Literature
Text
Autobiography
Compositional
Functional illustration
Snapshot
Try it and see: all photographs fall into one of these categories or combinations of them. Actually, I now think there is a fourteenth category, as unique to photography as the stop-time device that is its defining feature, the snapshot — namely, the ‘mis-shot’. It occurs when you make a mistake: you overexpose, you double-expose, the camera shakes or moves or the framing is wrong — the so-called ‘bad-crop’. My most famous photograph, ‘The Confrontation’, is a mis-shot, a bad-crop. I suppose a mistake might function beneficially in other arts — the sculptor’s hammer and chisel slips, the wrong tube of paint is selected, the composer unwittingly changes key — and it might enhance the whole in an aleatory way. But only in photography can our errors so easily become real virtues, again and again and again.
A list of my books:
Absences (1943)
Vietnam, Mon Amour (1968)
And the books I planned:
The View Down (shots from on high looking down)
Sleepers (images of people sleeping or resting)
Static Light (the final project — light stopped)
Bad-Crop (a deliberate selection of mis-shots)
And, crowning glory:
The Horizontal Falclass="underline" Photographs by Amory Clay
A list of my lovers:
Lockwood Mower
Cleveland Finzi
Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau
Sholto Farr
John Oberkamp
Hugo Torrance. .?
2. WILLOW RANCH
It was a 250-mile drive to Bishop from Los Angeles, north in the general direction of Death Valley. In the end it took me five and a half hours, with breaks. I set off on the Garden Park Freeway out towards Pasadena, then on to Highway 395 all the way to Bishop. The journey led me round the massive sprawl of Edwards Air Force Base — I saw B-52s climbing slowly into the air, training for Vietnam, no doubt — and then along the periphery of the China Lake weapons testing range. We were entering desert country, the land arid, caught in the rain-shadow of the Sierra Nevada mountains, whose long saw-toothed bulk — summits white with snow and ice — I could see as I drove ever northwards into the Owens Valley. On either side of the highway stretched flat steppes of desert scrubland — sagebrush, buckwheat, salt grass and creosote bush — and a lot of sand.
I pulled into a picnic area off the road at one stage to stretch my legs and I looked around at this great parched wilderness baking in the high summer heat. Away from LA’s smog the sky was a crystalline blue — a perfect blue — and the few clouds that hung motionless there were cartoon-like in their whiteness, freshly laundered, ideally puffy, promising not one drop of moisture. I felt very alone all of a sudden and full of an unfamiliar trepidation. Cole Hardaway had insisted that I feel free to call him at any moment if I felt I needed some assistance but I stirred myself into a form of reasoned anger — something had happened to my daughter and changed her, she needed me, and I was going to find her on my own. It occurred to me that those breezily robotic letters were actually a covert cry for help. I simply couldn’t believe that Blythe had run away and foresworn us so casually, our small, close family of three. She must have been suborned, persuaded, turned in some way. I had to find her, talk to her, discover what had happened — and try to persuade her to come home, if that was what she really wanted.
The San Carlos Motel, Glenbrook, California, 1968.
I drove into Bishop and then out again, retracing my steps, finding the San Carlos Motel a few convenient miles down the road in the small town of Glenbrook, valiantly guarding its ‘city limits’ as Bishop’s suburbs remorselessly encroached.
In my room, air conditioner thrumming, unpacked, I laid out my map on the bed and plotted my next move.
Cole Hardaway had told me everything he had discovered about Jeff Bellamont and Blythe. They had travelled from Los Angeles to Bishop, spent a night there, and then gone to a small settlement called Line Lake. At Line Lake they had paused at a convenience store and bought some provisions and made a phone call. Then they had asked directions to and then motored on to an abandoned dude-ranch complex called Willow Ranch and that was where their journey ended, he presumed, there was only one road in and out. Cole hadn’t gone to Willow Ranch himself, but that was where the trail led. As far as he was concerned they were still there.
The problem was, he further explained, that Willow Ranch was no longer abandoned. It appeared that, according to the locals he asked, some sort of hippie community had taken over the existing buildings and had been living there for some two years, now, in sought-for isolation, ‘Growing vegetables and weaving baskets and smoking pot, you know the sort of thing,’ Cole had detailed in his matter-of-fact basso profundo. There were about forty people currently in residence, as far as anyone knew — Willow Ranch had a floating population, people were always arriving and people were always leaving. The place was the benign fiefdom of a charismatic Vietnam veteran called Tayborn Gaines. Gaines reputedly had served three years in Vietnam — and on his release from the army had joined the anti-war movement. He had been a prominent speaker at rallies and marches and had acquired some sort of minor celebrity reputation as he was an articulate and forceful debater. But, now he was installed with his community in Willow Ranch, Tay Gaines had gone off the media radar and rarely left the premises. There were a lot of runaways drawn there, a lot of girls, Cole said, the implication being that Blythe Farr was probably another of them.
There were more muted warnings from Cole, even though I had now received the message loud and clear. The Willow Ranchers kept themselves to themselves and they didn’t welcome visitors. They sold their farm produce and would volunteer for community projects in Bishop and Line Lake. The locals seemed to accept them and respected their need for privacy.
‘Just be cautious, Mrs Farr,’ Cole had said. ‘Up there you’ll be in the middle of a very remote, hot nowhere. The local sheriff is miles away in Bishop. I talked to the cops. None of them had ever been out to Willow Ranch. Never been any trouble, they told me. But it’s clear that the place, and what exactly goes on there, is something of a mystery.’
With that in mind, I had formulated a plan, of sorts, that I hoped would afford me entry to the place. Before I’d left LA I had ordered some business cards to be printed up. ‘Amory Clay. Staff photographer. Global-Photo-Watch.’ I was making the assumption that most people were flattered when professional photographers offered to take their photographs, for a fee, moreover — even, perhaps, publicity-shy people like Tayborn Gaines.
The next day I loaded up my two cameras with film, filled a gallon plastic container with iced water, bought a ham and coleslaw sandwich at a diner and drove out the few miles to Line Lake.
The lake itself didn’t really exist any more, apart from some shallow briny pools. Like most of the water in the valley it had had its inflow diverted to feed the Los Angeles aqueduct and was now a dry alkaline flat, cracking up in the relentless sun like a pottery glaze in a furnace. The hamlet managed to survive on passing hikers and there was still some freelance mining going on in the deep incised arroyos in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada — miners needed food and fuel and a place to drink. Line Lake boasted a bar, a gas station and a general store on the one street of brick, wood and plasterboard shacks. It was the twentieth-century version of a one-horse town.