Regarding 'James, Near Lathrup, Michigan. 1979'

 'JAMES':
I knew the guy was there with the camera. He was hard to miss. It was a big camera, and he was a white man with long hair and a funny accent. I didn't have a whole lot of experience with such things.

I don't know if that date is right or not, but if it is I was eight years old when he took that picture. I'm going to be 39 next year. If he said what it was for, I don't remember. I heard --this was much later, after the photo was in the newspaper in New York-- that it was in some magazine originally, but I never saw that. I never saw the picture at all until maybe three years ago when all this business came up.

I do remember that day, though. It was summer, and I had gone to stay with my grandmother in Michigan after school got out. I rode the bus with my older sister from Oakland. It was a long trip out there, and my sister was only four years older than I am, so we were  both children. My mother was working at a printing factory, and she worked the third shift in the summer when we weren't in school because she could make a little extra money. My father was in Detroit, but we didn't see much of him. My sister and me had been spending summers with our grandmother for at least a few years by that point.

My grandmother was originally from Chicago, but my grandfather's people were from Michigan, and the house where that picture was taken was his old family place. They went back there to live when my grandfather was dying --no rent, you know, and it was what he wanted. At that time most of the rest of the family had moved off to the cities --Detroit, Flint, Gary, Chicago-- for work. That place was old and I remember when it was a mess, but my grandmother was the hardest worker I ever knew, and she cleaned it up and made it her own.

I liked going there. It was a lot better than the place we lived in Oakland, which was a big, crowded tenement in a bad neighborhood. When we were in Michigan we could pretty much come and go as we pleased. It was still like a small town back then.

Anyway, the photograph. No, my name is not James. It's Robert. I don't believe the man ever asked me my name; I think he just put that on there: James. Which was my grandfather's name, and that's his old car I'm in, which was out back of the house and no longer ran. One of the cats that was around had had a litter of kittens. There always seemed to be a bunch of kittens, and I think I was probably messing around with one of them when that photographer came walking up the alley. For a while he just stood at the edge of the yard and took pictures. He didn't ask, but I didn't care.

That picture of me in the front seat of the car with the kitten in my arms and my eyes closed, that was definitely him asking. And then after he took some pictures he asked me to take off everything but my undershorts. I didn't think nothing of it at the time. No, he didn't ever touch me or anything. He just wanted the picture that way, I guess.

When I finally saw it at the museum in Chicago I mostly thought that 'James' on there was strange. But, yeah, he definitely asked me to take off my clothes. People probably thought that poor black kids just ran around in their undershorts all the time. Still, I wouldn't have said anything about it, or even seen the thing, if it wasn't for the fact that my sister saw the newspaper story and called the writer. After that I talked to a few people, I guess. Reporters. One of them took my sister and me to see the photo at the museum.

The picture was bigger than I expected. I suppose I can see why people think the whole deal is fishy, but like I said, the guy never laid a finger on me, and there's a picture of me hanging in a museum. How many people can say that?

That might be the only photo that was ever taken of me as a child. I don't remember any others. Other people might be upset, but I'm not mad about it. All I asked is that they change the name so it's right. If there's going to be a picture of me out there in the world I want my real name on it. My full name.

My sister wants the man to give me some money, and if he decides to do that I certainly won't have any objections. The rest of the fuss, though, I don't want anything to do with that.

THE PHOTOGRAPHER:
The kid was wearing a white t-shirt and faded jeans. The interior of the old car --a big Chevy-- was very dark. The cat was all white, and there was murky sunlight pressing in on the cracked windshield but not penetrating. I knew the picture I wanted. The kid was on his back in the front seat and had the cat in his arms.

I wanted the white cat against his black skin. That was really it. I wanted all that darkness, all those shades of black, and the white of the kid's teeth, the white of the cat, and the sunlight on the windshield. Right then that was the best picture I could get. I was young and excited to be in America and making pictures. I probably had some exotic and stupid notions. I didn't then and I still don't see myself as a reporter, but I do regret not asking the kid's name. You could get away with it then, though. I was taking so many photos and was constantly in motion. Very, very seldom --even now-- would I take that much time trying to set up a picture, which is why I remember that day so well. I can even remember stopping for a hamburger and a Coke and sitting there listening to Jimmy Reed and feeling really wound up; I knew I was going to get some good pictures.

