But there were, Mr. Gab assured u-Stu, the Saviors too. They bore witness. They documented. Eugène Atget had rescued Paris. Josef Sudek had done the same for Prague. August Sander had catalogued the workers of his country, as Salgado has tried to do for workers worldwide. Karl Blossfeldt, like Audubon, had preserved the wild plants. Bellocq had treated his Orleans whores with dignity. And how about Evelyn Cameron, who had saved Montana with her single shutter? Or Russell Lee, who photographed the Great Flood of ’37 as well as the Negro slums of Chicago? Or consider the work of a studio like that of Southworth & Hawes, whose images of Niagara Falls were among the more amazing ever made. He, Mr. Gab, had but one of their daguerreotypes. And Mr. Gab then disappeared into his room behind the rug to produce in a moment a group portrait taken in the Southworth & Hawes studio of the girls of Boston’s Emerson School, and through the envelope, which Mr. Gab did not remove, u-Stu saw the identically and centrally parted hair of thirty-one girls and the white lace collars of twenty-eight.
Mr. Gab went on to extol the work of Martín Chambi whom he had available only in a catalogue produced for an exhibit at the Smithsonian (so there were an unknown number of books behind the rug, perhaps in that closet, perhaps in a shelf above the boxes). Although Mr. Gab was capable of staring at a photograph uninterruptedly for many minutes, he had the annoying habit of flipping rapidly through books—dizzying u-Stu’s good eye, which could only receive the briefest tantalizations of an apparently magical place, set among the most remote mountains, Mr. Gab called “Macchoo Peechoo”—until he reached the photo he was searching for. There, there, Mr. Gab said, pointing: a young man in a most proper black suit and bow tie was standing beside a giant of a man clad in tatters, a cloth hat like an aviator’s helmet in the giant’s hand, a serape draped over the giant’s shoulders—and—and around the small man’s, a huge arm finished by fingers in the form of a great claw. The little fellow is the photographer’s assistant, Mr. Gab informed his. Who, u-Stu saw, was gazing up at the face of the giant with respectful incomprehension. But one was mostly drawn to the giant’s patched and tattered shirt and baggy trousers, to the barely thonged feet that had borne much, and finally to the huge stolid countenance, formed from endurance. Shots of shirts were rare.
Not all of Mr. Gab’s enthusiasms were trotted out at once. They were instead produced at intervals involving months, but each was offered as if no finer effort, no better example, could be imagined. Yet u-Stu came to believe that the artist Mr. Gab called P.H. (Ralph Waldo was the other Emerson) was dearest to him, after one afternoon being shown (again from the cache in the kitchen) a simple country and seaside scene: a crude sailboat manned by three, and oared as well, under way upon a marshy watercourse, the rowboat’s big sail, with its soft vertical curves and pale patches, in the center of the photograph, and to the left where the reeds began, though at the distance where there had to be land, a simple farmhouse resting in a clump of low trees, a trail of chimney smoke the sole sign of occupancy.
Every photograph by its very nature is frozen in its moment, Mr. Gab said, but not every photograph portrays stillness as this one does. The sail is taut, smoke is streaming away toward the margins of the picture’s world, and the postures of the oarsmen suggest they are at work; but there is little wake, the surface of the water is scarcely ruffled, not a reed is bent, the trees are without leaves, and the faint form of a small windmill shows the four blades to be unmoving. Nevertheless, it is the lucency of the low light, the line of the sail’s spar, which meets on one side a shoreline, on the other a small inlet-edging fence, which holds the image still; it is the way the mast runs on into its reflection, and the long low haze stretched across the entire background at the point where earth and air blend, where the soft slightly clouded sky rises; it is the relation of all these dear tones to one another that creates a serenity which seeks the sublime, because it is so complete. Complete, u-Stu, complete.
