On Anti-Portraiture

A Portrait of Anti-Portraiture

“The photograph is vaguely constituted as an object, and the persons who figure there are certainly constituted as persons, but only because of their resemblance to human beings, without any special intentionality. They drift between the shores of perception, between sign and image, without ever approaching either.”

-Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida.

Dear Reader, you have stumbled into a dark room with a large frame. There is no subject. No object. No landscape. No form. It might appear that the frame portrays nothing.

I started Anti-Portraiture with no end in mind. I wanted to write, and I did just this. It began, then, a piece about my distrust of cameras, of being perceived, the animal-child that is the embodiment of my restlessness, and my dysphoria. This distrust can be traced to my fear of being seen to be not quite right. I do not believe that this distrust is unwarranted. Everything that is not intended or is capable of intention is brutal in its intentionality, hence the distrust. What happens after is the removal of offence, but not of consequence. But a knife slipping off a counter, and cutting someone’s toe, intentioned or not, acted upon the world. The knife is no longer passive, but active and volatile. There is nothing passive about violence. I am at the mercy of the camera: a merciless and ruthless thing. This is what establishes the person-object-object relation. I do not consider the camera as an extension of the photographer, but the photographer as an extension of the camera. The wielder approaches the soon-to-be object with distance (object in-between, the camera), and interacts through the object in-between.

I have been asked why I am obsessed with the human eye, but find cameras unsettling. This is simple. The singularity, unlike human eyes, asserts and is insistent. It does not flinch or waver. It confronts. One can argue that we blink, not only for moisture, but to present ourselves as gentler and less imposing. An object on the other hand is imposing in its objecthood. It imposes and imposes and imposes. Why this is so is due to the function-efficient attribute of the object, as Heidegger posits. The Zuhandenheit. The object becomes its function. If an object was created to draw sunsets, it continues this way until it is faulty. The theory of objecthood is that of potentiality. It remains at rest, until it is prodded or provoked. Until the photographer, the wielder of the object, turns it. Until an object external to it, moves it. Perhaps one of my fears is that by being objectified, I’ll be reduced to a single function.

I wrote Anti-Portraiture, first, to tell myself that I was right to feel what I felt, and second, to denounce objecthood. The second goal has been repeated over and over, even in the course of writing the piece, during the shoot, during this piece. As human, as a thing capable of intentionality, of agency, to live, is to be able to denounce. To denounce and denounce and denounce.

By denouncing portraiture, I denounce myself. Portraiture is representation, and hence, the erasure of portraiture will only lead to the total dissolution of the model. This ripple effect is extended beyond physical portraiture to literature. If I, by rebelling against portraiture, write to this effect, then rebel against writing to this effect by erasing the self (a second process in the erasure, the adoption of second person pronouns), there is no longer a self to be found. The fictionalization was the third death. By rebelling against portraiture, and rebelling against this rebellion, I have killed off all existing models. What is left, ironically, in the death of the pyres I burned these selves in, is still portraiture. For if we, in order to take photographs of a subject in its absence, remove the subject, we have only replaced it with absence. Absence has become the subject, and there was no erasure in the first place. Even writing about anti-portraiture is still portraiture.

Here, I am writing about the last attempt at rebellion — the last portraiture. The complicity I once accused the reader of continues. The reader’s complicity here is less pronounced. It is the reader who has both the antidote and the hex. The reader, by reading, sustains the portrait as I try to dismantle it.

This portraiture continues on and on, portraiture after portraiture after portraiture, and it appears as though there was never erasure. Are we not all writing our own anti-portrait? Our own anti-autobiography? Are we not constantly erasing and rewriting our own history? By convincing ourselves through portraiture, by the act of fictionalization, by crowning ourselves as important, the boundaries between the writer and the self are blurred.

Isaiah once asked me if I rehearsed my words in conversations for literary effect. “This literary effect,” he continued, “draws the veil over the actual. What is real becomes affectatious and symbolist.” I must confess that while replying to him, I replied with the literary effect in mind. This piece is evidence.

The actual undergoes a process where it is translated into the absolute.. Since the process of translation is fictionalization, it replaces the “I.” I am no longer Sunmisola. I become a literary object in a literary situation. I do this in autofiction by replacing “I” with a more distant “You.”

Just as photography produces an object-referent, inauthentic, and as Barthes put it “neither a subject nor an object, but a subject who fears he is becoming an object,” the endpoint of this translation is inauthentic. The referent “Sunmisola” becomes distinct from the signage (text and photograph). This “portraiture” of Anti-Portraiture does the same thing. Where does the portraiture end? Where do I stop becoming a literary object? When?

At some point, I realized that I could never denounce objecthood, as it ties into portraiture. By the “phlebotomy,” I only relegated myself to the same objecthood I was trying to run from. Even the redefinition of self-harm as “phlebotomy” shows the extent of my fictionalization. What defines the boundaries of portraiture? Even if we exclude the subject/object and “abstract” or intellectualize it into nothing, to what end? To define portraiture is to define form, and to define anti-portraiture is to define form by attempting to defy it.

As I have always felt not quite right in my body, resisting embodiment both in photographs and dissatisfaction with my form, has been to a large extent, self-preservation. This paradox is such that anti-portraiture preserves rather than destroys. If, like Kafka said, we photograph things in order to drive them out of our mind, then a case can be made for the preservative nature of anti-portraiture since it is not a referent nor a copy, it simply is, and not has-been. This negation, however, dissolves the self as it asserts it. When I was younger, I would transfer the aggression to the photographer, pulling my face into the scariest scowl. If my portraiture was going to be made, it was going to be on my own terms. But this could only go on for so long. I wanted beautiful portraits, so I got rid of the scowls. Getting rid of the scowl, however, left me feeling vulnerable. How does one resist without resisting (this is to the end that resistance folds in on itself, and exists as a form)?

A friend once asked me: “Do you realize you could have walked out of the shoot? Set a later date or simply said you changed your mind and didn’t want to be photographed?” The act of being photographed itself was a rebellion against rebellion, and part of me wonders if there was a literary effect beneath the surface. I had considered representation even before the photoshoot, so it happened before it happened, while it was happening, and is still happening in this essay. I knew how uneasy I felt during photography sessions, but I wanted to do it “for the plot.” For the advancement of the plot. For the literary effect. But plots exert themselves upon the subject, and I was not left without injury (literal and metaphorical).

Since to define anti-portraiture is still portraiture, the eye is inescapable. There is no total deconstruction.