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MANAGE YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONStealing Souls
Thoughts On Photography
A FEW YEARS AGO, on a cool Fall afternoon in Central Park, I sat down at a bench and watched an odd man playing the drums. He was playing on the lip of a tall wastebasket, drumsticks in his hand.
“Baba-la-bop,” he kept saying over and over again, synchronous with his play. “Baba-la-bop.”
Somewhere down the line he had become a weird person. Who knows how long ago? Not him. In a gray trench coat he looked like a large man who had, inexplicably, become smaller; his head was oversized and dense. Then I realized something else that was different about him: he was wearing makeup, layers of it, and he had blacked his hair and sideburns with paint or shoe polish. He was Mr. Show Business gone loco.
“Buddy Rich!” he shouted out, and in the clicking of his sticks he made a fine adjustment.
There was something shocking about him, a zone of outrage and defect which distilled all the air between you and him. His face had a depthless quality, cartoonish; he was a Central Park doll who made certain noises when you poked him in the right places. And he was good at his drumming, for lunacy has its perfections, too.
I was only beginning to take photographs then, so I started to wonder how I would photograph him. Should I even photograph him? Did the world need another such photograph? At the time I couldn’t believe that it didn’t, so I set about preparing myself for the adventure — a certain push to the nervous system which would allow me to step out of my anonymity into the public world; a few adjustments of shutter and aperture.
Would Cartier-Bresson take this picture? I wondered.
Then I noticed that standing behind the drummer was a woman in a full-length fur coat talking to someone seated on a bench. Beside her a small poodle on a red leash stood prancing on little clicking feet. All of a sudden the poodle started jumping in the air, straight up, brief little nervous jumps, making no noise going up or down.
It was too irresistible. I slid off my bench, approached the drummer — who once again modified his drumming technique with the declaration, “Gene Krupa!” — crouched low, framed both the leaping poodle and the mad musician, and fired off a number of frames, maybe twenty.
What was I after? I had yanked two odd realities together, the way photographers do, and thought that was enough. Was there going to be a secret heart to my image?
Years later I realized that a poodle’s nerves and a crazy park minstrel have nothing in common except to the witless. Of course I could always claim the imperatives of absurdism . . . but hasn’t that been claimed enough? And is it even true? This absurdism which the lens loves to capture — isn’t it ultimately sterile and flat, the imposing of an aesthetic usually in the place of tears? For the most part, these dark demi-statements of the camera insinuate a potpourri of beauty at the heart of our tense world, a beauty which is there only because the camera found it. They make us seem profound at the exact moment we are being trite. Trite? Yes, of course, for what did I offer this man but a context in which all his sadness and loneliness were neutralized by my delight in the capricious. Much better by far to photograph him simply and let his own face tell a story.
A FEW YEARS LATER I stopped again to rest on a bench in Central Park a few yards away from the zoo. By then a photographer, I had been walking around the city for a few hours in search of certain images which had so far eluded me. My assumption was that the photographs I was looking for were just around the corner, and all I had to do was find the corner. It was not a bad notion really, for it built up the legs and taught me the joys of strolling, something I had never learned in thirty years of travelling by car. And I was learning to see too — not as of yet with any real clarity, but at least with the gradual sense that there was something to see, something, at any rate, beyond what I had already seen, something just around the corner. It was where this corner might be that was to occupy my thoughts as I sat down on the park bench.
I also sat down to look at a woman who was sitting on a bench directly across from me. She was an old woman, at the most seventy, in a black cloth coat, and she was covered from head to toe with birds, mostly pigeons, though there were a few sparrows hopping about her knees. Her coat and her red cheeks told me she was a foreigner, but I would have guessed it also from her open way with the birds, her conversation with them. She was chatting with them and cajoling them in an endless stream of bird-chucks and half-mutterings. There were criticisms, terms of endearment, feathered confidences, jibes about what they were doing today and what they did yesterday. She had names for many of them and would personally consult with a few special ones about their comings and goings. Out of a small white bag she fed them seeds while constantly reminding them of their manners, which were none too fine.
She was obviously of that breed of people, not so rare, who prefer the company of birds to that of people. In New York City where there are too many people and not enough birds, her like can often be found sitting in Central Park on warm afternoons. And on this day lots of people were in the park taking advantage of the lovely weather: elderly overweight ladies with little dogs, ears twitching with the news, lying at their feet, and old men with parchment skin dressed in neat threadbare suits, eyes closed to the sun, their starched white shirts bright like snow in the noon sunlight. Couples and families wandered by — the American families in unwrinkled clothing, cramming in as good a time as they could in as short a time as possible, the children whining and bored, and the European families, mostly couples, alert as birds and handsome in leather and lace, talking melodiously to each other. Down the way a drunk who looked like Rasputin slept fearfully on a bench. His green linen suit was stained and he was shirtless beneath his jacket. On each side of him a couple of feet of free space had been granted; an unwholesome presence.
I was not prepared for what happened next. A plump man wearing a shiny green short-sleeved shirt and madras pants, carrying a camera case under his arm, passed the woman feeding the birds, fiddled with his camera for a moment, and then, whirling around, took her picture. There was suddenly an upheaval of birds, an explosion of clucks; it was astonishing how quickly the bird-woman had detached herself from her charges.
“What are you doing? What are you doing?” she cried, advancing toward the photographer, one accusatory finger pointing directly at his face. “What do you think you are, taking pictures like this?” she shrilled in a loud querulous voice, her accent Germanic. “You think I don’t see you taking my picture? You think I don’t know you going to take my picture? I know before you know!” she yelled, still moving toward the poor fellow who was in a state of real confusion.
