The type of shoes and jackets you wore were important, too, if only to identify your country of origin. Most of the Paris-based photographers wore a French brand of leather shoe called Paraboots, which were smart-looking as well as rugged. I bought myself a pair of sturdy black ones that I loved, even though on me they just looked big and clunky. As for outerwear, anything in black or tan with large pockets was acceptable. The British photographers had footwear and outerwear that, in typical British fashion, divided them into their respective classes. The working-class guys tended to wear Doc Martens or Clarks, while their Oxbridge-educated colleagues favored the more expensive Timberlands, imported from America, or a well-worn pair of Church’s for less strenuous terrain like 10 Downing Street. The guys with the Doc Martens could wear any type of cool jacket imaginable, while the Oxbridge guys wore one jacket and one jacket only: a green Barbour, the kind usually worn with a pair of green Wellies during duck-hunting season back home. The Americans—along with the Japanese, who were always trying to be just like the Americans—liked any jacket and/or vest manufactured by Banana Republic, which they wore with either Timberlands or with sneakers, the latter for which they were teased mercilessly by the French. The Germans had ugly jackets with decals and boxy, utilitarian shoes made by companies like Birkenstock, and the Soviets, if they ever made it out of their country, wore nylon windbreakers and those hideous gray fake-leather loafers from the central Soviet shoe factory.
A photographer’s pants, on the other hand, told you nothing. Everyone, to a person, wore Levi’s.
Now, the manila film envelopes that you stuck in the back pocket of your Domke camera bag were the truest anthropological talismans of all. The envelopes were fairly sturdy, long and narrow—about ten inches long and four inches wide—with the opening on the short end. The guys with the Olympuses usually had either blank envelopes or no envelopes at all. The guys with the beat-up Nikons usually had envelopes bearing the names of one of the three big agencies—Gamma, Sipa or Sygma—in big black letters, or they had the coveted ones with the red letters that spelled out the words Time, Life or Newsweek. These belonged to the photographers on assignment and, more important, on expense accounts. It was their unwritten duty to buy philanthropic rounds of drinks for their less fortunate colleagues shooting on spec. But the mother of all envelopes was the one bearing the name of a photo agency called Magnum. A Magnum envelope in your Domke bag was, for all intents and purposes, the photojournalism equivalent of a field marshal’s epaulets. Never mind that the cooperative agency’s finances were in shambles—most “concerned” photographers are too busy being concerned to earn any money—and that every photographer who joined Magnum started to think of himself as a latter-day Leica-toting Spinoza (“I am not a journalist,” one of them once told me, pronouncing the word “journalist” with the same disgust one reserves for words like “bowel movement.” “I am a visual philosopher.”) Magnum was the holy grail.
Magnum was founded in 1947 by four photojournalists: Robert Capa, George Roger, David Seymour (aka “Chim”) and Henri Cartier-Bresson. It was the first and, for a while, the only cooperative photo agency, and it created a new precedent in the business of photojournalism by providing its photographers with the right to retain sole copyright over their images. Until that point, copyright was retained either by the magazine or by an agency itself; if an image was reprinted, the photographer never saw a penny of resale profits. Other agencies were soon created using Magnum’s business model, but none other required such an intimidating initiation process. You can’t just join Magnum by setting up a meeting with an editor and showing a portfolio. Like a candidate for a secret club, a photographer has to be nominated by a current Magnum member to set the election process in motion. After that, there are numerous portfolio reviews, a vote by members, and years of tangential association before the title of “Member” is bestowed upon the lucky few.
