Exposure
Ungloved hands
deep in developing fluid,
shaking a cylinder full of film
in the humming whiteness
of the photography lab, you discover
the sexual fantasy.
Silver curves surface in your dark
imagination, tender moonscapes of skin
lapsing into shadow, a glacial slide
of muzzy stomachs and thighs—
A hand on your shoulder
and you nearly scream.
It’s your grizzled professor,
his breath reeking of nicotine
and black cherry granola bar.
Sorry, you say. I’ll use protection next time,
by which you mean, you’ll wear gloves,
except you won’t do that either.
You’re going to dunk your hands
in those warm wet chemicals
and return to those secret islands
of flesh, those bodies yours
yet not your own.
| Rita Feinstein |
|
levelheaded: exposure
Exposure as in nudity revealed but also as in the process of photography is an obvious innuendo in retrospect. But what seems obvious when you’re done reading takes a moment to put together while you’re at it, and that’s because of sentence structure. For those first five lines you might not notice that “shaking a cylinder” with ungloved hands is sexual. When you’re finally given “the sexual fantasy” – in its own line, short and direct – you read the sentence again and details of the image unfold.
The tension Rita Feinstein creates is rooted in the duality of the poem’s sexual content. The photographs themselves appear to feature bodies, and if “stomachs and thighs” are in a photograph, we imagine it also features what is in between them. So both the process of development (the play with “warm wet chemicals” and “humming whiteness”) and the actual content go hand in hand in staging a sexual response from the speaker. The idea of the image as in a poetic device and the image as in the product of photography similarly intertwine.
There’s a moment of distraction for both the speaker and the reader when the vaguely threatening professor makes an appearance. The nuances of his breath’s odor are nearly comical in their particularity. He disappears from the poem as quickly as he shows up. Another intentionally obvious innuendo follows when the speaker says “I’ll use protection next time.” The professor’s role is more of a reality check than it is an agency of change or consequence. We are forced to come down to earth and think of granola bars and cigarettes, after the daze of tender moonscapes and glacial slides.
“Exposure” ends with “those bodies yours / yet not your own.” As an artist, the speaker has control over what she says isn’t hers. The bodies are subjects but also objects in their lack of individuality, and in their passivity. This tension too, is perhaps part of the fantasy for the speaker. The control the photographer has over the bodies’ appearance – shade, hue, and composition – is enough to send her diving into sensual contemplation.
– The Editors
