I guess, I thought.
I sat down on a bench and googled my name, discovering that I was in fact being sued, this time for posting a photo of myself on Instagram that had been taken by a paparazzo. I learned the next day from my own lawyer that despite being the unwilling subject of the photograph, I could not control what happened to it. She explained that the attorney behind the suit had been serially filing cases like this, so many that the court had labeled him a “copyright troll.” “They want $150,000 in damages for your ‘use’ of the image,” she told me, sighing heavily.
In the photo, I’m holding a gigantic vase of flowers that completely covers my face. I’d purchased the flowers for my friend Mary’s birthday at a shop around the corner from my old apartment in NoHo. The arrangement was my own; I’d picked flowers from various buckets around the shop while telling the women behind the counter that a friend was turning forty. “I want this bouquet to look like her!” I’d said, grabbing a handful of lemon leaves.
I liked the shot the paparazzo got, but not because it was a good photo of me. I’m completely unrecognizable in it; only my bare legs and the big old-fashioned tweed blazer I was wearing are visible. The wild-looking flowers substitute for my head, as if the arrangement had grown skinny legs and thrown on dirty white sneakers—a bouquet hitting the concrete streets, taking a walk out on the town.
The next day, after I’d seen myself in the picture online, I sent it to Mary, writing, “I wish I actually had a flower bouquet for a head.”
“Ha! Same,” she wrote back immediately.
I posted the image to Instagram a few hours later, placing text on top of it in bold white caps that read “MOOD FOREVER.” Since “Blurred Lines,” paparazzi have lurked outside my front door. I’ve become accustomed to large men appearing suddenly between cars or jumping out from around corners, with glassy black holes where their faces should be. I posted the photograph of me using the bouquet as a shield on my Instagram because I liked what it said about my relationship with the paparazzi, and now I was being sued for it. I’ve become more familiar with seeing myself through the paparazzi’s lenses than I am with looking at myself in the mirror.
And I have learned that my image, my reflection, is not my own.
* * *
WHILE WE WERE together several years ago, my boyfriend befriended a guy who worked at an important international art gallery. The gallerist said we might want to take a look at its upcoming show of Richard Prince’s “Instagram Paintings.” The “paintings” were actually just images of Instagram posts, on which the artist had commented from his account, printed on oversize canvases. There was one of me in black and white: a nude photograph of my body in profile, seated with my head in my hands, my eyes narrowed and beckoning. The photo had been taken for a magazine cover.
Everyone, especially my boyfriend, made me feel like I should be honored to have been included in the series. Richard Prince is an important artist, and the implication was that I should feel grateful to him for deeming my image worthy of a painting. How validating. And a part of me was honored. I’d studied art at UCLA and could appreciate Prince’s Warholian take on Instagram. Still, I make my living off posing for photographs, and it felt strange that a big-time, fancy artist worth a lot more money than I am should be able to snatch one of my Instagram posts and sell it as his own.
The paintings were going for $80,000 apiece, and my boyfriend wanted to buy mine. At the time, I’d made just enough money to pay for half of a down payment on my first apartment with him. I was flattered by his desire to own the painting, but I didn’t feel the same urge to own the piece as he did. It seemed strange to me that he or I should have to buy back a picture of myself—especially one I had posted on Instagram, which up until then had felt like the only place where I could control how I present myself to the world, a shrine to my autonomy. If I wanted to see that picture every day, I could just look at my own grid.
To my boyfriend’s disappointment, his gallerist friend texted him only a few days later to say that a prominent collector wanted it.
I knew the gallerist through a bunch of different people and had met him once or twice, so it didn’t take long to find out what actually happened to the piece. The giant image of me was hanging above the couch in his West Village apartment.
“It’s kind of awkward,” a friend of mine said, describing the painting’s placement in the gallerist’s home. “He, like, sits under naked you.”