Photographer Geoffrey James and I are playing Scrabble . . . to the death. We’ve been burning up the board on the same game for hours, neck and neck, tooth and nail, drink for drink. James is being so competitive that I’m determined not to let him win.
Somewhere around midnight Geoffrey suddenly inflates and with great pretension lays down a word exactly in the middle of the board and stentoriously declares himself the winner. I look down at his victory word . . . “yeg.”
“Geoffrey! What the fuck is that? That’s not a word. That’s bullshit.”
Jowls shaking like Diefenbaker, Geoffrey declares that it’s a perfectly good word — Philadelphia slang for safecracker. I, the little guy from small-town southern Ontario, glare across the table at this Oxford-educated, former Time magazine writer and now instant Brit Twit. Of course there’s no dictionary in the cabin and the roiling river is indifferent to my tragic loss.
The next day my first wife, Annick, and I begin the long retreat to Toronto. When I reach the beginning of my half-block-long downtown driveway she orders me to stop the car. I do and she jumps out, mounts the front steps and vanishes into the house. By the time I’ve parked my car at the back and dragged our bags to the front she’s back outside with a dictionary in hand. She confirms that there is indeed a Webster’s word for safecracker. Triumphantly she announces that yeg has two gs — yegg! Now that’s loyalty. I’m not a loser.
When I was starting a family my wife worked for a large commercial architectural firm. It was one of those business-oriented partnerships designed to cover all the essential bases. One partner was a WASP, the other Jewish. One was in the old Granite Club, the other joined the Jewish Primrose Club. It worked well for years: commissions came from the old establishment and also from the ambitious, parvenu developers who were transforming skylines not just in Toronto but New York and London. This firm still exists today although the partners’ names have been reduced to initials. It’s a formula that’s still used although today’s most successful firms have taken on greater partnership ethnic diversity in order to reflect the multicultural makeup of Toronto and court global business. Nowadays you’ve got to add an Asian partner — a Chinese or Japanese Canadian — and perhaps a South Asian or an Arab. The main thing is to make money and get mentioned regularly in the papers.
Anyway, my then wife who is Jewish but very secular had to take a lot of shit from the Jewish partner. He hated the striped socks she wore to work. He thought the colours she wore too bright and the interiors she designed too playful. When I went to University College in the 1960s all the Jewish girls wore maroon and black. That was it — a very somber palette that must have informed his sense of proper dress. It was a culture still in mourning.
The partners had a kind of good cop/bad cop routine. The Jew would give her hell and then the WASP would invite her to dinner at a hotel he owned. The buildings this cultural marriage produced were staggeringly mediocre but the firm made pots of money because they kept their eye on the bottom line and were tough. Photographs of the firm’s offices in the 1960s showed all workers in white shirts, ties and business jackets when the world outside was rebelling in bell-bottoms and tie-dyes. Things hadn’t progressed much when my wife worked there a decade later.
Despite her perceived solecisms she soon graduated to running a department of interior designers. She had many buddies among the architects who actually did the grunt work of getting detailed designs finished and the buildings up. Their projects could be huge. I remember her doing floor and reflected ceiling plans plus colour and finish schedules for a building of a million square feet. No mean feat.
She continued working into the early months of her first pregnancy without complaint.
Then one morning I got a tearful phone call. Would I come and pick her and several colleagues up immediately. Puzzled, I jumped in the car and headed up the parkway. When I pulled into the office parking lot I was greeted by a huddle of crying women. They were all pregnant. All had been fired by the Jewish bad cop. Now no benefits would have to be paid. It was creepy to go in and collect their stuff. All their architect buddies scurried for cover or kept their heads down on their drafting boards. They all knew it was wrong. In fact it was totally illegal. But they all wanted to save their own skinny asses. It showed the depth of workplace friendships — not very. It was shameful.
In the car I urged the women to file a labour complaint and sue. But they were all now too preoccupied with their pregnancies to start a war. They let the bad cop get away with it.
