The self is something that is neither defined solely by internal, nor external criteria; it is a compromise between an exterior set of conditions, and base desire. Impersonators offer an exaggerated instance of this schism, representing this conflict on the surface of their bodies in the uncomfortable conflation of their everyday existence with the aggrandized construction they attempt to embody. They exemplify the common desire to maintain a stable image, one that is autonomous from the tumult of the everyday. When we get dressed in the morning, and consider our appearance, we are participating in a similar negotiation with a multitude of spectators, a similar performance of the idea of ourselves. Perhaps this is why there is a sense of transgression in looking at images of impersonators, a certain embarrassment, as though the fragility of our own performance is revealed by them. Roland Barthes describes this process in his aphoristic text Camera Lucida. For Barthes the relationship between photographer and subject is fraught with multiple levels of meaning. In the following passage he describes the complex interchange of power and trust that occurs when he allows a photographer to take his picture:

Now, once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of “posing”, I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into another image. This transformation is an active one: I feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice…

[…]

No doubt that it is metaphorically that I derive my existence from the photographer. But though this dependence is an imaginary one (and from the purest image-repertoire), I experience it with the anguish of an uncertain filiation: an image- my image- will be generated: will I be born from an antipathetic individual or from a “good sort”?

I’ve come to realize that the portrait is a microcosmic representation of the relationship between each person’s ego ideal to external conditions. We constantly negotiate with an idealized notion of ourselves, struggling against the material confines of our immediate world. Barthes explains how the act of being photographed, of having an image created of oneself, constitutes a total transformation in the state of his physical being.

When we know we are being photographed, we respond by attempting to project our ego ideal through the camera lens, hoping the photographer will be a “good sort”, who will interpret our pose in a flattering manner. The impersonators have constructed a very specific likeness they want to project: their own image conflated with the ideal they are emulating. They have a very strong sense of how to pose and posture, conducting themselves in every act as though they were about to be photographed. During the portrait session, our agendas inevitably collide; I have a specific idea about the way I want the subjects to appear, and I control this through my choice of

photographic tools: camera format, composition, and lighting. I try to enable their fantasies by using lighting and the 4x5 view camera; part of my function as photographer is to facilitate the sitter’s desire. The resulting pictures reveal the trace of this social negotiation, between my idea of how they should appear, and the way they see themselves. The impersonators see the act of being photographed as a way to celebrate their ideal selves, as a way to preserve their attempts for the future and to validate their efforts. The pathos in the resulting photographs is that they can never actually become the characters they try to emulate.

1.Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. pp. 10-11.

                                                                                       

                                                                                                                     -Siri Kaur, 2007

SIRI KAUR

ALTER EGO: THE MIRROR AND THE SIGN