The Collector

Frederick’s hobby of photography overlaps with his lepidoptery, both practically and substantively. Photography serves a similar purpose to lepidoptery: It allows Frederick to capture and preserve something fleeting (a sexual moment, a beautiful butterfly) so that he can look at it whenever he wants.

Frederick has always been interested in photography; after he wins the pools, he buys the most expensive Leica with a telephoto lens. Like his specially outfitted camping van, his camera soon serves another purpose. He quickly abandons the idea of using the Leica to photograph butterflies alive, like S. Beaufoy, a famous British naturalist did. Instead, photography becomes an outlet for Frederick’s repressed sexuality. Frederick secretly takes his voyeuristic photos of unsuspecting naked couples in the woods.

Later, Frederick refers to his pornographic photo books as inspiration for posing Miranda:

I looked at the previous photos and some books and I got some ideas. There was one of the books called Shoes with very interesting pictures of girls, mainly their legs, wearing different sorts of shoes, some just shoes and belts, they were really unusual pictures, artistic (113).

With his prudishness still at play, Frederick disguises his pornography as art—he can’t accept that he’s the type of person to take lewd, nonconsensual photos. However, in the end he tacitly acknowledges his photographs of Miranda as evidence of his crimes: “If I destroyed the photos, that was all there was, people would see I never did anything nasty to her, it would be truly tragic” (293).

After he kidnaps Miranda, Frederick photographs her whenever she allows and, later, when she doesn’t. In photos he preserves fleeting moments of her beauty. When Miranda first agrees to pose, Frederick is thrilled. He photographs her clothed in a variety of poses, effectively creating his own catalog. Sometimes he appears to prefer these photographs to seeing Miranda in person; Miranda remarks on this: “I don’t know why you want all these photos, she always said. You can see me every day” (64). The photographs allow Frederick to preserve Miranda like his butterflies. As Miranda reflects, Frederick needs her alive, but really wants her dead, pinned in a case like one of his other specimens. Photography enables Frederick to treat Miranda more like a butterfly: With his camera he freezes a moment of beauty, transforming her into another dead specimen. To Miranda, photography is a brutal medium: “When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies” (57).