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| Kids playing on East 5th Street, Manhattan, 1967. Speculative work – unassigned random pictures such as this image, made for potential sale or inclusion in a portfolio – is a big part of photojournalism. I've photographed in New York, New Jersey, Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois, Ohio, Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, Montana, Oregon, Washington state, Canada, parts of South Korea and probably some other locales I don't remember, but the only hostile reactions to my spec-photo efforts came from Seattleites, who in their well-documented xenophobia seem to regard “photographer” as synonymous with “interloper” if not “intruder.” Yet even in Seattle, where the sorts of street photography I had routinely done in Manhattan provoked so much anger I gave it up entirely, I was never hassled for photographing in public parks, even when the subject was children at play – pictures that often, though not always, were later published in The Seattle Sun. But earlier this week, when I attempted to shoot a mere three frames of spec work I thought might interest the Tacoma Metropolitan Parks District, I discovered that if you're an elderly, crippled male, merely pointing a camera at kids on a playground can put you in real danger of being lynched. Data: I used Bic Wite-Out and a red Marks-A-Lot, the only suitable paint-like materials I had on hand, to deface the print. The film is Tri-X; its grain structure says it was processed in Microdol-X at 400 ASA, but the rest of the information was lost in the 1983 fire. Because I snapped only one frame on East 5th Street before these attentive kids spotted me and started mugging for the camera, I was obviously not using one of the VT Canons on which I then normally relied, which means I was shooting with a Pentax H1A and probably its 55mm f/2 Super-Takumar – the choice of lenses indicating it may well have been that camera's maiden voyage. Photograph copyright Loren Bliss 1967, 2013. (Click on image to view it full size.) |
*
THE POST-TRAUMATIC atrial fibrillation
that made this piece so tardy has finally stopped, and now I can tell
the story as it deserves to be told rather than as a narrative
disjointed by bitterness and anticipation of death, but to put
everything in sharp focus, I should preface all that follows by the
mundane admission I cling to film cameras because I cannot afford the
approximately $1000 it costs to convert to a digital single-lens
reflex. The realities of Social Security, Medicare and the
post-American-Dream economy make it clear I will never have that
sort of money in whatever remains of this lifetime. Thus to any
onlooker even the least bit camera-savvy it is obvious I remain the
technological equivalent of an ignoramus or a bum or a weirdo and
possibly all three. True, M Leicas were the best and therefore most
prestigious 35mm cameras on this planet, but the retirement of the
last factory-trained Leica repairman in the United States mandated
their return to Germany even for routine cleaning and lubrication,
which I was authoritatively told would take a year or more, not to
mention the prohibitive costs of shipping plus the near certainty of
huge hassles with our ever-more-tyrannical customs officials. Hence
last year I sadly realized I had no choice but to to sell these
beloved machines while they were still operational, and with
funereal sadness I did just that. Since then my only 35mm cameras
are relatively low-end SLRs, specifically Pentax MXs and K-1000s,
which I formerly employed only as bodies for long lenses. They are
certainly durable, and the associated optics are superb, but they
are not Leicas, they are at least 30 years old, and I fear they'll
die before I do.
Because I am also fond of the 120
format, I've likewise kept a 1953-vintage Rolleicord III. For those
unfamiliar with the wonderful machines formerly made by Franke &
Heidecke, Rolleicord is to Rolleflex as Volkswagen is to Porsche.
This means the 'Cord is mechanically simple enough it need not be
returned to Deutschland for repairs – that even given the
notorious ineptitude characteristic of too many USian camera
mechanics, with careful shopping I can (probably) find someone
stateside to clean, lubricate, adjust and – assuming the continued
availability of spare parts – even fix it if it goes Tango Uniform.
