Photographic performance is both private and public. Performance for a photograph is a show for one and at the same time a show for all. Come one come all. A photograph gets distributed, reproduced, blown up, uploaded. To perform for a camera is never really private: an object is created, an audience winked to. This performance is not the same as singing a song in the car or a lover’s striptease. To perform for a camera is to create something that will never again be live, but can be seen over and over again.
But to make the photograph, to be in the picture, is so often a private act. No matter who will see the picture later, in the moment of creation it is just me and my lens, a long cable release, tv on in the background. A genuinely private moment of creative toiling, with only light as my witness. I am not an actor or a burlesque performer, not a singer or a comedian. Sometimes I wonder about being these things, try them on and play, alone. Often I wonder about the ways that dreams become reality and reality is consumed by dreaming. The photographic performance displays publicly the private moment of the subject’s experimentation with their own presentation, with their body in space and their hopes and dreams for it.
Perhaps she hopes to be a star, but she only hopes, she does not do it. The photograph is a glimpse behind the scenes of her fantasy. The photograph is a community theater production of Grease, but it is dress rehearsal night and it’s not going so well. Then Sandy hits the high notes in hopelessly devoted to you, and the simulated moonlight carves the curve of her cheek, glittering in her eye, and for a moment she and we forget that we sat in these same seats for our middle school graduation, we forget that this Sandy works at the bank. For a quivering second, we are all inside the performance and it is beautiful.
Rosemary Warren