Getting Right          

2,232 wds             

The Photographer:

You may find the origin of some of my photographs interesting. Here is how i happened to shoot #16. Two old, unshaven men sat on a curb outside a convenience store where i go for the newspaper and coffee. There they rested, enjoying the sun. As i passed one said, “Hey, buddy, can i hold what you got left?” My immediate thought was sexual, my next monetary. He wanted money. I had plenty of money, but don’t like to encourage begging and was ready to turn away when i had an idea.  

“Sure, i got a buck for each of you. No, don’t get up” I rushed over to them as i pulled out two fresh one dollar bills.

“I want to take your picture, “ i said, almost ripping the cover off my camera. It was my everyday use camera, an Asahi Pentax K100 with straight lens. The two old guys were so surprised by the money i flashed i was ready to shoot before they could hide it.

“Hold up that dollar, buddy, don’t be shy, “ i said to one and to the other one, “spread that buck out in the sun, show me the green!”

They smiled and held up the cash, I took three shots, thanked them, they quickly hid the money and i went my way. The moment had passed. If i wanted more from them i would have to give them ten dollars apiece and talk for a long time before i could get a shot and the shot would look contrived. The moment was past and over, gone forever, like life.

They let me go cheerfully and i didn’t think about them until we met again in the dark room. The contact sheet revealed nothing special. I was disappointed. I made a print anyway, based on my memory of a feeling and there in the first test print was evidence, a clue. I followed it as far as my technical expertise could carry it and the result is one of my finest photographs. 

The new bills i had given the men catch the morning sun at precisely the same angle. This uniform intensity of reflection in two level, centered rectangles set as they are against a background of indirect, muted absorption, make for one photograph close up and another from a distance. Thus the composition changes as the eye approaches or withdraws. From a distance it is abstract; two glossy rectangles floating in a sea of dull refraction; closer, two merry old faces emerge from behind the hard, brittle light of the cash. The possession of money is a symbol of personal or collective achievement, this could be one interpretation.   

I decided to show this image not just because it is so sound yet shifting, compositionally, but because the two old guys look so happy. We see so little common joy in serious art. Happiness, or the lack of it, is in the broadest sense the most fundamental quality, or non-quality, of art. But if a more specific theme must be applied to this work, if an idea must be rendered from it, it might be that members of society are lessened by a lack of money or made to feel bigger by an abundance of it. True beyond doubt, so it follows that the richest members of society might merely be bums with an abundance of money.  

A month after taking the picture i saw one of the men at the same convenience store and gave him a print. He took it, I thought, with some resentment. His buddy wasn’t around and he was drunk and sullen so i went my way and have not seen him since.

While photograph #16 is spontaneous, # 21 is more . . . “

The Social Worker

Dead, thinks the woman in the gallery. One is dead, the other disappeared, good as dead.  Well, they didn’t have far to go.

The photographer himself stands in a group of visitors to his show. Tall, lean, he wears a dark shirt and slacks and a black leather jacket. Anticipation has drained the blood from his face, she assumes, and he feels the tension of being who he is and where he is; standing with others in color and three dimensions yet also hanging exposed on the walls in black and white, surrounding them, and himself.  He wears a goatee. You expect tall artist-photographers to wear goatees and expect their hair to be black, especially with such a pale face. And on their opening night red eyes stare stone hard, yet restless. She thinks, this is what is meant by creative, regenerative stress.

A few others in the gallery drinking wine and eating cheese on cracker squares or circles and contributing to the gabbling banter in the stylish air know her and speak to her, but she tells none of them she knew the subjects, physical or thematic, of #16, ‘one of my finest photographs,’ according to the artist's statement in the catalogue.

She is amused and horrified, amused as a therapist trained in the administration of a shelter dispensing public assistance (and therefore forced to see, “the brighter side,”) and horrified recalling the wasted old faces she is often one of the last to see alive, whose eyes she might close before dialing a number someone will answer twenty-four hours a day and which took her dialing once, for the first time, to remember forever. Her office is in the homeless shelter where one of the men died. She never saw the other one again. Maybe he went to see his brother in Wyoming. After the first man was found dead, soon after breakfast, and the remains were removed and questions answered, she rushed to her office, locked herself in and wrote a letter to her best friend in Minocqua, Wisconsin. It began, “What a way to start the day. . . “ 

The deceased died quietly, slumped in his chair. His passing didn’t make the papers, possibly because no one knew his name. A few days later another man came to her office and showed her a photograph of them together, told her the name of the dead man, or what he thought was the dead man’s name. The photograph was a five by seven copy of the eighteen by twenty-four inch print hanging on the gallery wall, #16. 