Years later when I served on the curatorial and acquisitions committee of a major museum I sometimes had to share a board table with this man. He had no memory of who I was and had probably treated so many people badly that most were erased by utility. He’d been a collector all his life and when he made some little donation to the museum I had to witness a lot of sycophancy on the part of curators and the director. When you knew the backstory of the money it was painful to watch. One longed for justice.
2015
I run the river with a friend, bankside cedars browning, pines fading, but waters sparkling with the crystal light of fall and its breezes. A few days later I’m taking in the same light on the Seine. However the thickets of Paris, that city of foolishly self-important buildings, are composed of selfie sticks. Every tourist under 35 has one. Dead selfie sticks litter the sidewalks where poor African immigrants hawk replacements. Everywhere in the Pompidou, the Musée D’Orsay and the Louvre, one’s view of the paintings is blocked by young tourists taking selfies. They even take them during videos at the Louis Vuitton Foundation, entering the darkened screening rooms just long enough to capture themselves with a frame from videos like Christian Marklay’s Crossfire. They’re all young people struggling to be individuals in a world of seven billion. Who could have ever guessed that the true democratization of photography would be brought about by the telephone? We fly home.
Sheila and Michael at Les Deux Magots, Paris
A few years later I had a more extreme selfie experience back in Toronto. My younger son, Ben, had leapt into the lineup for Kusama tickets at the Art Gallery of Ontario. He must have started at dawn because by the time he scored tickets for himself, his girl, as well as Sheila and me, there were 45,000 people on hold. The big draw in this fun house carnival by Japanese pop artist Yayoi Kusama was the six mirrored “Infinity” rooms. The capacity audience on the Thursday evening we went had a median age under 30. All the young women teetered from room to room in stagger-steep heels and clothes so tight and skimpy that bared body parts squeezed out like toothpaste. This vain and horny crowd shrieked from mirrored room to room taking infinite selfies inside each before rushing off to the next, totally oblivious of Kusama’s paintings and sculptures. Their gallery visit had nothing to do with art.
We quickly discovered a workaround the lineups for each room. Spectators were being admitted for 20 seconds at a time in trios. As most of the shallow screamers were couples one could join a second line, much shorter, as a single in waiting to be paired with a couple. So we did. I seemed to inevitably end up doing my 20 seconds of vanity time with pairs of shrink-wrapped young women. Later when we left the gallery I puzzled over what all these fashion girls were doing with the balance of the evening. Sheila had the answer. “Oh, they’re back in their tiny rented condos trying to figure how to Photoshop the grizzled old lurker-guy, you, out of their Infinity photos.”
2006
We are five, seated at one end of the boardroom table in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Our job is to interview roughly 40 candidates for the position of photography curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario. One by one the impressive c.v.s enter one end of the room, spot the tiny cluster of interrogators at the far end of a table like a runway at LaGuardia and quickly shrink. The discrepancy between the paper and the person is frequently huge.
Of the small handful of applicants that are of interest it soon becomes apparent th
at they see Toronto through an old lens: as a tryout town where one polishes a few skills and contacts before moving on after a couple of years to somewhere more important. Others clearly have no interest in doing the grunt work. The AGO’s photography department has been on a donor-driven acquisition binge that parallels the classic donor edifice complex. The rich love to get their names on cornerstones and carved granite door arches but seldom have any interest in backing up their building donations with operating funds. Utility bills and replacement roofs aren’t sexy. The thousands of recently donated photographs in the collections have yet to be properly catalogued and conserved. Most male applicants for the job clearly see that part of the job as toil beneath them and best dumped into the laps of worker-drone grad students. The gallery needs a curator who will prioritize that unglamorous task.
The other scarce commodity is an individual not only intimate with the medium’s complex history but also sympathetic to the concerns and production of contemporary practitioners, especially domestic ones. Americans have been steamrolling over the medium for much of the past century. It’s time to recognize and nurture the many talents at home. This position will be a very large house with many rooms.
