What Trembling Is For

There is a particular tremor that sometimes moves through a hand or a jaw in the instant before a difficult picture is taken — not fear exactly, and not cold, though it can look like either. I used to think my job was to make it stop. I now think it may be the single most valuable thing that happens in front of a camera, and that most of photography's history has been a slow, well-meaning campaign to edit it out.

We have inherited, from a very long tradition of image-making, the idea that a good model is a still one — composed, controlled, giving the lens exactly what it asked for and nothing it didn't. Vulnerability, in this tradition, is a flaw to be managed: soften it, direct around it, wait for it to pass before the shutter opens. I understand why. An unguarded person is unpredictable, and unpredictability is expensive on a set with a schedule.

But I have stood in enough rooms now to notice a pattern that the schedule never accounts for: the photographs everyone remembers, months later, long after the technically flawless ones have been forgotten, are almost always the ones where something real was risked in front of the lens. Not exposure of the body — I have written elsewhere about how little that has to do with any of this — but exposure of the specific, embarrassing truth of a person in that particular moment: grief that hadn't finished, joy that hadn't been made presentable yet, uncertainty about whether they were allowed to take up this much space. The tremor is the sound that truth makes on its way out. Editing it away doesn't produce a better photograph. It produces a more comfortable one, which is a different thing entirely, and usually a lesser one.

So I have started treating vulnerability the way a sculptor treats the grain of a difficult wood: not an obstacle to the intended shape, but the only reason the shape will be interesting once it exists. My work, increasingly, is to build a set where trembling is not something a model has to apologise for or hide before we can begin. Where it is, instead, understood as raw material — perhaps the only material in this entire practice that cannot be faked, purchased, or generated by anything that has never had something to lose.

I think often of the artists who work with fragile, temporary materials — ice that will melt during the exhibition, scent that will fade from a room by evening — and who build the disappearance into the work rather than fighting it. I try to photograph people the same way. Not despite what is unsteady in them that day, but because of it, and because it will not hold that particular shape again, for me or for anyone, ever.

— Anna

The researcher Brené Brown, after more than a decade studying this exact territory, defines vulnerability simply as "uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure" (Brown, Daring Greatly, 2012) — and argues it is the birthplace of connection, not its opposite. Every photographer I respect already knew this. It is good to have the research catch up.