on being a fake yva girl

well technically, a fake yva woman

Thomas Quine via Wikimedia Commons

There’s this photographer whose work I really love. Her actual name was Else Ernestine Neuländer-Simon, but she worked under the moniker “Yva.” Still, even though I consider myself a fan, I’ve never really seen her work outside of some images you can find online and I have to assume that these reproductions are just okay. There’s a book of her photographs, but it’s out of print and I never see it going for under $200, which is a little much to spend on something that I cannot, however I try, justify to myself¹ as “research.” Even if it were in print, it would still be expensive, as books with high-quality art reproductions are expensive to make.

If you haven’t heard of Yva, it’s probably partly because she died in the Holocaust and (per Wikipedia) her legacy was left in the hands of the notorious Charlotte Weidler, an art dealer who stole art that had been entrusted to her by Jewish friends during the Nazi regime.² Yva’s clearly retained enough of a footprint that I heard of her somehow. But I also am not sure I’ve heard somebody mention her… ever…? aside from however it was that I heard of her, I guess. (I genuinely don’t remember.)

The point is that I really, really love this photographer—and even use one of her photographers as an avatar sometimes—but I never talk about her, because I don’t actually know anything about her. I’ve only ever seen medium-quality reproductions of a tiny selection of her work, after all. If I met a fellow fan, I wouldn’t have anything to say to them. Plus, even if I did have the book, what do I know about photography? Yva doesn’t have a weird and compelling story behind her, like Vivian Maier or (non-photography but) Charlotte Salomon, for me to lean on. She was a very talented and successful photographer who died a horrible death alongside millions of other people.

So my love of Yva is a weird and pointless secret (or it was, until I wrote this post). In fact if I met some sort of Yva superfan my response would probably be terror—oh no, I’ve been found out as a fake Yva girl.

It occurs to me that this kind of fandom once removed maybe wasn’t so unusual thirty years ago.³ (Not that that helps me, I was five and probably reading Nancy Drew.) The internet changes the game slightly. I’m constantly challenging myself with tests that prove that I am a fake ___ girl about all kinds of stuff. This is probably at least a little healthy—or at least, better than the alternative, of pretending to an expertise you do not in fact possess—but it’s also definitely stupid too, to act as if at any moment a troll will appear and say, like, if a fan you truly be, name to me their albums three.⁴

But if I’d happened to see a picture of Yva’s in a magazine in the nineties or something, clipped it out perhaps, it would have made sense to say I was a fan without really much experience or knowledge. And then there are things where that is still basically the case—like paintings. If a painter’s body of work is scattered across several museums in different countries, you’ll probably only see a handful of them in person. But I think it would still make sense to say “my favorite painter is Sargent” even if you’d never seen a Sargent painting and only seen reproductions.

On the other hand, and this is also very odd, it’s never really felt like people know less, or are less willing to go and look up something that they don’t know, even though it’s genuinely never been easier to encounter an unknown phrase and simply look it up.

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Over the past couple months I’ve had the experience of somebody assuming I had an advanced degree and having to explain that I didn’t and moreover (this part I didn’t really have to explain but I nevertheless did) I got rejected by every program I applied to, which is frankly almost a form of distinction on its own.⁵

However I think ultimately my reasons for wanting to go to graduate school were bad ones, so it probably wasn’t a terrible mistake to have been rejected. I felt like it would keep me from becoming mentally stale, give me something other than being “promising” etc, but of course in reality not only does graduate school not do the former it’s the place where the latter problem (feeling the date at which you can no longer be called “promising” loom) is basically your every waking hour.⁶ I don’t think this is sour grapes, graduate school is great, it’s just not a solution to “being mortal” which is what I was looking for. Instead I had a job (which wasn’t a solution either). There was a time I really brooded over this failure and then one day I stopped.⁷

What’s the point here…? Contingency, I guess. I happened to see a picture and I happened to like it. For a while I forgot Yva’s name but remembered the photographs and had to search to figure out who she was. Preferable, probably, to the other way. It would have been easy not to see it, but I did. Life could have gone a lot of ways but this is how it’s gone. Here’s the picture. I really like it.

1. It’s all research to the IRS.

2. I have a Google alert set up for her name, in case there’s ever an exhibit I could go to, but I only ever get emails in which she’s mentioned in the context of a more famous protege (Helmut Newton).

3. Previous writing on this subject:

4. I cannot possibly be the first person to make this joke so h/t whoever was.

5. I’m the mayor of Simpleton, as the song says.…

6. Barbara Pym (A Glass of Blessings):

‘Oh dear!’ Sybil paused and then laughed. ‘I wonder why I said that? Isn’t there supposed to be something unsatisfactory about him? He must be well on into his thirties now. At what age does one start to accept a person as he is? Could a man in his fifties or sixties still go on being labelled as “unsatisfactory”?’

‘Perhaps up to thirty, one may still go on expecting great things of people,’ I suggested, ‘or even thirty-five.’

7. I stopped because I had to go to MLA for work once and I sort of looked around and was like wait… do I even want to be here?