AMBIENT LIGHT

A Writer Talks About Photography

My first camera was a Kodak Instamatic 126. It was under the Christmas tree for me when I was six years old. The first photo I took with it was of a pen full of hound dogs, neatly foreshadowing the hundreds, nay, thousands of pictures I’ve taken of hound dogs since.  It made little square pictures, all of them fuzzy because while Kodak was making these dandy little cameras for middle America, they were outfitting them with the cheapest little plastic lenses ever. It was like making a photograph through the bottom of a plastic wine glass.  Did we even realize how awful they were?  Looking at these snapshots now really is like looking at your own hazy memories, everyone is no more than a suggestion.

Eight years later the Christmas tree once again bore photographic fruit. This time it was a much nicer camera, a Rollei B35, at the time the smallest 35 mm camera made. The “B” is for “Belichtungsmesser”– a lightmeter, which was built into the front of the camera. (You can see a B35 in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Melinda Dillon used one to take photos of the landing of the spaceship.) I didn’t have the opportunity to take a picture of any spaceships, but I did photograph chocolate shops in Brussels, friends eating herring outside the Hague, and a shot that showed early promise– I turned around and got a photograph of the hordes of tourists all taking snapshots of the Notre Dame.

I was already cast in bronze as a writer. Of course, I planned to be an actress and took to my high school stage as the Fiddler in Fiddler on the Roof, and Mrs. Smith in The Bald Soprano. I couldn’t sing well enough for the big roles in the musicals (the Fiddler, you might remember, is not Tevye, but a mute) and when I was cast as one of a dozen nuns in the Sound of Music I hotly told the theatre teacher, Don Oickle, that I couldn’t waste my time with such things. Which was probably the truest thing I ever said in that room. I was already editor of the school paper, after all, and for the first time ever I had an English teacher who both recognized my talent and raised the bar so high for me, that for the first time in my life I was having to work at writing.

I liked my camera, but I didn’t  think of it as anything other a means of recording memorable events, and always on slides. My stepfather had a very nice camera, a Leica IIIf from the 1950s and he shot (exclusively) Agfa slide film, so I shot Agfa too. We had a lovely Rollei projector and a good slide projected across the room can make a breath-taking image. They’re just a little inconvenient to casually leaf through. In time I started experimenting with different films, taking “artsy” photographs with an array of strange film from Ilford. I remember well a series of “eggs on a table top” that all came out cyan. My first year in college I stretched myself with the camera, shooting in the rain, at the beach, and all kinds of scandalous images that I’m surprised the local photo place deigned to print.

These were, however, good enough to get me into art school. On a trip to New York before I went off to MassArt, I “borrowed” the  Leica, and shot several rolls of the Chelsea Hotel, including a wonderful portrait of the famous hotel’s famous manager Stanley Bard. The Chelsea (in those days anyway) was very plain. Radiator pipes that banged all night long, narrow beds with thin blankets. But the wrought iron staircases were extraordinary, and the lobby was resplendent with boys in leather and raccoon-eyed girls, the celebrated and the notorious, cheek by cheek. I think that week is probably when I first started to use the camera as a different way to see. When I (ahem) “returned” the Leica, I left a roll of film in it, about half the exposures gone. I understand that when my stepfather went to pick up “his” roll of photos that he was quite bewildered by half of what he got back from Eckerd’s.

At Mass Art, I studied with Nick Nixon, who must be one of the most patient people alive.  My little Rollei had long since packed up (salt water and whatnot is hell on cameras) and with the first installment of my student loan, I bought an Olympus OM10 with a motor drive and two lenses.  Nick’s work is unflinching, capturing the beauty in the faces of people with AIDS,  people in nursing homes, the blind, the sick . . . and thank God, school children and city scapes. I wanted to take photographs like that, but I was shy about approaching people, so I shot almost exclusively with the telephoto lens. Yeah, it was a cop-out.

Even worse, I couldn’t get a grasp on exposure– I struggled with the light meter and most of the time just ignored it. I still can’t tell you exactly what “bracketing” or “matrix metering” is.  I understood why it was difficult to shoot a photograph of a black horse in the snow, and what to do about it, but I couldn’t explain it to you.  I suppose that’s like a writer who never bothered to learn to spell. It’s not that I meant to be disrespectful and careless. I was just in a rush to get the photograph. Somewhere I read a statistic that professional photographers believed that about five percent of the shots they took were successful. Five percent! That was one in twenty. I could produce a reasonable photograph one time out of twenty, well, most of the time.

