From the Magpie (Faces)

Novels are also mirror rooms, in a way; we read them “to see our reflections transformed, to wear another’s face.”

Magpie, definition, Cambridge Dictionary: 1) a bird with black and white feathers and a long tail, 2) someone who likes to collect many different objects, or use many different styles

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Kathy looks straight out from the photo in the Danny Lyon exhibit at the Whitney Museum. I can’t forget her face or stop looking at it in my mind. There are two Kathys, actually, in that exhibit, a younger one and an older one. I mean the older one, the one with the beehive and the cigarette in her hand, leaning against a bathroom wall. It is 1965 in the photo. The audio guide describes this Kathy as the matriarch of a biker clan that Lyon hung out with, and photographed often, but she looks too young to be a matriarch. Her expression is open, kind, somewhat curious. Maybe she’s amused, as in, Why do you want to take my picture leaning against the bathroom wall, Danny?

The toilet paper roll is clearly visible next to her. There is a towel heaped up on the bathroom sink. The dull wallpaper has a subtle curvilinear pattern; perhaps it is the visual contrast of figure and ground that intrigued Lyon. The contrast is between all the dull objects in the little room and Kathy’s face, which we see three times over because of the position of the two mirrors in the shot. We see her face simultaneously from the front, from the side, and from a slightly different front angle. Near, far, from this side or that, her face is like a bright coin on a gritty sidewalk. From every angle, from this chorus of angles, it says, My soul is alive. It still is, more than fifty years later. Lyon often photographed people in subcultures or in trouble or both, and as his friend, the curator Hugh Edwards, commented in 1966, “The pictures don’t ask you to ‘help’ these people, but something much more difficult: to be briefly and intensely aware of their existence.” There are landscapes and bodies and buildings in these photos, but over and over, there are faces that are so indelibly themselves, so illuminated by their own mysterious, interior worlds that it becomes almost painful to walk through the exhibit. You look at their faces, and you miss them already.

Perhaps that is the way one always feels about beloved faces, including one’s own. The Face: A Time Code is Ruth Ozeki’s book-length experiment in immersive attention, in which she studies her own face in a mirror for three hours and records what she sees and feels. In her own face, she finds the faces of her mother and father, the history of her mixed-race identity and how others have responded to her features, the evidence of childhood accidents, the memories of the projections of others that felt like masks or fantasies of what her face meant, and, of course, time itself.

We think that time is the enemy of the face, but this isn’t always the case. One of the Magpie’s friends had a facelift and when she saw her new/former face in the mirror she was alarmed, because it was the face she had had years before, when some terrible things had happened to her. She had thought that those dark times were over, but there was the face of that moment, an unavoidable reminder of a period she had worked hard to escape. This is a potential side effect of cosmetic surgery that isn’t generally mentioned. Like Tardis, the time machine in Doctor Who, a facelift can land you in unexpected, and frightening, places. Unlike with the Tardis, a facelift isn’t reversible, except by time itself, the very thing you wanted the facelift to counteract.

When I look at Kathy’s face, meet her gaze, it is as if her aliveness enters and illuminates me as well, not a facelift but a soul-lift. This is the great generosity of anyone who allows themselves to be photographed by a loving eye. Easier, by far, to be photographed by a cold eye, a cruel eye, a clinical eye; nothing will be given to the viewer except the photographer’s inherent minginess. But a loving eye, as Lyon’s seemed to be, inspires a personal gaze in return. Who are we, to partake of Kathy’s personal gaze? The shocking intimacy isn’t due to the fact that we’re in her bathroom, or someone’s; it’s that with her gaze she is looking at us with her entire self. It is a responsibility to look at her and an overwhelming gift to feel that her aliveness is some sort of mirror, that we are in that much-mirrored room with her together. Ozeki writes that novels are also mirror rooms, in a way, that “we read novels, after all, to see our reflections transformed, to enter another’s subjectivity, to wear another’s face, to live inside another’s skin.”

It’s a risky business, allowing oneself to be haunted by the faces of others. On a train the other day, I saw two lively little girls and their mother, all of them with high cheekbones and thick black hair. I thought they looked like people from the Andes, but, of course, I don’t know who they were or where they were going or where they were from. I have no idea who was in their faces, who they see when they look in the mirror. I don’t really know that the woman was the mother to the children, although she looked at them and spoke to them protectively and with an engagement that seemed to me maternal. I thought about their faces for the rest of that day, and I am still thinking about them. I liked their faces so much that I missed them the minute I saw them.

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Danny Lyon: Message to the Future is at Whitney Museum of American Art, until September 25, 2016.

The Face: A Time Code, by Ruth Ozeki, is out now from Restless Books