Dolce Vita

I used to think that to be a photographer meant you had eyes, as in Jack Kerouac’s salute to Robert Frank: “You got eyes.” When I was young I wanted to be a stick with eyes. So I dieted and took a lot of pictures. Later, when I studied with Tod Papageorge, I learned that Frank’s book The Americans was a direct response to, and almost a copy of, Walker Evans’s American Photographs. Papageorge claimed that Frank gave up street photography after he had exhausted the template that Evans provided, which proved that Frank really had no abiding love for the documentary tradition after all. As Papageorge saw it, Frank was an artist with a self instead of a world. At the time, the idea that any artist could choose not to have a self seemed plausible enough; I was certainly working to get rid of mine. A photograph—any photograph—reflects the world, but then again, someone made that thing you’re looking at. The voice in my head when I take pictures is still Papageorge’s: “What are you even looking at, Justine? It seems so vague.” Shut up, shut up.

It’s fine to be around a narcissist when things are going well: their rainbow of self-love extends to cover you and the work you make. Photography is the ultimate medium for a narcissist, and not just because of the selfie; every photograph places its maker at the center of the universe. Sometimes my students get stuck in the airless cage of themselves. Recently one of them wrote that everyone in the class had chosen me as a mentor because they were hardcore narcissists. He made the distinction between a pedagogy that reifies the canon versus one that locates value in the individual student’s own drives, and wrote about breakthrough moments when narcissism feathers at its edges. I know what he means—I too have glimpsed a world beyond the overhanging fringe of myself.

The truth is, a teacher often learns more from her students than they learn from her, and these students grow up to become mentors to a new crop of students in a chain of influence that extends in both directions, sometimes in support, other times with matricidal intent. Mentorship comes with an invitation to join the party.  Yes, please, make your narratives elliptical. Sure, it’s fine if you want to merge commercial techniques with documentary practices. Go ahead, look to the side of human drama and use objects as allegorical stand-ins. Or—why not?—face it head-on and turn it into an image symbol. Permission can be granted or taken, but like any inheritance it’s good to check the privilege. What does it mean, after all, to carry on a tradition? It’s a question I often ask myself, gazing up at my library of photo books, my own pantheon of dead or almost-dead white men.

And then, we also have to reckon with photography’s colonialist legacy. The New World was imagined as a Romantic dream of heaven on earth, and the young Americans saw themselves as babes in the woods of innocence. Over and over, we lament our lost innocence—after Watergate, after the Bay of Pigs, after Vietnam, after 9/11, after Trump. As though innocence is a lizard’s tail that grows back each time it falls off. In this light, our atrocities, whether historical or contemporary, are naturalized as the reverberations of Original Sin.  But to evoke heaven is also to conjure hell.  Not everything you’re given turns out to be a gift.

Shortly after Trump took office, I rode the B train to Sheepshead Bay and purchased a fluffy white kitten from a Russian cat breeder I had found on the internet. The cat’s name is Dolce, as in “dolce vita.” She is a pure-pedigree Siberian who doesn’t belong in my dump on the Lower East Side. I cut up chunks of meat for her raw-food diet and sprinkle them with bone meal and vitamins. To pet her fur feels like running your fingers through warm water. She stretches out under my hand, revealing her sleek rabbit carcass body. And because she is so irresistible I have committed to being her caretaker and mentor. She will live out her days trapped inside my apartment with only my son and myself to link her to an outside world she will never know. We are her lifeline and her life sentence.