Listen, someone’s screaming in agony.
Fortunately, I speak it fluently. —Spike Milligan
♦◊♦
When Noam learned that his self-portrait was being used by anti-Ahmadinejad protesters, he emailed some of the Iranian graffiti artists through Flickr, where they’d posted images of their work under aliases.
“I told them, ‘It’s me. It’s cool. I’ll be happy to see more of what you do.’”
One of the Iranian graffiti artists wrote back.
It was a two-line exchange.
“He was cool,” Noam said. “He was ‘Nice to meet you, I like your picture.’ I didn’t tell him I’m from Jerusalem.”
♦◊♦
A man’s face as a rule says more, and more interesting things, than his mouth, for it is a compendium of everything his mouth will ever say, in that it is the monogram of all this man’s thoughts and aspirations. —Arthur Schopenhauer
♦◊♦
My cousin’s face screams mutely from the walls in cities where protesters’ voices can only be safely raised under cover of dark. At the same time, it’s a handy image for rockers and artists and T-shirt vendors in dozens of countries; a fun decal for skateboarders; a conversation piece for bridge-players who deal cards with his face on the backs. It’s being passed from hand to internet-hand, used and re-used, altered and interpreted to fit the needs of the user.
There’s something glorious and terrible about a world in which a picture of one’s face can sweep around the globe this way, on the steady stream of human expression we’re learning to live with. Waves of information rebounding around the planet, carrying faces and voices and songs and secrets and slander … occasionally putting a megaphone to someone’s anonymous whispers … sweeping into every corner and proliferating or subsiding without warning. A human chorus working magic in one life, wreaking devastation in another, changing us for better and worse. Erasing privacy and mystery—obliterating, some would say, what’s most human about us. Simultaneously it allows a familiarity with others’ lives that just might save us.
Something in it inspires an almost religious awe: your face, traveling the world at the speed of data. The notion makes me feel more human. But there’s also something in it that unnerves me. I can’t work out whether it’s the end of innocence, or the start of it.
Because there is also something dehumanizing in the spectacle of a young man’s face being carried on the wind like dust. Because the same technology that allowed young Iranian protesters to find common ground with a former Israeli soldier also means that anyone’s face can be downloaded, stretched, tinted, appropriated, and made into an emoticon to suit someone else’s needs—a collection of features that can be digitally altered by anyone, anywhere.
If your face isn’t private property, what is?
It’s not a new worry—this worry over what might happen if your face could walk around the world without your knowledge or permission. Our literary tradition is crammed with works obsessing over the consequences of losing control of one’s own likeness. Gothic novels of the 18th Century are full of doppelgangers: doubles who look precisely like the innocent protagonist, but act out the darkest urgings of the human soul (for which, naturally, the protagonist gets blamed).
The Victorians picked up the theme and ran with it—the depravity of Dorian Gray in the Oscar Wilde novel is launched and enabled by the unnatural relationship between himself and his portrait. A Tale of Two Cities does offer an arguably redemptive outcome for those situations when someone else starts wandering around wearing your face … though Charles Dickens’ version of redemptive, it must be said, can leave the hero a little bit guillotined. It took no less a humorist than Mark Twain in The Prince and the Pauper to inject some optimism into the someone-else-has-your-face plot.
One’s face, according to the groaning shelves of our libraries, is a precious commodity. In fact, one of the ways you can tell you’re dealing with the All-Powerful, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, is that you never get to see His face. (Moses, in reward for his virtue and his labors, merits a perch on a cleft of a rock and a glimpse of God’s back while His glory passeth by. But the face? Nothing doing. “And I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen.” —Exodus 33:21–23)
Lose control of your face, change your relationship to it, give someone else power over it, and anything can happen. You might mend a social order, true. You might have some fun, find a quasi-redemptive way out of the injustices of the French Revolution.
Or you might get Jekyll and Hyde.
Is all our cultural face-obsessing just primitive superstition? Are these just simplistic, pre-Freudian, literary and mythological assignations with our darker sides? Maybe. In the novel Immortality, Milan Kundera mounted an argument against getting carried away by any mystical reverence for the face. “The serial number of a human specimen,” he wrote, “is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of features. It reflects neither character nor soul, nor what we call the self. The face is only the serial number of a specimen.”
Maybe Kundera was right. Maybe all those Victorians and Goths were being needlessly nostalgic. Does it really matter, after all, who controls your face—the serial number of your particular human specimen? Does it matter that my cousin has no say over where in the globe his likeness travels, or in service of what causes it’s invoked? Is there any point any more in asking whether a face bears any connection to that entity that secular people seem to have ceded the right to mention—a soul?
But if Kundera was right—if the face is entirely separable from the self—then what is it about this story that grabs the attention of everyone who hears it—far more so than if the image that went viral had been a picture of, say, the palms of my cousin’s hands? Why do the global reach of my cousin’s face, the politics of the face, the question of who knows what about the face, all seem to matter? Why is the notion of Ahmadinejad mocking the protesters for using an image of an Israeli Jew’s hands not nearly as potent as the notion that he’d mock them for using Noam’s face? Is that merely our human sentimentalism at work?