Look. In this work, the house, the boat, the rowing men have no more weight than the boat’s small shadow on the pale white water, or the bare trees and stiff reeds, because all are simply there together. Equals added to equals yields equals. One can speak one’s self insensible about the salubrious and necessary unity of humankind with nature, u-Stu-u, yet rarely enable your listener to see how the solitude, the independent being, of every actual thing is celebrated by the community created through such a composition. The light, coming from the right, illuminates the sides of the house in such a way it seems blocky and dimensional, as the boat does; however the sail, the sky, the water, and their realms, though made of a register of curves, are otherwise, and flat as a drawn shade.
At exam time, Mr. Gab would cry out: what have I been saying? What have I said? Every player is made a star when the team succeeds as a team, Stu promptly answered, whereupon Gab lost his mister and his temper at the same time, complaining of the comparison, and refusing (as he regularly did after exams) to speak to his help, who had been relegated a rank.
In this bumpy way his education proceeded, but it had an odd consequence. Stu’s experience was made by someone else’s words; his memory, formerly poor, was reluctant to linger on an early life that had been a bitter bit of bad business; so he adopted another person’s past, and he saw what that other person said he’d seen. He kept house in another’s household, and adopted points of view he never properly arrived at. Who could blame him? Would not each of us have done the same? Why not change residences when the skin that confined you was a bitter bit of bad business?
His fingers licked him through the pages of Mr. Gab’s dozen or so books of photography, mostly limited to Mr. Gab’s narrow enthusiasms; however there was a recent Salgado which rendered the stupid assistant weak in one knee, though he’d been told messages were for Western Union not for artistry. Such marvelous messages though—these Salgados proved to be.
Stu started stepping out—a phrase to be used advisedly. He obtained a card at the local library, shoplifted a few fruits, and sat in sun-filled vacant lots, deep in the weeds, happy with the heavy air. In the library he began examining the work of the two painters Mr. Gab admitted to his pantheon: Canaletto and Vermeer. In the shops he slyly added to his meager stock by stealing small fruits: figs, limes, kiwis, cherries, berries. In the weeds, feasting on his loot, Stu would imagine he lived in an alternative world, and he’d scale everything around him down, pretend he was hunkered in a photograph, where woods were black and white and pocket-sized. In the library he was eyed with suspicion, and Stu felt certain that only the librarians’ fear of a lawsuit let them lend what they did lend to him. In the open-air market, they knew he was a thief past all convicting, yet they hadn’t caught him yet, it was a public space, and they begged for the crowds that concealed his snitches with distracting blouses and billowy shirts. Shirts ought to receive some celebration. But he was soon run out of his weedy lot by a puritanical cop.
It was about then that Mr. Gab expelled Stu from his sleeping post, and he formally became Mr. Gab’s assistant. Mr. Gab had never paid his assistant a wage, not a dime, nor had he bought him anything but secondhands; even the comb he let Stu have had been run through many an unknown head of hair. Mr. Gab was frugal, probably because he had to be, so their diet was repeatedly rice and beans. He moved his assistant into public space and a rooming house run formerly by Chinese, or so the Chinese who ran it now maintained. It had brown paper walls, a cot and a chair, a john down the hall, a window without a blind, a throw rug which—to expose a splintery floor—would wad itself into a wad while you watched. You can keep this job if you want it, Mr. Gab announced, and I’ll pay you the minimum, but now you must take your meals and your sleep and your preferences out of here—out—and manage them yourself.
At first the new assistant was wholly dismayed. What had he done, he finally asked. You’ve grown up, was Mr. Gab’s unhelpful answer. You go away, god knows where, and look at god knows what, color and comic and bosom books. Actually, it was as if Mr. Gab were clairvoyant and knew
that his assistant had come on a book by Ernst Haas called Color Photography in the same local library where he had obtained his volume of Vermeer, and been subsequently ravished, just as Mr. Gab feared. But if Vermeer was photographic, Haas was painterly. Stu was sure Mr. Gab would say, very pretty, very nice, nevertheless not reliable. The object is lost, can you find it? torn posters and trash—that’s the world? and how far into a flower can you fall without sneezing?
Reality is made of nouns not adjectives, Gab shouted at the wall where his nouns sat in their sacred gray desuetude.
