In California, my mom worked an entry-level job at what now might be called a Silicon Valley tech business. It made audiocassettes. My dad made peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and popcorn. He picked me up from preschool, strapping me into the yellow child seat mounted at the back of his bike. He had a mustache and sideburns and not much more hair than that, and on his bike I toured the campus of the university where he was studying and went to swimming class and the grocery store, and at his side on our sofa I watched cartoons on our small black-and-white TV, a TV in which I always saw colors, though I was told by friends that this wasn’t possible.
My dad never told me that it wasn’t possible. He was my buddy, and we made model planes and ant terrariums, and went hiking in the hills and swimming in Lake Lagunita, which in those days was sometimes dry and sometimes not. We fed butterflies sugar water and watched them unfurl what we called their tongues and drink.
My mom drove to work every weekday morning in our secondhand blue Datsun and drove back every evening in time to make us dinner. She brought home the bacon, in my mind. (Of the non-pork variety, I ought to add, given that we were a Muslim family, though I’m not sure I was aware that there was such a thing as religious identity, back then.)
Before he died, my father reminded me that when I was four and he asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said I wanted to be a writer. Of course, what I meant by “writer” then was a writer of Superman comics. In part I was infatuated with the practically invulnerable Man of Steel, his blue eyes and his spit curl. I wanted both to be him and to marry him—to be his Robin, so to speak. But more importantly, I wanted to write his story, the adventures of the man who fought for truth, justice, and the American Way—if only I could figure out what the fuck the American Way was.
How could I tell the story with such glaring holes in my knowledge? I was terribly bothered that I did not know what the American Way was, and became even more so when I began to wonder whether there was such a thing as the Lebanese Way and whether I would recognize it. My parents were Lebanese, but I was born in Jordan, raised in Kuwait. Could my way be Kuwaiti and not Lebanese? Since most of my classmates were Palestinians, I had a Ramallah accent. Did that mean I’d lost my way?
I wanted to tell stories that belonged to me. Superman would be my friend, his world mine. In a single bound, he would leap the tallest buildings, basically my house and my cousins’ across the street. My Superman would be more powerful than a locomotive, stronger than my father’s red Rambler. I wished to share my story with the world, and it did not occur to me at that age to ask whether the world had any interest.
Design-wise, the most famous collaboration between a writer and a photographer did not end up looking like much of a collaboration at all. Walker Evans contributed a preface to the 1960 reissue of “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” the study of poor tenant farmers in Alabama, originally published in 1941; “Walker” crops up a number of times in James Agee’s text, but a formal separation is maintained between the tenderly austere photographs of families and their homes — printed at the beginning — and the 400 pages of Agee’s highly wrought, much-agonized-over text. This, for Gore Vidal, was no bad thing, because it left Evans’s “austere” photos untainted by what “good-hearted, soft-headed admirers of the Saint James (Agee) version” so loved about the sharecroppers’ gospel.
When it comes to the relationship between a critic or curator writing about photographers or photography, the results span the spectrum of exclusion, segregation and integration. There is not a single photograph in Susan Sontag’s classic “On Photography.” At the other extreme, the exquisite silence of the plates in lavish monographs is sometimes protected by only the slimmest prefaces or afterwords. At all points in between, the word-image ratio shifts constantly between the writing informing the pictures and the pictures illustrating the writing. But there is one form — the simplest in many ways — that permits and encourages a uniquely intimate relationship between writer and photographer.
John Szarkowski was for many years the head of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2000, in the twilight of a provocative, highly influential career, he published “Atget,” a selection of 100 images by the French photographer Eugène Atget, each reproduced on the recto page with an accompanying caption-essay on the facing verso page. With Szarkowski as the best kind of guide — one whose itinerary allows interludes of undisturbed contemplation — we wind our way through the haunts of old Paris, emerging from time-shuttered streets into the open skies of the surrounding countryside. Szarkowski had always been a distinctive stylist, but this format enabled him to give free rein to his talents as a writer, which were usually securely tethered by curatorial obligation. He also drew confidence, I think, from an earlier assay at the same form, “Looking at Photographs” (1973), in which he used a single picture by each of the most important photographers in the museum’s holdings to compile a radically synecdochic survey of the medium’s history. The obligation to cover so much ground, to balance what he had to say about so many major figures on such slender plinths, rather limited Szarkowski’s range of literary and thematic movement. With Atget — whose photographs, appropriately enough, were originally offered as “Documents for Artists” — the combination of abundance of subject matter and limited space encouraged a kind of tight flourishing or contained extravagance. Szarkowski’s knowledge of Atget’s work was so extensive that he had scarcely even to think about what he knew. And so the photographs serve as starting-off points for reflections on all sorts of things, including how photography has changed our view of the world: “I do not think that empty chairs meant the same thing before photography as they mean to us now.”
0 Comments