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.
Bowering's Latest Book Writing and Reading
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.
