This “he” I kept hearing about was certainly not me. I had stopped basking. My fatigue turned complacent and then panicky. I had not introduced myself, so I was temporarily forgotten. They would be justified in thinking that I was spying on them. They might round on me and say, “At least you could have had the courtesy of telling us who you were!”
But no one in that jammed room asked.
“Isn’t that him?”
More than that (“Excuse me, lady,” a man said, yanking a tray of drinks out of my reach), I noticed a distinct irritation when my glance met one of these wild-eyed talkers, as if I were a gate-crasher who had no right to listen. I could have put up with being ignored; I could not bear being strenuously shunned. I was in the way! And there was a lot of shoving when the real celebrities showed up, various people I had seen on television talk shows, mainly hideous novelists who had written frank autobiographical books about their unnatural acts.
“Mind moving?” This from one of our photographer friends with a chunk of expensive apparatus in her mitts, a motor-driven Voigtländer aimed at my earhole.
Someone famous had just entered. Who it was, I could not say. But there was movement, a prelude to stampede, people beating their elbows to get past me.
“Pardon me.”
A man’s hand squeezed my shoulder. About time. I turned and smiled.
“Are you Lillian Hellman by any chance?” The man bowed to hear my reply.
“Sorry, buster. I’m her mother.”
But though I was furious for being mistaken for Lily (is there any old lady on earth who is flattered by the suggestion that she resembles another old lady?), I hoped the man would pause long enough for me to tell him who I really was. Rebuffed, he fled sideways into the mob.
Already I was sick of the party. The people had stopped talking about me and on their third or fourth drink were just whooping it up, paying no attention to the posters with my name on them.
“He’s done it as a multi-media event. I’m going in as soon as they shut this wine off.”
I had no business here. This was a spectacle of the kind I had avoided for thirty years. There was no reason why anyone should have recognized my face: professionally I had no face. I was for most only a name and Twenty-two White Horses and celebrated for a period of blindness when I had done Firebug. For one person I was the Cuba pictures, for another the Pig Dinner sequence; blacks knew me as the creater of Boogie-Men, New Englanders for The South Yarmouth Madonna, Californians knew only my Hollywood work, the British were aware of my London phase but nothing more, literary people my Faces of Fiction, and for some camera buffs I was the young gal who had done Stieglitz with his own peepstones.
To be famous is to be fixed — a picture, a date, an event, a specific and singular effort. To be fixed is to be dead, and so fame is a version of obscurity. One appeared at one’s own party only to haunt it. If Frank had been around he would have steered me into the crowd and made the usual introductions, as the custodian of my reputation. But I did not see him.
Nor did I see the show. There was still a mob at ENTER HERE and it was the same bunch I had seen earlier, a bit rowdier and more drunken than before. They had found a cozy place to gather and were ignoring the exhibition — plenty of time for that when the drink ran out. The party was the thing. Yet it burned me up to think that they had come here to see each other and were not paying the blindest bit of attention to my pictures.
I wondered if I should throw a fit — wave my arms and bellow at them, maybe embarrass them with a hysterical monologue about the meaning of art; or do something shocking, make a scene that they would talk about for years afterward.
Bump.
“I’m awfully sorry.” The jerk who had taken me for Lillian Hellman rushed away. The party was starting to repeat, to replay its earlier episodes in tipsy parody.
Several people, assuming my black dress to be a uniform, demanded drinks from me. They howled when they saw their mistake, but it inspired me. I found a tray of drinks and began to make my way through the room, handing them out and sort of curtseying and taking orders, saying “Sir” and “Madam” and “I’m doing the best I can.”
All my photographer friends who in other times would have been here — dead. The people I had photographed: Mr. Slaughter, Huxley, Eliot, Teets, R. G. Perdew, Lawrence, Marilyn, Harvey and Hornette — dead. Editors and journalists and gallery-owners — dead. Orlando and Phoebe: now I knew I had driven them into the sea. I had killed them with a picture. I deserved this contempt — the people shunning me or treating me like a waitress; I deserved worse — to be treated like a criminal bitch who had hounded my brother and sister to death. I put the tray down and lurked in the crowd like the murderess I was.
Scuffing paper underfoot I bent to pick it up, although my first thought was to leave it so that one of these partygoers would trip and break his neck. It was the catalogue, a thickish manual with my name on the front just above Frank’s and a different picture (Negro Swimming to a Raft—but “Negro” had been changed to “Person,” making nonsense of the picture). I had refused to write the personal statement Frank had requested and had told him that I would have nothing to do with the rest of the catalogue either. I should have gone further and said that I wouldn’t be at the preview party. I felt ridiculous — guilty, stupid, ashamed — having come so far on false pretenses. I belonged in jail.
I had made a virtue of being anonymous. I had abided by it; and why not? Anonymity had done for me what a lifetime of self-promotion had done for other photographers. It was too late to reveal myself, for there was a point in obscurity beyond which exposure meant only the severest humiliation. It was better to continue anonymously and finally vanish into silence. I had spent my life in shadows as dense as those that hid me at this party. I had entered this room as a stranger — I had to leave as one. If the place had not been so impossibly crowded I would have done that very thing.
Acknowledgments, I read, opening the catalogue. There followed a list of money-machines, not only the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, but the National Endowment for the Arts and five others, including the Melvin Shohat Photographic Trust. If Frank didn’t make a go of his curatorship there was always room for such a financial genius in the International Monetary Fund.
My career, spent in attacking patronage, ended with these cash-disbursing bodies footing the bill. But I had forfeited the right to object. I was dead. They were all dancing the light fantastic on my grave.
Maude Coffin Pratt, Frank’s Preface began, is probably one of the most distinguished American photographers of our time—
“Probably”? “One of”? “Our time”? He was pulling his punches. Quite right: I had blood on my hands.
But there was, after all, a message from me, titled Statement from the Artist:
The Bible says, “In the beginning was the Word.” The Bible is in error. In the beginning was the Image. The eye knew before the mouth uttered a syllable; thought is pictorial.
Photographic truth, which I think of as the majestic echo of image, originated in the magic room known as the camera obscura. This admitted the world through a pinhole. Man learned to fix that image and photography was born with a bang. Painting never recovered from the blow. It began to belittle truth and, faking the evidence, became destructive.