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Topic: Snap (09/04/08)
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TITLE: Snapshot of a Life Unlived | Previous Challenge Entry
By K Donnelly
09/11/08 -
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How can we know the dancer from the dance?
-- W. B. Yeats
A decades-old mustiness and a yellowing Polaroid divided pages 73 and 74 of A Guidebook to Syria. Out of the barren landscape of bric-a-brac and romance novels, it announced its significance. I bought the book and kept the photograph. It shows a girl of eleven years old propped in the doorway of a crowded disco: she is tomboyish in posture, glossy-eyed; her face is geisha-pale and finger-streaked with make-up. She wears a red nylon dress. Under the harsh, theatrical lighting, shadows find the hollows of her body, casting an inappropriate sensuousness to her prepubescent form. Theatrical lighting illuminates her – but it is somehow as though she alone is the source of this clash between light and dark. There is a poignant muteness to the picture which is challenged only by the expression on her face. It is the expression of a girl at the very moment of change – a drama of suggestion, a snapshot of potential, fused with an almost imperceptible inevitability. The shutter button descends between rebellion and resignation. It is a moment of realisation and of finality. A shaded, hairy arm passes into half light---
Somewhere, out of shot, a man claps his hands and a crowd of girls, heavily made up, move passively onto a dance floor where men in linen suits circle. Mothers in traditional dress huddle in a dark corner scoping for clients. If you turn to the left you can see the woman on the fold down chair watching the girl in the red dress. They have the same nose. Turn right, zoom in: the bambiesque face of a frightened teenager.
‘Dance with me, won’t you dance?’
The air is dense with money tonight. Phone numbers are exchanged and will be dialled later by those huddling mothers. ‘Thirty, twenty then – final offer, take it or leave it.’
Vision without a self, scanning, recording, ‘Will you dance tonight?’ ‘She’s worth every penny.’
And do you see how they bend and sway, bend and sway like poplars under the men’s gaze? It’s a wonder they have functioning eyes at all. The shutters are open tonight, have her strike a pose. (Pictures are extra.)
The woman in the fold down chair watches the man who watches the girl in the red dress who watches nothing. The woman rises. Look closer now as she fumbles with her pen-torch in the semi-darkness, now switches it on, now shines it on her daughter as a signal. It isn’t necessary – he has already fixed her with the finality of a glossy colour picture. An arm reaches beyond the frame of the lens – click – and finds the tensed slope of a girlish shoulder.
It has been years since I found the photograph, decades since it was taken. But sometimes, it seems she might still exist somewhere, that girl in the red dress. Sometimes it seems that the picture in front of me is just a projection, that if I were to go looking for her I’d find her leaning against that same doorway, eyes glazed with contradiction, arms crossed against herself. But then reality intrudes, time resumes, and she remains the delayed rays of a distant star long since burned out. The arm of finality is already poised to find her thin shoulder - has already found it. In the absent click of the camera her fate was sealed. And often I wonder who the guidebook belonged to. Did he want a memento of depravity or was it an attempt to preserve her life? Like a cheap souvenir, it is the corpse of an experience – both a signifier of life, and harbinger of death. The arm that reached out for her could only ever be his. Photographer, or butterfly collector? The snap of his snapshot pinned her, pins her, to the passive pictorial. Past, present, future.
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Lovely story 'developed' from a photo.