The stupid assistant suspected that Gab had listened to what was going on in his stupid assistant’s head, and heard objections and reservations and hesitations and challenging questions, both personal and educational, particular and theoretic. Then said to himself: this Stu should go elsewhere with these thoughts. Ernst Haas had photographed some flowers through a screen, making romantic a symbol of romance; through an open oval in a dark room, like the inside of a camera, he had rendered a bright café scene so its reality seemed an illustration in a magazine; he’d snapped a cemetery bust at night as if the head had leached the film and raised a ghost; and Mr. Gab would certainly have denounced these startling images as mere monkey business, had he seen them: the cropped stained glass from Cluny, too, glass heads looking like stone ones in a dismal darkness, a regiment of roofs in Reading, the silhouettes of fishermen fishing in a line along the Seine; but the assistant could remember now, Sudek’s magical garden pictures, with their multiple exposures, dramatic angles, and cannily positioned sculptures, and he found himself thinking that it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair to be so puritanical, to live with a passel of prejudices, even if each enthusiasm that was denied inspection intensified the believer’s devotion.
Mr. Gab’s exiled assistant came to work just before ten each morning like a clerk or a secretary, but if mum were Mr. Gab’s one word, he would not utter it. Between them, throughout the day, a silence lay like a shawl on a shivering shoulder. In the flophouse where the assistant lived now there was plenty of jabbering, but he couldn’t bear the cacophony let alone find any sense to it. In his room the world had grown grossly small. The window framed an alley full of litter. The brown paper wall bore tears and peels and spots made by drops of who knew what—expectorations past. Yet in such stains lay lakes full of reeds and floating ducks and low loglike boats. Instead of the sort of wall which furnished a rich many-toned background for so many of Atget’s documents: instead of the cobbled courtyard that the remainder of the photo surrounded, shadowed, or stood on; instead of gleaming disks of stone with their dark encircling lines; instead of the leaves of trees in a flutter about a field of figures; there might be—instead—a single pock, the bottom of it whitish with plaster: that’s what he had to look at, descend into, dream about, not a rhyming slope of rock, its layers threaded and inked; not the veins of a single leaf like roads on a map, or a tear of paper resembling a tantrum—his rips didn’t even resemble rips—or faded petals that have fallen like a scatter of gravel at the foot of a vase; not an errant flash of light centered and set like a jewel: instead he had a crack, just a crack in a window, a cob’s web, or that of a spider, dewdrop clinging like an injured climber to its only rope of escape; not a clay flowerpot given the attention due a landscape; not a scratch on the hood of some vehicle, not directional signs painted on the pavement, instructions worn by the wheels of countless cars; not a black eye enlarged to resemble the purple of a blown rose. These were the images in his borrowed books, the material of his mind’s eye, the Lilliputian world grown taller than that tattered Peruvian giant.
Even Mr. Gab’s heroes, even Josef Koudelka, had devoted at least one frame, one moment of his art, to a slice of cheese, bite of chocolate, cut of fruit that had been strewn upon the rumpled front page of the International Herald Tribune to serve as a still life’s prey—a spoiled fish—a party of empty bottles. That’s okay, he heard Mr. Gab say, because such a shot records a lunch, a day, a time in the world. I want that, u-Stew-u, I want the world, I don’t want to see through the picture to the world, the picture is not a porthole. I want the world in—you see—in—the photo. What a world it is after all! Am I a fool? Not to know what the world is; what it comes to? It is misery begetting misery, you bet; it’s meanness making meanness, sure; it’s calamity; it’s cruelty and greed and indifference; I know what it is, you know what it is, we know how it is, if not why—yet I want the world as it is rescued by the camera and redeemed. U-Stu-u. Paris is…was…noisy, full of Frenchmen, full of pain, full of waste, of ordinaire; but Atget’s Paris, Sudek’s Vienna, Coburn’s London, even Bellocq’s poor whores (I never showed you those ladies, you found out and stared at that filth yourself), Salgado’s exploited, emaciated workers are lifted up and given grace when touched by such lenses; and every injustice that the world has done to the world is forgiven—in the photograph—in…in…where even horse-plopped cobbles come clean.
