I Traded My Image for Money, Now I Want It Back

The largest archive of footage of myself, ages twenty-three to thirty-years-old, never belonged to me but is owned by brands.

This is Focus Group Archives, a column by Katiy Heath about navigating womanhood and identity within the beauty industry’s white corporate gaze.

Days before moving, I deleted my social media accounts. I entered my new apartment with little furniture, no photographs of myself—no indication of an identity pre-divorce. Because if I could erase all traces of my married self, then I could carry on acting as though that entire phase of my life never happened. I assumed this was required for my fresh start.

If you looked inside my previous apartment, down the hallway to the bedroom of the quiet brownstone, you would see a life in frames on the walls: 4x6s of a woman and a man posed as a smiling couple. In each, they appear content, happy. One print shows the couple and their Labrador retriever at the ridge of a famous amphitheater carved into mountains. In another, the pair is on a bridge, white rapids and leafless branches over their shoulders frozen in motion. Pause at the bookcase, reach past the dusty art deco clock in front of the blue wedding album, and flip the weighty pages containing the woman in a white dress at twenty-three-years-old.

It becomes more difficult to recall those details as each month passes. Part of my processing of the separation included dumping all photographs, including the blue album along with the 4x6s, into the trash.

The removal of any photo of us together on social media was more challenging; after swiping through hundreds of pictures, my profile, although sparse, was one that reflected an individual life. But anyone with a social media profile knows that a life experienced online is shared online, consisting of photo tags far beyond my way of retrieving. Erasing is never a clean process.

In the midst of change, it is easy to fixate on the little things. For weeks, instead of dividing my belongings into boxes, I spent hours in bed, untagging photo after photo of myself.

After uncoupling, the scope of erasure can seem infinite. Beyond social media, there are email addresses, car titles, lease agreements, Apple IDs, a driver’s license, a passport, frequent flyer miles, bank accounts. That doesn’t count the way a contact is saved in the phone of a colleague, or the postcards of you two on a tandem bicycle stamped and distributed across the homes of friends and relatives.

Money makes it easy to allow yourself to be absorbed by company cameras.

And when the coupled photos are gone, what record remains? Much of my existence as an individual documented from the last decade was never in my possession. The largest archive of footage of myself, ages twenty-three to thirty-years-old, is owned by brands. Seven years, managing, on average, twelve two-hour focus groups a week, I found my likeness as well as the likeness of the six women in each session all recorded for internal client use—the unique ripples along our hairlines, the way each woman’s jaw dips when she speaks, the pitch of our voices, close-ups of our name tags, all encoded into moving pixels.

Money makes it easy to allow yourself to be absorbed by company cameras. Continuous validation from clients, colleagues, and peers makes it near impossible to quit.

In the business of beauty, women are never fully adequate. My job makes it so I devote my time to presenting women with products to help make their personal image more complete. I never ask them to consider the consequences of trading their data to corporations for social approval. I try not to consider it myself.

*

In the midst of her own life change, San Francisco-based artist Lynn Hershman Leeson, created a new identity that she would end up performing for four years. Roberta Brietmore emerged in June of 1974 at the Dante Hotel in San Francisco with $1,800 in hand and began establishing herself as a real person.

Distinguishing artist from character, Breitmore applied a blonde wig and carefully designed face of makeup. Breitmore had her own walk, speech, mannerisms, and handwriting. As a new Bay Area resident, Breitmore received a credit card and checkbook from Bank of America. She had dental x-rays taken, earned her own driver’s license. Breitmore also signed an apartment lease, attended therapist appointments, went on dates, and obtained a social security card. According to Leeson, her character of Breitmore qualified for financial and social capital that Leeson herself did not. Did this make Breitmore more of a “real” person than her creator?

When Breitmore was invented, Leeson was recently divorced, unemployed, while also raising a young daughter and trying to prove herself as a professional artist. Initially, the Brietmore persona was a way for an artist to escape her current reality in exchange for an alternative, a reality crafted in her own vision, not defined by institutional failings or limitations. A statement about becoming a real, everywoman. Leeson knew what I had yet to learn: To be seen as a real woman is to accept the constant negotiation of feminine identity between the self and the world.

