My Photo

by Jennie Rose Halperin

My friend Ben has never been able to afford to pay models for his photography practice, so he mostly shoots street scenes, friends, fellow writers, girlfriends, and lovers in intimate settings. He often reprints the same images over time in different formats—naked women supine in the blurry outdoors, a well-known writer touching her hair, an ex-girlfriend laughing on a beach, a large papier-mâché puppet. Most of his recent work is in blue cyanotype on white fabric that he stretches on bars or hangs loose like flags. The last time I visited him, a large white sheet printed with a strikingly beautiful blue ex-girlfriend covered his window. He was wearing a t-shirt bearing the image of an elderly blue man playing the trumpet in extreme closeup: face, hands, instrument, and mouth.

Ten years ago, Ben took a portrait of me sitting by a lake in a forest in North Carolina. I had recently returned from a year in Europe, where I’d gained about twenty pounds, mostly from living above a baklava bakery. In the photo, I am wearing large sunglasses and a cheap bikini I bought from a lingerie shop in Paris. It was high-waisted and too big in the chest and I wore it until it fell apart six years later. I have looked at this photo hundreds of times— my face is round and young, my shoulders and clavicles are still bony and thrown back. I have an unflattering short haircut that shows my whole forehead, and I am slightly smirking. I look impetuous, mysterious, a little awkward. I was so hungry that afternoon. I obsessed about losing the weight when I got back to the States, dieting back down to my usual size within a few months.

I’m sure I’ve told Ben about my discomfort being photographed, about the disordered eating and dysmorphia that has followed me since my teens. There’s an internet saying that goes something like “If you are a millennial woman who escaped the early 2000s without an eating disorder, congratulations.” But the psychology of restriction has always been caught up in the ever-narrowing chasm between online and offline realities. Myspace became popular when I was 17, and we all posted digital photos with tilting chins or pouting lips pushed out to make them look bigger. My first profile picture was a grainy selfie taken in my bathroom with my bangs swept to the side and my already flat stomach sucked in under a cardigan, my chin down to make my eyes look bigger.