PARABLE OF THE UROBOROS AND THE CAMERA
by YOUSSEF RAKHA
2025 in Cairo and I’m looking at a gritty black-and-white picture. For several years now I haven’t made pictures or paid attention to them, but they still sometimes pop out of the web and strike at my psyche like a frog’s tongue.
Three young women in a small, busy room—slightly distorted by the wide angle. Two are posing, leaning with one arm on the closest surface while hiding the other behind their backs. The woman in the foreground has a wary, defiant expression, almost bitter. The other one opens her mouth mischievously, playing to the camera. Sitting behind that last one in the corner, the third smiles candidly, warm enough to reach past the fourth wall. Three distinct responses. And, around and behind them, an almost disturbingly homey scene: a window with plants on the sill, a table with a bottle and a Turkish-style coffee pot, a small bed with a pretty bedspread, and several matted but unframed reproductions of classic paintings on the wall.
It’s an image I found by accident—not by a photographer I’ve heard of, not of people I have a connection with, not in a place I know. But, bypassing cause and effect, it goes straight to my sense of self—my worth. Looking at it is like being asked, in my most vulnerable state, “Do you deserve to be loved?” I’m a nearly fifty-year-old husband and father but this unknown image makes me want to curl into a fetal position. And, even when I’ve identified the artist as the Georgian photographer Natela Grigalashvili—this is a 1988 negative of village girls in the dormitory of the Tbilisi shoe factory where they work, part of “Lost in the City”, a documentary project on people from the countryside who live in the city—the information explains nothing.
It’s clear the power the image has over me is in the way its subjects are responding to being photographed, the way they’re gazing back. And even though, beyond their shoulders being bare, there is nothing overtly erotic about it, my psyche is clearly susceptible enough to the libidinal forcefield Grigalashvili has created with her camera for the effect to work across this much distance in space and time. Then again, I remember—and my heart aches—I have always been susceptible to photography.
2025 in Paris and the young Chinese-Czech photographer Linda Zhengová is recording her responses to my questions into her cellphone. She is a generous interlocutor, as open as she is precise, and aside from my fascination with her work, her interest in the intersection of sex and photography overlaps with mine.
For her project “Oxymoron”—which started in Amsterdam in 2022—Linda posted an ad on a fetish website announcing her desire to shoot “what people are doing behind closed doors,” seeking out “the embodiment of restrained desires.” The ad led to encounters and entanglements, but nothing as significant as the emergence of what she calls her “nocturnal alter ego,” a “shadow self” which, even though she thought she was inventing it specifically for the project, she eventually acknowledged as a part of her being irrespective of photography.
“I don’t think the camera is a magic tool,” she tells me, “but eventually it can become some kind of a portal.” This project transported her to a place where she could accept and integrate an otherwise suppressed side of her (female) psyche, freeing her of other people’s judgement. “At the beginning I was more of an observer,” Linda remembers, “a voyeur. I was really curious about what people were into, what they’re doing when nobody’s watching. But more and more I became part of the sessions—not in the sense that I would have sex with anyone but you could see me getting closer to the subjects, you could see parts of my body in the frame.” The more people performed for her the more “obsessive” it became, “because it gave me this high—this immense sense of power and control.”
Everything was consensual, she says, but the moral dimension became confusing. “I’m not sure if it’s a healthy energy, or if it’s toxic, wrong. That’s why I call it ‘Oxymoron’, because it doesn’t make any sense but it also makes perfect sense.”
My heart aches while images materialize on submerged sheets of paper, back in 1998. Posh colonial neighborhood, old apartment building, spacious photo lab—and in the soft red light the woman I’m in love with, X, is working her magic.
X is more than a decade older, married. She started our relationship, but I’m the one who’s hooked on her; in more than one sense, tormented. She has this thing that makes her initiate intimacy but then balk at the last moment, again and again, like a turned-on teenager who just isn’t ready to go all the way. The one time I managed to make love to her, it was in a rush, on the floor of this lab; and to let it happen she shut off so much of her emotional presence it didn’t feel like anything. From what she’s told me X has that tendency because, though she grew up believing same-sex relations were taboo, her love life started with her best friend, a beautiful girl who didn’t have any doubts about her own sexuality and who was madly in love with her, but whom X jilted to be with men.
