It was a summer afternoon in 1917.
My father hung upside down in the little lozenge of glass; my mother’s chair was stuck in a canopy of flowers where my beautiful brother Orlando’s toes were planted, and he had his arm around my little sister Phoebe’s butter ball waist as if he was holding on for dear life and didn’t want to fall. I had stood them on their heads, but nothing dropped out of their pockets, and I saw at once that they looked even ritzier this way, like angels or Egyptians reflected in an undisturbed pool, wreathed in sunlight from below that showed the sleepless assurance of their wealth. In this reversal, their Yankee chins protruded like hatchets, our white house balanced on its weathervane, our windmill on its sails, and our trees depended massively, showing all their apples — with its foliage sprawling downwards the gnarled plum tree was transformed into a bird-eating spider. My new perspective offered me details: Orlando’s reckless embrace, the dog’s ball with munch-marks on it glued to a sky of grass; the cellar door, my cast-off sweater lightly defying gravity, and the long stripe of my summer shadow narrowing toward my brother, so that between his feet my little head lay, at the top end of my distorted body, like a lover begging for mercy, a sudden monster.
Gulls flew on their backs, the horizon floated on a cushion of air, and that vapor of glittering winks in the distance was Nantucket Sound, I had never seen anything like it. I was enchanted. Until then, I had been too ashamed to stare — in my family it wasn’t done. But now I could take my time and watch the dog sliding into focus like a fly crossing a ceiling, and see the great trick of light magnetizing my family by their feet into miraculous yoga postures.
That was when I noticed the tentative darkness near my father’s head, and the more I watched it the further this shadow spread, moving like night from the left-hand corner. The blur hooded them as if for a hanging, four victims awaiting the noose of forgetfulness to tighten the drawstrings and complete the drop: memory’s gallows of nameless martyrs with its expressive foreground of unrelated objects, the ball, the sweater, all those feet, and finally only the windmill. Come back!
“I can’t see!” I cried.
“Get that thumb of yours off the viewfinder, Maude,” said Papa calmly.
I did not look up. I experimented with my thumb and stared at the glass lozenge on the edge of my Brownie. My family reappeared, laughing. But upside down their mockery didn’t matter. They swayed as if they were about to be dislodged, the laughter shaking them out of their pompous practiced attitudes and giving them life.
I snapped the picture. I had caught a decisive moment of the past in my mousetrap. I held it in my hands, in that rinky-dink camera (everything further than eight feet was in focus), and I rejoiced.
The best pictures are seldom good pictures. This was the one I always started with when freeloaders like Bushrag and Grippo came out to see me. They had cameras slung around their necks, and their shoulder-bags were crammed with equipment. They wanted to see my work. I offered them the first look I ever had of my own family, and I waited until they saw what I did that hot afternoon.
But they crowded me, they looked over my shoulder and did not see anything. To them I was an antique, like the lobster pots and cranberry scoops they found in West Barnstable and took home to varnish and venerate. They were rediscovering me; it was a big favor — wasn’t I lucky? Each one treated me as if he’d invented me and would show me his Count Esterhazy shots, lingering too long on the ones he wanted me to admire, saying, “This one’s pretty incredible — I do some pretty incredible things,” a dazzling derivative sunset that was pure vomit, the inevitable park bench, a dead squirrel, a wino. Another, whose love of cement and rivets surpassed Berenice Abbott’s, would heave his tonnage of New York at me. There would be the shooter of tropical slums, his pictures telling me nothing more than that he had the air fare to Caracas: the one with the most expensive equipment always seemed to concentrate on starving natives — I could tell the price of a camera by the rags in a picture. Jostling for my attention they would have my head spinning with their fisheye lenses or nauseate me with mood pieces they’d developed in their own bathwater. The girls would be, as they put it, “into freaks, because it represents how I feel as a woman.” They came to see me and they did all the talking, pretending an interest in me to invite my admiration for them, the kind of coy blackmailing flattery that is a hungering for praise. I looked at their work. It may not have been tragedy but it certainly was murder. They were like amateur assassins whose parents gave them a gun for Christmas: they brought me their victims. I told them: A camera isn’t a toy, remember that. I didn’t add that it is, but just more dangerous than other toys.
“Your pictures,” I said, “are works of subversion. Are you proud of that?”
Sure, sure, they said. They had shown me theirs; now they were itching to see mine: my Pig Dinner sequence, my Faces of Fiction, my crying series, my pictures of empty rooms, my Hollywood shots, Firebug, Stieglitz, Slaughter, the Piano Tuner, Huxley, my blacks — I was the first to exhibit them: no one had ever seen them before.
The album was on my lap. There were others in the windmill, stacked to the ceiling, and trunks full of contact sheets. But I refused to go in there. My freckled hands remained on this old family photograph, that summer day I saw up side down through my Kodak Brownie. They did not want to look. They made the mistake all young people do when visiting the very old: we’re easy game, we’re deaf to sarcasm and can’t see them wink. They made funny faces behind my back: you can needle an oldster! They talked too loud and nudged each other and didn’t think I knew they were being insincere. As if I had never seen them before! Still, I wanted them to see this picture, my clumsy lyric stuck on the first page of my first album. I said nothing until they began to bounce on the sofa in impatience: How long is the old girl going to take? No one said she was a fucken ree-tard!
These believers in the immortality of the photograph wanted to deal with my life in a single afternoon. They could not even pronounce Niépce. They were eaten up with haste. It was their conceit: their speed, the speed of light.
They had all the equipment — what was the problem? These faddists of high contrast and golf-ball grain could shoot fly spit, the smell of an onion, sunspots, a virus picking its nose, bazooka shells bursting out of gun muzzles, indigestion, a fart in a mitten. With their motor-driven cameras — a lens for every occasion — they could do it underwater, with mirrors, twenty thousand feet over Rangoon. That shotgun was no shotgun; it was a Hasselblad with a telescopic lens on a shoulder rest, “for combat situations,” as the kid said, and it really did look lethal. And what of that Japanese capsule, the size of a tranquilizer, with a tiny pinhole eye? It was a camera so small you could swallow it at noon and photograph your breakfast.
I brushed these trinkets aside. I didn’t tell them I used a box camera until 1923, a folding camera until 1938 and only then broke down and bought a Speed Graphic for Florida. Instead, I said a few words on man the picture-maker — erect, sketching his fears on a cave wall — which left man the tool-maker on all fours, hunched over a nut he was bludgeoning with a rock some fool scientist would enshrine. The mind is made of pictures, I said, not words; thought is pictorial, the eye is all art, get the picture? And, sure, sure, they said — saying no meant saying why. They were in a big hurry to see Twenty-two White Horses and my contacts of Ché Guevara and my blacks. Never mind Orlando and Phoebe or myself when young. They didn’t have time for that. They took pictures hanging by their ankles, their light meters could detect glowworms in the next county. And at this point they were haywire with curiosity.