As she took my pulse, holding two fingers against the inside of my wrist and looking at her watch, I began to feel suddenly and unexpectedly euphoric. ‘Thirteen/eight — that’s fine. Now…How long have you been finding it hard to sleep?’
I told her about my nights — my addiction to working at night, whether out of doors or in my own dark room at home. My clinging to wakefulness. Wanting never to let go. My pleasure in feeling the neighbourhood asleep around me, its inhabitants’ dreams floating in the air. I go back and forth from printer to baths and from baths to printer, always on my feet, turning the lights on and off, at once excited and focused. On the dry side, I love studying the grains through the grain magnifier — they have an organic feel to them that reflects the nature of light, something pixels can’t achieve. (Pixels are real Germans: Alles ist immer in Ordnung!) On the wet side: the same awe every time an image appears, even when there’s something wrong with it. It’s like making love — stirring no matter what happens. When I take the paper out of the first bath, slick and shiny as a fish’s stomach, it seems to be alive. I slide it into the other two baths, spend long minutes washing it, slap it up on the wall, study it, and start over, printing a bit differently, using a masking card to bring out detail in one part of the image without overexposing the rest…I can remain on my feet twelve hours straight without even noticing fatigue. Night hours are flexible and generous — they have no minutes — whereas day hours go marching past like soldiers, in serried ranks…These last few months, though, nightmares have been tearing me out of slumber and washing me up on the shore of the day dead beat, broken.
I lay down on Dr Matheron’s medical bed, wearing nothing but my blue silk lace panties. She exclaimed at how thin I was. When she asked if I ate normally, I said, ‘As a rule, yes, but my sons are living with their dad right now and I find it hard to cook just for myself.’ With swift, deft, gentle motions, dabbing each spot in advance with a bit of alcohol-soaked cotton, she went about screwing thin needles into my ankles, hips, and collarbone, talking to me all the while in her warm, musical voice. ‘Everyone finds it hard to cook just for themselves,’ she said. ‘I myself have been eating like a barbarian even since my husband’s death. I just take some salmon out of the freezer, slap it into a Pyrex dish, add a bit of white wine and stick it in the microwave for ninety seconds.’ ‘I doubt the barbarians used microwaves to cook their salmon,’ I said. ‘You’re right, we have no idea what they used their microwaves for,’ she said without missing a beat.
Rena laughs out loud, remembering. Thanks to that witticism, the tendrils of friendship that had been sprouting in her heart since she’d first entered Kerstin’s office burst into bloom. Now, five years later, the two women are inseparable.
Exhilarated by the panoramic view, Rena phones Aziz and gets his answering machine. ‘Aziz I love you I miss you I want you I desire you I wish I had your gorgeous cock in my mouth this very minute. When you’re not around I feel I’m going mad, I lose my sense of humour, my bearings — my self. Just now I was looking at a statue of Neptune and I thought it had multiple sclerosis, can you believe that? Oh, baby, if only you were here with me…At least we could fool around together, sneak off into dark corners and do all sorts of naughty things to each other…I adore you. I can’t stop thinking about you. Catch you later.’
Their branches waving gently in the wind, their foliage rusted by autumn nights, the trees look like wild-haired witches. Rena crouches down, takes out her black bag (a sort of sweater with no neck opening), and loads her camera with a roll of infrared film. Instantly elated, she moves slowly back down the hill, concentrating passionately on every object in her viewfinder.
The extraordinary thing about infrared, the voice in her head tells Subra, is that it happens elsewhere, in an alternate reality. What you photograph is not what you see. You have to imagine what the photo will look like once you develop it, taking all sorts of factors into account — the reds in the landscape, the angle of sunlight, the filters you use or don’t use. You have to dream each tree individually and try to guess at its secret, knowing the foliage will end up looking like an explosion of white lace. Infrared reveals a delicately deformed light that seems to come from a forgotten past. It is not, as many people think, a gimmick. The eyes of some animals capture infrared light rays; ours happen not to — but those rays are emitted whether we see them or not.
It all depends on who’s looking at what, with what, from where. Close up, a cloud is a mass of water droplets in suspension; from far away it’s a purple mountain against a blue sky — and even the blueness vanishes, as Simon pointed out to me under LSD, if you get too close to it. Photography is relative: when you slip the negative into the enlarger and beam light through it, tiny black spots get projected onto the Barite paper below but those spots are not the photograph, they’re only a network of possibilities; you can move in closer until all you see are tiny filaments dancing in the void, or move away until the whole image is one black dot; you can drown the spots in light or lose them in shadow…People, too are relative: seen from too close up or too far away, they lose their meaning. Instinctively, you learn to manipulate distance, framing, exposure, contrast, searching for what is meaningful…‘They want to be paid that much attention,’ as Diane Arbus once put it, ‘and that’s a reasonable kind of attention to be paid.’
What a lovely thing to say, Subra breathes…
When her ex-husband and best friend Allan Arbus went off to live in California, Diane started hanging out with fringe groups — dwarfs, giants, hermaphrodites, twins and mental patients…She said her camera lens protected her, opened doors for her, helped her forage in forbidden territory…Did she use people to get the pictures she wanted, or did she use her camera to get close to people? Probably both. Later, after her father’s death, while continuing to work and to take care of daughters during the daytime, she started going on sexual sprees at night, giving a new slant to that ‘reasonable kind of attention’…
I, too, use my Canon to convince men I’m interested in them — and I am interested in them, very interested. For whatever reason, the theatre of masculinity, with its spectacular rituals, games, contests and costumes, has been studied far less than the theatre of femininity. I slip into soccer stadiums and take photographs of hooligans, big bad boys, young and not-so-young supporters. Men blind drunk on beer and testosterone, high on collective emotion, floating on the anonymity of the pack, bawling out the names of their favourite players and insulting those of the opposite team, ecstatic to be part of a group. On the surface, the supporters of Paris-Saint-Germain may seem potent and frightening, but in infrarouge you can see they’re frightened as well. Close-ups of young men’s faces twisted with hatred. Moving in…closer and closer…oh the sweet dizziness of blowing up images until you enter matter itself…slipping beneath the skin…down, down…passing through layer after layer of memory, all the way to childhood. It’s overwhelming when that starts to show up in the revealing bath…
Misteries has been my most successful show to date. It travelled to a dozen cities and was made into a book. Juxtaposed images of male behaviour the world over — military marches in front of Moscow’s Kremlin, meetings of the Camorra in Naples, welcoming speeches at the French Academy, complete with swords and green uniforms, Hell’s Angels gatherings in California, initiation rites of Brazil’s Bororo Indians, pimps in Tel Aviv, traders in Tokyo, soccer fans in Manchester, right-wing militiamen in Montana, senators, freemasons, prisoners — oh, such posturing! Such strutting and swaggering! Men, men, men! As anxious as they are arrogant, their arrogance being merely the flip side of their anxiety because they’re so much more mortal than we are. It moves me to see the way these womb-less higher primates clench their jaws, march up and down, do everything in their power to attract attention and remind the world that they, too, exist, count, matter.