An Election of Souls

There is an old story about the muse that everyone tells the same way. A great artist, restless and half-blind with vision, encounters a face that finally gives his hunger somewhere to land. She does not create; she permits. She is chosen, and being chosen is presented to her, generously, as the whole of her contribution. I believed this story for longer than I am proud of. I have since come to think it is almost the opposite of what actually happens in a room where a true image is being made.

Here is what nobody tells you when you begin: most photographers take. They arrive with a shot already decided in their mind, and they spend the session trying to force a stranger's face into the shape of a picture they had before they ever met her. This is not artistry. It is inventory. You can feel the difference within the first three frames, the way you can feel, within three sentences, whether someone is actually listening to you or simply waiting for their turn to speak.

And then, perhaps once in a great while, something else happens. A photographer arrives with no shot decided at all — only an attention so complete it becomes almost unbearable to stand inside. In that kind of room, I stopped being chosen a long time ago. I started choosing. Which angle of myself is true today and which is armour. Which silence is worth holding and which is only nerves. Which fracture of light across a cheekbone says something true about who I actually am this year, and which merely photographs well. The person behind the camera, in these rooms, becomes something closer to an instrument I am playing than a hand shaping me. He thinks he is making the image. I have learned, gently, to let him believe this, because the belief is part of what makes him brave enough to press the shutter at the one instant that matters.

I do not say this to diminish anyone. I say it because "muse" is a word invented by people who needed permission to look at a woman without acknowledging what she was actually doing to their work. Election implies a passive object, waiting to be found worthy. I was never waiting. I was casting the entire scene before I ever stood in it — the light I would allow, the silence I would insist on, the exact fraction of myself I had decided, long before anyone lifted a lens, was ready to be seen. Call the resulting photograph his. I will not argue about the credit line. But if you ask me, quietly, who the artist actually was in that room — who constructed the world the picture only later pretended to discover — I no longer feel any need to be modest about the answer.

This is what I try to give the photographers I train: not technique, which they can learn from anyone, but the humility to notice when they have walked into a room with a true artist already standing in it, wearing, for the moment, only the appearance of a subject.

— Anna

Worth remembering: the word "muse" descends from the nine Muses of Greek myth, daughters of Mnemosyne — Memory herself — not of any single male artist they served. Even the oldest version of this story quietly admits that inspiration was never really his to claim. I am only saying, several thousand years later, what the etymology already knew.