At twenty-two, I know I’m a link in the ongoing chain of paramours her husband was forced to tolerate. Though I’ve worked on the assumption she’ll be rid of me before she takes on someone new. But last night at her house, a famous artist happened to be visiting from abroad, someone she’d never met, and when I left her husband dragging on a joint in the living room and got up to go pee, there she was making out with that man in the narrow corridor leading to the bathroom. In between kisses her face showed the same hopeless longing I’d thought I alone brought to it; and when she noticed me, she hustled her way out of the situation with the same brazen-but-embarrassed giggle she gave every time she thought her husband had caught the two of us touching.
Now, watching the wet white surfaces miraculously take on depth, I don’t want to bring any of this up with her. But the devastation I’m feeling makes me wonder why I didn’t cancel our darkroom date.
The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan saw desire as a consequence of language. According to the Lacan scholar Bruce Fink, desire is the gap between what words can ask for and what is really needed; “that very leftover… constitutes desire. It is the remainder of my experience of need that fails to be fully expressed in words and that persists after ‘my demand is formulated, and even after I have been given what I expressly asked for.’” Unlike animals, we experience, express, and try to satisfy our needs using language, but language being what it is, words and concepts are never precise or consensual enough, never “quite right.” That is why, according to Lacan himself, “Desire has no chance of being satisfied.”
Now, coming at this idea from somewhere else entirely, the French photographer Antoine d’Agata says, “I think of photography as a language, and I think a language should be used to speak, to say what you have to say.” If language is what produces desire, and if photography is a language, then it’s only logical that—whether or not it explicitly depicts nudity or lovemaking, whether or not it happens at all, in fact—photography should produce desire. “My aim is not to provide answers,” d’Agata says, summarizing his moral position in this context. “But all these questions we ask—that some of us ask and others choose not to consider, are my responsibility… It’s not a matter of explaining or solving anything … it’s a matter of dignity, of being honest when facing my own rage, my own desire, my own fear, not giving in or giving up, and of keeping it up every day, being an actor in my own life and in society, refusing to be a scared and passive consumer.”
Cairo fucks itself like the uroboros. To get from where X’s photo lab used to be to where I lived on the opposite side of the Nile, I have to cross an island, going over the river twice and so walking along one bridge, then another; the effect is weirdly cyclical. It’s as if, walking straight ahead, you end up exactly where you started.
In Egypt sex and photography are frowned on to the same degree. The first undermines the purity of bodies believed to be the property of their respective patriarchs, or God. The second implies seeing and being seen outside the studio sets of piety, propriety, and patriotism. To enjoy sex is to become a prostitute or pimp; to take pictures is to be a conspirator or spy. Nobody wants to live by those standards but nobody will openly renounce them. And so, the absurdity becomes a paradox, a vicious circle.
Cairo fucks itself like the uroboros. Those who take society at its word turn into shriveled and soulless pawns of the overarching mendacity. Or, possessed by the demon of fanaticism, they end up practicing homicide in the name of faith. Three times in the two years prior to that day in X’s photo lab, young men waging jihad had massacred groups of unsuspecting tourists and been killed doing it. They believed they’d be transported straight to heaven, where unearthly houris could give them better sex than anything they might even conceive of among the living.
Cairo fucks itself like the uroboros. The desire it pushes out of one tip comes back to consume it at the other. And, while one violence begets another, my life starts with a sentimental education soaked in hypo. The glorious abundance of X’s breasts framed by prints hanging to dry, a splash of developer burning an erection into my crotch. Film spools down like party ribbons while she weeps. And weeps.
More than a quarter century later, the first thing that comes to mind when I think of my affair with X is the American photographer, Diane Arbus. Not because she was a fellow portrait photographer whose depression X identified with—she seems to embody the same paradox. The analgesia of privilege, in the American writer Susan Sontag’s withering take on the Arbus ethos, seeking the pain of a weaker party in search “of a strong sensation.” Profound pessimism turning real-life suffering into a narcissistic fairytale through which the active party can pass, in Arbus’s own words, “from boredom to fascination.” In X’s case the fairytale was a love story with a man she’s just met, doomed by the original sin of having destroyed her innocent connection with a woman. She never tired of reenacting it.
Sontag believes that to be the subject of a picture is to submit to “a subliminal murder”—“a violation.” I don’t know about being photographed but that is what it felt like to be seduced by a portrait photographer. Not because X saw me as I didn’t see myself or knew me as I didn’t know myself—that’s what Sontag says about Arbus’s praxis: that she saw and knew her subjects better than they did themselves—but because what X did to me is what photography does to reality, according to the French philosopher Roland Barthes, at least. X made me an instance of something “reproduce[d] to infinity.” The “Photograph,” Barthes says, “mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.” He’s talking about moments in time, but the same applies to X’s blueprint—her negative. Even though each reenactment involved a different, existentially unique person, I felt like a dispensable, replaceable link in a mechanical chain of ephemeral male partners.
