The Weekly Screed (#835)

Shutterbug
by David Benjamin

“Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face, the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited, and the wealth and confusion man has created. It is a major force in explaining man to man.”
                                                                        — Edward Steichen

MADISON, Wis. — My camera bag, which weighs about ten pounds, has a tendency to strain my back and jangle the nerves in my shoulder. It could be lighter, if I discarded a telephoto lens, spare batteries and computer cord, my “triage” notebook, the book I’m reading (currently The Flagrant Dead by Stephen Bluestone), postcards, stamps, two kinds of pills, a phone, business cards, spare glasses, a loupe and a sewing kit. But I need this stuff.

Besides, if I leave home without my camera, I feel inadequate.

This compulsion goes back at least to my newspaper days. To venture beyond my office without being ready for the shot that could define the week’s news and fill half the space above the fold was a dereliction of duty and a crime against journalism. I never knew when that shot might suddenly appear before my eyes. I had to be prepared.

Even before I was handed my first news camera (a post-WWII vintage Mamiya C3 with a gunsight viewfinder), I had learned photography’s capacity for exposing the remarkable that lurks within the ordinary. Today, for example, on my hike from home to coffee, the light was flat and gray. But we’re into the onset of autumn and everything along the way is changing. Not just leaves. Plants blossoming a week ago are brown shreds laced with spiderwebs. Birds are out, ravaging the overripe crabapples and the moulting berry bushes. The angle of the light has changed from Cailebotte to Monet.

There was stuff to shoot today, just not at a 500th of a second.

As I scanned for photos, I recalled a Facebook embarrassment. Steve  Bluestone (see above), a poet who also takes serious photos (he’s sort of a Renaissance Brooklynite) dropped the term “etherized” in a photo post. I pedantically proposed “ethered” as a better construction — which it might be save that Steve was making a literary allusion to T.S. Eliot, who used “etherized” in the first verse of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. This was a line I’d long forgotten but Steve, being a poet, kept it in reserve on the tip of his tongue. Steve didn’t make fun of me, but his friends did.

I gained from the exchange, however, because it reminded me of how we all come to knowledge, and often come together, on vastly different paths. While Steve in his pre-teens was (I presume) memorizing The Wasteland, I found inspiration in a humbler wordsmith named Jim Kjelgaaard, who wrote outdoorsy novels for adolescent readers. The Kjelgaard classic that most fired my fancy was Wildlife Cameraman. It chronicles the adventures of Jase Mason and his dog Buckles as they stalk the birds and beasts of the forest primeval in quest of the perfect snapshot.

“Boy,” I said, “that’s what I wanna do.” I spent the next year begging my elders for a camera, finally scoring — on my 11th birthday — a glistening bakelite Kodak Brownie 127.

A week or so later, when I got my first few rolls of film back at Miller’s Walgreen, I discovered that a Brownie 127  is ill-suited to the challenge of freezing — in black and white, at a 60th of a second, from a distance of 15 yards — a sparrow in flight. Or a sparrow sitting still. Or a sparrow sneering from its perch and flipping me the feather.

As I perused my Kodak harvest of blurry gray blobs, I forsook my wildlife cameraman dream. But it never truly died. Years later, on my first day at the Mansfield News, when I finally got my hands on a professional camera, I was 11 all over again, and Buckles was my invisible co-pilot.

Of course, most news photos tend to be grip-and-grins, group shots, graduations, Little League parades and mundane nature mort. But, on a slow week, I’d sneak off to the woods to chase chickadees and silhouette the evergreens. At school events, I studied the angles for capturing kids in unguarded moments — a little girl launching a kite or a boy screaming at Punch and Judy. I took pride, eventually, in capturing the passion (and boredom) of speakers and spectators at the annual Town Meeting.

By and by, the old Mamiya gave way to a 35mm Pentax K1000, a wonderful camera. I shot Tri-X film in black and white, from which I learned that fifty shades of gray make lousy pictures. Every focal object demands clarity, and for that I needed contrast — sharp edges and black highlights. To accomplish that, I had to heed background as intently as I watched the birdie, or the hurdler in the track meet, or the fresh-minted high-school grad waving her diploma and flinging her mortarboard.

Lately, I shoot digital, in color, but my Tri-X lessons still apply. “Contrast,” said cinematographer Conrad Hall, “is what makes photography interesting.” When you think about it, it’s also what makes America (black and white and lots of colors) more interesting than, say, Finland.

I took probably 40,000 news shots and absorbed epidermally at least ten gallons of D-76 developer, but never quite got the bird photo I’d been seeking since I was 11. That finally came a few years later, in Japan, when I spotted a Tokyo crow atop the spire of a Buddhist temple. I mounted my telephoto and aimed my Pentax, intending a portrait of the bird at rest. But as I squeezed the shutter, the crow lifted off in silhouetted symmetry, tail spread, beak foremost, wing feathers stretched and separate against a pale sky. Weeks passed before I saw the print — more dramatic than I expected — a blurry Buddha in the foreground and the crow, in perfect focus as he departs his spike on the temple’s pinnacle.

If you take enough photos, you develop a sixth sense that makes this sort of happenstance more frequent, like the ancient lady I spotted on Montmartre with a dangling Galloise and a flower in her hair. Or a day in Paris near the hilltop dome of the Panthéon. A tourist couple resting on the steps weren’t the least bit photogenic. But they’d brought a little girl, perhaps seven years old. She seemed to be seething with untapped energy. As she tiptoed up the staircase, I hurriedly changed my lens. I focused on her, expectantly.

Then, bam. Suddenly, she she struck a pose, clutching her hands beneath her chin. I got that, and I kept shooting as she burst into the dance she could not contain. Her parents didn’t see. She had no audience but me, and I in secret. My result, as I saw immediately on my digital screen, was an urchin fairy in jeans and t-shirt, unleashing her inner Isadora Duncan, with Paris as her stage.

The contrast was almost jarring, but that’s what made it work.

One of photojournalism’s fundamental rules is that when you attend a performance you aim not at the show, but at the audience. One day, at the place Pompidou, I came upon a street busker nimbly juggling a set of hoops. I arranged myself behind him, firing away at the throng, mostly young — who oohed, aahed and laughed at his antics. Among the photos that I perused, edited and eventually printed was three friends close together and, altogether, a tableau of joy. The girl on the left was black, on the left a white girl. Between them, a Muslim girl, coffee-toned in a most fashionable hijab.

I cherish this shot because it captures the necessity of contrast, in photography, in humanity.