I am presently struggling with a George Bowering essay in which he asserts that a photograph I took of him is not of him. I am re-reading Susan Sontag’s On Photography and Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. I want to somehow get back at our Great Contrarian which is what Bowering is. 

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In rereading these books on my comfortable Kits quarantine bed I have realized that the man who read those two books years ago is not the same one now. My memory has declined and I am thrilled by passages now that I might have skipped in my ignorant youth.

These self-portraits which I would correctly call self-scanographs I now look differently after having read Bowering’s essay. Bowering argues that two dimensions can never reflect the reality of three dimensions.

Is he right? Right or wrong, he has given me the challenge to somehow rebut that my portrait of him wearing my mother’s red shawl is indeed that of our former first Poet Laureate.