On occasion she turned the lens toward the mirror so her face was obscured by the chunky black camera body, pulling focus to her dry heart-shaped lips and rabbit teeth (the same ones I have, the same ones she has since capped). But mostly, the eye is drawn to her nakedness. Legs spread defiantly. This wasn’t officially her art, but she was committed.
The fact that she was shooting on actual film—and not an iPhone or a Polaroid bought at Urban Outfitters, à la the selfies of today—lent an appealing seriousness to her fascination with herself. Something about the intentionality of the medium. After all, she had to load the camera, print the film by hand in her darkroom, then hang the images on the line to dry. When her roommate Jimmy, a more seasoned photographer, wasn’t around to ask for help, she called the Kodak hotline, which was manned by one single put-upon gentleman (“It’s boiling hot in my darkroom and I’ve been putting ice cubes in my developer. Do you think that’s okay?”). Embarrassed by the frequency of her calls, she would affect extreme accents to mask her voice. Imagine going to all that effort, just to find out what your bush looks like when paired with lime-green rain boots and shining aviators. This wasn’t as simple as swinging your iPhone around and pushing your tits together. This took work.
My mother is slim. A long torso, loose arms, and a collarbone sheer as a rock face. But the camera clung to her imperfections—the ripple of fat below her butt, the sharp knob of her knee, the massive birthmark on her forearm that she had removed as a fortieth-birthday present to herself. I think of her developing these images, sloshing them around in the photo solution with a pair of salad tongs. Waiting, as they blushed gray, then appeared in full contrast, to see what she really looked like.
She convinced her little sister to pose, too. Her little sister: a blond med student with the kind of body designed to sprawl in wet sand. This feather-haired, horseback-riding beauty queen was suddenly sullen when her shirt was off. Shy. The camera, that great equalizer.
My mother understood, implicitly, the power of it. See these hips, these teeth, these eyebrows, these stockings that bunch and sag at the ankles? They’re worth capturing, holding on to forever. I’ll never be this young again. Or this lonely. Or this hairy. Come one, come all, to my private show.
When my father appeared on the scene there would be pictures of him, too, sitting in the bathtub, holding a frying pan up as a shield. As disconcerting as it is to see your father make a face that can only be described as “coquettish,” it’s the images of my mother that fascinate me. The flash of fear in her eye—or is it longing? The feverish need to reveal who she really is, as much to herself as anybody.
I get naked on TV. A lot.
It started in college. Pressed for actors who embodied the spirit of sexual despair I was looking to cultivate, I cast myself. Unaware how sex scenes were handled by the pros, I didn’t purchase nudity covers or enforce a “closed set.” I simply pulled my shirt over my head and dove in.
“Do you want me to actually suck your nipple?” Jeff, my confused scene partner, asked.
Later, looking at the footage in the Oberlin media lab, I didn’t feel shy. I didn’t love what I saw, but I didn’t hate it either. My body was simply a tool to tell the story. It was hardly me at all, but rather a granny-panty-clad prop I had judiciously employed. I didn’t look elegant, beautiful, or skilled. This was sex as I knew it.
Exhibitionism wasn’t new to me. I’d always had an interest in nudity, one I would describe as more sociological than sexual. Who got to be naked, and why? The summer between fourth and fifth grades, I remember riding bikes with my best friend Willy around the lake in Connecticut where our families congregated for the summer each year—think Dirty Dancing, but with more known pedophiles in the neighborhood—when I became keenly aware that I was wearing a shirt and he was not. That didn’t seem fair. After all, my mother had recently told me it was technically legal for women to walk through Manhattan shirtless, even if very few exercised the right. Why did Willy get to enjoy the summer breeze on his chest? What was so bad about exposing mine? I stopped, removed my t-shirt, and we pedaled on in silence.
In 2010 I got the opportunity to make a television show. The network told me they wanted to see my age group, the concerns of my friends and enemies, in graphic detail—and they didn’t seem to be bluffing. If I was going to write honestly about twenty-something life, sex was a topic I’d have to address head-on. And the sex in television and movies had always rubbed me the wrong way. Everything I saw as a child, from 90210 to The Bridges of Madison County, had led me to believe that sex was a cringey, warmly lit event where two smooth-skinned, gooey-eyed losers achieved mutual orgasm by breathing on each other’s faces. The first time I got naked with a guy, grotesque as it was, I was just so relieved he wasn’t deeply inhaling my natural scent or running his hands up my torso to the strains of Chris Isaak.