I hadn't been in the South yet, but that town was the first place that sort of had that look and feel that I associated with the South. A day or two earlier I'd been in Detroit, I'd been in Chicago, and then all of a sudden I was in this place that felt...I don't know, Faulknerian. It was a small town in the industrial outskirts, just barely, but it was old and rundown and still had a rural feel to it. It sounds corny, I know, but I was very excited to stumble into that place. This was the America I was looking for. Obviously Robert Frank had had a huge influence on both my visual imagination and my ideas about America, but I thought I could get somehow closer to the subject. I could be warmer. You know, I don't think of Frank as warm.

Anyway, yeah, I'd do things differently now, but the truth is that nobody thought anything about it or asked any questions for more than 25 years. It was just a good picture. I'm truly sorry there's been this controversy, and I understand it, but I still think it's a good picture. That kid was beautiful.

Catch And Release: My Photographic Education

How many words do you think you can run through your head in a day?

It depends on how many words you have in you, am I right?

Images, though, they're something else; they represent a bigger, more universal language. All you need to do is look around and keep your eyes open. Yet I could pretty much guarantee you that there are people all over this country who are all but visually illiterate, people whose visual vocabulary is as impoverished as their command of the English language. They don't really look at anything. Show them a photograph of a nook or cranny in their own house and they wouldn't even recognize it. They've done all sorts of studies and experiments on this phenomenon, of course, asked people to identify their neighbors or co-workers from photographs, or to describe the cars their neighbors drive. You'd be surprised by how many people can't do this, can't even come close.

I once went to an exhibition of Irving Penn's photographs, which I find occasionally astonishing but more often than not overly cool and stylized. At any rate, there were all these beautiful images of very common objects --frozen food, for instance, or a scrap of litter from the street-- and people were lined up gaping at these photos as if they were looking upon something wholly exotic or unfamiliar. Which, of course, they were.

It's what you look at that's important, my father always told me. What you choose to see. He was a photo nut, and he was always pointing stuff out. Do you realize, he'd say, how much compelling drama and pain and boredom and joy goes entirely unseen in this world?

That was the way he talked. Look around you, he'd say. Take in the details. His one great dream had been to be a photographer, but he'd never been able, he felt, to come close to capturing what he thought he saw and what he felt was truly there. One day he dug a hole in the backyard and buried his cameras alongside the graves of our two dogs, which was exactly the sort of thing he'd have loved to see someone else do.

Look, he'd say, calling my attention at a stoplight to a stray hand protruding from the shadows of another car and drumming with long, thin fingers on a bright yellow patch of the driver's-side door. Look, he'd say, isn't that beautiful? That's an Eggleston photo, right there.

I remember a few of his photos, and whether they were successful or not I couldn't say. But I do remember a photo of a fiddle underneath a bed, nestled amid the dusty sprawl of shoes, books, and magazines. There was another of a plump strawberry sitting next to a burning cigarette in an ashtray. These things were what he was looking at, he would say, but not what he was looking for. That was one of his favorite questions: What are you looking for?

People, he said, didn't see the trees for the forest; they couldn't see the beautiful moments all around them, lost in the stream and bustle of life. That was the wonder of photography, of seeing the world concentrated through one lens, one eye closed, the other pressed tight to the camera, focused. Those were the pictures my father remembered, those moments when he'd zeroed  in on something with his camera, or seen something he'd never before realized was there, never mind if it somehow mysteriously vanished in the developing tray or at the photo lab. He knew what he had seen, even if he had not quite captured it.

He used to drag me down to the public library, where he would build big stacks of photography monographs on one of the long white tables upstairs. We would sit there for hours while he slowly turned the shiny pages of those books, pausing over each photo to say, Look, look at that, or, just as frequently, I don't see it. I can't tell what she was looking for.

He liked the periphery, photographers who found things in the margins and shadows. The frame isn't always what or where you think it is, he'd say. Get outside the frame and you get away from the self-consciousness that photography has instilled in so many people. If people think they're being looked at or watched, even if by a camera --or perhaps especially if by a camera-- they become actors, actors hiding in their own skin.

