The Only Way, Part 3
I’ve taken upon myself, not to be remembered as a husband, a brother, technical writer, or a man, but as an amateur photographer. The project is very much in progress.
You say that if I’m good enough, I should be winning photo contests. I have entered a few. You pay a fee to upload three images and never hear from the contest sponsor again. Most of the time, that has been my case. I did get an honorable mention in a Photo Review contest and had my picture of a penguin posted online by the New York Times. This fame is fleeting.
Or, you say that I should roam the streets to take pictures of daily life. I can serve as a runner for the local paper, perhaps even beyond the immediate neighborhood’s paper, which would be online, anyway.
Well, daily life has been seen before. Where I live, daily life can be of the homeless. Four pictures of mine of one homeless man made the San Francisco Chronicle. The photos pointed out the plight of a human being, not a criminal. Five weeks after I took his picture, he was caught that day for shooting and killing a young woman. He was acquitted for the shitting but is serving a sentence for arms possession six years later. Since then, I have come to believe that taking a picture of the homeless is a cheap shot. (Easy for me to say.) Besides, one photo of a homeless person sleeping could be taken today or thirty years ago, as I did of a homeless black woman on Michigan Avenue.. Photography of the homeless, a seemingly intransigent problem, helps no one. I suggest putting the camera down and listening, and if you can’t do that, move on.
Let me give you an example. Twenty years ago, I took photos of a homeless man named Roosevelt. He wore a black cap and big silvery rings. He was a ham in front of the camera. He loved my two beagles Henry and Jack. When they died, he always asked, “Henry and Jack, Jack and Henry. They were good dogs.” The dogs seemed to like Monroe.
One day, Roosevelt said he was going back home to Mississippi. I guess he wouldn’t be living on the streets. He’d take a drag on his cigarette which would one day, he claimed, give him lung cancer. A few years later, he said he was getting some treatment for lung cancer. He told this to me between puffs of his cigarette.
I didn’t believe Roosevelt was going anywhere. His home was always going to be West Portal. He had all that he needed. He wore his black leather coat and sterling silver rings, one on each finger. Monroe had no hesitation to ask about one’s son or daughter or my beagles.
At this point of their relationship, I no longer took pictures of Roosevelt, although Roosevelt begged me for his picture, which no longer existed.
“Hey, where’s my picture?”
“Next time.”
I would go about his business until I got so sick of Roosevelt begging for a photo, I’d snap a picture with my phone and flash it at Monroe. No one else was going to see the photo.
This all goes to show that even if you take a million photos in the course of your amateur photographer career, you have the choice to drop a subject because you no longer like the person. I had always thought that the camera is the conduit toward connecting with people in order to empathize with them. Like kicking a dog, losing trust is a surefire way to lose compassion for anyone. So, no photos. That is why I have so few photos of my first cousins.
Roosevelt died recently. An old wood pallet stands just outside a Starbucks on West Portal. Bouquets, already shriveled, commemorated his existence. I took a couple of pictures of his memorial. There is his chance for immortality.
I suppose it would be good if my photography would mean that something of me will last beyond my own death, but I’m not counting on it. A number of my projects document the times. My project, “Images from Earth,” are quirky. People do the darndest things. Another project that seems to have no end is “How Do You Want to Be Remembered?” These are headshots. If I was lucky, some of the headshots rise to portraits, because they say something about the person. I posted some photostories as slideshows online and made crude photobooks of my work prints. The photobooks have rough edges. In the slideshows and books, I paired the images and prints with cute poems or puzzling stories. You might say that I’ve thrown a lot of spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.
It’s still a pleasure to run across a photographer who has worked so hard to be remembered. Their images carry an efficiency that speak volumes, or the mastery of the printing makes a curtain be eternal. Or they connect so well with their subjects the energy lives in the image. Or, the photo-documentation is so critical, like Frank’s, that the photo-work simply cannot be forgotten.
In my old house, when I look up at the black acid-free boxes overflowing with my work prints, most that have not risen to museum quality, I have to remember that this entire business of taking and printing pictures is a day-to-day process. Today, I’m looking through the white light of a summer afternoon. The gray patio reflects it back on fern leaves. Their shadows play off the splintered trellis, a ghost of its faded self. The light still shines through its squares to an empty black space. I get restless. I’m back on the streets in the city and size up the scene asking questions about what this person is doing or why things are such a mess. What if I did approach those two women grilling chicken on a sidewalk on Harrison?
I move on another day. I end up in Union Square and take unnoticed several shots of Korean Baptists chanting by the ticket counter. I end up in Chinatown. Stockton is still plump full of shoppers buying gai lan and soy sauce chicken for dinner. Hands flutter to cleave the chicken and pack the takeout tray. I can shoot life.
