My Body(36)

In the photo, I’m holding a gigantic vase of flowers that completely covers my face. I’d purchased the flowers for my friend Mary’s birthday at a shop around the corner from my old apartment in NoHo. The arrangement was my own; I’d picked flowers from various buckets around the shop while telling the women behind the counter that a friend was turning forty. “I want this bouquet to look like her!” I’d said, grabbing a handful of lemon leaves.

I liked the shot the paparazzo got, but not because it was a good photo of me. I’m completely unrecognizable in it; only my bare legs and the big old-fashioned tweed blazer I was wearing are visible. The wild-looking flowers substitute for my head, as if the arrangement had grown skinny legs and thrown on dirty white sneakers—a bouquet hitting the concrete streets, taking a walk out on the town.

The next day, after I’d seen myself in the picture online, I sent it to Mary, writing, “I wish I actually had a flower bouquet for a head.”

“Ha! Same,” she wrote back immediately.

I posted the image to Instagram a few hours later, placing text on top of it in bold white caps that read “MOOD FOREVER.” Since “Blurred Lines,” paparazzi have lurked outside my front door. I’ve become accustomed to large men appearing suddenly between cars or jumping out from around corners, with glassy black holes where their faces should be. I posted the photograph of me using the bouquet as a shield on my Instagram because I liked what it said about my relationship with the paparazzi, and now I was being sued for it. I’ve become more familiar with seeing myself through the paparazzi’s lenses than I am with looking at myself in the mirror.

And I have learned that my image, my reflection, is not my own.



* * *



WHILE WE WERE together several years ago, my boyfriend befriended a guy who worked at an important international art gallery. The gallerist said we might want to take a look at its upcoming show of Richard Prince’s “Instagram Paintings.” The “paintings” were actually just images of Instagram posts, on which the artist had commented from his account, printed on oversize canvases. There was one of me in black and white: a nude photograph of my body in profile, seated with my head in my hands, my eyes narrowed and beckoning. The photo had been taken for a magazine cover.

Everyone, especially my boyfriend, made me feel like I should be honored to have been included in the series. Richard Prince is an important artist, and the implication was that I should feel grateful to him for deeming my image worthy of a painting. How validating. And a part of me was honored. I’d studied art at UCLA and could appreciate Prince’s Warholian take on Instagram. Still, I make my living off posing for photographs, and it felt strange that a big-time, fancy artist worth a lot more money than I am should be able to snatch one of my Instagram posts and sell it as his own.

The paintings were going for $80,000 apiece, and my boyfriend wanted to buy mine. At the time, I’d made just enough money to pay for half of a down payment on my first apartment with him. I was flattered by his desire to own the painting, but I didn’t feel the same urge to own the piece as he did. It seemed strange to me that he or I should have to buy back a picture of myself—especially one I had posted on Instagram, which up until then had felt like the only place where I could control how I present myself to the world, a shrine to my autonomy. If I wanted to see that picture every day, I could just look at my own grid.

To my boyfriend’s disappointment, his gallerist friend texted him only a few days later to say that a prominent collector wanted it.

I knew the gallerist through a bunch of different people and had met him once or twice, so it didn’t take long to find out what actually happened to the piece. The giant image of me was hanging above the couch in his West Village apartment.

“It’s kind of awkward,” a friend of mine said, describing the painting’s placement in the gallerist’s home. “He, like, sits under naked you.”

But it turned out Prince had made another Instagram painting of me, and this one was still available. The piece was a reproduction of a photo from my first appearance in Sports Illustrated. I was paid $150 for the shoot and a couple grand later, when the magazine came out, for the “usage” of my image. I hated most of the photos from that spread, because I didn’t look like myself: the makeup was too heavy, there were too many extensions in my hair, and the editors had kept telling me to smile in a fake way. But I did like a few of the images of me in body paint and had posted one of those pictures, which Prince then reused for this “painting.”

Prince’s comment on that post, included among several others at the bottom of the painting, alludes to an imagined day he has spent with me on the beach: “U told me the truth. U lost the []. No hurt. No upset. All energy bunny now that it’s sunny,” it reads. I liked the comment he left on this one far better than his comment on the black-and-white study, where he asks, “Were you built in a science lab by teenage boys?”

When I realized that my boyfriend and I had the opportunity to procure this one, it suddenly felt important to me that I own at least half of it; we decided to purchase it directly from the artist and split the cost down the middle. I liked the idea of getting into collecting art, and the Prince seemed like a smart investment. But mostly, I couldn’t imagine not having a claim on something that would hang in my home. And I knew my boyfriend felt like this was some kind of conquest; he’d worked hard to get it. I should be appreciative, I thought. Just split it with him. Besides, I was twenty-three; I hadn’t made enough money to comfortably spend $80,000 on art.