*

Post-divorce, mid-pandemic, I am now deliberating all that once made me feel real: wedding ring (gone); Facebook page (gone); job (temporarily paused), hotel key cards, airline itineraries, moderator name badge and clipboard waiting at the facility (gone, gone, gone, and gone).

If you walked into my new apartment, you would be surrounded by bare walls and countertops. An open floor plan where a broker once asked you to imagine filling the space with personal keepsakes. Walk around. Let your steps turn from soft to heavy. Imagine where you’ll display the Infant of Prague statue blessed by the Pope your grandmother brought back from Rome, and the magnets from the honeymoon in Paris. It’s getting harder but keep imagining the missing remnants from the past until you remember how you arrived here: on the sidewalk of this prewar rental with a newly shaped perm, pink lips, and an envelope of cash, as though you just appeared from the fog.

Part of what makes recalling the past difficult, is that nearly all memories are meshed with an old relationship, each is shared. What is mine is yours, yours mine. I liked and still believe in this sentiment. Partnerships can take this shared-life mentality to an extreme, and while we didn’t have a combined Facebook account or relationship hashtag, we might as well have.

We entered a joint union when social media platforms were just beginning to allow everyone to merge their on and offline worlds. Brands entered the space and began to act like humans, and humans began acting more like brands.

With the #brandyourself trend taking off, and the fact that my ex-husband and I both worked in the same industry, our marriage soon became viewed less as a partnership between two people and more as a co-branded coupledom. In matrimony, success is most often measured by longevity. Striving toward success, we curated similar Facebook timelines filled with recordings of every holiday, every vacation, every birthday and anniversary. Even the changing of my last name was positioned to me as what is best for the consistency of our future family. Because it was implied, that as a woman, I must not only share my narrative, but also defer to his. Soon each post, new ‘friend,’ and geo check-in needed spousal approval, or so it seemed.

If your personal narrative is tethered to someone else’s goals, there is little room for self-exploration. Despite what corporations want us to believe, brands are not humans, and humans are not brands. We are fickle, require autonomy and room for change. What happens when you realize the branding of your life is telling a different story than the one you had expected to write for yourself?

When your personal identity, your likeness, is at the center of your work, there is power in a woman’s ability to reinvent, manipulate, and reject new versions of themselves. Public figures like artists or celebrities aren’t the only people who rely on their likeness to make money. As a moderator, my likeness, I am often told, is what makes me good at my job. My likeness is the primary source of professional praise—my resemblance to an actress with ash blonde hair and dimples, any female in Hollywood known for doing more showing versus speaking in-scenes—my likeness is what is discussed in backrooms and meetings as though it were a line on my resume. If I were to go back and watch, what aspects of my likeness would I see on-screen?

Demonstrating the process of identity making—the act of becoming—was also a central theme for many female artists in the mid-seventies to early eighties: Ana Mendieta explored her experience as a female emigrant by using her naked figure to create silhouettes in nature, forming dialogue between the landscape and the body; Lorna Simpson uses photographs combined with words to confront conventional ideas about women, culture, and race; Lorraine O’Grady’s performance of the invented beauty queen “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire” involved crashing events in full character, protesting against the exclusion of Black people from the mainstream art world.

By expressing conflict of their identities within the system—a system led by and for predominantly white male audiences—each of these women exhibited how linked patriarchy and white supremacy are to capitalism: all three systems derive power from exploitation of identity.

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s making of Roberta Brietmore interrogates the systemic commodification of female identity by inventing a kind of likeness intended to be reproduced. In order to do this, Leeson recorded herself generating Breitmore’s character. In a short film, we see the alterations to the face and hair that would become a how-to guide for others to make the transformation. The camera cuts in and out of a close-up on Leeson’s face. She applies white contour makeup to lighten her dark eyebrows and thin the bridge of her nose, ultra-blue shadow to widen the arch of her eyes, and scarlet paint to change the pout of her lips. The camera cuts out and back in, and we see the curling of fake lashes. She fastens the blonde wig in place. Lynn now Breitmore, runs a hairbrush through, never breaking eye contact with herself in the vanity reflection as the camera continues shooting over her shoulder.

