What I know about Frankie are the things she told me, filtered through what I came to understand about her. Of necessity and habit, she is protective and compelled to obscure her details by always making both subtle and grand changes to her stories. But that's okay -- we all do the best we can.
I met her 3 years ago when she was clerking in the local liquor store. I had noticed her before -- her left arm sleeved in tattoos and her ever changing hair colors made her hard to miss. But she spoke in a very quiet voice and seemed young, and I was caught by the contradiction. It's out of character for me to ask strangers if I can photograph them, but one day she was sporting a red-tipped mohawk and I couldn't let her pass by again. She told me she was going to say no, but when the person in line behind me blurted out 'yes', she surprised herself and agreed.
I was rarely sure who was going to show up at my studio when we were scheduled to get together. Frankie can be more than withdrawn. During our first several sessions, there were times when she was so unresponsive even to casual conversation that I had to wonder if she was alright. And when she became present again, she was defensive, manipulating, and angry -- or shy, unsure, and easily embarrassed. It took some getting used to, but I like roller coasters and very quickly among those many mood swings I found someone who became one of my most cherished subjects. She never came to the studio as anyone but herself, and she always let what her life at the moment was come through. It's not possible for me, as a person or as a photographer, to ask for more.
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Frankie wears large parts of her inner life on her skin. She carries Angelina Joli's initials high on her left shoulder, and the word 'truth' on the back of one upper arm and 'trust' on the back of the other. She has a rendering of a Helmut Newton photograph of Kate Moss on her right forearm that is framed with hearts and words of love. On her left forearm the word 'lithium' is surrounded with flowers and capped with a skull. I asked if it was for the band, and she said no. She said lithium was crushing her, but it let her be where she was.
After a short while I could tell by her posture when she was headed for trouble -- she would sit and stare at the floor, so hunched over as to make me wonder how she was able to breathe. She managed a few words at a time, but she flinched as if burned if I came too close. Then she'd disappear for weeks or months. No phone calls, no messages returned, no emails. The first time it happened, I was thrown off -- but when she came back she offered bits of tales about what her time was like in the hospital, and how she'd avoided her medications and how, as always and with a certain pride, she'd been finally forced to leave because she was too difficult to deal with.
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Frankie sent an email saying she was going to try art school in Philadelphia. She said she had been at her mother's house, staying in her room to work on her collages and healing herself. She said she was feeling ready. Often when we worked together we talked about the possibility of her leaving bad situations for the promises new ones offered, but nothing ever came of it so I assumed nothing ever would. Her plan was unexpected and more than a little disconcerting because it was such a bold move on her part -- and because if it worked then this time she might truly not be coming back. That idea left me deeply uncomfortable -- but I was pleased when she said she wanted to study photography because the work we had done together had been so important to her.
Unfortunately, it didn't work out very well.
When I heard from her next, she wrote to say she wanted to be a Suicide Girl. She said being one was important enough to her so that she would pose nude, something she always refused to do before. In fact her refusal to pose without her pants had been a periodic point of trouble between us. I would cajole and she would refuse, I would push for an explanation and she would just say no. Her reticence didn't make sense to me because she was never anything but comfortable posing without her shirt on. When I saw the swastika burned into her right thigh, it made sense. I already knew she was a cutter and a burner because she took some satisfaction in showing off what she considers to be part of her art, but I was surprised at the size of the scars on her thigh. She said it came from a different time in her life and that she was deeply embarrassed by it.
Suicide Girls is all about erotic fantasy and asks participants to strip off their clothes in a series of still shots. Let's just say this sort of sexual playfulness is not part of Frankie's repertoire -- in any way. At all. But we found our stride eventually, and the red haired series was accepted.
Something very interesting happened during the course of that shooting. Frankie started to open up, almost to expand in a way, and she allowed an unfamiliar enthusiasm for what we were doing to show. She started the sessions with blue hair, and by the time she dyed it red she was standing up straight and actually posing. Even more interesting was that she was smiling and asked to make a couple of comical shots for a friend. This was uncharted territory for me -- I had grown so accustomed to the moods and the distance and seeming indifference that this brightening and shiny redhead was a complete and welcome stranger.
When she told me she was feeling better because she had been off her meds for awhile it was clear this new Frankie would soon be gone. I only saw her once after that and she had crumbled into her old self again. Her face was blank, and her eyes empty again. My emails to her asking how things were went unanswered until she finally replied that she wouldn't see me or work with me again. That was almost a year ago.
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There's no doubt Frankie was important both to me and to my creative life. Not only was she an excellent and complex person to photograph, but she was also a one woman educational force about the intricacies of the human mind. It's an assumption on my part, but I think what she felt and what we accomplished in our last few sessions scared her into retreat again, and I regret that. But I don't regret the photographs, or the pleasure she seemed to get from doing them.
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