Smile please

on being photographed and being pleasing

Today I am having my picture taken for a magazine. I am nervous about it, as I always am. I am fussing over what to wear. I want to look cool and laid-back, but I also want to make a good image. We’re doing it in a park so I want to wear my red dress, which I know will pop against the green. Very Kate Bush in the second “Wuthering Heights” video. I worry that if I wear the red dress, it will look like I tried too hard, like I got all dressed up to get my picture taken. But if I wear something more casual, it won’t look as arresting. And the imp of the perverse sits himself down at my desk and asks: what’s wrong with looking like you got dressed up?

Because, imp, it looks like you’re trying to look nice. Trying isn’t cool. Looking “nice” isn’t cool.

The imp doesn’t give a fuck about what’s cool. Kate Bush doesn’t give a fuck about what’s cool. Red dress it is.

I wrote about the cool/cringe dyad in Vocal Break, the way “cool” is used against women’s voices, and the way women vocally collude with patriarchy to survive; I give the example of a young woman I heard at a talk at a gallery once, who was there to introduce the speakers. You guys…… she drawled at the audience, in that particular key of vocal fry you find in really privileged white girls, I think we’re gonna start….. I was both irritated by her affect (Own it!! I wanted to say, occupy your position, you have chosen to be here, don’t act like you’ve just been put in charge of the class while the teacher steps out to the toilet) and sympathetic to her insecurity — what she was saying, as well as please quiet down we’re going to start was: please don’t reject me.

Barthes calls this a doxa: a social norm so taken for granted as to feel natural. Don’t look like you’re trying. Don’t look like you care.

It feels related, somehow, to the unspoken injunction not to smile when photographed.

Now, becoming a writer, for reasons having to do with the growing importance of marketing (especially social media) within the publishing world, means you will have your picture taken, and often. Sometimes professional ones — headshots, press pictures, festival portraits — but also candid ones, during events, or afterward, or on signing visits to bookshops, where you awkwardly hold your book to your chest while a bookseller takes your picture for social media, somehow managing to capture your least flattering angle. There is no way to be cool in these pictures. You are not in control of how you appear, no matter how carefully thought out your outfit, no matter how well you did your hair before you left the house. You are not even in control of what you will do when the camera is turned on you.

Last month, I did an event with the brilliant Alice Vincent at Veranda Bookshop for Vocal Break, which dovetailed really beautifully with her recent book Hark: How Women Listen, which I cannot recommend highly enough, it is so sensitive and thoughtful and will shift the way you think about the world, and listen to it. When the event was over, Alice had to head out, as she had an early start for a family trip. We took a quick selfie together. Oh god I have to learn not to smile reflexively, she said.

I knew exactly what she meant: a couple of years ago, I did an event at the Institut Français with Deborah Levy and Marie Darrieussecq, and afterward, someone took our picture together. Marie looked at the lens as if someone just said something nice to her. Deborah gave Intense Writer Stare. And what did I do? I smiled big for the camera! They ended up looking like legitimate authors, and I looked like someone who’d asked for a selfie with them.

I asked Deborah about it once. [more after the jump]