Ohmigoddddduh, the pictures I got in my email yesterday! I wonder if I really need a haircut that bad. I mean, I think I’d only just had one.
A photographer friend took a load more shots of me last week, ostensibly for my author pic etc for Salt, who ask for six pictures (i.e., more than my normal number from any given ten-year period) – which I haven’t seen yet, but they looked pretty damned alarming when they were still on his camera. All weird hair.
I try, I try, you know.
(My best friend, Ms Rational Self-Behaviouralism – and let me tell you what a crock that is sometime, we’re talking about a woman who thinks she’s on a diet when she switches from wine to tequila, as she was trying to tell me over a bottle of Sancerre and a chocolate pot at lunchtime two days ago – where was I, oh yes, she went to a job interview once and when she came back and told me about it – I was babysitting – her entire account was about how she could feel her hairpins working loose throughout the interview, and was afraid to move her head while she spoke lest her enormous hair should fall down in one whoosh over her face, making her look completely useless, which also had the effect of making it almost impossible to think of the answers to their questions…)
Anyway, there we are. The picture above is a cropped version as I’m not sure the other person in the photo would wish to be featured internationally in a feature on mad hair. My own excuse is that it was a cold, windy day and I had removed my hairpins so I could more easily wear my pink felt beret, which I then – not wishing to appear like a pink-beret-wearing idiot in perpetuity – in turn removed for the picture. In other words, it’s a slippery slope.
But of course Ms Baroque is not the only one who hates the camera. Philip Larkin, famously lugubrious in decades of photographs, was far more vain than one might have thought, as it now turns out following the unearthing of his correspondence with the photographer Fay Godwin. As he reviewed her prints for approval he complained of having “as much expression as a lump of sugar,” or looking “like CS Lewis on a drugs charge” – or indeed the above sheep.
“He marked the ones he did not like, adding: ‘Destroy them if you like. I hadn’t realised my affinities with the late Stan Laurel’.”
(Now, that’s something I’ll never have to worry about.)
In one letter: “‘I think on the whole they are highly successful. It is not your fault I look like a cross between an egg and a bloodhound on some of them’. Later that year he admitted to Godwin that there was a good thesis to be written on the reaction of sitters to their photographs. Looking at a new batch he disliked ones ‘where I am peering out from among dark shelves with a somewhat furtive, whimsical appearance’.”
Mind you, I think furtive and whimsical is exactly how I come across, above. And deranged. And slightly witchy, which is my bane (though not my wolfbane, no never) and no amount of nice nail polish ever seems to dispel the image. And I get that hysterical crackpot look every time I laugh; but whaddamigonna do, huh? (1. Learn to keep my mouth closed. 2. Just grow up. 3. Leave the hairpins in.)