After doing more interviews and hosting finalist presentations to staff back in Toronto we five announce our decision. This results in me, and I’m sure some of the others, being pulled into corners and grilled by senior staff. Why were we proposing the selection of the “junior candidate”? What was unsaid but suspected was why were we not only supporting someone who was recently out of graduate school but also female and gay. But we collectively stood our ground; the committee’s choice was honored in the end. We got a classy woman with one foot in the past and another firmly planted in the present who knows her stuff and, best of all, is not an import but a deeply established Canadian with roots in both Anglo and Francophone culture. May the era of hiring Brits and Americans to run our cultural institutions soon end.
So what about photography? Can a photograph make a difference? Do pictures matter? Have all of us who take this so seriously been wasting our time? Do they do anything useful beyond greasing the wheels of commerce in advertisements and packaging?
Unquestionably they can and do.
Roger Fenton’s 1854 photograph of the so-called Valley of the Shadow of Death in Crimea was a progenitor of millions of war photographs that were to shape and change public attitudes to all future conflicts. No one can forget their first viewing of Nick Ut’s Napalm Girl and the outcry it generated. The photograph of drowned three-year-old Alan Kurdi on a Turkish beach changed attitudes toward refugees and influenced Canadian immigration policy. And when I was an undergraduate at University of Toronto I had a friend there who was a medical student. He always carried a crumpled copy of Steichen’s Family of Man in his bag to remind him why he was studying to be a doctor. For him that book’s photographs had healing power.
Finally, everyone on the planet was affected by the 1972 Apollo 17 crew’s photograph of the entire Earth as a vulnerable little blue and brown ball lost in a vast black limbo. It energized the environmental movement and made us feel like rats clinging to a shipwreck in a dark, disturbed and hostile sea.
***
It’s the second of September and I’m alone on the island. The heartbreaker crystalline autumn light has arrived, allowing every rock, tree and living thing to strut its stuff.
Five
A Tarnished Little Revolution
“We struggle against the Yankee, enemy of humanity.”
Himno de la Frente Sandinista
“You can always rely on America to do the right thing. Once it has exhausted the alternatives.”
Winston Churchill
1984
The room is pin drop silent. After being marched into Comandante Olga’s office at gunpoint I am ordered to sit in a low chair facing her desk ten paces away. She’s a big woman in a fighter’s uniform with a practised scowl. Two soldiers cradling automatic weapons stand on either side of her. The pair of soldiers who’d escorted me in fidget with their weapons somewhere behind me. She glares with displeasure.
After travelling around Nicaragua for 10 days photographing the ongoing revolution I’ve been ordered into the Comandante’s headquarters. Her people had designed a program for me — places to go, situations to photograph, people to interview. Word had gotten back to her office: there had been deviations and digressions. I had been caught asking my Jeep driver to suddenly stop en route. I had chosen houses at random and knocked on doors, gotten myself invited in, had asked questions. I had taken unauthorized photographs of ordinary people who hadn’t always understood what was correct. I had gotten too close to Presidente Daniel Ortega at a rally. All this was treasonous.
Finally she spoke. From now on a soldier would travel with me everywhere. And there would also be a handler to take notes and report on everything I said and did. I made no reply — I had no power to stop this. A stiff silence returned to the room. After some minutes she lifted a sheaf of papers off her desk and tossed it toward me. It fell short on the floor. “Pick it up!” she snapped. I leaned forward and retrieved the papers. “Read!”
