Christopher Bernard

The Photographer’s Face

He’s never counted them~—a fool’s errand, he thinks. Thousands culled from the tens of thousands he has taken. The ten thousand worlds.
Organized by year: ’65 through 2006. Forty-one years of a sometimes checkered but not, in the end, unsuccessful career snapping everything and everyone from blank-eyed celebrities to dyed vegetables, the idle, or spastic, rich to the tormented or numbed and drugged-out poor, the exotic to the banal, the powerful to the pitiful, the for no clear or any justifiable reason famous to the irredeemably and punitively obscure. The boxes for the last several years fairly skimpy, like the first.
	He hasn’t saved every single picture he ever took, as some did. That seemed an unnecessary form of masochism. William Lamb knows he is a sinner: he doesn’t have to shove his nose into every one of his sins.
	It’s hot, silent except for the whisper of a car passing over a nearby hill.
	He stands in his bathrobe, his hair whitening and unkempt. The young’ve all gone digital, they don’t even know what a negative is anymore! He pulls at random and holds up to the light a dusty square of celluloid.
	What have we got here?
	A middle-aged black woman screams at him in skeletal white, half-turned around on a stoop, glaring back at him, her eyes twin storms of rage. Behind her a teenage girl, most likely her daughter, half hidden, looks out, embarrassed, timid.
	His mind sails back to the years spent between taxis and airports and airless hotel rooms and clogged streets of riot and demand, murderous resentment, suicidal hope, the riots, the politics of hate, the weird bloody-minded euphoria of those strange wild years when he first entered the pro-fession, fresh out of school, and cut his teeth on his craft through the wire services, which is what a young ambitious photographer did in those days. A crazy, exhilarating time, strangely exalting and terrible . . .
The woman is hurt, denouncing and accusing. As if caught in an act of shame.
Leave us alone, you jackal!
	Mississippi, Haiti, Africa? And did I have even the decency to stop? Or did I just keep on shooting, drunk with the power of the camera, the photojournalist if you please, shaming the world with your nakedness?
	Ambitious, idealistic, confused young thug I was.
There are dozens, hundreds, like this one, teem-ing in their show of misery, fury, exposed wounds. 
	He slips the negative back in, pulls out another.	
	A seascape, black beneath the sun.
It startles him. He stares at the blackness for a moment, blinking. It shouldn’t shock him so; it’s a negative, after all. The exact opposite of what I saw.
A few lean bones of fragile-looking fishing boats appear beneath the celluloid’s once shiny surface. Serene. Remote. That time in Trinidad maybe—~a busman’s holiday. For a travel brochure, never printed, for a cruise company that never launched. 
One of many an exercise in futility at the time. Good practice for a young photographer, anyway. Sweet people. Gorgeous island. Poor as the dirt under their feet.
	Like so many during those years he waded through in their crowds, mobbed into schools of shacks up the flanks of bald, tree-depleted hills and in the skanky laps of fetid valleys lining toxic streams. The remote millions, hungry, filthy, battered by shame and fear.
	A tiny head appears in profile near the prow of a boat, looking down intently into the inky water. Fishing? Gazing at his own reflection? Astonished.
	Who has seen the photographer’s face?
He glances at the camera he’s carried around with him for decades~he calls it the kist, an old Scot’s word he got from his grandmother for a box used to hold money, also meaning a coffin: its corners rubbed down to the metal from his touch, now sitting a few feet away from him, primly, on its equally ancient tripod.
He turns to another box.
An executive in a blank white suit (the actual one a conservative midnight blue, no doubt) is being hustled by police toward a car. The man slouches in shame, hiding his face with his handcuffed hands. He looks panicky, crying. In the background a clutch of suits stand, sweltering, nervous. 
A few more of those faces went to jail, finally. In somebody else’s time if not mine. Look like they’re holding their necks, terrified of the cameras. Stealing their soul, catching them in the act. The photographer as truth teller, whistle-blower, voodoo priest, all wrapped up in one. To have been so lucky!