Contrary to what Sontag believes of her, I think Arbus identified with the “freaks” who populate her iconic square prints, “people who were visibly creating their own identities,” according to her biographer Arthur Lubow: “cross-dressers, nudists, sideshow performers, tattooed men, the nouveaux riches, the movie-star fans.” But she always kept enough distance to generate her forcefield. X was like Arbus in this and other ways: she delighted in seeking people out, sharing and keeping secrets with them—more their secrets than her own, but still—and she was not content with seducing but wanted to keep those she seduced forever, no matter how many of them she had. “So,” as Lubow says of Arbus, “she found it very difficult when a man with whom she was involved moved away from her, even when she had several men at once, and she was married. She still found this extremely painful and talked about the dissolution of herself in the wake of the ends of these affairs.”
That is how badly X took it when I finally departed, too.
In 1960, Arbus went to shoot a performer who worked with a python that fed on live rats. At one point she ended up alone with the python and its prey. And, appearing to penetrate the rat while it gobbled it up—the rat’s legs “splayed wide in complete abandon”—the python feeding looked to her like “a sexual paradox, a parable to be enacted on Judgment Day, in which the female at last entered the male.” Aside from the resulting photograph, it was another version of the uroboros. And it’s reflected in Arbus’s entire life course, which charts two seemingly parallel trajectories, never directly intersecting even though the one constantly fed into the other.
On the one hand there is what contemporary wellness discourse might call her “sex addiction,” aspects of which are detailed in her psychiatrist Helen Boigon’s notes: “going up to strangers on the street and propositioning them for sex… answering ads in swinger magazines and bedding physically unattractive couples… sexual escapades on Greyhound buses and at orgies… episodes of sexual intercourse with sailors, women, nudists, and the Jamaican waiter [as well as sleeping] with her brother, Howard, whenever he came to New York.”
On the other hand, there is her photographic genius: the way that, looking at her pictures, as the art critic Peter Schjeldahl describes it, you get the crazy feeling “that you have never really seen a photograph before.” It was this that drove her search for adventure, her obsession with what can happen when people photograph other people, or meet them—what Lubow calls “the promise of direct feeling.” It is an utterly erotic thing. Yet Arbus’s “sex photographs might be stills from a cheaply produced pornographic movie.” Her attempts at work explicitly depicting orgies or encounters she witnessed or participated in always failed. Those pictures had nothing at all of the miraculously charged mystery of her posed portraits.
Linda feels that though Arbus’s “sexual behavior and photography obviously correlate,” it would be simplistic to read her work in that way. “They might be both escapes from the constraints of a mundane, uptight and prudish society, but also at the same time, this rhetoric, ‘Oh, she’s fucked up, so probably that’s why her images are great’ is totally, totally wrong…” Like Arbus, Linda is not interested in beauty so much as an intensity of feeling, the effect of her images on the viewer. “If somebody says, ‘Wow, your images are so beautiful,’ I’m not really sure if I should take it as a compliment or if it’s actually an insult. Because if somebody tells me, ‘Wow, your images really move me, they do something to me, they transform me,’ that’s when I take it as a compliment.” But, unlike Arbus, she seems able to achieve that effect by shooting people who are more like her, in a more straightforwardly consensual way.
Linda tells me of meeting an artist couple during her residency in Buenos Aires and ending up shooting them at their home: “I remember that after a couple of shots in the living room, there was this intense energy coming up between them and they said, ‘You know what, what if we go to the bedroom?’ And at some point I was photographing them having sex and it was such an intense feeling to be in the same room with them and part of this experience.” For a moment Linda felt it in her gut that she was “part of this too,” and when it was over and they were back in the living room it was exactly as though she had taken part in their lovemaking. “I was like, ‘Why am I so red and sweating?’ We all felt this insane high. And this intensity, this energy is something I try to put in my images. It’s not necessarily about them having sex in front of me, it’s about this feeling we could all share.”
Still, “my pictures of sex,” Linda concludes, “are not so much about sex. I feel they’re more about the idea of transcendence, this spiritual experience of being outside of your body. And in most cases, portraits for me are more sexual than even depictions of sexual acts. It’s in the way people look at me or through me” at the viewer, what those three women in Natela Grigalashvili’s photograph just did to me. “Also a still life can be very sexual,” she adds, almost as an afterthought, “like some sort of remnants of fucking.”
