The Journalist and the Photographer: Janet Malcolm's Still Pictures

Abstract

The Journalist and the PhotographerJanet Malcolm's Still Pictures Brian Dillon (bio) Janet malcolm, who died at the age of 86 in June 2021, was above all a payer of close attention, an extreme noticer. Obituaries and appreciations of her work reminded us that she practiced an exacting, even unsympathetic sort of attention: Malcolm, according to a cliché on which her mind might have snagged, "cast a cold eye" on her subjects, whether they were murderers, television personalities, wayward Freudians, great artists, or morally ambiguous journalists (among whose number she counted herself). What else should we call her? Essayist, critic, biographer, celebrity profiler: in Malcolm's case they all reduce to the rigors and lures of reporting. [End Page 110] She was certainly renowned for this precise reportage, but in her writing there are other kinds of exactitude—other styles of attention due. In her most daring profiles during her long tenure as a staff writer for The New Yorker, Malcolm frequently "senses" something about her interviewees, providing the reader with some intuition, quality, more or less occult truth about the people she describes. Frequently this mysterious "sense" depends on strictly visual cues, details Malcolm gives us with a nicety and ease that seem immune to distortion. Her distinctive ability to reflect on images and appearances comes into focus in a new book, Still Pictures, a posthumously published memoir of sorts. It is composed of twenty-six essays or chapters, most departing from or (rarely) staying close to a single photograph in her possession. The subtitle is "On Photography and Memory," a phrase that immediately summons photographic ruminations in the work of Marcel Proust, Vladimir Nabokov, Roland Barthes, and W. G. Sebald. And in invoking those writers, she reminds us that images may be diversions from reality. The book is also a reflection on the nature and desirability of autobiography. As Malcolm has it, autobiography contends peculiarly with memory. In a short essay from 2010 called "Thoughts on Autobiography from an Abandoned Autobiography," she writes: "Memory is not a journalist's tool. Memory glimmers and hints, but shows nothing sharply or clearly. Memory does not narrate or render character.…If an autobiography is to be even minimally readable, the autobiographer must step in and subdue what you could call memory's autism, its passion for the tedious." Still Pictures may not be an autobiography, as it is all about memory, its passions and errors. It's possible that photography operates here—and in modern autobiography in general—as a way to indulge or excuse what Malcolm calls (with a dated turn) the "autism" of memory. An excuse not to be tedious but to tarry with details without racing to judgment. To allow a kind of drift, a vacation from acuity. That in Malcolm's case the rest cure does not take is surely no surprise. She remained wary of the genre, its longueurs and indulgences, the unwarranted settling of scores. [End Page 111] Click for larger view View full resolution Janet Malcolm photographed with a camera, date unknown. Courtesy Janet Malcolm and Farrar, Straus and Giroux. [End Page 112] This predilection for details plays out in her writing more generally—she sometimes wrote about images, but she always wrote about appearances. She inherited this commitment from nineteenth-century fiction: a belief that the first task of the narrator is to detail her characters' appearance and dress, the fixtures and fittings of their home or work. Such details open a royal route to the delineation of character and morals. How often does Malcolm note that this or that person she has met or interviewed reminds her of a minor character in Russian fiction? The genius of the method includes those moments when she is forced to admit she got it wrong and has misread the appearance in question. One of the risks: that she is looking from some hampering vantage, with her own tastes and prejudices in the way. Another, that this becomes the representative Malcolm trick, and we stop trusting it. When she was interviewed by Katie Roiphe for The Paris Review in 2011, she made sure to leave the room so that her interviewer could take notes...