“Now, scrunch your toes and think of Brad Pitt”

These were the instructions from the photographer also a Brad (Delaney), who was shooting my author headshots. He said this whenever I became self-conscious, which was rather a lot. “What actor do you like?” he had asked me early on. I’d said Brad Pitt because I’d recently seen his acceptance speech at the Golden Globes and he’s not just pleasing to look at, he’s a funny guy. I like funny guys. My partner is a funny guy.  Anyway, as I’m not comfortable with having my photo taken, BD was attempting to relax me, to give me something else to think about other than how weird I felt, or whether I was projecting the serial killer vibe.  Someone told me once I had serial killer eyes and this has stayed with me.

I’ve never been easy in front of a camera. The person I see in photographs doesn’t resemble how I feel inside. That person is a shock. I can’t understand how the people I love can put her together with me into a cohesive whole for long enough to share a meal and a movie. It’s absurd, but it’s clear to me, they do it, and often. BD instinctively understands the phenomenon. He says most people our age don’t understand how to approach the camera, unless they are actors or models and it’s their job. We haven’t had the selfie training. We go blank (resting bitch-face), we draw back (highlighting double chins), we widen the eyes too much (serial killer), we stretch the smile without opening the mouth (crazed serial killer) and with each successive failure, we further entrench our beliefs about our poor photographic performance.

Did you know, if you engage a very small muscle under the eye, the one you use to wink (but keep the upper lid still), you appear interested in your audience? If you don’t, you can appear blank or bored or full of yourself. It’s amazing, right. There are people like BD who have such a handle on body language down to that smallest muscle below the eye. I’m flabbergasted when he tells me this. Less so, when he tells me he comes from a family of artists. Artists notice things. It is their job to focus on the internal and the external all at once.

The dissonance I experience when I look at photos of myself is like gravel rash. It’s my interior world rubbing up against my exterior world. And I’m a writer right, and so my interior world is so much bigger. It’s where I spend most of my time. I often have food on my face and don’t know it. It can be there the whole day and I still won’t know it until I’m brushing my teeth that night. As a journalist, I was better. I’d focus on an interviewee intently, but I’m not really visual. I wouldn’t be able to tell you what they were wearing afterward. I could tell you exactly how they said something, though. I would be listening for tone.

Anyway, BD would take a few photos of me standing up against a plain backdrop with two large diffused lights just centimetres from my cheeks and then we would retire to a huge computer screen and view them. It’s was very confronting – this big me. This is when he would show me where I needed to adjust things. He said there are only three things we can change on our face, our eyebrows, our eyes and our mouth. That simplified things. Surely, I can do those three things? Then, we’d go back and try again.

I don’t remember how often we did this, but I do know it wasn’t long before I was no longer confronted by ‘big me’. I could sit and examine the photographs, like I was looking at someone else. Editing my writing is very much like this. It requires an emotional uncoupling of the self from the work. In the case of writing, it’s about not loving everything you write, just because you wrote it. With photography it’s about seeing the emotion in a face and respecting that. It’s about stripping away the layers of emotional baggage, so you can see what is special, what loved ones see. It’s epiphanic. I left changed. More together somehow, the dissonance, if not gone, then muted. That is no small thing. Thank you, Brad. Brad Delaney, I mean.

If you are curious to see more of Brad’s work, visit him at The Headshot Guys.