But what about, the stupid assistant began, what about Haas’s Moreno, a photo full of steps, the dark woman walking toward a set of them, her black back to us, the red and white chickens standing on stairs…they’d all look better gray, he was sure Mr. Gab would say. Or the lane of leaves, that lane of trees beside the Po, or the Norwegian fjord photo, Mr. Gab, the faint central hill like a slow cloud in the water, what of them? what of them? So what, he replied on behalf of Mr. Gab who was somewhat cross, when one can have Steichen’s or Coburn’s streetlamps, spend an evening full of mist and mellow glisten, bite into an avenue that’s slick as freshly buttered toast.
But Mr. Gab, do you dream that Sebastião Salgado wants anyone forgiven: are the starving to be forgiven for starving? are those scenes from Dante’s hell (the hell you told me about) redeemed because the miners of Serra Pelado’s gold—worn, gaunt, covered with mud and rags—are, through his art, delivered from their servitude and given to Dante? am I to be forgiven for my deformities? my rocking, as if I were indeed the baby in the tree, is it okay? If cleverly clicked? o yes, Mr. Gab, you’re right, I did peek at the fancy girls, and I was toasted by one in striped tights and a bonnet of hair who raised to me a shot glass of Raleigh Rye, but so many of them, sad to say, had scratched-out faces, only their bare bodies were allowed to be; while Bellocq too, by the book, was said to be misshapen…not quite like me; but he didn’t dwarf himself, I bet, and behaved himself with the girls because he understood his burden; just as it’s true, I didn’t do me, someone else, perhaps yourself, Mr. Gab, did, but I was not a party to the filthy act that made me, or to the horror of having insufficient room in an unsuitable womb; I didn’t mangle myself, suck the nail from my own thumbs, shorten my stature, wound my mouth; yet daily I inflict them on others; I wobble along on my sidewalk and all those passerby-eyes flee the scene like shoo’d flies.
Should Salgado—u-Stu-u—Mr. Gab rejoins, should he then forget his skills and just picture pain picture human evil picture human greed picture desolation picture people other people have allowed to become battered trees made of nothing but barren twigs, picture many murdered, meadows murdered, hills heaved into the sea, sand on open eyes, the grim and grisly so that it approaches us the way you do on the street, so we will look away, even cross against traffic in order to avoid any encounter, because the overseers of those miners don’t care a wink about them, never let their true condition sneak under a lid, form a thought, suggest an emotion—unless there is a fainter, a sluggard, a runaway—no more than the other workers, who sweat while smelting the ore, give the miners time, since no one thinks of the smelters either, the glare oiling their bare chests, no more than those who stamp some country’s cruel insignia on the country’s coins or dolly a load of now gold bars into a vault think of anyone else but their own beers and bad bread and breeding habits.
But Mr. Gab, sir, when I look at that huge hole in the earth, and at those innumerable heads and shoulders heavy with sacks of dirt like a long line of ants on paths encircling the pit that their own work has bit int
o the ground, just as you and Dante said hell’s rungs do; against my will, I see something sublime, like the force of a great wind or quake or volcanic eruption.
Yes, u-Stu-u, because u have a book in hand, u aren’t in the picture, u are thousands of miles from Brazil, u wear clean underclothes (I hope and suppose), but can u now reflect on your own sad condition, as molested by fate as they’ve been, those poor workers, because who of us at the end of the day goes home happy? do you go to your room and laugh at its luxury? You saw—it’s less than the whores of New Orleans; don’t you still see trash from your window, and stains on the wall and through a pock or two if you peer into them won’t you encounter again that unearthed creature covered with a silkskin of mud, a man who a moment before the photo was in a long climbing line up the laddered side of one of hell’s excavations, and won’t you continue to find behind him, and free of misery’s place in the picture, another man in shorts and a clean shirt studying a clipboard? and what are we to think of him, then? and what are we to think of ourselves, and the little gold rings we wear when we marry?
Starve the world to amuse a few. That’s man’s motto. That sums it. But now Mr. Gab’s assistant didn’t know—couldn’t tell—who was supposed to have said it.
Eyes Page 4