	Four black kids, pale as milk, race down a city alley. In panic, in thrill? Their faces blank. Their legs a blur against filthy cement. Someone in the background turns to look.
	Three Hispanics lean against a Chevy. Two of them with arms folded, one with an eye patch looks glum; his companion, sitting on the hood, sneers, sar-castic. ’Ey gringo! ’Ey ’mericano! The third is wide-mouthed with laughter, his hands in his pockets. He looks like he knows something. What is it you know?
	But as always, the photo tells him nothing.
A fleshy middle-aged Caucasian, wall-eyed, in a rumpled shirt, a pair of glasses balanced awkwardly on his nose, stares out defensively. You can’t tell what he’s looking at. A reverse Mona Lisa: no matter where you stand, he doesn’t seem to be looking at you.
His skin is blotched and saggy. 
How badly white skin ages.
	He flips to the next: a young woman in a halter walks away in a glow of darkness, her head cocked back, contemptuous.
Didn’t even ask her rate, and here I am taking her picture: the nerve! . . .
A retired dictator with a hare lip and wearing a Hawaian shirt stares remotely at him through a large white pair of sunglasses – some nameless monster sipping daquiris in Miami, sunbathing on the Florida sands between hurricanes and wet T-shirt contests. 
Nice picture. I even caught his snakelike silence.	
	A pile of corpses lies smothered in mud, a single living hand, in a triumphant wave, cut off at the corner.
The foul lieutenant with the disgusting smile, nodding obsessively, waving at the bodies as though they were trophies, expecting us to applaud him.
God I can still smell the stink . . .
	He puts the negative back quickly and moves to the next box. But they are just more pictures from the magazine years.
Cambodia. Vietnam. Palestine. Ethiopia. The Sahel. Nicaragua. Indonesia. Angola. . . .
Famine. War. Rebellion. Hurricane. Plague. . . .
Angry, proud, terrified, anguished, dead faces, in rows, piled in corners or spread like dropped laundry down empty streets. 
Dead faces all look alike.
A row of guerrillas stand in the hills of some forgotten third world dictatorship, Commander Zero or Blanco, Arawasii, Mchebe, dead center with his scarf covering his nose and his AK-47 (always an AK-47) cocked on his thigh, a blood-thirsty twinkle in his eye. And his lieutenants, most of them teenagers on a lark of blood and rifle oil, anarchy, hormones, and mayhem called the revolution.
An unknown pair of eyes – thousands of  unknown eyes – skim the images he has taken and published in a thousand magazines and a thousand newspapers; they frown, they wince . . .
What are they thinking, what are they feeling – disgust, anger, pity, fear? Indifference? Boredom?
They flip the page.
Did I have any effect? For good or bad? Were the pictures I took shocking or irritating or enraging? Were they entertaining? Did they fill an empty moment in the dentist’s waiting room? Did they distract someone from the thought of the awaiting drill? Did they have any effect at all?
	A half-naked white couple, clothing pulled down to his knees and yanked up to her neck, screw on a kitchen table with a refrigerator behind them. His penis looks like a pipe stuck into her crotch.
	Lamb looks sullenly at the image, flips through the rest of the box: the same sort of thing, repeated dozens, scores, hundreds of times.
Revealing nothing. Invisible behind their genitals.
	A bad spell, those years, too many of them, when the politics of the profession changed and he was considered too “risky,” sensitive, temperamental, liberal, he was getting out of sync, he was becoming “unprofessional.” 
I had to pay the bills some way.
He flips through a few more, feels a tickle in his groin and a turn of self-disgust. He had more than one dirty weekend with the models he used. Then he stops.
Years, he thinks. Too many years . . .
	In the next box are the pictures of Julia.
……
	He hesitates, taking a moment to clear his mind, to wipe it clean. He blinks and gazes outside, through the attic’s one, dusty window, its dim view of trees, the gable of a neighbor’s house a hundred yards off, a glimpse of far-away hills. He hears the whisper of another car passing over the hill nearby. Then he turns back to the box in front of him.

	Julia grins gleefully on the boardwalk in Atlantic City.
