Make It Scream, Make It Burn, page 14
This kitchen-table shot is also, of course, a photograph of the photographer—her cameras resting on the table. Another photo shows Annie’s shadow falling across a stack of bricks, and this image feels like a confession: I was there. She was part of it. Her photographs insist upon the mess of subjectivity, the tangle of caring and caring for, of getting angry and coming back. In a 2000 photograph taken at Doña Lupe’s house, Annie crouches in front of Carlos with a camera held up to her face as he laughs and the rest of the family watches. She is at the center of the frame, but of all the people in the photo, hers is the only face you cannot see—as if she is confessing her desire to erase herself, as well as her understanding that this cannot ever fully happen.
Self-portrait with María and Jaime, 1995
Annie has transcribed her Mexico journeys in a series of diaries that now total more than a thousand pages. They describe long naps on the couch with the youngest baby, Viviana, sleeping on her chest, feeling her tiny heart beat twice as fast as her own; or sweltering afternoons spent at the river with Carlos, watching him catch a two-inch fish in an empty can of Orange Fanta, letting him sling green algae at her forehead and then getting him back by smearing it between his shoulder blades. These diary entries are a reminder that the documentarian was also, always, a woman drying her socks on the windowsill and getting eaten alive by the “night shift” of mosquitoes, a woman who got irritated and tired, who drank cold beers alone when she was exhausted by the relentless communion she craved, who was heartbroken by a lover’s betrayal back in California or by her father’s death in Texas—who brought those griefs with her. They soften the diary pages like humidity.
Annie always knew how absurd it was to arrive in Baja or San Martín or Tijuana and complain about her “grumpy boss” alongside everything María and her kids were facing. Her journals confess how the lens sometimes felt like a necessary buffer between their lives and her own guilt: “No electricity, for some reason, at Lupe’s tonight, so I was officially excused from picture-taking, and couldn’t stomach hanging out in her house without the distraction of work to keep me from thinking too much about how impossible the way they live is.” It wasn’t always romantic to watch the kids do homework by candlelight.
Getting involved never felt sufficient, but it started to seem necessary. After María’s youngest brother, Guillermo, came across the border with his family, Annie kept taking photographs of their new life in the States. And when Guillermo faced deportation, Annie wrote a letter on his behalf and helped his wife, Gloria, look for a house to rent in a different town. After taking photographs of Gloria at work—picking grapes in a vineyard, her scarf-wrapped face almost hidden among the vines—Annie purposefully tracked muddy footprints across the floor of the vineyard’s upscale tasting room. She wanted to bring dirt into a room that had forgotten the hands picking the grapes outside, or had never cared at all—had never cared about the woman who’d crossed a desert pregnant, who supported an infant daughter with a chronic lung disease while living with the daily terror that her husband might get deported. Annie understood her own muddy footprints as an act of insistence, the ways her photographs were an act of insistence: that this woman existed, that her life mattered.
It can be easy to believe that a documentary project requires absence in order to do its work most effectively: that the writer or photographer or filmmaker should step out of the frame in order to leave room for her subjects. Early in her Mexico project, Annie fantasized about this kind of invisibility: “relinquishing self 100% so as to become a blank canvas of sorts, on which I can record the true colors of the situation at hand.” But for me, Annie’s work succeeds because it fails at making her absent. She’s at the kitchen table. Her shadow falls across the bricks. Her photos are saturated by the full range of her feelings: admiration of Jaime’s curiosity, rage at his drunken violence. Her presence isn’t cumbersome baggage, but part of the work itself. “Self” and “other” are not forces caught in a zero-sum game. Annie’s failure to remove herself entirely doesn’t obstruct what she documents, it widens the scope of what she’s documenting: not just her subjects but the emotional complexity of photographing them. She confesses her own residue. She owns the taint of artistry.
