True likeness

One of the readings I assign in my freshman composition classes at Keene State College is N. Scott Momaday’s short essay, “The Photograph.” In it, Momaday recounts a memory from a visit with his father to a Navajo Indian reservation. The elder Momaday brought a camera, and an old Navajo lady begged to have her picture taken then showed up every day thereafter to inquire after the photo. When the photo was finally developed, young Momaday claims that it was a true likeness of the old woman; when she sees it, however, she becomes violently upset and begins to wail loudly and unintelligibly.

I assign this essay as part of a larger assignment sequence on “Capturing Memorable Moments,” which focuses on the arts of photography and videography as memory-makers. (I’ve mentioned before another essay we read as part of this sequence, Susan Sontag’s “On Photography.”) The main question I raise as we discuss this essay is the definition of the term “true likeness.” Why was the old woman so offended by a photo that Momaday insists reflected her actual appearance? What is it that makes some photos “look like” a person whereas other photos don’t? As part of this discussion, I ask students to bring in two different photos: on one day we do a “show and tell” with photos that capture a moment of human emotion whereas on another day I ask students to bring photos of a memorable “rite of passage moment” such as a graduation, prom, or birthday.

I’ve done this same “show and tell” exercise for several semesters, and the results are suggestively homogenous. When I ask for “moments of human emotion,” I get the requisite shots of grimacing athletes and joyous lottery winners, but most students bring in candid shots of their high school friends: here’s a gang laughing at their favorite pizza parlor, a handful of buddies drunk and goofy at a football game, or a group of girlfriends giggling at a slumber party. “Moments of human emotion” are always unposed, and they’re never taken by parents. Instead, they result when you hand a camera to either a journalist or a friend, and the shots are almost accidentally composed: at just the right moment, somebody snaps the shutter on a scene that perfectly captures a particular spot in time.

My students’ “rite of passage” photos, on the other hand, are homogenous in a distinctively different way. These photos are always posed, and they are often taken by doting parents. Students bring in childhood pictures of themselves boarding the bus on the first day of school, family snapshots of young couples in formal dress posing beside stretch limos, and photo after photo of beaming students in caps and gowns holding diplomas. These photos all look remarkably alike: your (or your children’s) graduation pictures probably look remarkably like mine. Although the particular nuances of our various rites of passage differ from individual to individual, the posed photographs of these moments typically do not. The similarity of these moments, the homogenous uniforms, props, and poses, allow us to create in our minds a narrative that makes each picture unique: my story is different from yours even though our photos (compositionally) look pretty much the same.

So what is it that makes for a true “true likeness”? Is a candid snapshot of drunken teenagers at a prom after-party more “true” than the staged photos Mom took of the reluctant, corsaged and cummerbunded couple hours before the prom began? Do the impeccably posed and perfectly coiffed visages that smile out from formal portraits express a more genuine image of personality than a blurry snapshot of rowdy, tousle-haired hijinks? Is a “true likenesses” necessarily flattering, and are pictures where we look our best (or pictures where we look how we’d imagine our best to be) necessarily “true”? John Keats notwithstanding, truth and beauty might not be synonymous: a beautiful picture might not be true, and a true likeness might not necessarily be beautiful.

Although Momaday’s essay is titled “The Photograph,” the story of the old Navajo woman and her picture takes up only the last paragraph of the essay. Elsewhere, Momaday spends his time describing his father and the trips they took, the landscape around the Navajo reservation, and his memory of seeing the reservation from the air when he was learning to fly. Why would Momaday spend a mere paragraph talking about the photograph that gives the essay its name, and why would he include these seemingly irrelevant snippets about family and landscape and visual perspective?

My best guess at an answer to this question–a guess that my students usually come to gradually and eventually with some prodding–is that Momaday believes the only way to capture a true likeness of a person, old woman or otherwise, is to describe where they come from, how you relate to them, and how your perspective has changed over time. As such, you can’t possibly judge whether a likeness is “true” unless you’ve spent time with a person, have made yourself at home in their habitat, and have in some way befriended them. Once you speak a person’s language and have walked a mile or two in their shoes, you might possibly be able to see and judge their true likeness. Otherwise, you’re no different than a portrait-taker who is trained to capture perfectly posed but essentially homogenous superficialities.

And so how can I capture the “true likeness” of these past several days? Driving into northern Ohio, Chris and I saw from afar a distant thunderstorm: Ohio is flat, so you can see storm-clouds from a distance, rain appearing on the horizon as a gray slanted smudge. The earth was spread flat as a ruler and divided into agricultural squares of brown and green; as raindrops the size of peas pelted our windshields, we followed the tail-lights of tractor-trailer trucks headed eastbound from Iowa and Nebraska. As we left this isolated thunderstorm, the kind of tempest that brews tornadoes, I marveled at how quickly the sky changed from brooding to gleaming, slants of sun trickling down from pinkly lace-fringed clouds. What camera could capture the scene? Even the most wide-angle lens would be inadequate for such an infinite and quickly changing sky.

Today’s stint with a digital camera and a graduation cake can’t possibly capture the “true likeness” of today much less the course of my academic career, the places I’ve been, or the person I am. And so as Chris’s mom took photo after photo of me with a cake, the task at hand seemed to grow more and more ludicrous: what possibly could these pictures capture other than a several insignificant moments that happened to fall at the culmination of a memorable goal? Is Chris’s mom any more or less qualified to capture my “true likeness” (whatever that is) than any random stranger or professionally trained photographer? What is it that she hoped to capture, and what is it that I would have liked to express? Is “true likeness” able to be captured via any means or media, or is it eternally evolving, as elusive as time itself? Perhaps we cherish photos because we subconsciously recognize that photography is a flawed medium, a way of freeze-framing moments in time in a way that defies the rules of nature and of personality: now you see me, now you don’t as my true nature bends and morphs as quickly as a spring storm-cloud. Are these gestures and poses “me” or are they another disguise: is there an ageless maiden hidden under even the most cantankerous Navajo crone? When it comes to both place and personality, is what you see ever what you truly get?