What is it about Noam’s screaming, upturned face that so appeals to people who might not agree on anything else?
♦◊♦
At fireworks displays I like to take a moment to turn from the spectacle in the sky to watch the faces of the people around me. I do it because there’s something in the experience of a good fireworks show—the heart-jumping explosions, the pure shock of beauty—that unmasks the most sophisticated. I try to carry that image with me: the faces of adults undone, humbled by overpowering experience, reduced to wonder and even tears as they watch the sky.
Just as I carry—just as I can’t help but carry—the faces of people gaping upward in my native New York during those moments when the World Trade Center towers quaked and faltered and fell.
I used to take temp jobs in those towers to help pay the rent through graduate school. I used to ride the shuddering express elevators to the 94th floor, an eerie moan in the elevator shaft as though the wind itself had entered the building. I spent my days with the workers in the mail room, in HR, at the reception desks. Orville, Denise, Lisa. People I knew only by their first names—people who might hate their jobs, but were stuck with them for the foreseeable future. We bonded over the usual: bad coffee, gossip about weekend plans, and impossible bosses.
During my lunch break I’d sometimes search out a place to look down from, my nose touching the cool thick glass, and I’d spend my break watching Manhattan in its truest beauty—visible only from this terrible height.
In Medieval times, people didn’t indulge the folly of believing they controlled their world. Medieval people acknowledged the power of the universe to over-awe them. Plague or drought easily unmade their lives. A simple storm might render their world unrecognizable overnight, and all they could do was seek shelter and wait for the world to do with them what it would. In the morning, we read in tales of the era, they went outside to see what had been done.
In Medieval art, in pietas and bleeding Christs and sculptures of the innocent and the terrified, the faces are turned to the heavens in agony or bliss. Image after image embodies the 121st Psalm, itself written roughly 1,000 years B.C.. I lift my eyes to the hills, whence cometh my help.
As far back in history as we can see, the upturned face is a last stand for the human soul. I like to think, sometimes, of my city—any city—and its human faces. A nation, a world of human faces. All of our faces, turned heavenward, in wonder or terror, protest or prayer.
♦◊♦
God gave man an upright countenance to survey the heavens, and to look upward to the stars. —Ovid
♦◊♦
Noam’s face is lean, his hair short, his eyes brown behind the camera that routinely obscures the view of his face. He doesn’t stand out in a crowd, which is—still, even after everything—how he likes it. There’s nothing in his appearance that would make you guess his face is all over the globe—and perhaps that’s part of the reason it is. He could be any one of us—his appearance almost anonymous behind the raised camera through which he registers, over and over, the present moment.
It seems to me, though I may be fooling myself, that he’s changed a bit since his face traveled the world for him. I wonder if it’s not too much to say he’s been brought, just slightly, out of his shell. His eyes seem to have lost some of the caution that used to reside there. It makes it easier to notice the kindness and curiosity there.
Noam is still shy. He still speaks in brief sentences more often than paragraphs. But although he first said, in response to my questioning, that he didn’t think this experience had changed him, he did observe that maybe it had brought him more fans on the Facebook fan page he’d now launched. And in the past few months, since his discovery that his self-portrait had gone global, his photography business has grown, expanding outward from sporting events into some celebrity shoots. When people find out he’s the guy whose screaming face they’ve seen, he says, they ask for his business card. He identifies himself more readily as a photographer. As an artist. Referring to CNN’s request for his photos of the steampipe explosion, he says, simply, “Now I might do it if they’ll ask me.”
Noam regularly updates a Facebook album with images of his portrait from around the world. Most recently, he added a photograph of his screaming face stenciled onto the wall behind a toilet in a West Village bar. He’s started a small sideline, too: selling Scream products. Mugs, T-shirts, magnets, aprons, even shoes. He says he takes it as a compliment when other artists use his photograph, and likes seeing what they do with it. He says he doesn’t worry about loss of personal privacy, because so far no one has recognized his face on the street. He’s glad, he says, that the Iranian protesters are using his face.
He’s irked, it’s true, that someone in London is selling a T-shirt with his face on it for the equivalent of $40—but that aside, he feels a bit like he’s hit the jackpot. “If you do something cool,” he says, “you want people to see it. Maybe it’s not organized,” he says, “but it’s good.”
It’s Noam’s screaming adult face that’s become the property of the world: a gaunt, anguished, challenge roared into the firmament. An anonymous Everyman, a hieroglyph for protest.
But I remember my cousin’s face when he was a boy. I remember him at the age of three: pale and expectant, with a quiet gaze that seemed to take in everything, while his older brothers tossed soccer balls inside the house and made dishes quake on the kitchen shelves. On a routine pediatrician’s visit in Jerusalem, though, my aunt was told to take Noam to an ophthalmologist; the ophthalmologist, in turn, discovered the extreme nearsightedness that meant Noam would walk through life from then on looking at the world through powerful lenses.