And I love what can be done with medium-format negatives. There is
also the fact I am inordinately fond of twin-lens reflexes. My first
camera, which my father gave me for my 12th birthday, was a TLR, a
Kodak Brownie Reflex that used 127 film, and I learned my first
(self-taught) grab-shooting lessons with its eye-level sports
viewfinder. The first newspaper-issue camera with which I worked –
this at age 16 for The Grand Rapids Herald in Michigan –
was a Zeiss Ikoflex, a Rolleflex competitor. The second, during my
18th year, was a Rolleiflex itself; it was issued by The Fountain
Citizen, for which (if memory serves), my first picture
assignment produced a rather pedestrian but nevertheless
Page-One-worthy image of U.S. Sen. Estes Kefauver braving a
torrential East Tennessee summer thunderstorm as he campaigned for
re-election in 1958. Then maybe four decades later I realized the
tacit bowing of one's head to the subject – the gesture mandated by
the waist-level finder that defines all TLRs – evokes a response
that is entirely different from the what obtains during eye-level
photographic encounters, especially amidst the Cyclopean
intrusiveness of SLRs. At about the same time it dawned on me one
of the great but mostly unacknowledged attributes of M Leicas, VT
Canons and I guess all other 35mm rangefinder cameras is how they
enhance photographer-subject intimacy because the machine never
completely masks the photographer's face. Hence I concluded a TLR
operated at waist-level appears safe, compliant, respectful, even
reassuring, to the person or persons on the other end of the lens,
which makes it a very useful tool indeed – except of course in the
Land of Omnipresent Hatefulness the U.S. has become since 9/11 – or
more accurately since 11/22/1963.
***
The senior housing project in which I
reside is not far from Wright Park, one of Tacoma's better
recreational facilities. The park's 27 acres is especially convenient
for walkers and joggers because a single circuit of its perimeter
path measures exactly one mile. It was also a primary beneficiary of
the $84.3 million improvement bond the Tacoma Metropolitan Park
District convinced the voters to approve in 2005 – fortuitous
timing indeed, as two years later the One Percenters began their
deliberate downsizing of the USian economy and thereby ended forever
any electoral willingness to invest in expanded government services.
But the park is in a high crime area, and its interior was ruled by
criminals even in daylight until it was reclaimed about four years
ago through the cooperative efforts of the local neighborhood
association and the Tacoma Police Department. The park is now not
only attractive and well maintained, it is also notably safe, and it
has become a favorite spot for mothers with children. But when I
walked there Wednesday, children were not on my agenda. I was intent
on photographing only a huge paper-birch – a tree so big it
probably predates the park's 1886 founding by as much as a century.
Though I soon realized my Gossen Luna-Pro SBC had finally died of old
age – had I followed its reading I would have over-exposed my
negatives by five stops – the light meter in my head seemed as
good as ever, and nine frames later I had what I wanted – textural
studies I intend to use in some new sandwiches.
As I walked back toward my apartment
I passed one of the more notable improvements the bond issue had
funded: a water-playground for children. Called the Sprayground, it
was built to replace a conventional wading pool. It features a number
of fountains, shower-head devices, stationary hoops and exercise
bars, many of them distinctly sculptural and therefore visually
interesting, all designed to allow kids plenty of room to run and
play while granting them the pleasure of a thorough soaking on a hot
summer's day. And now watching the girls and boys joyfully dart
around and through the gleaming columns of sun-bright water, I
understood why some of my neighbors here in geezer manor had been
urging me to visit the Sprayground with a camera. I also saw
immediately how much safer it is for children than playing in streets
doused by sprinkler-headed fire hydrants, a summertime sight so
common in the urban neighborhoods of New York City, it long ago
became a journalistic cliché – one to which I surely contributed
my own share of hackneyed images during those halcyon years before
gentrification exiled me forever from my home. Now, knowing
I had three frames left on the Rolleicord's 12-exposure roll of Kodak
T-Max 100, I wondered if I might get a non-cliché
image I could peddle to the park district. What
better than the Sprayground to illustrate the reclamation of
the park from its former criminal masters? The
pictures would be all the more telling because the kids
I was now watching – a dozen children ages five through 10 –
were of such obvious ethnic diversity.