Self-portrait with the family at Doña Lupe’s house, 2000
The language of photography conjures aggression and theft: You shoot a picture. You take a photograph. You capture an image or a moment. It is as if life—or the world, or other people, or time itself—has to be forcibly plundered, or stolen.
If you take a photograph, what do you give in return? In the early years, Annie knew that a single paycheck from her day job could pay for a year of textbooks for María’s kids, or even a few months’ rent. She gave what she could: cash, art supplies, backpacks, new shoes, bananas, beans. Her budgets list the pesos she spent on each trip: for a waterpark trip with María’s sons, for jicama and toothpaste, for mangoes and tortillas, for a birdcage for Doña Lupe, for tickets to the hypnotist and popcorn at the show. Each time she returned, she brought back prints for everyone in the family, giving them back to themselves.
When María needed to get one of her rotten front teeth pulled—it made her too self-conscious to smile—she asked Annie for the money to get it done. Annie said she would give her the money to fix her teeth if María would start smiling for her photographs. It was a joke, and also something more complicated than a joke—an acknowledgment of the ongoing transaction that framed their deepening intimacy.
When Annie finally gave María the money, María didn’t use it for her teeth. Five years later, María asked again, and got the money again, and didn’t use it for her teeth again. Annie felt betrayed both times, and judged herself—both times—for feeling that way.
What did María use the money for? Clothes for the kids. Tortillas. Propane.
After Jaime switched from tequila to heroin, and his abuse grew intolerable, María asked Annie for the money to leave him. Years later, Annie recalled their talk this way:
María called to ask me for help after she’d finally decided to flee Jaime’s violence against her and the children. One hundred dollars for six bus tickets and a thirty-six-hour bus ride home. Was it right? And if I’d denied her request for help? A different life for them all. I’ve wondered if I did the right thing for ten years now. Looking at photos from that time, I identified a bottle in Jaime’s hand for a majority of the images. I’d forgotten that part, like the feeling of fear when he beat her in front of me that time.
Once Annie had gotten close enough to María and her family, not doing anything started to feel like doing something, too. When María’s elder daughters accused her second partner, Andres, of beating them when they refused his sexual advances, Annie thought about giving María a month’s rent so she could get a place of her own. “Discovered that a house the size of María’s current place runs $30 U.S. a month,” Annie wrote in her journal. “Thought I could pay her rent in advance if she wants to leave this abusive man…What should I do? What shouldn’t I do?” She didn’t end up offering rent for a new place, but she did tell Andres she was aware of his abuse, and willing to defend María: “I stood a foot away from him, and face to face I whispered, ‘Should I hit you with my new belt? Which end should I use—the metal buckle, or the smooth side? Show me how to do it properly, Andres.’”
In one journal entry, Annie instructs herself, “Always say yes,” but her diaries also confess the times she didn’t: the time she didn’t pay for Doña Lupe’s propane tank, the time she didn’t give María her favorite green sweater, the times she needed to be alone for the day. She never gave anyone in the family her address because she knew if they ever crossed the border and showed up at her home, she wouldn’t be able to turn them away.
When photographer Mary Ellen Mark and her husband, Martin Bell, were making their 1983 documentary Streetwise, centered on a thirteen-year-old Seattle prostitute named Tiny, they were constantly torn about how much help to offer. It can feel inhuman to document pain without trying to ameliorate it. But a documentary project can become unsustainable when it claims the additional responsibility of aid. And it’s also true that for some subjects no amount of aid will ever feel like enough. Mark and Bell never gave the kids they were filming money, but they did give them food, jackets, and shoes. When they went back to New York after they were done shooting, they offered to take Tiny with them—“to adopt her, essentially,” as Bell put it. The only condition was that she go to school, which she didn’t want to do, so she didn’t go with them. They stayed in touch with her for decades, and nineteen years later, she told them: “I think about it all the time. The fact that I didn’t come.”
