or makes a secret of, things felt. We see what we want or need to see. Likeness is a slick vagrant. The dust-jacket photographer printed a half dozen images from the ten rolls she exposed during our session. Our preferences parted ways. She liked the one with chin resting on clasped hands. I look so distinguished, I’m a personage, a multilingual world traveler who grew up listening to opera, studying art history, cultivating tomatoes with his adoring mamma in their backyard. Do you know where and how I grew up? I ask. Do you know about South Philadelphia working-class immigrant neighborhoods in the 1950s? I’m not exactly your Philippe de Montebello type. I know where and how you grew up, she says, but you are this anyway. And besides, I love that vein (which cables, Bela Lugosi-ishly, forefinger to wrist). She’s looking at a picture. I, who look at pictures for a living, am looking for a semblance of self, of what I’d like to think I am. She’s preoccupied with formal values. I just want a picture that looks like me, as if I knew what I really look like.
A good portrait is an investigation into possibility. It can make us feel realer than real or like a ghost of the flesh. We save photos of ourselves as ex-votos, tokens of thanks for being alive. Because portrait painting (or drawing) occupies significant durations of time, takes up time the way we take up space, feeling its way along, it’s a more meditative activity than photography, which practices time. A photo depicts mortality, a painted picture represents it. A painting’s aura seals in non-likeness, floats it in the medium of pigment. A painted portrait makes a shape of the subject’s inner life, a shape opaquely layered as an object of knowledge mediated by the artist’s hand, a reality now more complex— or more simplified and irreducible—than it was before. For all their visceral intensity, photographs (black-and-whites, anyway) are auras, emanations, spooks: the sharpest photo can be more evasive in its delivery of the human form than the loosest painting or drawing. It’s a token of lost time. Paintings aren’t tokens, they are alternative presences of what’s now real.
Not long ago, while sitting on that patch of grass in a backyard, I was sitting in the Upper West Side studio of the painter Paul Resika. We’ve known each other nearly twenty years. I’ve seen a great many of his paintings and he has read my books. He’d been wanting to paint me, but since I didn’t have days to give up for an oil portrait, we spent a long afternoon talking, smoking cigarillos, and drinking sherry—very Philippe de Montebello—while he drew. An hour or so along I was confiding secrets (which is not my habit) and relating long-ago events that hadn’t before snagged in my consciousness. I monologued (also not my habit), I couldn’t shut up, I was being a real chiacchierone, as my family would say, wagging their hands as if flicking water from their fingertips. Roy Eldridge boiled from the CD player while I related an anecdote from my childhood, about a time when I briefly and uselessly took music lessons. “You should write about that,” Resika said. And a year later, I do, but in the writing the originating anecdote turns into an essay on how in my youth music became inseparable from physical pain. It’s pure self-portraiture. (But what is its truth?) Meanwhile, it’s three hours later and Paolo has finished two drawings, one a suave, light-handed, rather fair likeness. “Not bad, this one,” he says. “But I think I got something here.” What he got was a portrait that snapped and roared at me—an angular, anxious head that looked not so much drawn as struck. He had found, or reimagined, animal quickenings in my inner life which only I (I thought) was aware of; the image also coined a sensation very familiar to me, a crude blending of idiotic irrational joy and fevered fear of living in a world of harm.
Good portraiture is an archive of invisible life, the subject’s and the artist’s. If you’re the subject, chances are the portrait will be the really you in the not-so-likeness-of-you. An artist’s language, if fresh and grasping, uses any available likeness to construe the artist’s own temperament and feeling for reality. Resika’s drawing flashed the excitability and expansiveness visible in his paintings, high-keyed colorist blasts gestured into recognizable motifs. Schiele made the body —no matter the identity of the sitter—a site for self-devouring, a machine of self-torture. In any Giacometti portrait, the head—a mass of scar tissue left as a record of the artist’s exertions—is a planet of pentimenti. Kokoschka, who in a childhood accident fell into a maggoty pig carcass, made the human face a comic theater of lumpy, exquisite disgust.
The greatest diarist of selfhood was Rembrandt. In a self-portrait etched when he was forty-two, he sits at a table making an etching, looking out at his mirror, making the marks that are himself. It documents change and the very act of self-scrutiny. Toward the erosions and failings of old age, his own included, he showed a pitiless love. In an etching of his aged mother, the figure is locked into a contemplative pose, hand clenched on her breast, and we feel her entire body doing the work of final reflection —her flesh is a fatigued soul. The greatest living painter of agedness is Lucian Freud, for whom self-portraiture is an occasion to meditate on the mystery of incarnated consciousness. In his latest pictures, where the handling is freer than ever and driven by raw feeling, he makes flesh a dry, drab garment worn by a toughened but nearly depleted spirit. Head, eyes, and face have been lived into. Contingency has worked them over.
A year later, on another of my visits to Paul’s studio, we’re both shirtless, trying to keep cool in New York’s gummy August heat. He’s in his seventies, I’m pushing sixty. Our bodies don’t want more gravity but it wants us, a story that’s modeled in our sagging, wrinkled torsos. I’m telling him about a recently discovered cave in the Dordogne covered with engravings and drawings dating back 28,000 years. In addition to the usual bisons and rhinos are drawings of naked human figures. Unusual for a Paleolithic cave site, there are also buried skeletons. Our earliest instinct was to represent what we thought we looked like, right there with the animals. The original making of marks wasn’t just embedded in animist rituals, it was an impulse to give form to sexual embodiment—a few of the cave figures seem engaged in sexual display or activity—spoken in the same sentence as death and burial. I see that Paul has pinned the better of those two drawings to the wall. I want it for myself. I want to hang it near a mirror in my apartment. There he is, an “it,” some “me” or other, stuck with messy internal goings-on, squirming on the studio wall, a nearly sixty-year-old man carrying more anger than is healthy, his poultry neck and newly dewlapped waist artfully concealed in a blousy blue snowsuit.
W. S. Di Piero’s most recent book of poems is Brother Fire, published by Knopf in the fall of 2004. He writes a column on the visual arts for the San Diego Reader.