Gilles Peress, Magnum photographer, taught at Harvard as a visiting professor during my junior year when I was just beginning to study photography. I wasn’t in his class, but I sat in on a lecture he gave and was immediately seduced by the intensity of his speech and the in-your-face nature of his photography. Gilles is a black-and-white purist, and his pictures are like little two-dimensional jails; once you’re inside, there’s no escape. In his pictures from the Iranian revolution—my favorite photos of all time—faces pop up from the bottom of frames, arms fly out, hands fly in, eyes stare out with the intensity of bombs about to explode. “A good photographer is never afraid of death,” he said to the assembled students. “He seeks it out, he gets close enough to smell it. He lives every single one of his days as if it were his last. Otherwise, his pictures are shit.” I remember writing in my notes “SEEK OUT DEATH/OTHERWISE SHIT” in capital letters and underlining it.
Though up to that point I had never shot anything other than snapshots on my Instamatic camera, I’d always appreciated good photographs. My childhood piano teacher had a book filled with old pictures from Life magazine in her waiting room, and I would pore over it every Monday after school as I waited for my sister to finish her lesson. I’d be sitting there, wracked by guilt over having not practiced my scales or “Für Elise,” and I’d take one look at those thalidomide babies or Riboud’s flower child or the starving kids in Africa with the distended bellies and feel okay. I hated the piano lessons, but I loved that book.
My favorite, the one I would always turn to first, was that Pulitzer Prize–winning Nick Ut napalm bomb shot of the naked Vietnamese girl screaming in pain as she runs down a road toward the camera. I could stare at that picture forever, my eyes moving from dead center—the naked girl with her arms stretched limply on either side of her—to the clothed, wailing boy in the immediate foreground, to the other children running with the girl, to the soldiers very casually strolling behind them (as if this kind of fiery apocalypse were all in a day’s work), to the ominous smoke behind them all and then back to the naked, crying girl, all the while awed at the absolute perfection of the image. I remember thinking at the time that most photojournalists probably work their entire lives and never take a picture like that, a picture truly worth a thousand words, if not more.
A prescient thought, in retrospect. But it never stopped me from trying.
When I got to college and started shooting pictures myself, my appetite for the medium was insatiable. I shot at least eight and sometimes fifteen rolls of film a day. I went to the library and to bookstores to pore over the photography books. I memorized every image in Robert Frank’s The Americans and marveled how they echoed the words of my favorite book at the time, Kerouac’s On the Road. I devoured Walter Benjamin’s Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment, Susan Sontag’s On Photog-raphy, old Aperture magazines, anything by Vicki Goldberg and every-thing I could get my hands on that chronicled the life and career of Diane Arbus. “Push yourselves,” my professor Christopher James told our class. “Take pictures that challenge you, that challenge the way you see the world and the way the world sees you.” As this was a photography class at Harvard—a roomful of valedictorian geeks with cameras—half of them took Christopher’s advice as a call to shoot naked self-portraits. I took it as an excuse to shoot strippers.
I couldn’t believe it was that simple. I couldn’t believe that just hanging a camera around my neck gave me carte blanche to see any sordid thing I wanted to see. Like Arbus, I’d always wanted to slog through the grimy underbelly of life, to visit strip clubs, sex clubs, heroin dens, to see the kind of places where life was as raw and on the edge as it could get, but before studying photography I’d never been able to figure out how to do so without becoming a stripper or pervert or drug addict myself. And then I walked into the Pussycat Lounge with my dad’s old Nikkormat around my neck, said, “I’m a photographer,” and voilà, the gates magically opened.
Okay, well, not so magi
cally. First I had to fight off the Pussycat Lounge owner, who suggested I have sex with him and then said, “With that tight little ass, you should be up on stage with the rest of the girls.” I politely declined both propositions and then struck a deal with him: I’d bring him and his girls free eight-by-ten photos every week if he would keep his paws off of me and let me shoot in peace. “Fine with me,” he said, “but I’m not the only one you’re gonna have to convince.”
He was right. The strippers themselves—and who could blame them, really?—were extremely distrustful. My first day of shooting, they put me through the wringer. They made me get stoned with them. Then they passed me a rolled-up hundred-dollar bill and a mirror with three lines of cocaine on it and forced me to snort all three in rapid succession right then and there. I was a casual user of both drugs, so that part of the hazing didn’t faze me, but then, just as the high kicked in, they sat me in a chair in front of the mirror and watched as one of the girls smeared makeup all over my normally unpainted face. “So,” the stripper said, applying (and quite forcefully so) scarlet lipstick above my upper lip, then all the way down to my chin, “now do you feel good enough to fuck?” Now that was truly disturbing.
