My Pornography

If it doesn't have ambiguity, don't bother to take it. I love that, that aspect of photography— the mendacity of photography—it's got to have some kind of peculiarity in it or it's not interesting.

Sally Mann

1. Definition of an Excellent Photograph

I grew up in my father's low-slung house on Gondola Drive, where he brought home, along with the groceries and dry cleaning, porn.

A lot of porn. Every afternoon he went down to a post office box he rented at the Oak Hills branch. The brown paper–covered mail piled on the counter between the sugar-flour-coffee-tea canister set and the coffeemaker. The brown wrappers mingled with Fortune and U.S. News and World Report, Playboy mixed in with bills and offers. Sometimes I looked inside.

I put an enormous amount of energy into not-seeing anything in front of my eyes.

When one is very good at not-seeing the real world, there's a sliver of opportunity to see what can't be seen. Call that faith. I slipped in.

In every room in the house on Gondola were photographs that did not seem like photographs, reality, or anything fascinating. The photographs of the girls smelled of despair, and it was shiny; theirs was a graphic life.

Pornography means writing about harlots. It's a new word, from 1850 or so. I never once said the word aloud (until I was in graduate school), and I never allowed myself to think What is wrong with this picture? A girl, in a house with so many magazines and videos. Labeled adult.

It was my father; I lived in his house.

2. What is Art?

A decade after I left my father's house, I bought a book of Sally Mann's photographs, Immediate Family, photographs of her children as water creatures, fierce pale humans energized by fear and abandon. My boyfriend at the time said she was wrong to do this to her children, photograph them naked. He used this word: unnecessary. He believed some things were more important than art.

For a photograph to be interesting, beautiful, Mann says it must have two things: mendacity and ambiguity. I add: for a childhood to be interesting, or maybe anything.

My interest in Christ comes from those photographs of women, fingers on their labia, spreading, smiling, softening, showing, melting. But I don't study the teachings out of fear or because I am craving an antidote, a punishment, clear rules, justice, refuge, or safety. Christ is ambiguous and peculiar. With faith, I must keep looking at something that isn't photographable, and, just as when I looked inside the magazines and tried to understand, I keep seeing more, not less. Faith is not-seeing perfected; it's what my childhood brought me to. It's what my childhood was for.

Faith is art perfected.

Pornography, like Hummel or Precious Moments figurines, is not beautiful or ugly; it's harshly sweet, and collectible, meaningless without a series, and similarly odd. Porn, Hummel, Precious Moments—in each case the body is pressed into shapes that bear little resemblance to daily real shapes.

And an awful lot of weird shades of pink. A kind of bisque.

I always want to be photographed naked. Not actually photographed. But remembered clearly, delighted in. Irresistible: the idea of the body made applicable.

I have an illusion that naked is real. I have an illusion that if I could just pin down a real self, someone to be, finally I will be able to relax.

I always want my photograph taken.

We all want to be seen. Faith: see the invisible, never become it.

3. Florida

Is a place with a taut skin, where, like pornography, the juicy and delicious and forbidden and the hot and wet are just another day. Pelicans, flamingos, hibiscus, bougainvilleas, geckos on the ceiling of my bedroom, frozen in time and fragile and moving toward sex and as far away from death as possible and right into it—Florida is a blossom and a death. And I always wonder: where...