The more real Breitmore became, the more of the actual character was needed for encounters with people in the real world, which led to Leeson hiring performers, introducing three ‘Roberta’ multiples into rotation. The Roberta storyline was becoming less sustainable. By the end of the project, the likeness of Roberta Brietmore no longer belonged to her creator, but was now occupied and shaped by her environment.

*

Knowing footage exists of me that is not in my control is unsettling, which is how I ended up on the phone with customer support at FocusVision.

In the business of beauty, women are never fully adequate.

I am leaning over the edge of the tub, phone to ear. A young voice answers and I say that I need to access footage from groups conducted at the facility in Santa Monica the week of December 15th, 2015 (the last I moderated before the separation). I am placed on a hold. A smooth jazz piano improvises as my toes prune and I think of the representative ambling through the database like the stacks in a library, thumbing through each year of my life neatly arranged in volumes I-VII on a shelf. I would be willing to pay whatever the cost to get those seven volumes back, to catch a glimpse of a twenty-three-year-old me in her sundress phase or the silver-toned dial from my Shinola men’s watch that ticked against my left pulse. The representative comes back on the line and explains a new policy that automates the deletion of files. Before we disconnect, he offers an email for follow-up. It will help if I make it clear what I am looking for.

Because nothing on the internet dies, it is difficult to believe all records of the research Skincare Incorporated based a multi-billion-dollar brand on is gone forever. While I know the FocusVision archive will not appear in an advertisement, its contents inform the type of women, ideas, and products used in advertisements. How far does the line of exploitation extend when it comes to our image?

When strangers began phoning her house looking for her alter ego, Leeson knew she must end the Roberta Brietmore performance. Breitmore had fully manifested into her own complete person, and managing co-identities was no longer an option.

Leeson contemplated ending Breitmore through suicide over the Golden Gate bridge. But in the end, the project finished in 1978 through a theatrical exorcism at the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, Italy. During the final performance, a Breitmore multiple, played by artist Kristine Stiles, entered the gallery by emotive dance using Breitmore’s body language and gestures. From her wrists to her buckled Mary Janes, she was in concentrated movement. A photograph of the character construction chart was set aflame and when the smoke cleared the audience saw the Breitmore multiple in final position next to a coffinlike vitrine, one the size of a small basin.

*

I follow up with an email to customer service and more months pass. Leaves change and then fall before I finally receive a curt response from someone named Nancy, who informs me that they will not be able to recover the file.

I ruminate on the possible footage Nancy and her team can still access without my consent. Are the day-one-endometriosis-cramps more obvious than I realize? Do viewers hear mumbling? Am I strategically tacit, or do I come off as passive, or meek?

Or what if what Nancy wrote is true, that all footage of my past self is gone? That the tedium and energy spent searching and deleting has culminated into closure and a squeaky-clean ending.

But erasing is never a clean process; it leaves traces of what has been extracted behind.

So, I am not all that surprised when I come across a file on an old hard drive hidden among training materials and transcripts.

I decide to watch on mute. I hit play, and the video opens on a shot of me in the moderator’s seat. The camera is recording from above the two-way mirror, picking up all six faces of the respondents and the back of my neck.

The ring on my left hand and the odd, neon-colored furniture transport me back to a session held in New York, but the date is fuzzy. I see myself in a white cardigan, resting both elbows on the sides of the chair, only slightly tilting my head every once and awhile to show engagement.

A question is asked, a participant talks, and my right wrist rolls and twists, choreographed to those who speak, while the rest of my body remains still. On mute, the anxious wrist rolling appears more obvious, more exaggerated as each minute passes. The more I watch, the more I hope that it will become clear what I am looking for.

There is something sad about watching old footage and seeing yourself wasting time. Looking at a version of me who cannot stand-up and walk out on her situation. There is something even more wrenching when I consider the hours spent trying to modify the past.

Can you erase too much? When you’ve exhausted the erasing process, what’s left? I thought I had to edit the past or risk smudging the potential of my thirties with the mistakes of my twenties. Why would I think it’s possible to try and erase my way into feeling whole again?

The clock on the dashboard tells me more than an hour has passed. I decide not to watch it through to the end. I consider dragging the file to the trashcan icon on the desktop, but instead power down until the screen goes black.