I am forever looking up art galleries and museums when I’m traveling to new cities. I was in Calgary for a poetry reading with the Flywheel Reading Series (established by Filling Station Magazine) this past weekend, so I knew I wanted to visit the Glenbow Museum. It’s a fabulous place, but add in the lure of an exhibit of Frida Kahlo’s home photos and, well, I was bound to find it.
Kahlo’s father was a professional photographer, so she grew up around cameras. I’m assuming, too, that as a visual artist, other artistic mediums would appeal to her. As a writer who is inspired by visual art and photography, by images, I can see how this connection would also appeal to a visual artist. The Glenbow exhibit includes 241 photos of the 6500 images that were revealed to the public in 2007 by the Frida Kahlo Museum. These 241 photos are fascinating, but I left the museum wanting more, mindful of how much I am drawn to Kahlo’s life story. (Her work intrigues me, but I can imagine that such brilliant work would have been the result of a unique woman who would’ve been interesting to talk to over a cup of tea. I’d say the same of other creative women who inspire me as a writer. They would include women like Virginia Woolf, Georgia O’Keefe, Emily Carr, and Leonora Carrington….and then I’d probably throw Maud Gonne into the mix because I find her to be a Yeatsian paradox of the highest order! Now, that would be some dinner party…)
What struck me most about this exhibit, and there were plenty of photos to look at on Saturday morning, were the photos that documented Kahlo’s life after her tram accident. Her love of theatre, and costuming, too, intrigues me. She became an artistic subject, the ‘leading lady,’ really, in her own life, and in a life which she created as a sort of living mythos. I don’t know how many artists do this, take (and paint) their self-portraits to such an prolific extent. I think, somehow, of Emily Carr, and of how there are plenty of iconic historical photos of her, some of my favourites being the ones with Woo, her pet monkey. Still, she really didn’t paint herself into those beautiful, raw British Columbia forests she so loved to capture in colour.
The thing about Frida is that her accident changed the way she viewed (and lived in) her physical body. If you think of how complex women’s relationships are with their bodies, and then you add something like chronic pain and amputation to the mix, I can imagine the story a woman would tell herself would be a source of creative material. This sounds rather sadistic, but as a writer, I think it wouldn’t be too far fetched for a woman to feel out new ways of being and experiencing the world through her physical body, even if it’s so badly wounded. It is, after all, still her body.
Kahlo’s tram accident, when she was just eighteen, broke her body. As Mauricio Ortiz writes in an essay titled “The Broken Body,” the effects of the tram accident included: an abdomen “pierced by an iron bar…” and “her elbows, spine, pelvis, right foot and right leg were fractured in various places.” Ortiz goes on to say that her life was complex, indeed. She had a miscarriage and two surgical abortions, as well as suffering from alcoholism, nicotine addiction, and anorexia. Kahlo died in 1954, at 47 years of age, under suspicious circumstances that point to suicide. One can only imagine the body and breadth of art work that would have been created after such a young age, if she had only lived longer. But one can also imagine the intense and constant pain she must have suffered from after her accident.
There are a number of Kahlo paintings that speak to her physical agony. They are well known. The photographs are so raw, though. There are the ones where she is draped over herself in a hospital bed in New York City, in 1946, her long hair obscuring her face, but her hands are clasped together in a pose that evokes a keen sense of despair and defeat. The photo of her head in traction, taken in 1940 in Mexico City, depicts a woman who stares directly and defiantly into the camera lens. She wants to make you feel her discomfort, so that you can imagine and feel how trapped she was in that body of hers.
And then there are the photos of her painting in bed, a canvas rigged up above her head, her right arm raised and her head still in traction. It looks painful, definitely, but you can see from her face that she delighted in creating paintings. It was a way to escape from the physical pain, her creation of art. In 1953, she dealt with the onset of gangrene in her right foot. This was the year she lost her right leg and foot to an amputation just below the knee.
I had known of Kahlo’s amputation before seeing “Frida Kahlo: Her Photos” at the Glenbow Museum last weekend. For me, amputation has a strong personal connection. My mother suffered from vascular issues and gangrene in the year before she died, and had a trans-metatarsal amputation of her right foot. She was bedridden for the rest of her life, directly as a result of that amputation. In my experience, physical amputation is unlike any other pain, but I can only say this from close observation. The psychological effect for a woman, of having part of a foot or leg taken off, is damning. The importance of the human foot, which we often won’t spend time thinking about, is key to all ambulation. We balance on the balls of our feet, we wiggle our toes, we swirl our ankles in circle when they are stiff. We walk. We dance. We shuffle. We don’t think about our feet, really, until we lose them.
