Editor’s note: This essay contains discussion of body dysmorphia, disordered eating and related issues.
Image: Supplied
The first thing you need to know is that the camera always lies. Light the subject from above, and cheekbones emerge from the face. Add a softbox, and the years slide away. The camera is a machine, and data gains meaning in the interpretation. Photographs reveal only that reality is changeable, labile. Shift a reflector and the world moves with it. The ultimate lesson is that the most powerful force is light.
I remember the exact moment I realised I was fat. It was Christmas. I was twelve. I was standing in my grandmother’s spare room, the lace curtains filtering the sunlight into soft licks. I remember the pants distinctly: a pair of pale-blue and white short trousers, fitted at the thighs. They were patterned with flowers, a pastel Eden. As I passed the mirror, I saw a stranger. The body I had looked at my whole life had shifted in a single moment of monstrous clarity. The thighs strained the seams of the floral pants. The stomach was distended and bloated. Only the face I recognised as mine. I had the sensation of expanding uncontrollably, fat bubbling under my skin, flooding my clothes. As a child, I had checked the mirror to admire my surfaces: outfits and expressions. I had never given much thought to what lay underneath. In this room smelling of powder, I looked at myself for the first time with an adult gaze. I looked at my body and used a word I had never used for it before and, in doing so, I was altered irrevocably. Words are weapons. As I called myself fat, I went to war.
In the study of our family home, there was a wall of photographs, decades made flat and speared with silver pins, the images near the window slowly bleached blue by the sun. Across the wall, my brother and I grew from squalling babies to doughy toddlers to laughing children. In the upper-left corner was a photograph from my parents’ wedding. My father would stand in front of it and cluck. In the photo, he wears a brown suit, louche and winking, full of saucy charm. ‘I’m going to fit back into that suit,’ he would say. ‘Look at me now. I’m a fatty.’
He was his own white whale: the impossible goal that is the past self. I would gaze from his broad, muscled body that I loved to climb, which wore children on its shoulders like parrots, to the lanky slip of a man in the photo, cigarette pressed between his fingers. The groom did not look capable of dispensing my father’s hugs: secure and grass-scented and the size of the world.
The family scales were ivory-coloured, stained with dust and age. I weighed myself daily. The first time the needle moved down, I felt a bright shudder of delight. The thrill of achievement. Of success.
In the wedding photograph, my mother looks drawn and shy. Her dress sits loose on her hips. It is only her wrists that hint at the delicacy of the body under the fabric. My father had agreed to marry her on the condition that she put on five kilograms. Cruel to be kind. As a child, I would pull out her wedding veil and prance around in it, squinting at the world through the lace. The memories that remain from the years of my diminishing look the same: fuzzy and white. The weight loss was fairly linear, but the details stutter and jag. I don’t know whether I was too malnourished to form memories correctly, or whether the tedium of my thoughts from that time was so profound that my brain can’t be bothered to replay them. Numbers and bones.
A recent US study of women from childhood through to old age found that ninety-one per cent were dissatisfied with their bodies. Body dissatisfaction is so common in women that in 1984, a suite of researchers called it ‘normative discontent’. Men are not immune. Forty-five per cent of Western men are unhappy with their bodies to some extent. Twenty-five per cent of Australian men in a healthy weight range believe that they are fat. The collective weight of the dismay directed at the world’s mirrors must be heavy indeed.
We had, at the time, one of the first Canon digital cameras. A wide black thing, heavy, with a dark iris that winked slowly at the subject. It took tiny, grainy images. At my very lightest, I snapped a photo in the mirror, side-on, in my underwear. It was a day when my vision slipped a little, like the memory of fainting, and I felt a thrill of terror at the slightness of me. In my twenties, I found the camera and tried plugging it in, but couldn’t find a software driver to run it.
Years passed, and the camera vanished, thrown out at some point in one of my mother’s periodic culls. I longed for that image. Longed for the proof of it. There are no photos of my whole body at that time, just hints of the wreckage—blue fingers from the arms of a tracksuit, a drawn face with wispy hair above it. I felt the loss of the jagged pixels in that image for their authority, their indexicality. The evidence of what I once was, and wasn’t.
*
There is a photo of me in a cafe in Edinburgh, hand under my chin, blonde hair a cloud, sporting a rictus grin. A few minutes after the photo was taken, I rushed to the toilet, nauseated with fear, anxious beyond all reckoning. Those weeks I spent crying in the street, scared of everything, unable to eat. A friend commented on the picture, ‘This is the most beautiful photo I’ve ever seen of you.’
I found other avenues for my discipline. When I first picked up a camera, in my first semester of university, I took a self- portrait every day for a year. At eighteen, I learnt how to light, how to edit, how to expose and how to hide. I was my own most patient and devoted model.
