Headshot

Turning Insult Into Art One Photograph At A Time

This is a story about a photograph that doesn’t yet exist, and how it led to the taking of thousands more.

In late 2021 I was exiting an abusive relationship, after twenty years of psychological, emotional, and verbal mistreatment, the final straw being my wife secretly meeting another guy on the night of our sixteenth wedding anniversary. When I cornered her with proof of her activities that night, and the lies upon lies she told in the days before this date, she denied everything and then whispered, “maybe you’re fucking paranoid.”

Things went dramatically downhill from that moment, though there had been a similar pattern in our relationship for some years, me catching my (thankfully now ex-)wife secretly planning vacations or dinner dates with other men, me challenging her after finding proof (not evidence, proof in most cases) of these trysts, her denying she was anything but a dutiful and loving and obviously very misunderstood wife, and telling me my accusations were “all in my head, or “you’re paranoid,” or “you mustn’t love your kids if you can keep making up stories about their mother like you do. You need help.” That kinda thing.

It was a long and torturous ending to what was a psychologically abusive long and torturous two decades in total.

We had been arguing about just such a secret rendezvous of hers when my son entered the room and asked me to take his headshot for a project he was doing – he is gorgeous, chiseled, freckled, his face framed by luscious red hair – and I was about to exclaim “sure!” when his mother yelled,

“Don’t ask your father! Tim takes nice photos!”

At that time Tim was a neighbour, and Tim does take nice photos, but headshots? Nah, not his thing; he’s into sports photography, and astrophotography, though I’m sure like most photographers he could try his hand at headshots and get something decent. He’s got mad skillz, as the kids say.

But that’s not what mattered. What mattered to my wife in that moment was that the insult hit. I turned to her, a smirk wide on her face, her savouring yet another opportunity to belittle me, and all the better that it was in front of one of our children.

My son stared at me, obviously embarrassed for me, then he turned and left the room. He and I never again discussed taking his headshot.

When I looked from my son and back to my wife, her lip remained curled in that smirk.

Weeks later, mere hours before I was to pick up my family from San Francisco International Airport after they had vacationed in Pennsylvania, in a phone call my wife tells me they won’t be on the return flight. “I’ve bought a house here,” she stated coldly yet excitedly, “and you’re not on the mortgage. I’ve enrolled the kids in schools here, and they won’t be coming back. You’ll see your fucking kids one week in summer and one fucking week at the holidays.”

That call lasted twenty-two-minutes.

Two months later and I am homeless, almost penniless, and weeks from losing my job, but I made one critical decision in the haste and chaos of the time: with my camera, I decided to record every significant moment until I could hug my children again. And I did. I took shots of from Amtrak trains as stations, mountains, and small towns whipped past on snowy nights; selfies in shitty motel bedrooms; scooping “good luck!” fondue with wonderful friends in Santa Cruz; and buying gallons of the only two truly essential COVID survival supplies, hand sanitizer and strong coffee. And, on that Christmas morning, I was both filming and taking photographs as I hugged my kids for the first time in three months.

I took shot after shot as life imploded, and I liked them, these snatched records of raw and chaotic moments. In fact, I liked several shots so much I decided to compile a book of the best and worst. Each tells a story, and be damned what anyone thinks of the end product, I thought.

And there it was, on my laptop, a digital book of images I deemed worthy of taking physical form. And there was only ever one title I could possibly give this work:

Tim Takes Nice Photos

There is but a single copy of Tim Takes Nice Photos, but I am toying with the idea of printing and selling a short run. As things stand today, I could simply have produced this one-off wank-a-thon of a book that I can almost casually position on my coffee table for visitors to notice and for me to scoff at in that affected manner, “Oh that? Ha! Just my meanderings with a camera, as you do.”

But nah, why the hell should I stop there? I have troves of sub-Tim-standard crap to share! So, Tim Takes Nice Photos 2: Take No Prisoners is in pre-production, and I actually intend to sell this compendium of garbage. And as we speak, I’m firing off shots for Tim Takes Nice Photos 3: This Time I Know It’s For Real.

One day, should the panoply of the gods decree it so, I might get to take my son’s headshot. For now, it’s the missing photograph that launched a thousand others. Until then, I will languish in the satisfaction that I have turned my abuser’s insult into art. And, as she undoubtedly tells her eager audience that “the Tims” are an affront to her, rather than the celebration of photography in its most chaotic form, as is the intention, “well,” I would say, my lip curling into a smirk, “maybe you’re fucking paranoid.”