I started in filmmaking at MassArt, drifted to photography and then upstairs to the Studio for Interrelated Media– “Performance Art.” There I built installations, made tape loops, shot film, and piled them all together to tell a story. Even though I was using various visual arts techniques to produce the finished piece, at the core all of my installations was the essence of it all: writing. I might have been running from words, but they were chasing me down.

The Olympus with telephoto lens and motor drive weighed in at nearly three pounds– which is a lot to carry on your shoulder day after day. Though I kind of hated to give it up, years later I finally packed it away in a box on the shelf for a much lighter Nikon SLR.  I was a long hold out for film. I’d see film stock from different companies disappear forever and each time would die a little  inside. Every time I had film developed, there was grousing about the expense. I understood the transient nature of a computer file though. Formats change, things disappear, they can’t be read down the line.

Daguerreotypes from the 1830s are still very much with us. Henry Fox Talbots “calotypes” of prints made with a silver solution fixed with salt still exist. You can make new prints from very old glass negatives. I love old photographs, particularly those of dogs, but also of family. My grandfather was an avid photographer and chronicled his family’s life with a medium format Speed Graphic, which belongs to me now. I have a photograph of Grampa, when he was just two years old, sitting on the lap of his grandmother, Elizabeth Tressler, who was born in 1837. So here’s a photograph taken in 1910 that is of someone I knew very well, well into my adult life,9 in the company of a woman who was born 125 years before me. I look at this image and I am connected to her. I can see that connection– he’s sitting on her lap!

I hated to change over to a format as tenuous as a computer file, and if the risks of losing the image weren’t bad enough, there was the trouble with capturing the image. I’d used friends’ digital cameras, snapping a picture for them at school functions and the like. There was no mistaking that lag between pushing the button and the shutter opening.  That  might be fine for taking pictures of a house or a tractor or an African violet, but what about shooting dogs, horses, children? You’d never be able to capture anything. They’d be long gone before the camera even cooperated.

Well, you know what comes next right? Nikon made a digital version of my beloved SLR, and it had no shutter lag. So I capitulated and agreed that the camera should be under the Christmas tree for me, 39 years after my first Instamatic. It’s been wonderful. Given that I never did master the technical aspects of photography, the digital format allows me shoot dozens of images to get the one I want.  This year, as part of a fundraiser, I used it to take pictures of pets with Santa Claus. I know, having had my owndog’s picture made with Santa Claus, that it’s usually one shot and you’re done. Not for me. I photographed each dog, as many times as necessary, until each owner had an image that made them smile. We would have gone broke trying to be that accommodating with Polaroid film.

None of my photographs has ever stopped anyone in their tracks.  Well, one maybe. In 1998, a friend and I spent 9 days crossing Wyoming on US 20. One evening, I took some photographs of an old fire truck parked under a sodium vapor lamp at the aptly named “Hell’s Half Acre.”  They were slides, and some of them were pretty fantastic. I chose the best one and entered, for fun really, in the Gallatin County, Montana Winter Fair. I should have had copies made, but I didn’t. Imagine how surprised and delighted I was to find that the photo had been named “Best Overall Photo” at the fair and “Grand Champion.”  When the fair was ending and I went to pick up the slide, and some other prints, my ribbons and prize money, none of it was there. Someone else had picked it up. At first I thought it must be a mistake, but as no one came back with them it was pretty clear they’d been stolen. You had to wonder about the man who usually won the photo contest at the fair, if he could be that small?  They reissued the prize money  and rosettes but the picture was lost forever and now Hell’s Half Acre itself is gone.

I take lots of pictures of the place I live, my family, some of the food that we conjure up in the kitchen, and of course, the dogs. One schmuck, an acquaintance, posted online a series of photographs he’d taken of Dayton. They could not have been less flattering. They weren’t even honest, just bad snapshots of parking lots and vacant houses and the quality was horrible– they might have been taken with my old Instamatic. When I shared my own photographs of Dayton with him he said they were the “typical yuppie bullshit” and called me a name. Another person looked at some photos I’d taken along the river  in Mississippi and saw in them a condemnation, when really that was not what I meant at all. So I think I’m not very successful in using photographs to communicate.