In 1993, while South African photojournalist Kevin Carter was taking photographs of the rebels in Sudan, he captured an image that would become famous: a skeletal toddler crawling on the dirt toward a feeding station while a vulture perched behind him. Carter crouched down carefully—not wanting to disturb the bird, so he could get the best possible shot—then waited twenty minutes for the bird to fly off; when it didn’t, he shooed it away and let the boy continue on his journey. Carter didn’t bring the boy food. He didn’t take him to the feeding station. He simply sat under a tree, and smoked, and wept. “He was depressed afterward,” one friend reported. “He kept saying he wanted to hug his daughter.” Fourteen months later, the photograph won him a Pulitzer Prize. “I swear I got the most applause of anybody,” he wrote to his parents after the ceremony, but two months later he killed himself at the age of thirty-three. In the note he left behind, he said: “The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist.”
In her diaries, Annie interrogates all the mythic versions of herself that she has wanted to believe in. “What truths shall I tell?” she wonders. “Paint myself as savior?” For decades, she has struggled against her desire to become one. In one entry she describes herself as a “naked, vulnerable, egotistical, self-absorbed artist masquerading as a well-intentioned ‘do-gooder,’ such an effective mask I’d even convinced myself.” After years, she finally told herself, “Not my job to play karma cop.”
I first discovered Annie’s work five years ago, when she wrote me an email saying she felt a kinship between her photographs and my writing—in particular, an essay I’d written about James Agee and his expansive, relentless, guilt-ridden book about sharecropper families in Alabama. When Annie described the duration of her own documentary project, I felt humbled. At that point, it already comprised more than twenty visits. It made me ashamed of the ways I’d written about the lives of others after knowing them for a year, or even a month. How meager that seemed in the face of Annie’s ongoing gaze. The ethical divide between showing up and coming back loomed large; it made me feel accused. This was respect, I thought: to look and keep looking, not to look away as soon as you’d gotten what you needed. Respect meant letting your subjects get older, letting them get more complicated, letting them subvert the narratives you’d written for them. It meant having enough stamina and humility to say: I’m not done. I haven’t seen enough. In one diary entry, nine years into her project, Annie wrote: “I understand nothing.”
From the beginning, Annie’s Mexico project struck me as a spiritual descendant of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, not only because both projects involved privileged white artists documenting impoverished families, but because both projects were fueled by a persistent sense of their own incompleteness. When it came to ongoingness, Annie had Agee beat. While he’d reported for months, she’d been coming back for decades. But both of them were hounded by the suspicion that no matter how much they said or showed, it would never be enough to conjure their subjects fully. The part of Annie that confessed she understood nothing could have been speaking directly to the part of Agee that worried his efforts would be failures, or at least wanted that confession contained within his project; the part of him that worried his words were not enough, that wanted to offer broken plates and excrement instead of sentences and paragraphs.
As I kept corresponding with Annie, I frequently felt flooded by her desire for connection and communion. For every note I sent to her, I got three back; for every reply, three more. (After I mentioned that to her, I got an email from her with the subject line My third reply.) It didn’t feel foreign to me, her hunger, but deeply intuitive: it spoke to the part of me that had stayed on the phone with my high-school girlfriends for hours each night, even though we’d already spent the entire day together; that thrill of feeling no borders between us, the futile attempt to reach a saturation state of closeness in which there was nothing we hadn’t shared.
The first time Annie and I met in person, it was for coffee in a hotel lobby, and I arrived to find she had brought two huge suitcases and started unloading their contents across several coffee tables. It was an array of her own prints alongside a spread of books that had inspired her. She’d set up a light stand so she could take my portrait. It was excessive. It was taking up room. I loved it. She was an agile, quick-moving woman with sandy blond hair cropped short around her ears. She radiated momentum and appetite.