When the eyeglasses were ready, my aunt brought Noam to the optometrist’s office to pick them up. It was evening, and by the time my aunt led him from the building, thick lenses perched on his face, it was already dark.
Only a few steps out onto the street, hand in hers, he stopped, his small round face upturned and agape. A boy scanning the borders of the world as he knew it, and glimpsing something astonishing. Ima, he whispered, pointing at the stars. What are those?
♦◊♦
Extra Reading…
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Wittgenstein epigraphs seldom fail to pull me in, and this is a sublimely crafted portrait not only of a young man and unlikely celebrity but of a global phenomenon of digital identity. Were there any doubt about the power of visual imagery, Ms. Kadish’s words should eliminate it. Well done.
My very first reaction as I started reading was could his mother possibly have a son who is painfully shy
when she is so outgoing, but moving past that, the story was fascinating and thought provoking.
Rachel, I never want to be the type who says “I knew you when you were just a baby”, but this time I say it proudly. Your writing is concise and I find myself paying attention to every single word and contemplating the verbiage and its message.
That such an image can be so powerful as to have universal meaning and go beyond cultural and political divisions would by itself make this story meaningful and interesting. But what strikes me deeply is its profound and fascinating origin. The “primal” screaming figure was created, not by a smart marketing entity, but by a person whose character is known to be devoid of verbal expression and who has communicated to us through a silent voice consistent with whom he is (at least until now). I, for one, have always longed to avoid the ambiguity and shortcomings of verbal communication… Read more »
Such a thought provoking discourse on the power of human expression to virally spread far beyond geographic, ethnic, and national boundaries. Kudos!!!!!
I have taken the liberty of forwarding this remarkable piece of writing about a remarkable piece of photograpy to several friends and colleagues in various European countries. To the protesters in Iran who used Noam’s photo, I wish well, and hope Rachel’s essay will reach them as the photo did,
To them all:
السلام عليكم وتياتي
ميشيل صرف
Beautiful essay, fascinating story. Thank you for giving this some real thought and thanks for sharing it.
In « La Prisonnière » (A la recherche du Temps perdu), Marcel Proust describes the yellow section of a wall in Vermeer’s View of Delft, which was so beautiful in the eyes of the dying writer Bergotte that he dragged himself to see it once more, just before his death. Thus the power of the visual is rendered into words, and without these words, many – of whom I regretfully count myself – could not grasp the entire beauty of the image: the words translate one beauty, visual, into another, stylistic, eloquent. Rachel Kadish does for the photo of Noam… Read more »
What an amazing story. What a beautiful essay.
Luckily he only looks like that while screaming.
on a local scale – In Israel, a photograph showing the full face of a celebrated Israeli writer was used and abused time and again by a political party he was strongly opposed to – and nothing could have been done to stop it.
Wonderful piece, Rachel! Beautifully written and really thought-provoking. What an incredible situation for someone so reserved to find himself in. Thanks for sharing!
One person really can make a global difference.
Talent apparently runs in this family!!!
Fascinating: a window on the evolution of culture in the new century. What’s to become of us if we lose our human face? Intricately (and masterfully) done, Rachel.
Gorgeous piece, Rachel. So surprising in content, so much to think about and so exquisitely written.
Brava!
I mean “streams!”
Extraordinary piece. I love how it steams through the personal, the political, the aesthetic, and the ethical, then deltas out into a meditation on identity. And then narrows back in to the personal, but with stars looking down.
And the woven-in quotations!
Wonderful.
nice
great photo and great guy
First thing seeing the image brought to mind was Edvard Munch’s The Scream. This is a beautifully written story; especially moving is the account of this little boy, who unbeknownst to himself or anyone else has been living as inside a cloud for the first 3 years of his life, and reacts with wonder to what most of us take for granted-clear vision.
The idea that Iranian protestors are inspired by an image of an Israeli is testimony to the artificiality of labels. Would it matter to them if they knew? I certainly hope not.
Rachel, fantastic story, superbly written, so rich. I loved this line — words I couldn’t find myself:
“The mouth is a black hole, crying to the heavens—but it’s not a passive howl. There’s something about it that implies that this scream is going to end. And when it does, the face is going to level its gaze at someone and take action.”
That is precisely why so many have used the image.
Thanks for a great story.
Thanks for the story behind the fascinating story. Shy people around the world are celebrating, quietly of course, and worrying that they might be next.
Noam – you are being robbed by big corporate thieves.
Time to call on copyright laws – if you were the one stealing their stuff they will have you in jail by now.
Thanks so much for sharing this wonderful..thought provoking story
Stuart
This is really great, Rachel. Your family will be proud. Well done, and thanks.
great topic. esquire would have liked this one. good job GMP for grabbing it, though.