What I am good at is that I can make a great snap shot, an informal portrait. I can take a picture of a building or a harness horse or a carnival ride and make you go “Hm, that’s interesting.” No one’s ever going to want to buy them and put them on the wall and that’s fine with me. They work for me as illustrations, something to make the stories bigger. Photography for me was always about seeing, and writing is about feeling. Each photograph may indeed be worth a thousand words, but when I look at a compelling image, the journalist’s old maxim rises up in me: who, what, where, when and why. I see the photograph and I hunger for the details.

The noted photographer Shelby Lee Adams was a close friend of my late father’s. He is best known for his images of Appalachian family life, and those images are stories just begging to be told.  There has been an ongoing controversy about his work and whether or not it is exploitive of its subjects.  These people are poor, to some they might even seem grotesque– but surely no more (and perhaps less) than the homeless on the streets of L.A. or New York, or the babies with AIDS that Nick Nixon photographed. Or the children made famous  by Diane Arbus’ work. If we look at a photograph of another human being and it makes us uncomfortable, do we then deem it exploitive? Utter nonsense. When I see Adams’ photographs, I don’t feel pity or compassion or contempt– I feel curiosity. I want to know more about what’s going on in the picture, how these people are related to each other, what the circumstances are. It’s not up to me to judge their lot in life, but I greatly appreciate the glimpse into their world. When Dad was alive we used to look at these images together and he would explain to me what he knew about them. He and his wife were invited to go to Kentucky for a “Dinner on the Ground” with Shelby and came back with more great stories to go with these faces.

I like to take photographs, but I am not a photographer. I’m a writer, so I want to use words to tell these stories, but a single image catapults that person into our lives front and center, if only for as long as it takes to turn the page.  Over my desk hangs a large print of “Chester and His Hounds,” which Shelby Lee Adams made in 1992, and when I glance  up to really look it, it always makes me grin. But then I always had a thing for pictures of hound dogs.

Night Hawks

“Night people, funky but neat” – John Cooper Clarke

More than one person has advised to write in the morning. Only one of them is a writer, and she happens to be a morning person.  The last thing my husband says to me before he goes up to bed is “Don’t stay up so late tonight.” I can’t help it.  This is when I write.

I’ve tried to write in the daytime. Writing on deadline would have been a lot easier if I could somehow focus on the matter at hand during the daylight hours. I could do the interviews, make the notes, fact-check and peel back the layers of research, but I had the damnedest time getting the words down on the paper in some kind of orderly fashion, let alone words that would dance, take flight, suspend disbelief.

Some of the absolutely most brilliant things I’ve written have been crafted long after the rest of the world has gone to bed–and some of the worst dreck too, which is why although it’s good to write late at night, it’s wise to edit in the daytime.

I am less guarded at night , which allows for the literary blood-letting that seems to have become an essential component of a number of these personal essays. It also allows me the quiet and the solitude to work out complicated issues and present them in some kind of halfway coherent manner.

It’s been this way a long time. In college, I once wrote a poem about defrosting the refrigerator at four in the morning, and I wrote it after I finished defrosting the refrigerator. And not just for the writing, but most social interaction too. In the old days, we didn’t even get ready to go out until 10 o’clock, closing down the clubs and finishing up with breakfast at the Varsity, or whatever all-night diner was available. Then, as now, I did try to go to bed before it was entirely light out. Last night was a squeaker in that regard.

At home or out in the world, the night feels comfortable to me. The risks seem better calculated, the interaction with other people more immediate, the night its own soft, safe velvet cloak. Even online, there is a sense of camaraderie at finding that someone else is also up in the middle of the night.

Edward Hopper’s painting Nighthawks, has become a kind of icon for night-crawling, and the scene with its four figures has been the subject of many short stories, poems and cinematic homage. Fluorescent lights were quite new when Hopper made the  painting in 1942, and they seem a beacon out of the diner. After seeing the painting as a cheap print, it was quite shocking to come face to face with it in the Chicago Art Institute.  For one thing, it’s quite large– five feet long and almost three feet tall. But more immediate to me was the sense of wistfulness it evoked. Not that the figures were experiencing “existential loneliness”  (as suggested by one self-important art critic) but that Hopper had captured that late night blend of melancholy and magic. I wanted to be at some counter in the middle of the night, eating pie and drinking coffee from a stout mug.