But, hey, that was all part of the fun, too: the perversion, the naughtiness. Never mind that spending my afternoons at the Pussycat Lounge shooting pictures of naked women and (sometimes) getting high was the perfect antidote to quiet mornings spent in Harvard lecture halls scribbling notes and making valiant if mostly failed attempts to wrap my brain around the tenets of Lacan and Derrida. The Pussycat Lounge was everything I’d hoped it would be—raunchy, dirty, vulgar and lewd. And the strippers? Right out of central casting.
There was Boom-Boom, with her enormous sagging breasts and her sadomasochist handcuff shtick. She was studying to be an accountant. There was Sally, who fake-masturbated on stage. She claimed to be an heiress, which, judging by her poise, Brahmin accent and mink coat, could have been true. There was Venus, the coke fiend/stoner strumpet. She was young, dimpled and totally fucked up—Shirley Temple after a gang rape. She stripped on stage to the song “I Know What Boys Like” while sucking on a giant lollipop. Then there was Steve with the Aerosmith haircut and skin-tight black T-shirts, whose job at the club I could never figure out. As far as I could tell, he was paid to hang out backstage, stare at the girls, bring them drugs and every once in a while, when the mood struck his fancy, to stand in front of the mirror with his jeans around his knees and jerk himself off in front of all of us. I took a not-so good picture of this one day, but all these years it’s stayed, unprinted, a tiny postage-stamp image on my contact sheets.
Not that I was fundamentally opposed to the idea of public masturbation or to shooting pictures of it. In fact, my favorite photo from my forays into the Pussycat basement was of Sally touching herself, shot from the neck down. My professor Christopher told me the fact that she was headless made a much stronger image—it signified the universal stripper rather than the individual stripper. I was more than happy to take credit for the artistic forethought, but the truth of the matter was that when I saw Sally sticking her fingers in her vagina, for perhaps the third time that day, I was so inept with the camera that after I found focus and calibrated the proper f-stop, I forgot all about proper framing and clumsily chopped off her head.
BOSTON, 1986
One day, while I was printing up a copy of this picture, Gilles, the visiting Magnum photographer, stopped me in the long corridor just outside the darkroom. “Your naked girls are very good,” he said. “Derivative, of course, because Arbus did it first and better, and then Susan Meiselas after that, but yours are good, too.” His French accent was thick, and he spoke with a conspiratorial air. He kept looking over his shoulders to make sure no one was listening, even though it was late at night and the hallway behind him was empty.
I had been wondering when he was finally going to speak to me. I’d noticed him staring at my work for weeks as I’d walk in and out of the darkroom with wet trays filled with stripper photos, but he never said a word. When I’d run into him in other parts of the campus, he would acknowledge our unacquainted acquaintance with a silent and perfunctory nod.
“Thanks,” I said. “Arbus is my newest hero. She’s now right up there with Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf.” These were actually my heroes at the time, and I meant it both as an opening to a philosophical debate—Discuss: Why did all of my heroes commit suicide?—and as a morbid joke, but Gilles didn’t laugh.
He invited me into his office for a chat. We talked for what seemed like an hour but what could have been only five minutes or so. You could never tell with Gilles. He was so intense, so full of passion for his art, it was exhausting just being in his presence. He told me all about Magnum, about his work. I was concentrating on the gray streaks in his hair, trying to avoid the searing blast of his eyes, when out of the blue he offered me a job as a summer intern in the agency’s New York office. I was surprised. Since I wasn’t one of his students and since he’d never before deigned to speak to me, I had not realized to what extent he’d been paying attention to my pictures. I thanked him, said I’d try to work out some sort of summer lodging in Manhattan and that I’d get back to him. When I turned around to head back into the darkroom he stopped me. “Arbus killed herself, you know,” he said, as if he were letting me in on a big secret. “They said she saw too much. Went insane.”