The 10-page, single-spaced document was written in somewhat imperative legalese Spanish. I began skimming through the typewritten pages. I was to express my solidarity with the Nicaraguan people and the goals of their revolution. I was to do the same for the Cubans. I could do that — what the Sandinistas professed to be attempting was certainly an improvement over the regime of Samoza and his American backers. Ditto for Fidel and Batista. After some time in Mexico and Peru I was all for reform. The document droned on and on about imperialism, colonialism and exploitation. Buried just before the florid ending was a paragraph in which I agreed to surrender all my film and notes to the Comandante for editing and correction before leaving the country. They would make all choices. They would write the captions. There was a space on the last page for me to sign and date the agreement.
I dropped the document back on the floor, leaned back in my little wooden chair and crossed my arms. Our eyes met.
“Sign it!”
“I can’t.”
“Sign it or there’ll be no more travel and no more pictures.”
“If I sign this thing and people in Canada and the U.S. find out that you edited the work and wrote all the captions this project will have no credibility. The whole effort will be useless. The National Film Board will toss it in a can.”
“Sign it or leave the country!”
“Como usted guste. I’ll go home tomorrow and there will be no show, no essays, no travelling exhibition.”
Comandante Olga stood up.
The tension set the soldiers to fiddling with their guns.
She sat down.
I stood.
Finally Comandante Olga rose to her feet and made for a back door. Just before exiting she turned to me and barked.
“You have until Friday to sign. In the meantime, there will be no more travel or pictures.”
She exited slamming the door.
If I didn’t get shot in daylight the night would bring adventures. My home base in Managua was a garden shed with a bed and washstand, camp stove and a hook on the door. I’d dump my camera bags there after a long dusty day in a Jeep, pump water in a pail, strip and start to wash off the day. This was usually when the tapping began. Finally I’d answer in the nude, peeking around the door, my bath water dripping on the bare board floor. They seemed to have worked out a schedule, those women, for they never doubled up. There was a beautiful Colombian whose Nica husband had died in the fighting. A skinny Ecuadorian with a baby would try to work my heartstrings. There were young Nicaraguan women as well. There was nothing there for any of them — not much for anybody. You couldn’t buy the simplest staples — bread, flour, toilet paper or toothpaste. Soap was a luxury. Those were heady times for the people but it was hard for them to have hop
e. At forty I was still a passable contender. I represented two car garages, TVs, thick towels and a soft life. They all wanted out and knew well their only capital. I just wanted to eat and sleep. I’d gotten through another day and survived.
***
Many nights now I feel close to not. I’m now in my late 60s and, aside from the usual handicaps of being no longer young, I have a heart that has been repaired three times. Mostly it seems to work fine and then suddenly it will wake me, pounding hard and fast in the dark. Sometimes I can’t get up the stairs — all this despite my having been so good. I drink several medicinal glasses of wine each day and haven’t eaten dead animals for decades. I walk everywhere, brush my teeth and eventually pay my bills. Like Woody Allen, I eat my broccoli. Yet, I suppose I take chances — like going alone north to my cabin or sailing my little catboat to where water meets sky. One day my family will find me sprawled slack-mouthed in the screen porch or the bilge of my boat. In either case I will smell bad.
Comandante Olga has been forced into an uneasy truce. After leaving her office I’d managed to find a phone and following several hours of failed attempts had finally gotten through to Ottawa and described the wall I was up against. The museum and the film board moved quickly. Soon the Canadian ambassador in Costa Rica — we didn’t have one in Nicaragua — was on the phone to Managua and the pressure was on. Canada had not endorsed Reagan’s position on the Sandinistas and was in fact a supplier of some aid and political support. We had a little push and shove. The Comandante grumpily backed off and I was back on the road.
After a couple of weeks in one sad hamlet after another it was a pleasure to drive into Granada, a charming small city at the north end of Lake Nicaragua. As we were in transit to the south this was just a lunch break. A rude little café was found and we settled in for the inevitable plate of bland rice. This country was like its capital, Managua — a city with no centre. The 1972 earthquake had leveled its core leaving a city like a donut — a huge hole of rubble in the middle surrounded by a suburban fringe of modest buildings.
Final Fire Page 16
