Flinching/Not Flinching

In the early 70's there was a photographer named Ralph Eugene Meatyard. He did a lot of spooky-funny, thumb-in-your-eye photographs. Toward the end of his life-he died of cancer at 47-he chronicled his own deterioration. The word the critics used a lot was ‘unflinching’.
I’ve been doing some self-pictures here in this blog and I have to admit to a bit of queasiness. The body I’m photographing is old and it’s now kind of scrawny and ravaged. Why am I putting it out in the world-even forcing under people’s noses?
I remember reading an article about a Philly guy named Jerry Blavat. Jerry is one of those livin’ large guys who had a lot of fun with rock and roll, shot his car a couple of times and still keeps a job. I admire Jerry. What puzzled me was the photo-it showed 67 year old Jerry stripped to the waist. Is this the new normalization of old age or have we just lost some sense of when it’s time to cover up for publication? The truth is, I don’t know. I do know that when an aged Joe Louis was asked to strip down to boxing trunks for a Bert Stern photo, he refused and the resultant picture-gnarled brown fists coming out of a camel overcoat-was a better statement about the strength of old age than the photographer’s original idea.
So what am I doing here? I’m not particularly embarrassed by my wreckage but I’m afraid to be embarrassed by bad judgment, by getting the culture of cool completely wrong, by being overly-revealing. Children being easily shamed by their parent's behavior, I worry about embarrassing my kid. I’m thinking it might be time to flinch.
And as soon as I say it, I know it’s not time to flinch. This is what cancer looks like today, October 16,2010.

That thing on my chest is tape over the 'port', basically an stainless steel insert that's an access to a vein just below a layer of skin. It let's them draw blood and infuse chemo without opening a vein in the arm everytime. The tube that you see there is for the infusion of fluids to keep dehydration at bay.