Hence my Plath/Woolf joke, I thought, but never mind. “I know,” I said. “So what?”
“So watch yourself,” said Gilles. “I don’t want to have to clean up any messes.”
The Magnum internship that summer was unpaid, so I had to work the dinner shift four nights a week as a waitress at the New Fuji Sushi and Steak House to make ends meet. But I would have been just as happy to pay Gilles to let me sit there in the Magnum office and sort through those photos. There they were, right in my hands, my favorite images since the dawn of photography. Cartier-Bresson’s man jumping over a puddle, Robert Capa’s dying Spanish soldier, Joseph Koudelka’s 1968 Czech uprising, Sebastiao Salgado’s antlike gold mine workers, Gilles’s own masterful work during the Iranian revolution.
My job at Magnum was hardly mentally taxing. I was to open up all the return packages of slides and prints, make sure nothing was missing and then pass the pictures on to Doug, whose job it was to file them back into the archives. Doug had tattoos, a crucifix earring, spiked hair, a beat-up Nikon and leather pants, and every morning he’d swagger into the office cradling his motorcycle helmet under his armpit. He sat immediately to my right, close enough to touch, which was convenient both for our filing system and for lobbing pheromones back and forth at each other. We’d spend hours together, staring at the stockpile of famous images scattered on the surface of our shared desk, trying to figure out what distinguished a brilliant photo from an ordinary one and trying to carefully avoid the magnetic field that had formed between us. Then one day, right after we agreed that Cartier-Bresson kicked butt over every other photographer who’d ever lived, he showed up for work carrying two helmets under his armpits: “We could go down to Coney Island, take pictures of freaks, eat some hot dogs. Whaddya say?”
I’d had few propositions in my life more tempting than that. A boyfriend in high school used to drive me around on his older brother’s motorcycle, and nothing I’d ever experienced up to that point had ever come close to delivering the same thrill. I loved everything about it: slicing through the wind, leaning into each sharp turn, bodies and machine as one—arms embracing leather, legs hugging metal—while the sweet ambrosia of gasoline and aftershave filled my lungs.
“Sure,” I replied. “Love to.”
Doug and I rode down to Coney Island, took pictures of freaks, ate some hot dogs. We wiped the sauerkraut off each other’s cheeks and kissed. Then he drove me on that motorcycle back into Manhattan, where, drunk with only the pleasure of our journey, we made out some more.
“YOU HAVE A MOTORCYCLE BACK in Paris?” I ask Pierre, taking a hit off a hash cigarette he’s just rolled. We’ve been sitting in a café a couple of blocks from the bombed house in Arnhem for well over an hour now. You have to hand it to the Dutch and their laissez-faire legal system. Marijuana is not legal, nor is it illegal. So at many cafés, along with a menu for pastries and coffee, you can also ask for the hash menu. It’s nice to be able to say, Hmm, let’s see . . . I’ll have a croissant, an espresso and a quarter ounce of Jamaican gold. And if you don’t mind, I’ll just sit here all afternoon getting stoned.
“How did you know I have a motorcycle?” Pierre asks.
I eye his jacket. “Just a hunch,” I say.
“I see,” he says. Then he leans forward, as if to tell me a secret, and smiles seductively. “But, I must tell you, it is not a Harley. It is only a Honda.”
“A Honda? Well, in that case, forget it.” I stand up from the table and pretend to walk away.
“No, wait, Deborah,” Pierre says, laughing and chasing me through the café. Like Pascal, he pronounces my name in three syllables, with the French accent aigu over the e. Dé-bo-rah. It sounds so much better than plain old Deb-ra. Unlike Pascal, however, he doesn’t raise one of his eyebrows when he says it. And his laughter is genuine.
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