Over at A Proposal, I provide some context for my last post, which, despite my efforts, ended on a much more ambiguous note than I’d intended.

In Montreal, for the first time, I began to actively seek out and take pictures of people. Before this, my primary interest had been urban photography. Deserted buildings, bright dumpsters, bricked-in alleyways — these were the things that fascinated me, because of the opportunity they gave me to disorient notions of beauty and urban geography. And being a photographer in spaces like those also troubles notions of a clean divide between the public and the private.

But then in Montreal, people sought me out and asked me to take their pictures. It went to my head. Montreal is a city full of people constantly on display. Its people take a good picture. So I was surrounded by beautiful people who wanted beautiful pictures, and I was happy to oblige. I became a little giddy.

But I’ve been thinking a lot these days about human bodies and a camera’s relation to them. I’ve been trying to write about it too, and have been getting stuck. I want to draw a parallel between a proprietorial relationship to language and the potentially limiting effect of a camera (at least in terms of the photographer’s relationship to the models/bodies). There is something so surgical about the process that I have vague, inarticulate concerns …

Meanwhile, I have half a dozen concepts swirling in my head, and am terribly excited to start recruiting models to help in their execution in about 2 weeks.

What is … what is the name for those striations in lips, those fine wrinkles that ridge up and then plummet away under the exacting touch of fingertips, that tighten into fragile cobwebs of dryness in frigid winters. And those expanses behind ears, those wide and soft landscapes that valley into the sweep of your neck, what do you call them. Ears themselves — each elaborate whorl of pliant bone under velvet skin must have a title, something I could use to explain why their sight makes my breath catch in my throat.

Suprasternal notch. I learned this name the other day, for that hollow where neck bleeds into chest, where one shoulder meets the other.

“Look up,” I said, almost whispering, with no one else to hear me.
So, obediently, you look up.
“Up.” A finger at the tip of your chin, and your head tilts in the direction of its pressure, obedient, silent.

The picture I take is wholly unremarkable, angled altogether incorrectly. I had been meaning to catch the twin protusions that cradle the dip, that rise knoll-like on either side. But in the photograph, they are too faint, the shadows did not hold, there is an inconvenient blur. The camera caught other things, like the tips of your eyelases and how the ends of your mouth tuck neatly into themselves. And then it didn’t know what to do with those things, so it let them fall, weakly.

And now I miss the days I spent in labs, surrounded by the leathered remains of people’s legs and arms on tables, with hearts and lungs in clear jars arranged on shelves, and silent cadavers resting on tables in the cold room behind. I could have been a better student, then. I could have stifled the nausea and committed more carefully those names to memory (of the people? of their parts).

So these are the inner ends of your clavicles. I could have known the names of these and other bones, of all the muscles and tendons that pull things together, that ripple sleek under my cautious palm.

But it isn’t the same to want to name things as to want to know them. It isn’t the same to want to see a thing as it is to want to photograph it.

Suprasternal notch. I learned this name the other day, and have been unable to look at necks the same since.

I.
I emailed my kid sister pictures I’d taken of my parents in November. Which is kind of crazy meta, if you think about it. My parents don’t even like people taking pictures of them, so the last time I was home, I basically never took my camera out of my bag. Until the very last night, when I frantically started taking pictures of everything, of my mother eating leftovers for dinner and my father striding late through Pearson to see me off.

II.

- Tell Ummah to let me buy a camera, says my sister on the phone.
- Why do you need a camera?
- Because I want to pictures of everything and nobody’s got a camera here. And Ummah said you already have one, but you’re in Vancouver. You can get them for 4$ at Walmart. Tell her.
- Those are disposable cameras. Don’t get those. How about you say it’s a camera for the family, instead of for you.
- So my sister yells into the living room on the other side of the continent, Ummah, can we buy a camera for everyone?
- Okay, says my mother.

III.
I have few, very few pictures of my parents, or even my siblings. My brothers are even more adamant about taking not taking pictures than my parents. So I take pictures of them asleep.

We grew up traditional that way, strict in that cleancut way that prohibited graven images. I still get uncomfortable in front of a lens, still feel every muscle in my face freeze on the other side of a camera. But I don’t know if those things are connected, or if it’s just that I’m still and always will be the girl who couldn’t stand mirrors.

But on the other hand, I have a picture from the terrible summer of two years ago that I took of my father, in his spotless white thobe and mosque cap, swinging on the swing in my aunt’s Scarborough backyard. These things are also true.

IV.
I don’t remember faces. The more a person means to me, the less likely I am to remember the way their lips would meet or the colour of their eyes. It’s as though I can only remember without my glasses on or contacts in.

I mean, when I think of you, I think now, with less and less clarity, of how the lightest touch of your hand on my skin always hurt like nothing else I’ve ever felt. But I can’t remember your face.

Except there are moments, for which I am never prepared, when suddenly, in the middle of some other thing I’m doing, an image of your smile, sharper than all the photographs I never took of you, interrupts me.

V.

VI.
Then the image fades, of your mouth and the bridge of your nose, and what I’m left with is not you, but the memory of remembering you.