EGGSHELLS vol. 1: Self Portraits and Secrets
On two triumphs of women in photography.
I missed you so much! Really, I mean it. I won’t bother with excuses, but suffice it to say I’m more of a party girl than a disciplined self-publisher. It hasn’t been all fun and games, though: I’m rounding out a period of immense professional growth that I’ll share more about soon. In the meantime, let’s get back to the heart of Parent Newsletter, which beats irregularly but pumps blood all the same. That’s right—we’re returning to The Egg Theory.
“I have this half-baked theory,” I wrote to you two years ago, “Which I adopted in part from a half-baked theory presented in the pilot of the upstanding and wrongfully sacrificed Hulu original High Fidelity. Rob (Zoë Kravitz’s character) and Simon (white guy without a Wikipedia page) are sitting in a bar and arguing that the things you like (art, literature, films, food) are more instructive than what you are like.” It’s a provocation I stand by. If there was ever a point of Parent Newsletter, it was to share what I like with you, at considerable length, or sometimes not. And that’s what my new series, EGGSHELLS, is all about.
Without further ado, I present EGGSHELLS, vol. 1; two meditations on works I’ve encountered since matriculating at Washington University. When I think of artists who capture something curious and worthwhile about womanhood, I think of Vivian Maier and Lauren Hare. Here is why.
ON “SELF-PORTRAIT, 1959” BY VIVIAN MAIER
The woman we can see capturing this image is clearly invested in matters of framing. She stands before a smudged mirror to the right side of what appears to be a train car. Although, she’s definitely not on the subway: light pours in through at least six pairs of rounded-edged windows on either side of the car, before melting into the vanishing point the photographer obstructs from view. The windows curve as their glass extends upward, manipulating the part of the ceiling that rests above the woman so that it’s not far from touching her head, giving her an illusory persona as the hunched giant who lumbered onto the train. She wears a dark pantsuit that catches both sunlight and shadow, and her face (from underneath a fingerprint, maybe) lowers in concentration as she snaps the photo on the bulky camera clutched in her hands.
The snapshot is a street photograph as much as it is a self-portrait. Moving from the foreground and to the left, a man in a crisp white shirt is frozen forever shifting in his seat, adjusting his pants. One table over, a pair of middle-aged women—one with a light cardigan draped over her shoulders, the other with her hands clasped in her lap, both wearing glasses—gaze slightly downward. It’s unclear whether they are watching the young woman in capris and high socks nudge along the little boy in a plaid flannel, just as it is unclear whether the young woman and the little boy are mother and son or brother and sister or neither, just as it is unclear why the man in front of them is reaching across a seated passenger, or who is responsible for the robot sticker on the mirror that scratches another man’s head in the foreground. In the eyes of the photographer, that they are all here is compelling enough.
“Self-Portrait, 1959” was one of 30,000 images composed by Vivian Maier and discovered at a Chicago auction in 2007. Her work did not receive acclaim until it was published on the Internet in October 2009, just a few months after her death at age 83. I hope she’d find solace in the idea that so many of us are drawn in by representations of urban life, and the multiplicity of individual lives within it, that we may read into if only for a moment.
ON SECRETS BY LAUREN HARE
There are portraits that put their subjects on a pedestal, and then there are portraits that put their viewers on a pedestal. Lauren Hare’s Secrets (2017), miraculously, does both.
I follow Hare’s gaze as it penetrates a windowpane that more closely resembles a sheet of celluloid. A smoky line of paint sheepishly defines the bottom edge of the cut-out; it becomes challenging to count how many frames box in the woman before me. If I traced a heart on the glass with a sticky finger, would it even get through to her? She’s praying I’m not there—not me, Kennedy Morganfield, but the onlooker I represent: this is more or less a private ritual. I don’t think she could become aware of me even if she tried. She’s willed the other patrons at the diner into existences of semipermeable shadow.
The young woman is not only far away from me, she’s far away from herself. Eyes lowered in shameful concentration on separating brain from body. Because this body admits defeat. Shoulders slumped forward, away from a mustard leather cushion. Left hand sighs against the wooden tabletop. Right elbow propped up, right hand holding to mouth a cake donut. Cake donut, the penthouse plucked from atop a teetering tower, a half dozen. Mouth meets cake donut for the first time (today) and won’t part ways until the tower is razed. There is something familiar along the path toward demolition, but watching her get there gives me the sense she never wants to do this again.
For now, though, here she is: biting down. Perhaps the disgust on her face concerns the taste of the donut itself, but then, she wouldn’t shield the other five so carefully. She will eat all six. And never once feel satiated by them, by anything.
There are ways we brace ourselves against the world that batters us. Some we share with others, some we don’t dare to confront even internally. For many years, binge eating disorder was my secret. I don’t think Lauren Hare sets out to literally depict that here, though. She has captured a universal futility in our attempts to self soothe. We turn to excess or deprivation in an attempt to exercise control. Better to hide than expose ourselves to what is out of our hands.
Secrets puts the nameless woman in conversation with James Baldwin, Alan Cummings, and Lottie Green Varner, among other acclaimed subjects featured in The Outwin: American Portraiture Today. She establishes herself through neither her work nor her reputation, but through her vices. And, despite that being my worst nightmare, I can’t look away.
That’s all for now! I hope you enjoyed this new (to you) work. It’s been a long time coming, I know, but the essay I really want to share has proven personally disastrous to edit. It’s coming soon, along with another EGGSHELLS, and much more down the pipeline. I’m still not sure why nearly 5,000 of you are here, but I’ve never turned away an audience and I surely won’t be starting now. But seriously. Thank you for everything. <3