Photographs

I just had photos made for my new Alien Registration Card. All foreigners in Taiwan need an ARC and all ARCs must have a photo. I hate having photos taken of myself. It’s not necessarily that I don’t like what I look like, it’s that I can’t recognize myself in the picture. I never could. Not since childhood. That person is not me. I’m much shorter. I have dark hair. A less bulbous nose.

It’s a very strange thing. Everyone else can see you, but you can’t see yourself. Not your face anyway. You can look at yourself in a mirror of course but the mirror always presents a partial, and completely staged, image. As a result, no one really knows what they themselves look like. We are all more or less mistaken about the most salient fact about ourselves — our looks.

I should write more about this in some context. It’s very interesting.

When I lived in London I had passport photos taken in a shop on Oxford Street. It was an obscure establishment with a perilously steep staircase leading up to a studio on the second floor. Yet once upon a time it must have been a famous place. There was a large collection of pictures of previous customers on the wall, including people like John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, George Harrison and Mick Jagger. Most of them were taken in the Swinging Sixties. Maybe this was one of the few places that did passport photos back then.

I suddenly realized I had found a private key to a line of a Beatles’ lyric. In Penny Lane there is “a barber showing photographs of every head he had the pleasure to know.” And of course some barbers have pictures on the wall showing examples of the kinds of haircuts you can get. Yet it doesn’t seem likely that a barber bothers to take photos of all of his customer. A photographer, however, does. On the wall of that place on Oxford Street the photographer was literally “showing photographs of every head he had the pleasure to know” (the famous ones at least). And Paul McCartney, responsible for Penny Lane, had obviously been one of those customers.