Fucking is so essential to d’Agata’s work he will try “to just forget, and even deny, the existence of the photographic dimension” while documenting himself doing it, not only disengaging from the camera but placing himself in the frame. The paradox is that his way of doing photography renders photography itself unnecessary—the point is “to be there.” The image is as accidental a consequence of the attempt to “abolish any kind of political, emotional or physical distance” from his subjects as a click of the shutter can be. Prostitutes, drug addicts, and homeless people, d’Agata’s collaborators, are like Arbus’s in that they live on the fringe of society, but they are chosen not for their eccentricity or imaginative—sensational—appeal but simply for their indigence, their social-material misfortune.
“I don’t want to understand the people I photograph,” d’Agata says. “I want to be with them, but inside them. I don’t want to look at the pain, but feel the pain. Solidarity has to go through the flesh.” In this sense the purpose of photography is simply to experience the life force, to be alive and present in a way that mainstream contemporary life will simply not permit. Unlike him, X said she shot other people in order to know and share her knowledge of them, and that is partly why her work spoke to the conventionally acceptable discipline of journalism. She was not interested in combating whatever the culture does to desire in the service of a reactionary agenda, prohibiting or commodifying it. D’Agata, by contrast, takes pictures in order to “contaminate” and “pervert” the “ideology of a culture made out of conventions.” He completely puts himself out.
For Arbus—as for X, who often shot male writers and artists she wasn’t as interested in as she pretended to be in their presence—the process of befriending the subject was less sincere, but was it less moral? “I think you’re paying a kind of attention to them that nobody pays,” Arbus said. “I want to hear everything they have to tell me [though] for me there’s often a big distance between who I want to be with and who I want to take a picture of. I think I’m kind of two-faced… Everything is, ‘Oooo,’ I hear myself saying, ‘How terrific,’ and here’s this hideous woman, you know, making a hideous face.” I have no interest in judging a person who helped me grow. But remembering X in the light of all that, her relationship with me starts to pose moral questions. It feels like exploitation of precisely the kind that both Arbus and d’Agata are periodically accused of, though I wasn’t an eccentric or indigent social pariah being photographed but simply a (male) ingénue being promised love.
2025 in Cairo and—riveted, reduced to tears by a stray picture from Tbilisi—I’m recalling that night in the small, out-of-the-away apartment of my filmmaker friend Y. Late 2003, early 2004—and I am still recovering from the mental breakdown that’s paralysed me in the wake of my father’s death, carrying my Nikon TLR with two fast prime lenses everywhere I go. Perhaps as a kind of retaliation, I took up photography after I was cured of my love for X; and spending time in the tiny, ill-equipped darkroom I set up between my bedroom closet and one corner of the bathroom has been helping me to stay above water. The fact that I am developing my own film also enables me to take nude pictures safely in those pre-digital times.
That night Y has also invited a singer who happens to be a sexual partner of his, Z. She’s a petite woman I find attractive but a somewhat abrasive character; and though I am single, unattached, and spurred on by Y, I feel ambivalent when the possibility of joining in their lovemaking presented itself. So, when Z rebuffs my first, tentative attempt at touching her, implying she’s more comfortable with me watching her with Y, the space quickly transforms into a kind of low-light studio where I stand at one end of the room and follow their dimly lit embrace, partly obscured by a translucent curtain, as they settle on a couch at the other end. My camera is loaded, I know I can push the film to make the ambient light sufficient and, taking pictures with their evident encouragement, it feels like my presence is stimulating not so much their sensuality but their eagerness to demonstrate it—to be seen. More and more clothes are shed as they sink further and further into sensual abandon.
I’m trying to recall what was in those pictures. I remember a closeup of Z’s face that she liked enough to use as a promotional poster for one of her concerts soon after. The way she gazed at and through me as I watched her: there was almost more eroticism in that look than in what Y was doing to her when she gave it, which prompted a loud moan right after I clicked the shutter. I remember there was something paradoxical about the dynamic—like Linda’s oxymoron, like d’Agata’s denial of the photographic dimension—as though they were completely unaware of me even as their awareness of me conditioned every breath they took. I was shaky and tired; the beer tasted sour in my mouth. I felt no arousal whatsoever but I remember smiling at the thought of the uroboros: from being the photographic subject at X’s photo lab, in five years I had come this far. I was now the photographer.
author pic here
Youssef Rakha is an Egyptian writer of fiction and nonfiction working in Arabic and English. The Dissenters, his first novel to be written in English, appeared with Graywolf and Peninsula in February 2025. Postmuslim: A Testimony, is due out with the same two presses in the fall of 2026.
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