He would open the pages of a book of portrait photography --by August Sander, perhaps, or Mike Disfarmer-- to illustrate his points. You see, he would say, portraits can be fascinating for what they reveal, but also for what they disclose, and on entirely different levels. They work when the subjects have either fierce delusions or no illusions at all; the best and most fascinating portraits of all --and you will notice this often in these works of Sander and Disfarmer-- are of these last types, people who are comfortable in their own skin, or who are not yet truly conscious of the power of the camera. You could look through thousands of contemporary portraits and never stumble across a single such photograph. The camera has made a pet of the average American. Point a camera at someone and they retreat into the dreams and archetypes of childhood; they become mugging clowns or vamping starlets. I love it when people recoil from the camera, my father said. These are the people I give my heart to, the people with the fascinating peripheries.

It's a gift to look away, my father also told me. Few people even know how to look around, but the really special people learn to look away. Think about what I am saying: in any situation --in every situation-- there is always something that commands attention: the focus. The people in power and the people who manipulate desire know this; the mythmakers understand this as well. It is hard to look away from that focus of attention, whether it is a beautiful woman walking down the sidewalk, a movie screen, or the batter in a baseball game. Yet if you can teach yourself to look away you will see all sorts of startling and wholly unfamiliar things; you will see not just reactions and response, but indifference and an infinite variety of furtive behaviors that are absolutely human. You will see things that no one ever looks at or sees closely.

A great photographer, my father said, can find desolation in even the brightest colors, romance in squalor, heartbreak and loneliness amid jubilation, and beauty in even the most ordinary objects--maybe beauty is not even the correct word. Grace, that's perhaps more accurate.

Look at this, he would say, absorbed in a photo of a rack of candy bars or the inside of a freezer. Look how mysterious this world is. Isn't that the message of every one of these photographs: Can you even begin to imagine?

Photography was my father's obsession, but he had plenty of other strange habits. I suppose, really, that you could define him as a constellation of strange habits. Among his many peculiarities was the fact that he never ate anything much beyond  breakfast cereal and cottage cheese. He couldn't keep a job, and would go so far as to admit, It's awfully hard to hold down a job when you don't have a work ethic. It didn't seem to bother him in the least that he bagged groceries or worked as a night clerk at a local motel. He'd claim that he couldn't afford to invest any of his available pride in anything the "real world" would consider a job. His real work was looking at photographs, and finding --but not taking-- photographs in the world around him. Certainly no one was going to pay him to do either of those things in a little river town of fewer than 5,000 people.

Movies, he said, were a poor substitute for photographs, and television was even worse. Yet even when he watched a film my father would be studying the margins and the backgrounds, looking for his own stills, the things no one else would ever notice. I want to stop time, he would say. There’s too much movement in this world, and too many fantasies that are the stuff of nothing but pathetic dreams. I just need the instants, and they tell me everything I need to know about the world we’re living in.

My father hated America, or at least he hated  what America was becoming and what it had allowed itself to become. This was 20 years ago; I can only imagine what he would make of the place now. He seemed to have an almost foreign perspective on America; he saw the country from some great and distorted distance, and condemned as imperialism all laissez faire capitalism. The biggest victims of America's cultural imperialism, he would tell anyone who would listen, were Americans themselves. I can't afford to be an American, he would say. It takes more energy than any civilized human being should ever possess.

Yet for all his contempt of America, my father never went anywhere else. He never even visited New York except in photographs. I think he actually thought of himself as European, or at least he saw the country primarily through the eyes of European  intellectuals, artists, and, especially, photographers. Foreign photographers took the best pictures of America, he said, because they saw things differently. That was another of his pet phrases: I guess I just see things differently, he'd say whenever somebody in our little town bothered to disagree with him, which was less and less often the older he got.

My father certainly didn't have an easy life, and I know his frustrations were compounded  by the fact that he had so little access to the images he craved. He never had any money, and there wasn't even a bookstore in our town, so he was left with the limited resources of the local public library. He always used to say that the only American institution he supported without reservation was the public library. I'm sure my father drove the librarians crazy with his requests for inter-library loans; most of the monographs he was interested in had to be borrowed from the collections of larger libraries. There are an infinite number of things to see in this miserable town, he would say, but they’re still not enough. For the missing things you have to look elsewhere.