How should she tell the photographer about the picture the old man had given her resting now in a drawer in her office?  "They were lost long ago and now they are gone," one of her co-workers is fond of saying. Her staff is used to this kind of thing. It’s better, more peaceful than a fight. They joke about how well ventilated the room gets when the rescue squad is called. Everyone except the staff runs off so by the time the rescue squad arrives the doors have been opened and the cigarette smoke has cleared out. Another old man had been dead an hour, sitting up in a chair. The others in the room said they thought he had been asleep. No one knew anything about him, as he was not inclined to gab much even on his lively days. The staff found nothing in his pockets.

She circles the photographer quietly, slowly, keeping just within the sound of his voice. He is talking about his favorite instructor, dead now and standing in ghostly form behind his student’s opinions, if not his work. She hears him say, “The man gave me balance.”

Should she tell him their alleged names, would names be important to him? Is her motive to embarrass and insult him or to inform him? Her goal is not a sexual liaison, he is way too young and 

why would he take an interest in a middle-aged woman like her and her bulge around the middle? No, with age one must be content with friendship. 

Lately she feels like insulting anyone who has recently had a bath and a good meal, but her anger is checked by an opposing anger 

directed at those she tries to help. They are stupid, lazy, arrogant about nothing and they desire petty things. They are, in short, average and normal. Thus she is held in balance.

“I knew your friends with the two dollars,” she says over his shoulder. 

He turns. The conversation stops, mostly. Someone had been making a point and goes right on making it and stops when no one responds to it. The people in the group look at each other and the photographer, who is looking at her and listening for more. A man in his position must not respond too quickly. 

“I knew them, worked with them, your two dollar friends.”

“Oh, you know who they are?”

“Who they were. They are no longer with us.”

Whereas the others look puzzled, they don't know what she's talking about, since they have come to this opening to speak to him and of him, not look at his work. Sadness crosses his face and she feels she might have judged him too harshly. The others don’t know this matronly femme, nor of whom she speaks or why the photographer should look saddened by her words.

He says, “I’m sorry to hear that. Were they friends of your’s?”

“Sometimes they stayed at the Survival Center. I work there.”

“I would like to talk to you about that photo.“ He turns to the six or seven others there, some very elegantly dressed and says, “Excuse us for a moment, please.” And to her, “Can we take a look at it?” gently leading her away by the elbow. They stand before the photo.

“I know of the fine work being done at the Survival Center and i think keeping it going on the trickle of money the government lets out is a lot like being in the arts and trying to get a grant,“ he says and turns to her. She nods and smiles. He continues, “I give what i can afford, but i’d like to give more, so i want to know if you have space on your wall for this portrait, or any of the others, choose one you like and when the show closes i’ll bring it over myself and hang it for you. I live in the neighborhood.”

How can she refuse him? Vaguely she thinks she would prefer one of his cityscapes, but the two old men seem more appropriate for her office wall and she will not second guess, question or manipulate the giving of a gift. They talk of the men in the photo, but there is little to say about them besides what she knows happened to one and what they both know will soon happen to the other. As a subject juggled while sipping from a clear plastic glass of wine and eating cheese with crackers crumbling off the lips, it quickly loses forward motion. No more particulars can be known of them; they are neutralized, they have become types. Aside from their presence in this photograph, no other visual form of them exists. 

Two Dollar Friends:

Hanging now on her office wall, many visitors, members of the staff and residents make positive comments about the photograph. She is certain this means they hate it and she very soon wishes she had taken a cityscape. There is often a hint of sarcasm in their voices, particularly intoning the word ’interesting.’ She can’t decide if the photo is comic or tragic. One way or the other, she is beginning to think the photograph is a mirror. 

One night in a dream she sees the two old men and they frown at her, very displeased. The next morning she takes the photograph down. As soon as it rests in the closet she feels better. She thinks of taking it home but that would feel like taking work home, or never leaving the shelter. For a week she tries to convince herself she should grow up, that the photo doesn’t truly make her uneasy and for another week she looks for something to hang in its place. At last she replaces it with a reprint of an oil painting of a speckled dog, one forepaw raised and tail straight, intent on a bush out of which a beaked face peeks. Seeing the old men are gone, the attitude of her visitors seems to lighten. This new hunting scene is sincerely popular because no one has to pay attention to it. She thinks she has done the right thing, for hanging a photo of two residents of the shelter is redundant. If there's a window in a wall one doesn't want to look out of it and see what's inside the building. This old, tired world needs more windows than mirrors, she thinks.  The final and indisputable proof that she has done the right thing comes in a dream of the two old men. They are happy, laughing, jostling each other like boys. One does a handstand, the other says, "Hey buddy, watch this!" and does a standing back flip. They warmly thank her, and then, maybe to remind her of what she learns anew each day, that her job will never end, they ask her could she maybe help out with something so two unlucky guys can get right?

end of “Getting Right”                                 

No amount of technical expertise can make up for the failure to notice.                      W Eugene Smith