Sister Wendy Bennett, an English nun who has been trotted out for a program in Art History on the BBC (honestly, even the premise sounds like a Monty Python skit) wrote in her book Sister Wendy’s American Masterpieces that the figures in the painting symbolized caged and miserable birds of prey, but it was unclear if the woman was preying on the men or the men on the woman. She loaded on more tripe about only the counterman being able to experience freedom by having a life outside of the diner. She thinks perhaps Hopper based both the male customers on himself (not the case) and that this indicated that he thought of the men as clones. Clones?

It’s not my place (or anyone else’s) to tell you what the  painting’s about. That’s the nature of art. Experience it for yourself and make your own interpretation– but in my opinion the English nun is heavily layering her own negative feelings about late night perambulations on top of whatever Hopper intended.

There is a very definite sense  in our culture that it is virtuous to be up early, and degenerate to be asleep at noon, even though there should really be no difference.  Ben Franklin, echoing earlier philosophers wrote “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy wealthy and wise,” and those prejudices linger, generating all kinds of pop culture studies, medical research and unending zeitgeist that it is better to get up early. Sometimes that moment of awakening and leaping from the bed is referred to as the heroic minute. Heroic! But apparently not so heroic when the minute of your rising is after 11 a.m.

Studies over the last forty years have shown that there are “differences in the fundamental property of the intrinsic period of the circadian rhythms” that will determine whether someone is an early bird or a night owl. These differences then are hard-wired, but can be adjusted through habit, will, and light therapy. There is sometimes a bias against “night people” in the workplace, where they may be regarded as undisciplined or lazy. In January 2007, “night people” in Denmark began a serious campaign to end discrimination against those who stay up late. Forming the “B Society,” they argued that the “Early Bird Model” was less relevant in a post-agricultural society and sought to attract the support of “trade unions, politicians and policy makers interested in making a more flexible workplace.”

I don’t consider myself “nocturnal,” but rather “cathemeral,” like a lion– an animal that is active night and day, depending on the circumstances. We night-hawks are in good company, though:  James Joyce, Winston Churchill, Marcel Proust, Hunter S. Thompson and Keith Richards.

A few years ago, a high school classmate rekindled our acquaintance. She and her husband both did shift work for the Canadian coast guard and often we were all three up in the wee small hours of the morning. I think those late night online conversations helped us to forge a much better friendship than the one we enjoyed in high school.Since then they have both retired and no longer have to deal with shift work (which neither particularly cared for) and I’m glad for them. But I miss seeing Jeanne pop up on my computer screen when I am noodling around after dark.

Tom Waits’  1975 album Nighthawks at the Diner was inspired by Edward Hopper’s painting, and the song “Eggs and Sausage“  is a brilliant evocation of late night in a diner. For years though, I mis-heard the line “Now the paper’s been read” as “Now the paper’s put to bed,” which for journalists is a lot more sensical. The paper’s “put to bed” when it’s sent to the press, a nocturnal exercise everywhere– it’s close to daylight when the day’s edition hits the streets. (And if it was the previous day’s — why bother reading it?)

There’s a rendezvous of strangers around the coffee urn tonight
All the gypsy hacks and the insomniacs . . .

I could get up at, say 5 a.m. and try to write. An hour into it, my son would be hitting the shower. My husband would be up soon after, and then downstairs making coffee, and letting the dogs out. The television would snap on for the morning news. Julian would stick his head in the study to ask if I know where something is, or can he have ten bucks, or did I  make an appointment for the dentist? They’d be out the door to school — I’d have 30 glorious minutes of peace and quiet and then my husband would be back. The mailman rings the doorbell, the dogs bark, everything pulling at my attention from fifty different directions.

If I start writing about midnight, I can write for four hours with very little to interrupt me. Four glorious hours, my family snug in their beds, the dogs snuffle, feet twitching, chasing rabbits in their dreams.