	Julia sucks the cake frosting off her fingers while baking a cake.
	Julia, in a sun dress and sitting on a swing, pretends to ignore the camera. Her arched eyebrows, the smile she can’t quite suppress. He remembers her going back and forth on the swing.
	She sticks her tongue out at him.
	He can feel himself grin back at her as he gazes at the photograph.
	Her breasts and belly down to the top of her pubic hair, with the white spots of her nipples, her navel.
	Her back, the bones of her spine, the rack of her hair pulled forward over her shoulder. Her body black as ebony, her hair shockingly white.
Julia against a bank of snow, her figure like a crooked S, her laughter loud enough to hear.
	Julia at Christmas, mugging at the camera with her new snow hat. 
Whatever happened to that hat?
Then he remembers the day they had that fight and I fell and broke my nose. And she spent all night crying because she had never meant to hurt me. My bloody nose, her tears . . .
He snorts a little laugh and feels himself tearing up.
	Julia dancing with a bunch of kids in a park somewhere, oblivious of him, of the camera, of everything that wasn’t before her, inside her.
	Her hands lie cupped across her face. Her eyes stare, bright, serious, wide, through soot-black fingers at what, I’ll never know, since I never knew you, since I will never know you.
	O Julia, what were you thinking? What were you feeling?
	The days when we were happy. Before it died. Our love. No―yours. Never mine.
	He feels it again. It rises from the horizon beyond where he stands and holds the little celluloid a lifetime away, a sudden surge and wave of almost unbearable happiness . . .
	He puts his head in his hands for a moment, despairing, rapturous. 
These are all the pictures of her.
Then he suddenly pulls himself together and closes the top of the box roughly and moves on to the next.

	The BMW ads. The Marchese d’Alba ads. Perry Ellis. Donna Karam.
	Henry Weinhard. Ore-Ida. Chuck Valente Spaghetti Sauce. Paul Newman Salad Dressing.
	Boxes and boxes, and boxes. Never realized just how many of them there are. Hundreds. Thousands. Tens of thousands. I gave in, I gave up. It was too strong for me. They beat me in the end. I surrendered, and they welcomed me with open arms and bushels of money. 
	Nothing disreputable, really. They paid their way. People liked them, people loved them. They made me a lot of friends, they built this house, they built this attic. He looks quizzically around the airless room that surrounds him, almost empty except for the boxes of negatives lined up unevenly along the wall. 
A few even won awards. But . . . 
They aren’t even lies.
	He goes over to the tripod with his old “kist” screwed onto it, looks through the view finder, adjusts the focus, the light meter, the timer. Then he pushes a button and moves back in front of the lens.
 	The old, almost obsolete camera whirrs and ticks for a second, then stops.
	He goes back to it, tinkers, returns to the front and presents his profile, with a blank expression, like a mug shot. The camera whirrs, ticks, stops. 
He goes back, tinkers again, then stands in front of it, closer, and gazes straight into the lens.
What does this face show?
	The old kist whirrs, ticks, stops.
	Find out in the dark room, maybe! 
	He returns to the boxes.
On top, under a lid, out of its envelope, is a negative of a dirty toy machine gun lying on the backseat of an abandoned car.
Lamb stares at it a moment. How did this get here . . . Then, remembering something, he abruptly goes back to the very first box, the one with his earliest photographs in it, leaning in its ancient cardboard dilapidation against the attic wall, and starts rummaging through it.
At last he finds what he’s looking for, picks it out, and draws into the light. It is an old yellowing thing, of a middle-aged couple—the man flat-faced, meaty, a Finn, in a tartan flannel shirt, the woman taller, a Scot, unnaturally skinny, in a shirtwaist dress, with exactingly coiffed jet-black hair (black in the negative; her real hair was sandy blond) and eyes that glared. Seen from the waist up, the couple stares at him, surreal black against black. His parents. 
In the background is a garden seen vaguely through a door. The heads are dead center in the photograph.
Too self-conscious. I said, don’t smile – not look like they’re at a funeral!
Incompetent photograph . . .