Across that year, I put on weight, but to look at the images, you’d think the opposite was true. I took control over the visual narrative of my life. I learnt the trickery of it, how to tell the camera what to notice. How to elevate the tripod so that a shadow fell hard under my chin. How to tilt my head slightly to the right to make my eyes seem bigger and my jawline sharper. How to smile viably, charmingly into the cold eye of the lens.
I built a portfolio of myself online. To those in the digital no-space of the virtual realm, I was unfailingly creative, flirtatious, effortless. Men twice my age messaged me, confessing that their wives didn’t satisfy them, asking if I’d consider flying interstate to meet. I was sexy in the images in a way I had never been in life. I had lost the capacity to control my body in the real world, but I could control how it represented me online.
I had lost the capacity to control my body in the real world, but I could control how it represented me online.
That year, I joined social media and uploaded my first profile picture. The likes began to trickle in.
Seventy-one per cent of Australians have active social media accounts. They spend an average of one hour and forty-four minutes per day on them, scrolling through the lives of others. There has been a great deal of academic investigation into the relationship between social media use and body image. Certain trends emerge. One is that higher overall Instagram use is associated with greater ‘self-objectification’: viewing the body as an object to be looked at. Self-objectification encourages women to value the appearance of their bodies over their performance or functionality.
It was Laura Mulvey, the feminist film theorist, who wrote about scopophilia, the pleasure of looking. About how women come to see themselves as things, performing for the gaze of men. Now, we are all both object and voyeur. We solicit the gaze every time we post, and we teach the algorithm with our hungry eyes.
Throughout my career, I’ve often photographed children. When I first picked up a camera, they were mercurial subjects—on the move, internal, immersed in their own business. Photographing them at play involved few smiles; the imaginative world of a child is serious and profound.
Now, when I lift a camera, children freeze. They raise their faces, gurning, towards the lens. They bare wobbly teeth and scrunch their eyes in a crude imitation of a grin. When I drop the camera, they return to play. Surrounded by adults with camera phones, they are alert, constantly attuned to the need to pose. Before they can walk or speak, they are learning to relinquish their subjecthood. They are learning to become objects. Before the shutter can freeze them, they have already stopped. They turn themselves into things.
My young cousin joined Instagram. Scrolling through her posts, the gentle effort of her toothy smiles, I noticed that many of the comments weren’t words, but numbers.
‘6,’ one would say. ‘7.’
‘My mate reckons 5 but I reckon 6.5.’
They were comments from boys. They were ratings out of ten. Beneath each, my cousin had replied, the same words every time: ‘Thank you.’
In my second year at uni, I began to photograph other people. Fellow students and actors, full of excitement at the prospect of modelling. Full of their own anxieties and insecurities, too. It was one thing to make tweaks to the reality of my own body; it was another thing entirely to make those decisions for other people.
The requests started almost immediately, little throwaways: ‘Fix it in post,’ and ‘Shoot from above so you can’t see my chins,’ and ‘Photoshop me til I’m unrecognisable.’ Jokes that didn’t feel much like jokes. Now and then, someone would ask if I’d do a nude shoot with them, to help them feel good about their bodies. I said yes, a few times, at the start: photographed women who lay in lingerie and told me how much they hated themselves, who begged me to make them sexy. One woman, a friend of a friend, posed nude apart from her favourite pair of high heels. When I showed her the photos on the back of the camera, something retreated deep inside her. She became monosyllabic. She drew her knees towards her chest. When I sent her the photos, she never replied. I don’t say yes anymore.
It was one thing to make tweaks to the reality of my own body; it was another thing entirely to make those decisions for other people.
Photo manipulation has existed since the first image bloomed out of a chemical bath. Stalin was particularly well-known for editing out party members who pissed him off. To control the image is to control history. I have saved on my computer two versions of a photo of Joan Crawford, shot in 1931. In the original, she looks radiant: painted and pearled. She also looks human. Her cheeks and neck are scored with lines. Her forehead bears the trace of a frown. In the retouched version, her skin is as smooth as a sigh. There are no lines, her face creamy and unblemished. The editor, James Sharp, did his work with only a backlit negative and a pencil. The results are astounding.
For a time, the gulf between celebrity and public was measured in imperfections. Negatives would return from chemists as prints, marked with blurs and wrinkles and spots. On billboards and in magazines, celebrities were as distant and bright as stars. We allowed them to be somehow unreal. We expected it of them. Their personhood was never fixed. Now, the distinctions are blurred. On social media, we rub shoulders with influencers and Hollywood stars. Like them, we know our angles, we filter our photos and retouch our selfies. The gulf has collapsed. We are all editors, now.
