click! Photography Changes Everything

Who We Are

Photography changes how we perceive ourselves

Story By
Jim Moore [ BIO ]

Jim Moore

Jim Moore, poet and educator, is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently, Lightning at Dinner, published by Graywolf Press (2005). His poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the American Poetry Review, the Nation, and the Paris Review, as well as in many other magazines and anthologies. Moore—a recipient of awards from the Bush Foundation, the LOFT Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, and the Minnesota State Arts Board—teaches in the MFA Program at Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Jim Moore, poet, contemplates what it feels like and what he’s learned from being photographed repeatedly.

My wife, JoAnn Verburg, has been photographing me for twenty-five years. As soon as we became serious about each other it started and though there are long periods where she doesn't photograph me, eventually she wants to work with me again.

Just as her approach to photographing me has changed over the years, my attitude as the model has changed. At first, when we were falling in love, I felt flattered that she wanted to photograph me. No one had ever looked at me with such intensity and for such long periods of time. I've heard her say that photographing me—some of these pictures were quite large heads—allowed her to get used to the idea of a big head waking up next to her each morning: it was a way to get to know me using her medium as a tool.

I suppose that being her model was also a way for me to get to know her as well: because, after all, she was not just observing me, I was observing her. Over time, my response to how it feels to be photographed has ranged widely: sometimes it has bored the hell out of me, other times it has put me in a meditative state (after all, when you’re being photographed with a large format camera and if you can't move for thirty or forty minutes, it does encourage an inner stillness as well as the outer stillness); most often—and most prosaically—it has put me to sleep. Literally. And this has suited her purposes as a photographer since she has focused on photographing me while I sleep.

I don't know that she would agree with what I am about to say but I believe that one of the reasons she so often photographs me asleep is that she is "practicing" for the day when I will die. As a poet, I believe that the most challenging conversations I have in my work are often with death. I think this is true for a lot of artists, whether writers or artists working in other mediums.

Sometimes JoAnn says, "Art is a wish." What her wish is, as an artist, I can't say for sure, but my wish, as a model, is that for the period of the time I am being photographed I might become someone who is somehow different from the man he usually is. While sometimes a nap is just a nap, occasionally it is more than that and I wake from it with a calm kind of clarity that visits rarely but is all the more welcome for that.

A number of years ago I wrote a poem that brought together some of my feelings about being photographed so often. As I read it over now, I realize that posing is also a sensual experience. In the kind of work that JoAnn does, it is very much about letting your body relax, open up, be present: life doesn't get any better than that.

You want me lying down and I, too, love the unbuckling,

the slow lowering, alone, onto the old green couch, eyes now

barely open. The camera stands stiffly on its tripod,

a kind of disciple in need of focusing from

someone like you who fusses over sleepers and serves

the world by preserving loss, one image at a time.

At first I track you as you move above my body.

Stretched out near sleep, I am the helpless universe you need,

someone about to lose himself to dreams, to disappear

beyond any purpose or hope a waking world can solve.

Alert and intense, you hover above me.

Meanwhile, I fall asleep. For me, it’s just another nap.