BETWEEN THE MONSTER & THE PHOTOGRAPH

WRITTEN BY TONY M. VINCI

I’ve always hated having my picture taken. Maybe it has something to do with the way my family used to raise their cameras like weapons. Stop. Smile. Pose. Pretend. Be Perfect . . . or else. Photographs were hard evidence of my failure as a person. I was angry. I was depressed. And it showed. I was a visual symbol of everything my family and the world I inhabited wanted to believe did not exist—trauma, abuse, mental illness. Being photographed made me feel like I was a freakish, broken thing, a creature born into the wrong world by some cosmic mistake. Being photographed made me feel like a monster.

But that’s okay. I loved monsters. Fierce, otherworldly creatures that threatened the normalcies of everyday life—monsters made me feel strangely safe. Through them, some of those wounds the world tries to hide might find a way to be seen, to be heard. Perhaps this is why there is an entire history of horror tales (films, tv shows, novels, short stories, comics, video games) that explore the link between monsters and the photograph: they teach us about our dual desires to encounter the hidden histories of the world and to document such secret stories, to make them real through photography.