The Portraitist

 There once was a time long ago that I was not seen without a camera around my neck. In high school, I was that kid... the one with a Pentax K-1000 single lens reflex and dozens of little plastic film canisters littering everywhere I went... with not one of them, shockingly, holding residue of weed. Yeah, I was a serious square, a nerd, a geek whose hands smelled each day of primarily "fixer" (one of the chemicals we used back when cameras used something called "film"). Thing is, it was a passion and every few years, when I get a camera (digital) that feels right, I go crawling around the forest floor taking pictures of little bugs hiding in flowers and mushrooms poking up from the earth. I, um, will start with one photo and then just get lost and some time later have to explain myself to the passing hikers why I am crawling on my belly along the trail. Ah, photography...

This love was not just a shallow thing. I've always had an eye and I paid attention in my art classes (and history... but the rest? that's the mystery...) Along with my love of visual arts, throughout high school I began falling in love with particular artists and their techniques as well as photographers. I had one teacher... man, this guy was great!... he really did some things that stretched perspectives and talents. Hell, I had a friend who was taking art classes as an elective to hang out with me, after that second year when Mr. Neal started his experiments, he started actually producing real work. My photography teacher was as well a boundary pusher and I'm really surprised now that they let me get away with what I did back then in the early 1980s. Seriously, my first oil pastel was a nude and the image I used, from a Penthouse magazine, I sat and worked with at my desk without issue. In a project of superposing two images in the darkroom, I took a photo of some guy named Adolf and placed him looking approvingly over some preacher named Jerry standing at the pulpit with a greedy grin. Four years after I graduated, I went to visit on an open house night when my little sister was at the school. Turns out, that photo, um, it was still a hot topic with, according to my Mr. Holgate, the photo teacher, an argument breaking out over it in the staff breakroom that very day I was visiting. Oh, I had some great teachers!

When I started going to community college in earnest (working 50hours a week bartending, 16 credit hours and a new baby whose mother liked soap operas), my focus on photography really went deep and there again I had an incredible teacher who offered, on that first day of that first class there (I ended up taking photo classes every semester no matter what just so that I wouldn't have to turn the bathroom into a darkroom... the missus hated that), a couple pieces of advice. One was to throw my flash away. Since I had only a crappy little flash I never used, that was done. He challenged us (and I took it to heart) to only use existing light. I became a master at holding still at 1/15 second shutter speed, something the teacher told me was impractical. He also challenged us to only compose in camera. In other words, don't take a photo and then crop it to where you want. Instead, make your composition in-camera and never crop in the darkroom. That one right there forced me to see. Seriously, it made me work for what I wanted. The last rule was to only use a 50mm lens... no zooms or wide-angles as such pervert perspective and at this point I was in the process of falling in love with a few particular photographers. You want to emulate your heroes, right?

No longer do I have a refrigerator filled brown bottles marked poison. When I was, a couple years later, doing the same only without the soap-opera viewer around to occasionally help with, well, anything, that passion was stifled and after years, the usage of the back bathroom was no longer available and with moves and moves again, what remains are the lessons learned. As for those lessons, they extended well beyond the process lost (and lost now to digital). They were the lessons in how to see, how to compose and image and weigh the balances to achieve the harmony or discord needed. Shapes and forms, color and hue (even in monochrome), shadow and light... these elements that the photographer works to compose into an image that tells a story, even if that story is recognition of a pattern pleasing. I still take a kick-ass photograph.

Another boon I am ever thankful for is the education I received on those whose work impressed me, from those of artistic bent such as Ed Westin to the documentarians such as Gene Smith. One thing I always looked for, no matter the subject matter, was, if there was a human (or certain animals) involved, the portrait. Where there is a subject of willful intent, there is always where the portrait is found and always, if you look, there is a portrait. It is the sailor and the nurse, it is the infant screaming in the ruins, it is the monk in peaceful immolation, the mother's worried expression with child in arms... and there is the portrait that most captures my attention the expression of that word is summoned. Dorothea Lange's endearing portrait of the migrant mother with her child is all that beauty and composition rolled into one. Of the photographers of that particular era, the Portraitist who most inspired my own attempts would be her more than any others.

I was thinking about her and Margaret Burke-White and Evans and some of the others who traveled America during those depressed years documenting the plight of this nation knocked to its knees. I had intent and reason to be thinking along these lines one July evening in 2018. I had driven my daughter down to see her mother and had returned up I-17 as I always do and on that 7 mile climb to Sunset Point, where it always seems to happen, an idea glanced off the clouds in spectacular display and my mind was set adrift. Arizona sunsets can have that effect... and for some reason, that spot right around the Bumble Bee turnoff seems to always be where new ideas spring forth from nothing.

When I got home, for then I was still holding those little white cylinders of stink of habit, I was out standing about in the creek bed, pacing to and fro over the drive as a light, gentle rain touched around. It was this that was on my mind. I was discovering with explosive force the elements that would go into this story, the base germs at least. It was as I was pacing, cigarette in hand and thoughts on fire, I heard a sound intrude upon my awareness and pull my attentions away. It was not a new sound, but one which waited to distinguish itself from its ordinary course so as to influence in the way it could best. The water falling from the drive, as I looked into the moonlit forest upstream, drew my thoughts away from this Portraitist and the beauty I knew was potential. It drew me away and sent me shortly inside whereupon a flurry of typing produced in a few short days "Puddle of Mud". It was "The Portraitist" I was ruminating over when that water behind me shifted me with thoughts of  revenants lurching forth from the pool below. This is how it works.

It took some time but I at last returned to this story, "The Portraitist". With "Mama Death" done, I was sent to the List again and upon seeing this title, decided the time was ripe. If I could have conceived this story which I had been avoiding, then I could write it. The research was done decades before, all aspects of it. I just needed to dedicate and pick a point of entry. The story flowed forth with ease as soon as I convinced Mrs. Gluck that it was okay to talk. I offered her a gin and tonic as well. It worked. The story came out fast and it followed basically the design I had originally hoped only better. That Professor Jasper Van Hooten showed up and laid the groundwork was a delight. It seems I've found a way, between this and "Tell Me About the Butterfly Man", to have the good Professor show up here and there and beyond, the simple device of the interview seems to work well.

"The Portraitist" is personally one of my favorite stories that I have written. I capture something here, at least I hope I do. I hope I painted this particular portrait with enough care that the tender touches come through. "The Portraitist", completed on May 18 of 2020, took me deeper than I think I had been planning on going, both into Eve's head but as well into Bezer and what our dear Millie and her grandfather, Jonathon Kearns, were up to. Yes, the year is 1938. Jonathon Kearns was born in 1840. He was 98 years old when Evelyn McPhee and Eddie Gluck chugged to a halt, to the startlement of everyone, before the gates of Bezer and the subsequent invite to photograph the struggles God's Chosen bore here before the Gates of Hell. Needless to say, having shown Kearns a sample of her work and him being so impressed as to offer that boon, this is still in the environs of the Bajazid.

1969 is the year Eve Gluck was visited by that Professor, and in 4,972 words, I examine just what horror a still plate can hold.