The only camera he kept after he gave up on himself as a photographer was a cheap 35-millimeter that he hung onto so that he could make personal photocopies of his favorite images from the collections he pored over in the library. When he was dying he burned even these, and when I expressed my dismay he told me that the photos did not belong to him, and they certainly didn’t belong to me.

The world is the only gallery of photographs that matters, he said. Looking isn’t hard, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look hard all the same and hold on tight to every startling thing that catches your eye.

Your Lives In My Tiny Little Hands

This one guy, every couple weeks it's these amazing places you can't even believe, mountains, usually, and he's standing in water or strung up on a cliff and hanging from ropes. He'll bring in ten or twenty rolls of film at a time, and it's gotten so that I look forward to seeing him come through the door. You see the whole world, is how my boss put it when he was training me in. This job is a privilege, he'd say. These people are trusting us with their most private moments.

I've always been one of those guys who isn't much for going places --going places, actually, doesn't bother me; it's the being there that I have a problem with. But it is interesting for me to see these other places and to imagine, you know, my own versions of the stories these pictures might be trying to tell. One time this guy brought in a roll of film and it was nothing but pictures of dead cows --seven dead cows sprawled around in the dirt. There wasn't a single person in any of the photos, just the dead cows, and somebody had taken pink paint and outlined their bodies in the dirt, just like they'd been murdered in the movies.

Of course you get the pictures of women in bathing suits, and people on the toilet --I've seen hundreds of those-- and occasionally actual bare breasts or even some full frontal, although we're not supposed to develop anything that's "too far over the line," as my boss says. But I have to admit that in five years we've never refused to process a single roll of film that I'm aware of.

My own family never took photographs. I don't think I ever saw a camera in either of my parents' hands. These people would come around at school to take photos of the students and I remember bringing home a little packet of those every year but I'm not even sure what my mother would do with them. They didn't go up on the refrigerator like they did at other kids' houses, I know that much. My mother didn't put anything on the refrigerator.

I'm sure people would be horrified to think that we look through their photos, but they must know. It's human nature, my boss says. I think one thing that happens so often is that people will find an old roll of film still in a camera or laying around the house somewhere --in a kitchen drawer or in the glove compartment of their car-- and they'll have completely forgotten what's on there and curiosity gets the best of them so they bring them in to be developed. They bring them in because they want to know, and I think that's when you get some surprises.

People always ask, what's the strangest thing you've ever seen looking at all these photos day after day? And, to be honest with you, that's not an easy question to answer. I've seen so many strange and I guess disturbing things mixed in with the birthday parties and the picnics and parades. More than one person with a gun in their mouth. A dead dog laid out on a kitchen table with a flower in its teeth. This one guy we called the Sign Man, who would take photographs of himself holding hand-lettered signs that said things like, "Tammi, I am not a part of your experiment anymore," or "I am sick and tired of being taken apart by robots." Unsurprisingly, the Sign Man eventually turned in a roll of film with a photo of himself with a gun in his mouth.

I have seen so many babies being born that it is no longer even mysterious or interesting to me. I have seen a hundred families or more standing in front of Mount Rushmore or shaking Mickey Mouse's hand. Young couples in formal wear, of course, getting ready to go to a dance or get married. Little children crouched next to their beds with folded hands, saying their prayers. People in coffins and carnival rides and tombstones. Christmas trees, obviously, and kids sitting on Santa's lap. Lots of people in Halloween costumes. One I do remember in particular was a picture of a cross-eyed little kid with a snail creeping up his tongue. 

People also take a lot of pictures of food, color photos of turkeys and hams and Jello. You see everything, really, pretty much anything you could imagine.

Personally, I like the stuff in the margins, the mistakes and unintentional shots that show what goes on outside the world of what people think of as a picture. I like to study the people who are just standing in the background, looking puzzled and unaware. I couldn't tell you, really, what staring into those pictures makes me feel. Captured, I suppose, the way I feel when I stand far enough outside myself sometimes that I can see how small I am.