The smell of that shirt.
William Lamb looks at his father’s face and the shirt whose smell he suddenly remembers so keenly. The face that was so open, warm and laughing when outside home with friends and company, then would shut tight as glue as soon as he walked in the front door, except for the regular lashings out in irritation or anger. 
Never could talk about anything with his father except basketball. Which he himself loathed. And wood carving, which bored him. All those gnomes on the rec room shelves the old man had carved over the years.
Once, when he was very young, he saw his mother and father alone together, through a doorway, facing back to back. He watched them: when they got up, they carefully avoided each other’s eyes, like two caged predators gingerly avoiding each other’s claws.
The woman’s face. Its set glare. The resentment he was unaware of at the time. Except as an everyday form of menace. The quick slaps, the putdowns.
Can’t tell what she is really thinking. Not now. Not then. 
The shot reveals nothing. Of either of them.
How they hated each other.
He rummages some more: railway tracks receding to infinity, a lonely tree, reflections of clouds in a mud puddle. Clichés, apprentice work. Flush with enthusiasm and faith.
	No. That was the only shot I ever took of them.
	Lousy picture.
	They stare past him into the rafters above his head.
	Nothing lies like a photograph.
	He returns it to the box, closes the lid, and sits on it, gaping into a corner of the attic.
	Dead faces all look alike, he thinks again.
	He looks at the camera on the tripod and frowns. It seems to be staring at him.
Go to hell! 
He wipes the wetness from his face, lifts one of the boxes, and carries it downstairs.

The two men, one of them a reporter, stare down at the body quizzically. One of them scratches his head.
	“Looks like he was burning all his negatives.” 
“His entire life’s work, then.”
The first scratches his head again.
“Yeah. He lived alone for years, I hear. The office says he had no survivors.”
“So no kin to fight over the inheritance. And no inheritance, to speak of. Just an empty house and a pile of vile smelling ashes.” The taller of the two scrunches his nose in disgust.
“Carrying them down from the attic must have strained his heart . . .”
They pause.
	“Funny thing about that camera.”
	“Really. Whatever he was shooting, he forgot to spool the film.”
	“Early-stage Alzheimer’s, do you think?”
	The other doesn’t reply.
	“He was strange about not being photographed.”
	“Odd: the invisible photographer. Well, he got he wanted!”
The other looks at him strangely.
“Big time!” he says, and looks down at the strangely small, crumpled body, still in its bathrobe. 
They pause again, awkwardly.
“Any of his pictures saved?”
	“A few over here. Ad campaigns mostly. Nothing personal.”
	“I’ve heard he was mostly commercial anyway.”
	“No loss to the art world then. But I hear he was a nice man, if a little strange.”
	The reporter’s cellphone sounds with a ringtone based on the Lone Ranger’s trumpet fanfare.
	“Bob Reese . . . I’m down there now. . . . Yeah, tragic . . . Okay.”
	He’s closing the phone when he pauses, considering.
The reporter kneels close to the dead photographer’s face and aims the phone’s camera. The eyes are half open under a narrow square forehead. The cheeks are pale, there is a sign of grizzling on his chin. The lips show a foam of saliva. They are turned in a little smile, as though they know something they’re not telling. The nose displays an ancient break. Wonder what caused that, the reporter thinks. The face, half hidden in the grass, leans into the ground. As though turning, at last, retreating, into the earth. The grass, recently cut, is fragrant. 
The reporter clicks. Then he pushes a few buttons and waits.
	A bird starts singing in a nearby tree.
At last the phone’s display flashes, the reporter pushes a button, and a text message appears from his editor: “CGRATS. YR PIC WM LAMB ONLY PIC KNOWN.”
	The reporter contemplates the face of William Lamb, comparing it with the small image on the phone’s video screen.
	“He almost looks like he knows something.” he says. “What does it say, anyway? But he took his secret to the grave. Dead faces all look alike.”
	He flips the phone shut and sticks it into his pocket.

____
Christopher Bernard is a founding editor of Caveat Lector and author of the novel A Spy in the Ruins.