Reverse Portrait

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[This text was originally published in the Kim Waldron book Another Woman _ Another Woman.]



A woman has a portrait in her attic. As she gets older the picture gets younger. Not her image in the picture but the picture itself. There are no other words to explain this. You look at the picture and somehow you know you are looking at a different, a reverse, understanding of time. The wooden frame gets younger, the pigment, the brushstrokes, the idea to even make the work in the first place. Up there in the attic, where almost no one ever goes, the self-portrait carelessly leans against a wall getting younger. Meanwhile the woman continues living her life. Her life is the important part of this story, though it will be difficult to tell the story in a way that makes this at all times clear. The problem is: she knows about the picture in the attic and so do we. It would be an exaggeration to say she thinks about it constantly, but she does think about it, from time to time, more than from time to time. For her, this picture represents something like her “ideals,” it is her ideals that are getting younger, but for us, at least so far, it represents almost nothing. It is a MacGuffin, a red herring, a picture that is getting older, but everything is getting older, every minute of every day. No, already I’ve gotten myself confused. The picture is not getting older, as you already know the picture is actually getting younger. That is the counter-intuitive, the magical, part of this story. The part that makes no sense.

Have I mentioned yet that there are many pictures of the woman, existing out there somewhere in the world, paintings (well, mainly just the one painting in the attic), photographs, drawings, illustrations. She even appears in images she apparently doesn’t appear in, in the background, or just a sliver of her at the edge of the frame. These images have been made for a wide variety of purposes. For example, one is an image that was part of a planned advertising campaign. However, when the company saw the image they vetoed it. They thought of their product, and they thought of the image, and came to the kneejerk conclusion that one would not be able to sell the other. (They did not mean that the product would not be able to sell the image, though that was probably true as well.) This unused advertising image was placed not in an attic but in a filing cabinet. Let me try to get back to the woman’s life, which we still know relatively little about. The part of this story that is most important is the part we so far know least about. As I have already mentioned, the part that is most important is this woman’s life.

One day the woman decides to attempt an experiment. She goes up into the attic with a large format camera and photographs the portrait. It is a woman photographing a portrait of herself, as the portrait is getting younger, to find out if she can photographically capture this magical painted reversal of age. As she does so, she realizes that for much of history portraits were created from paint, then for much of more recent history portraits were captured on photographic film, while now portraits are captured digitally and often called selfies. (We already know the proportional gender of the historical painters in relation to the proportional gender of the historical subjects. This is a contemporary story and things have not changed nearly as much as they should.) She was not a painter, so she asked herself: what would it feel like to paint another persons portrait? Or to paint her own? To consciously or unconsciously mix your own personality with the personality and image of the sitter? Or with the personality and image in the mirror? She had the photographs she took of the painting in the attic developed and had to admit she found the results rather unspectacular. It just looked like a normal painting, there was no evidence that it was getting younger before her (or the cameras) eyes. Just as in a normal photograph of a normal person there is no evidence that they are getting older before our eyes. The process moves too slowly. (Is it worth noting that the eye of a camera is called a lens?)

The woman knows that there are many images of her that exist somewhere out there in the world. She has seen many of them. She has also created many of them. Some of these images have even been sold for a small profit. Once she received an email from someone who owned an image of her, someone she had never met. “You don’t know me,” the email began, “but in some strange way I feel that I know you. Every day, as I drink my morning coffee, I can look to the far end of the dining room where a picture of you hangs on my wall. Maybe you already know this and maybe you don’t, I’m not quite sure.” She did not already know this. The email continued: “I know it is not actually you looking at me, out from that image, across the entire length of the room. It is not you, but I feel somehow judged by that gaze and therefore, in some sense, I feel I am being judged by you. It goes without saying that I am most likely only being judged by my own guilty conscience. You might have already guessed the particular reason for this feeling of being judged. It has to do with wealth, with my ability to purchase your image alongside many other remarkable works of art. The amount of money this work cost is almost nothing to me, pocket change. The reason you might not know that I drink my coffee every morning under the judgmental gaze of your image is because I purchased it on the secondary market. That is why I know, of the amount I paid for it, none of the money went directly to you. In my life, especially as I get older, I feel guilty or regretful about many things, and for some reason this is one of them. Therefore you will find attached, if you choose to accept it, a money order for the exact amount I originally paid for your work. As I said, for me it is nothing, but I suspect for you it will be a substantial sum. I see no reason you should not accept.” She stopped reading, transferred the money order into her account (what the email said was true, for her it was a substantial amount), and shut down her computer. She did not reply to the email, on that day or any other. She could not afford to refuse the money but she certainly did not want to thank him for it. She never heard from him again. In her ideal world, he would assist her financially while continuing to feel guilt. Maybe this guilt would lead him toward other good deeds in the future. She could only hope.

In the attic the painting continues its journey toward youth. (For a moment she wonders: does the painting know it’s getting younger. But how could it know.) Every few months she heads up to the attic for a visit. She sits across from the painting and, on this particular day, she even finds herself talking to it. This conversation is private, just between her and the painting, so I will not recount it here. Of course she does all the talking, the painting does not respond. Or it only responds by getting younger at an imperceptible rate, though at times she almost feels as if she can sense it changing before her eyes. In the attic there are many other objects that have been brought there because they were no longer needed in the rest of the house. I will not list them all. I will focus only on one particular item: a polaroid camera that no longer works. At one time it was a novelty to be able to take a picture and almost instantly see the results. Now this is obviously no longer the case. She picks up the camera and holds it in her hands. It hasn’t worked for a very long time. She examines it from every angle, rotating it calmly from hand to hand. What was once an exciting new thing is now little more than an item of nostalgia. Strangely, as she examines it, it suddenly goes off, a picture smoothly whirring out the front slot. She puts down the camera and holds the picture in front of her, staring at it, watching as it slowly develops. She is not surprised to see that it’s a picture of her. But not her now. Her from fifteen years ago, the last time she remembers using the camera, the last time she remembers it working. It is strange to see her younger self slowly come into focus within the white frame of the polaroid. Just as it is also strange to look up and see a painted version of her younger self, leaning against the wall. And then she has a strange thought: aren’t all images of our younger selves. Every image, no matter how imagined or arranged, is simultaneously a documentary image from some moment in the past. Even a selfie is an image of us a few seconds ago when it was first taken. She does not want to live in the past. She prefers to live in the present, if such a thing can even be said to exist. She leans the still developing polaroid against the painting and heads downstairs back to her normal life.

Dorian Gray had a picture in his attic to tell a story of corruption. This is not a story of corruption. The picture in the woman’s attic is just another picture, just another image, albeit one with certain magical qualities. It depends how you choose to tell the story. I’ve chosen to tell it badly, perhaps because I’ve chosen to tell it using only words.



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