Linda Troeller, Maine Photo Workshops, 1998
In: Personal Opera by Linda Troeller
In On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry (1999) wants to rescue beauty from its detractors and she finds that one of the reasons beauty is disparaged is that “it causes a contagion of imitation,” it prompts this “impulse towards begetting” (2, 9). Perhaps these statements are more jarring than usual because of the very real risk that contagion poses to us; perhaps they are more jarring because the de facto shibboleth of quarantiners has been getting bangs, a contagious beauty affect. Quarantine begets cutting your own bangs—and I did—and then painstakingly acquiring more, impulsively buying Olaplex No. 3 online, “an at-home treatment, not a conditioner, that reduces breakage and visibly strengthens hair.” But as Scarry points out in a literal reading of Odysseus’s encounter with Nausicaa, “beauty is lifesaving” (it inspires joy, it makes life worth living) but it’s live-saving capabilities are hindered by that fact it inspires “deliberation” too. Undercutting the joy that the disappearance of my split ends would inspire, is the strategic nature of acquiring and experiencing beauty: I have to painstakingly apply Olaplex to my hair for the next three months to get the hair I find beautiful.
In The Will to Power, Nietzsche says that “to experience a thing as beautiful means: to experience it necessarily wrongly.” Perhaps the life-saving power of beauty that Scarry finds is undermined by deliberation, is simply a part of experiencing a thing as beautiful. It has to be—it will be—wrongly experienced if it is beautiful. In 1987 (1989 ed.), Susan Sontag used this quotation near the end of her treatise on photography but it was in 2004 when in “An argument about beauty,” Sontag completes her rendition. Beauty isn’t the same as the beautiful: beauty is imperious and impermanent, while the beautiful and the “capacity to be overwhelmed” by it survives “amidst the harshest distractions.”
Linda Troeller’s photograph is undoubtedly experienced wrongly. Crudely put: it is too beautiful to be experienced right. I can’t speak to beauty just yet, but the capacity to experience the beautiful amidst the pandemic rings true: Troeller’s picture is startling in its aspects. There she is, squinting elegantly, a picture taken at the Maine Photo Workshops in 1998. She is framed as such that light illuminates her face while bathing the rest of the picture in shadows. Her robe is bright red and printed; she doesn’t so much as wear it as she adorns it. To experience the picture is to be transfixed by it and then deliberate upon what makes it so eye-catching.
The highlight however, is the hair. Not quite Twiggy or Kate Moss, bangs a bit denser that Brigitte Bardot of the 60s, hair the color of Madonna’s Blonde Ambition years, a cut more blunt than Anna Wintour’s bob and sharper than the Debbie Harry look. As the self-portrait demonstrates, it is not about the bangs. The woman in the picture isn’t Paola Masino’s woman as furniture. The picture is about about how the bangs are worn, how there is the feel of carelessness to them. There is something about experiencing the beautiful and knowing it is enduring and perhaps nowhere is it more visited than in Troeller’s life of portraiture. (She is creating self-portraits from her Instagram in quarantine). Or maybe it truly is all about beauty as contagion. Maybe it is as Fleabag claims decisively, “hair is everything” and I just want bangs and no split ends.
Citations:
Masino, Paola. 2009. Birth and Death of the Housewife. Suny Series, Women Writers in Translation. Albany: State University of New York Press.
OLAPLEX. n.d. “No.3 Hair Perfector.” OLAPLEX. Accessed May 6, 2020. https://olaplex.com/products/olaplex-no-3-hair-perfector.
Scarry, Elaine. 2001. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.
Sontag, Susan. 1989. On Photography. Pbk. ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
———. 2002. “An Argument about Beauty.” Daedalus 131 (4): 21–26.