One knows that New Yorkers are famous for confrontations, but no out-of-towner can ever be ready for one. They are always thirty seconds behind the retort they would like to make, the one they would like to recall when they get home. And our photographer, probably a Midwesterner, was no exception. Exposed as he was to this unexpected assault, he blushed deep scarlet, stammered, stepped backward, his camera clutched at his side as if it were something unclean. What is more embarrassing than when we have been caught peeking? In his confusion one could see a blow to his virility — which was wilting in front of the eyes of thirty people. And let it be said that this was no ordinary assault or anything resembling a dispute — it was an obsession provoked and let loose. And she wasn’t even finished.
“You give me that film!” she demanded. “You give me that film, or you pay me money! You want the picture so bad you help pay for food! I know what you do when you go home to Ohio! You put my picture in the magazine or newspaper! You help me pay for food and then you put me in a magazine!”
But by this time the photographer had realized that the punishment did not fit the crime, and mumbling something about a crazy old woman, he walked away. She, mumbling something about stupid tourists, went back to her bench where the birds, soon reassembling, joined her as if nothing had happened.
This scene was to repeat itself a couple of more times in the next thirty minutes. After a while I could anticipate her dashing up from the birds as some innocent tourist began to point a camera in her direction. And her complaint was always the same: her photograph was going to be put somewhere, and for it she would receive no compensation, not even enough to pay for air, for bird seed.
At that moment I recalled a scene from a movie I had seen at least fifteen years before. It was not the first time I had recalled it — in fact, I have thought of it so many times that I now wondered if I hadn’t dreamt it. (Which of us, after all, hasn’t remembered an experience in detail which never occurred — an experience we needed perhaps, but never had? Did we end up having the experience? I wonder.) The movie was Lawrence of Arabia, and in the scene a native, perhaps on top of a train, gestures furiously to someone below not to take his picture. Someone explains, “The natives believe that if you take a person’s picture, you steal his soul.”
I don’t know why I’ve thought of that scene, real or imagined, a hundred times since I saw that movie. I suppose that I thought at the time it was somehow true, that an act of appropriation could take place when a photograph is taken — but surely in my life as an American young man no point of view I ever encountered would countenance such a notion. Yet why did that scene keep coming back to me over the years — why, more particularly, as I was sitting across from the woman with the birds?
A process of revelation began for me at that moment which it would take me years to conclude. I haven’t gotten to the end of it yet. It came from looking closely at the woman and her birds, looking without a camera, without the hope of anything other than the look. It was partially epiphanic, one of those bright, seemingly divine moments when a crowd of isolated thoughts and notions fuse into a single perception which changes everything. It was also a moment earned — after all, back in North Carolina a marriage was clamoring for attention I was putting elsewhere. And wasn’t I, sitting here languidly on a park bench in Central Park, the only one in the world who wanted me to be here? There was a hint suddenly that nothing of importance would ever come to me if I weren’t sitting on a park bench somewhere by myself, and that I was absolutely right to be here today — far away, all at once, from everything, all the good things and all the bad things, all the responsibilities and the distractions, all the choices which had ended up so unclearly, and all the urgency which would soon force me to make new choices. I was, simply, available; and my dukes weren’t up.
Yes, it was true — something was being appropriated, but I didn’t know what. I would find out what it was. A woman sitting on a bench was having her picture taken by men and women she didn’t know. Inside a camera an emulsified surface had received a scattering of light — and somewhere down the line this emulsified surface would be bathed in chemicals. An event which occurred in time would be converted into an object which occurs only in space. This is pretty close to magic, even if it can be explained — and if not magic, then at least something strange, very strange. What could be stranger than an odd old New York lady’s image appearing suddenly in the troubled waters of an Ohio darkroom? Particularly if she wishes it not to be so. To me, sitting in the bright New York sunlight, such an image seemed very strange indeed. What is she doing, after all, in that water? What is her image doing there? Outside the darkroom an angry woman may be cooking dinner, a rerun may be playing on a television a few rooms away. Shouldn’t we ask what is going on here? Why has she been thus converted? And for whose benefit? All we know with absolute certainty is that it is not for her benefit — since she has established it most ferociously in our minds that she has never received a penny for her birds, and that’s what matters to her. I mean, if she is to undergo conversion, if a woman sitting on a park bench is going to be converted into a two-dimensional image, we might ask why.
THE QUESTION WAS particularly close to me in those days. Why take photographs? Or to put it another way, is the impulse to take photographs an artistic impulse, that is, one which tries to enlighten, to disclose, to make meaning, or does it come from a semi-voyeuristic inclination to make thrills by stopping time, by perpetuating an event beyond its natural closure? And if photography is an art, how do you make it one? Running up and down the city as I had for the past few years, I had come up with a number of interesting images, but I wasn’t sure that according to my own inner measurements they were worth very much. I wasn’t sure they said anything real, and, never being a cynic, I was afraid they contained very little of that feeling for life which I consider basic to the truest instincts of art. As of yet I hadn’t been able to take out of me feelings and get them into a photograph. Even the best of my images partook of that impersonality which is the curse of the medium. All this machinery in front of us — it’s so unlike a brush and paint, paper and pencil, which conveys, without our choosing, who we are and what is the disposition of our heart. Where, I wondered, was my theme, my true subject? Robert Frank had found his America — where was mine? Cartier-Bresson’s photographs were saturated and explosive with his curiosity for place and his passion for the historical event. Steiglitz took photographs of New York City and made them look like photographs of a mind. Even Diane Arbus, claustrophobic, addicted to Halloween and nightmare, had nevertheless made the world her own. Hell, I wasn’t even able to get in my photographs the specific kind of joy and energy which one constantly comes across in the photographs which friends take of friends. Why we take photographs was no small question for me, playing, as I was, in the suburbs of art.
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