In Frida’s case, she wore beautiful long skirts to hide her damaged legs and feet. In the case of modern amputation, people will bandage up body parts in gauze and try to hide the carnage. When you see the state of an amputated foot, with toe bones emerging from an unhealed forefoot, well, you can imagine that being bedridden is often par for the course. In a diary entry dated March 11, 1954, Kahlo wrote: “My leg was amputated six months ago. It feels like years of torture, and I have almost lost my mind at times. I still feel like killing myself…I’ve never suffered more in my life. I’ll wait a little longer.” The despair is there. How could it not be? This does not, either, take into account the surreal experience of phantom limb pain, and of how the amputee must deal with pain in a part of the body which no longer exists. The mind plays cruel tricks…
Before the amputation, though, Kahlo’s photos in hospitals are interesting because she juxtaposes images of chronic pain with images that are highly seductive. There is one photo, taken in New York City in 1946, where Kahlo is on her belly. Her face is tilted towards the camera, her hair cascading around her shoulders, one hand on the pillow next to her, and her back is partially bared. What changes this photograph from being one of pain to being one that is almost sensually charged is that she looks directly at the camera. This, in itself, is nothing out of the ordinary. She seemed to like looking directly into camera lenses. There is, though, a sense of something secret in her gaze, a sparkle, a bit of seduction, as if she is owning her sexuality despite her brokenness. There’s a great sense of spirit and rebellion in this pose and photo. She is not “done” in this photo. She is still fighting. It comes eight years before the pain became too much and before the morphine became the better lover.
And then I will come to Susan Sontag’s fabulous book, On Photography, which I’m reading right now. (It’s funny how books come to me when I most need them to…all divine timing and serendipity of the highest order.) Fiddling with notions of Kahlo’s broken body in my mind, and of how women view their physical bodies, and of how men view women’s bodies through the infamous ‘male gaze,’ and jotting down lines for some ekphrastic poems that will investigate these notions, I was sitting in Pages Bookstore in Calgary on Saturday night, right up next to a shelf of books. My friend, Calgary writer and editor, Sandra McIntyre, ran her fingers along a shelf, found one, pulled it out, passed it to me, and said, “Oh, Kim! Have you read this? By Sontag? Not just a book about photography, but a piece about art. You’d love it.” So, this is the way I have come to spend time with Susan Sontag this week: during a delay in the Calgary Airport, sitting with a cup of cinnamon tea on a Wednesday night after listening to a poetry reading in Windsor, and reading next to a snoring shih tzu who is pretty much totally blind now.
First released in the early 1970s, a lot of what Sontag writes about is now even more timely, especially given how even the most inept among us can ‘point and click’ our iPhone camera and seem to be Instagram-worthy world renowned photographers. As she wrote in the 70s, “To photograph is to confer importance.” This works for me, as I am forever taking and posting photos of trees on my Instagram account. Well, trees, dogs, skies, bodies of water, and also abandoned houses. These are the things that seem to draw me in, as a viewer, a human, and as a poet. I gather images when I photograph things. I pull my car over on back roads, or I have my friend, Jen, stop the canoe when I see the sun hitting a high ridge of rock near Killarney in a soul-stirring way. (I can be an annoying hiking or canoeing partner…gathering images….always exclaiming “Oh, my God! So beautiful!”) So. All that is to say that I confer importance on the natural landscapes into which I choose to enter. I don’t really like cities, but give me the woods, or a lake, a brilliant sunrise or sunset, or just a general preponderance of trees…and I’m lost. As Sontag writes, the compulsion to photograph something is a way “to turn experience itself into a way of seeing.” Yes. I get that. A lot. I also see my love of photography as a way to remember things I’ve experienced, a log of my life’s moments. Maybe some will transform themselves into lines of poetry, or find themselves in a short story or novel or on stage in a play, but I mostly just want to see where I’ve been, to capture that essence in memory. Social media just serves as a way to archive or catalogue, I guess…and if a few friends stop by along the way, that’s okay, too.
So, when I think of Frida Kahlo’s collection of old family photos, and then of Susan Sontag’s On Photography, I think about how images work, how we notice things that begin to gain our attention, our “poignant longings for beauty” as she says in her essay, “In Plato’s Cave.” (This is probably why I like William Morris and his views of art and beauty, and of aesthetics, but that’s another blog.) When Kahlo pressed a lipsticked kiss to the back of a photo or two, or cut out the faces of someone who hurt her heart, I can imagine she was a woman who lived her life fully, despite the physical limitations she dealt with after that fateful tram accident.
I’m drawn to Kahlo’s notion of the female body as broken (due to injury, or maybe even to the rhythms of life itself), whether that is visible or (in)visible. I’m also drawn to the way in which she speaks to a woman’s sense of her own sensuality and how it never really leaves you, even when you think it might have. It’s always there, just under the surface of things, waiting to emerge. Sometimes, too, when you think you’re whole, you really aren’t….and when you’re broken, well, that “brokenness” might be the best teacher you’ve ever encountered. And maybe, just maybe, we become whole by working through our brokenness. I kind of like that idea. It works for me.
peace,
k.
The Republic of Poetry 