I always thought of photos as little trigger-finger wishes, I guess. You know, people press that button and they hope that something will come out that looks like how they want to remember the world and the time they spent living in it and trying to create moments that looked like pictures. Something they can look at and say, "See, here it was. What a grand life we had." Or maybe even, in some of the sadder cases, they want evidence that the nightmares and heartaches they endured were demonstrably real.

So often when people pick up their photographs they can't wait to see if they got what they wanted, and they'll stand right there at the counter and shuffle through them. I'm prepared to swear that the vast majority of these people look clearly disappointed. I've concluded that it must be hard to take a true picture, or at least a picture that captures what you thought --and hoped-- you'd seen, experienced, felt, or looked like or at in that one paralyzed instant. I suppose that's one reason why I've never felt inclined to even try. I'll think I'm seeing the world sometimes, and fear that a photograph would only confirm that I have never done anything but look at the wrong things or in the wrong places.

It's sad when people wish, my mother always said. She'd say, You pray that when you get to a ripe old age you can look back and count the number of really sad days on one hand. Maybe that's why she didn't like photos around, because they were like reminders of all the things that never quite managed to turn out the way she had hoped or planned.

Regarding The Photograph That The Young Woman Did Not Want The Blind Rabbit To See

The blind rabbit, of course, had never seen the photograph that so disturbed the young woman who stopped by twice a week to read to him.

The young woman refused to describe the photograph, and said repeatedly that she wished she had never mentioned the subject. She said, "If I were to describe the photograph to you, you might have the idea that you have seen the world, but this photograph is not the world. This photograph is not at all what life looks like."

The blind rabbit asked the young woman to describe for him a photograph that depicted what life did look like, a photograph that would look like the world.

The young woman thought about this request and then asked the rabbit to tell her what he imagined when he thought about the world.

"The world is what I smell and what I hear," the rabbit said. The young woman asked if, based on the things he smelled and the things he heard and the words she read to him, he had any notions that might correspond to a visual conception of the world.

"You are asking me if I see?" the rabbit said.

"Yes," the young woman said. "I guess that I am."

"I cannot be certain," the rabbit said. "I know only that I feel things, that the smells and sounds affect me as feelings."

The young woman asked if these feelings could be described in a way she might understand; as happy or sad, for instance. The rabbit said that, yes, he believed this to be true, although he tended to think of what he felt as either "good feelings" or "bad feelings."

"What sounds or smells like a bad feeling?" the young woman asked.

"Noise that I do not understand is a bad feeling," the rabbit said. "Or smells that ask unfamiliar questions."

"Well," the young woman said. "The photograph in question is most certainly a bad feeling. The questions it asks are not necessarily unfamiliar, but they have no answers."

"And that is not the world?" the rabbit said.

"It is not what life looks like," the young woman said. She asked the blind rabbit what good feelings smelled and sounded like.

The blind rabbit sniffed the air and pondered for a moment. "Like the good day," he said. "Like the things that give me pleasure and that I can trust and depend on. The warm and soft things, the tenderness underfoot and the tender things that come to me as smells and sounds and caresses of one sort or another. The things from which I need not run or hide. The sound of your voice reading Don Quixote. The music of your amusement, which I do not understand but which is nonetheless like a sound from the trees on a morning when all the sounds and smells are bright and there is promise afoot in the world."

"That is what a photograph of life would look like," the young woman said. "You would take such a photograph, and keep it forever, because it captured something in the world that you wished to always remember."

The blind rabbit paused again, and then said, "I'm not so sure about that. Surely without some permanent evidence or memories of the bad feelings I would unwittingly find myself in situations of great peril. I must respectfully argue that the photograph of which you refuse to speak serves some purpose in the world, and therefore depicts in some way the world whose purpose it serves."

"Surely no one needs a photograph to remind them of the existence of ugliness and evil," the young woman said.

The rabbit shrugged. He did not wish to argue with the young woman. "Perhaps you are right," he said. "But I feel I must point out that you are neither blind, nor a rabbit. And I am quite certain that I would not long survive without all of the photographs."