This Is a Photograph of Me

Canadian poet and novelist Margaret Atwood wrote the poem “This is a Photograph of Me” near the beginning of her career. The poem opens her second self-published collection, The Circle Game (1964). Two years later, The Circle Game was reprinted by Contact Press and went on to win Canada’s Governor General’s Award. The House of Anasi Press published an additional reprint in 1967. “This is a Photograph of Me” is one of Atwood’s most widely anthologized and read poems.

The poem is often used as a key example of Atwood’s writing, since many of its stylistic and thematic components—such as its mid-way twist and parenthetical aside, its use of the photograph and landscape as metaphors, and its themes of patriarchal oppression, erasure, illusion, and witness—recur in her other work. In a 2017 article for The Atlantic, Lenika Cruz noted that the poem “plays with notions of identity, visibility, passivity, and words versus image” (Cruz, Lenika. “The Subtle Horror of Margaret Atwood’s ‘This Is a Photograph of Me.’” The Atlantic, 2017).

In 2009, Atwood published a graphic novel version of the poem, This is a Photograph of Me: Girl with Horse, 1928, to appeal to younger readers. 

Poet Biography

Atwood was born on November 18, 1939, in Ottawa, Ontario, in Canada. She has an older brother and a younger sister. Her father, Carl Edmund Atwood, was an entomologist who traveled with his family throughout northern Quebec studying insects. Atwood did not have formal schooling until she was 12, but did enjoy reading and writing from an early age.

Atwood graduated from the University of Toronto with a bachelor of arts in English in 1961. She earned her master of arts from Radcliffe College at Harvard University, and then began but did not finish a doctoral degree. She married Jim Polk in 1968; after they divorced in 1973, she married writer Graeme Gibson. Three years later, Atwood and Gibson’s only daughter, Eleanor, was born. 

Atwood first garnered acclaim as a poet. Her first collection, Double Persephone (1961), was self-published. The Circle Game, which opens with “This is a Photograph of Me,” was published initially as an art book in 1964, and then later revised and republished in 1966. This second collection won Canada’s prestigious Governor General’s Award, solidifying Atwood’s reputation. The Circle Game was republished again in 1967. During the 1960s and early 1970s, Atwood published other poetry collections, including Kaleidoscopes Baroque (1965), Talismans for Children (1965), Speeches for Doctor Frankenstein (1966), The Animals in That Country (1968), The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), Procedures for Underground (1970), and Power Politics (1971). Atwood also embarked on her career as a novelist with The Edible Woman (1969).

While Atwood continued to write poetry, including the collections You Are Happy (1974), Selected Poems (1976), and Two-Headed Poems (1978), her concentration on fiction led to much critical acclaim. However, additional poetry collections came out: True Stories (1981), Love Songs of a Terminator (1983), Snake Poems (1984), and Interlunar (1984). Her Selected Poems were also published in two volumes (1984 and 1986). During the 1980s through 2000s, Atwood’s career as a novelist eclipsed her poetry publications. Still, she published Morning in the Burned House (1995), Eating Fire (1998), The Door (2007), and Dearly (2020) after the death of Gibson in 2019.

Atwood is best known for her contributions to fiction. After The Edible Woman, she published Surfacing (1972), Lady Oracle (1976), and Life Before Man (1979). After the publication of Bodily Harm (1981), Atwood published The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), which won her critical praise and worldwide fame. Subsequent novels—Cat’s Eye (1988), The Robber Bride (1993), and Alias Grace (1996)—only furthered her reputation as an important contemporary novelist. She won the Booker Prize in 2000 for The Blind Assassin and also won awards for her books in a speculative trilogy: Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013). The Heart Goes Last was published in 2015. She also received critical notice for her retelling of Homer’s Odyssey called The Penelopiad (2005), as well as Hag-Seed (2016), which reworks Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. In 2019, The Testaments, a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, also won the Booker Prize.

Atwood has written collections of stories, nonfiction essays, graphic novels, children’s books, books on the history and future of Canadian literature, and a libretto. She has taught at a variety of Canadian and American universities and has received multiple honorary degrees.

Poem Text

Atwood, Margaret. “This Is a Photograph of Me.” 1998 (1964). Academy of American Poets.

Summary

In “This is a Photograph of Me,” the speaker describes a photograph taken some time in the past. The photograph lacks clarity, appearing hazy as if someone coated it with something or disturbed it during processing. On close inspection, an observer can recognize items in the image. There is a fir tree in the “left-hand corner” (Line 7). On a hill on the right side, “a small frame house” sits (Line 12). Behind these is a lake, with hills visible on the opposite bank. 

After recording the landscape, the speaker reveals, in a parenthetical aside, that an unknown person took the picture following the speaker’s death by drowning. This photograph thus includes the speaker because the speaker’s body was floating right “under the surface” (Line 18) of the lake when the image was captured. Yet, the narrator concedes that it would be hard to pinpoint the exact location or define the size of their material body. This is because clarity of vision is distorted by the way the sunlight refracts off the water. The speaker ends their parenthetical digression by claiming that if the viewer observes the landscape of the photo for a period of time, they will be able to see the speaker and/or their corpse.