Little Wild Girl: Cari Ann Wayman
Originally written by Terin Talarico for Illiterate Media
Perhaps one of the most alluring and misinterpreted books of the 20th century, Nabokov’s Lolita deconstructs the nature of desire, beauty, aestheticism and eroticism, particularly in the United States. In 1955, Lolita was a description of just how pornographic American culture was (and is), even before it fully developed into the Internet and the contemporary “Britneyfication” of tweens. America is one of the most apparent allegories in the book. What America stands for - consumerism, kitsch culture, desire, fetishism, mass media - are what Charlotte and Dolores “Lolita” Haze embody. And what drives Humbert Humbert insane about America and Lolita is, “the two-fold nature of this nymphet, perhaps; this mixture in my Lolita of tender dreamy childishness and a kind of eerie vulgarity.”
With so many girls on the Internet continuing to say “use me, dream me,” Nabokov’s Lolita archetype remains relevant: Annie Leibovitz’s controversial Vanity Fair photos of Miley Cyrus, Terry Richardson’s scintillating American Apparel campaign ads, and 12-year old international runway model Maddison Gabriel. As grown-up and post-feminist women move away from traditional roles and consumer habits enforcing “femininity”, more marketing, attention, and money is being paid to young women and tweens, and in turn, the parents and audience encourage this fetishism.
Americans are opposed to any form of censorship, leaving one solution: consumer awareness. People, including kids, can control their media experience. Someone I often think of as highly aware and media savvy is 22 year-old photographer Cari Ann Wayman, also known as YYellowbird on Flickr
Wayman’s most compelling work is her self-portraiture, depicting herself in magical and abandoned American scenes: foreclosed homes, run-down amusement parks, classic cars and shop-windows, bedrooms filled with the antique knick-knacks of Charlotte Haze. Dressed up in frilly dresses, hole-y knee socks, Oxford shoes, bows, animal hats, messy bangs and skinned knees, Wayman’s precocious art direction screams “Lolita”. Her photographic scenes lend themselves neatly to romantic and melancholic interpretation, fueled by desire, nostalgia, and the teen pop culture that Humbert Humbert despises. She shoots digitally but references a film aesthetic, with light leaks, bokeh, blur, and grain, which helps create a fleeting and aching tone.
Wayman states in her blog that she is drawn to “enlightened forms of existence, sparkling and drenched in sun.” This echoes Nabokov’s solipsism and interest in “aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.”
By turning the camera on herself, Wayman makes Nabokov’s objectified Lolita archetype a heroine: a girl creating her own image of girlhood during that dangerous age from 12 to 21. Wayman’s interpretation of Lolita becomes many things: the aware and subversive narrator; both object and subject; a girl dying of self-consciousness; someone practicing for romances of the future; planning a life along the course of lyrics of songs; prone to secrecy; “cursed with the capacity for pining”; something a lot harder to get at. Cari Ann Wayman’s Lolita “is all the right stuff: what desire is made of” (Uta Barth).
Cari Ann Wayman’s website