In one of her letters to me, Annie said she missed in herself “a sense of inner boundaries that I have longed to understand since childhood.” Over the years, I’ve started to suspect that whatever force prevents these boundaries from finding purchase inside her—her unquenched curiosity, her porousness, her hunger for fuller exchange—is also precisely what carries her back to Mexico over and over again. She once told me about her fascination with the construction crew that perpetually painted and repainted the Long Beach bridge. She could see them from her studio window. They would spend a year repainting one side, then a year repainting the other, in a never-ending loop. “All these years later I can see my early obsession with the idea of ‘process’ taking shape,” she told me, remembering her fascination with those painters and their endless job. “Little did I know at the time this would one day describe me too.”
When I finally wrote about Annie’s work, in a brief essay to accompany a magazine portfolio of her Mexico photos, the piece upset her. I wondered if the critical distance of writing about her rather than to her felt like a boundary erected between us. She said the writing had made her feel betrayed and exposed, and she articulated that reaction as a kind of abandonment, as if I’d left her by removing too much of my own subjectivity. “Where are you in this, Leslie?” she wrote. “It does not even sound like your voice.” Apologizing a few months later, she said: “It was my own inability to handle the intensity of your gaze, and the naked truth.”
I have spent much of my life as a writer chasing poet C. D. Wright’s suggestion that we try to see people “as they elect to be seen, in their larger selves.” But it’s an impossible dream. Making art about other people always means seeing them as you see them, rather than mirroring the way they would elect to be seen. And yet I felt defensive of Annie. In the face of the ways others might dismiss her obsessiveness as pathology or excess, I felt protective of her relentless drive toward connection and her compulsion to make herself vulnerable, to communicate fully, to say everything, to document everything, to capture every nuance, every complexity. At a certain point, I started to suspect that my ongoing obsession with Annie’s obsession stemmed partially from a savior complex of my own—my attempt to defend an outsider artist who was almost stubbornly uncool in her methods and her affect, who was gloriously unrestrained and sentimental, who didn’t apologize for being earnest. Sometimes the relationship between artist and subject can get messy and overwhelming. Agee knew it, and so did Annie, and so did I.
Annie’s impulse to keep expanding her project plays out a certain fantasy I’ve felt in my own work: to put no boundaries around my evocation of my subjects, to make them infinite, to let them keep going forever. Representing people always involves reducing them, and calling a project “done” involves making an uneasy truce with that reduction. But some part of me rails against that compression. Some part of me wants to keep saying: there’s more, there’s more, there’s more. It’s why I often write ten thousand more words than I was assigned.
It’s back to the Borges problem: in order to do justice to the world, the map has to reproduce the world in its entirety. But does more of a thing always make it truer? If the average length of a photographic exposure is one-sixtieth of a second, Spencer observed, that means Annie has cumulatively captured only about six minutes of her subjects’ lives. But the force of Annie’s work isn’t the achievement of a complete gaze. It’s the yearning for completion. Her work succeeds most fully not as a comprehensive account of a family but as an account of her longing to know them—as a testimony, more broadly, to the human desire to witness other people.
There is something contagious about her obsession. It has certainly infected me—her sense that no account can ever be complete, or enough. If Annie feels it about María and her family, then I’ve come to feel it about her. Her appetite has started to seem ecstatic, her drive toward connection almost Whitmanesque: a generative superpower. And I’m convinced that the fulfillment of her longing would only take away the engine of her art.
Carmelita and Diego, 2017
Every time I hear from Annie, she tells me that the Mexico project has gotten larger: another trip, another set of photographs, another series of entries in her ever-expanding diary. In recent years many of these trips have involved visiting María’s brother Guillermo and his family in the various American cities where they have lived, and on each trip she plunges right into the grain of their lives: going to church with Guillermo to pray he won’t get deported, helping Gloria straighten out a tax reimbursement, listening to their daughter tell stories about her Tinker Bell doll and to their son talk about wanting to go to medical school because he has been so deeply affected by his younger sister’s lung disease. Even though Annie initially decided it wouldn’t be wise to give Guillermo her home address, she eventually ended up not only giving him her address but inviting him to visit her in San Pedro.