I once found a forgotten, unedited photograph of me on a disused hard drive. In it, I stood nude, my arms stretched behind my head, my fingers curled daintily in golden light. I was backlit. My stomach fell in a paunch, despite my stretched torso. Before I put it online, I made adjustments. I opened the image in Photoshop and smoothed out the shadows. When I was done, my stomach was flat. I toggled between layers, watching the flab appear and disappear. I posted the photo to Instagram. I joked in the caption about having had to censor my nipples and pubic hair. I did not mention the other quiet tinkering I had done. Often, when looking back at old photos, I forget where I have made alterations. I find myself longing for a body that was built on a screen.
I am never so brazen with other people when I photograph them, unless they ask for it. My edits are smaller. Difficult to notice unless you’re looking for them. The ripples in a jean leg gone. A lump in a ponytail vanished. Sweat and shine that is invisible to the eye but that blossoms under studio lights blended to a silky highlight. No under-eye bag goes untouched. One friend has heavy purple circles under his eyes. I take particular pleasure in reducing them. In the edit, I can force on him the rest he needs in life.
Now and then, I make major changes. Years ago, I shot promotional images for a cabaret artist, smouldering in a low-cut dress. She was renowned in the industry for her charisma, a laughing eroticism that rendered every encounter charged, enticing. She gazed over my shoulder to squint at the back of the camera. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘sex is gonna sell this show. But these’—she gestured to her A-cup breasts—‘aren’t going to cut it.’
At my computer that night, zoomed in so close that the soft shadows of her chest became blocky and square, I almost emailed to tell her I couldn’t do it. In the end, it was curiosity that got the better of me. A few hours passed, and I leant back to gaze at the full, round flesh that spilt out of her dress, catching the light and holding it. The lie of it was intoxicating. The show sold out.
Most tasks in Photoshop are not automated—they take long, tedious time and effort. Some things, though, are deliciously, shiveringly easy. The tool used to remove pimples and blackheads, erase stray hairs and lift dandruff from clothing is called the healing brush. Its process is as soothing as its name: paint over the offending item, and it vanishes. It is not foolproof. It makes humorous mistakes of machine logic. But when it does work, it is magical. The ingrown hair, the zag of a broken capillary, the fleck of lipstick gone rogue: one click, and they are gone. To pass over an image with the healing brush is to groom the body, to render it clean, tidy, perfect.
*
To create a portrait of someone is to show them a version of themselves, as they seem to you. It is a precise magic. Sometimes, this is a great and glorious power. A friend once traded me a jar of marmalade for a photoshoot. They had recently come out as non-binary, and wanted to see themselves anew. I set up a studio in my living room. Their partner painted on red lipstick and zipped them into my best black velvet dress. I fluttered around, adjusting lights. They lifted their head towards the softbox. Under a dreamy blue glow, they transformed. In the photos, they are soft and strong, elegant and erotic. The images clarify possibility into form. When my friend posted them online, the caption read: ‘These photos capture something I wish I was capable of always seeing, but that takes practice. I’m glad I have them as a reference now.’
To create a portrait of someone is to show them a version of themselves, as they seem to you. It is a precise magic.
After a decade photographing, I sometimes feel complicit in something malign, in being part of a system that misrepresents the human form and spreads dissatisfaction. Then a drag performer will lean over my shoulder to see the image on the back of the camera and laugh, saying: ‘Those are my mother’s cheekbones. The light found them.’ In these shoots, I am a prospector, mining the things that lie unseen beneath the surface of the skin. These are the days that make me love the craft. The ones that carve another world into existence. They are a reminder, to stop thinking of a photo as authority and start seeing it as sorcery.
At the gym in the heat of summer, I snapped a photograph in the mirror. I was red and sweaty. My stomach puffed under my tights. I was smiling, though. I wanted to mark the occasion. To formalise in pixels an achievement. That day, I had deadlifted my own weight. It was a strain, but I was enough for the task. I carried myself into the air in the form of a bar and several bright coloured discs. It was heavy. But it was not too much. In the photo, I am shining. Full of weight, I am haloed with light.
For a time, my partner Mike drew a daily three-panel comic as a form of diary-keeping. I took great pleasure in his scribbled drawings of me, my mop hair and round glasses sketched out across the page. We had been to the beach one day. I had waded into the freezing ocean in my underwear while he stood laughing in the shallows. As my feet went numb, I had looked down and sighed at the scale of myself. When I thumbed through Mike’s notebook the next day, he had drawn that moment. In the sketch, I am reaching up to brush the hair out of my eyes, encircled in foam. There are lines radiating from my head, and a heart floating above me. The caption reads: ‘She looked so beautiful coming out of the water it made my heart explode.’ For a week, I picked up the notebook whenever I passed, and stared at the panel. I stared at it the way I’ve had clients stare at the back of my camera, with the wonder of seeing the self transfigured into something new.
The camera lies, and so do the eyes. There is no truth, only versions upon versions. The body shimmers at the edges of vision, waiting to be coalesced.
This is an edited extract from The First Time I Thought I Was Dying by Sarah Walker (UQP), available from 3 August at your local independent bookseller.