It is relevant at this point to note I
was casually but reasonably well dressed – blue-gray
flower-patterned shirt, khaki bush jacket, navy blue slacks, tan
straw hat. My shirt collar was neatly folded over the collar of the
bush jacket. The Van Dyke that in 2005 or so replaced the full beard
I had worn since the 1980s was freshly trimmed, and I was wearing new
dark brown leather sandals over black wool socks. I bore a tan canvas
shoulder bag with a medium-sized matte-gray aluminum tripod collapsed
and hooked to its top, the strap slung diagonally over my right
shoulder. As always – thanks to a knee injury from junior high
school football and the spinal injuries inflicted on me by a habitual
drunken driver in 1978 – I walked with a cane. In other words, I
looked exactly like what I am – an elderly, obviously crippled but
nevertheless dedicated photographer, most likely a resident of one
of the multi-storey apartment complexes that abound near the park.
As I usually do before I start exposing
film – unless of course it is a riot or a fire or some other such
emergency – I stood and watched, absorbing the possibilities of the
scene, framing and otherwise previsualizing pictures. The visual
geometry of the interactions between the romping children and the
water and the hard bright circular and linear forms of the facility
itself were fascinating, and the potential for transcending cliché –
particularly since I was shooting black-and-white film – seemed
uniquely promising. But the two-stop difference between sunlight and
shadow was tricky, especially with all the added glare. My old
Luna-Pro was now garbage, I no longer have a darkroom in which to
manipulate an image, the burn-and-dodge capabilities of my Gimp photo
software are minimal at best, and I learned long ago the over-priced
local labs are less than adept at remedial custom printing. Hence it
took me a couple of minutes to decide an exposure – f/11 at
1/500th, and to get the shadow detail just right I would bracket one
stop each way, f/16 and f/8. But after I had shot only one carefully
composed frame, a young white woman approached me – a pretty woman
scarcely more than five feet tall, golden-brown hair to her
shoulders, a seemingly intelligent face. Curiously enough I don't
remember the color of her eyes, but she may have been wearing
sunglasses; I know she was a few minutes later. I wasn't paying that
much attention; I merely assumed she was going to do as so many other
parents have done on nearly all the (relatively rare) occasions I've
photographed children – that she would ask who I was and how she
might get a print “if the pictures come out.” Instead she quietly
asked if I had any children there in the Sprayground.
“No,” I answered, instantly
concerned yet another economically ruined parent had abandoned yet
another hungry and heartbroken child and had chosen the park as the
place of abandonment. “Why, is there some kid here missing a
par...”
Her response interrupted my question:
“you're creeping us out. What are you doing photographing these children?”
“I'm a professional
photographer,” I said. I reached into my bush jacket for my black
leather business card wallet, extracted a card, held it out for her.
“I'm just...”
She interrupted me again. She ignored
my offering. Now her voice rose several decibels: “Who do you work
for?”
“I work for myself, anymore. I'm
retired. Before that I worked for newspapers and magazines. But I
still...”
Her third interruption, and now she was
yelling: “why are you here? Why are you even looking at these
children?”
“Because...”
Interruption number four: “we don't
don't want you here. You don't have any right to be here.”
“Ma'am, look, I'm trying to explain
but you keep interrupting. Take my card...”
“I don't want your damn card.” Her
voice became a loud belligerent screech. “We don't care who you are
or what you are. You're creeping us out. We” – her sweeping
gesture indicated everyone within the Sprayground or just beyond its
circular concrete perimeter – “want you out of here now, creep.
Now! NOW!”
The vehemence of her words bespoke an
enmity I had not encountered since confrontations decades ago with
segregationists in the Jim Crow South. Now she looked a “why-aren't-you-here-yet” look toward a group of white males who stood
maybe 30 yards away at the perimeter's far side, four or five young
shirtless men staring in my direction though not yet really
glowering. And now I felt the first twinges of fright. The woman's
facial expression and body language suggested the
“sugarpie-that-man-just-insulted-me” combination of lust and sadistic
yearning you see on southern belles and other female bloodhawks when
they're trying to goad their beaux into making them wet by beating
someone senseless or dead, and I realized the woman's tantrum –
never mind it was utterly unjustified and unprovoked – might be
putting me in real jeopardy.
My muddle of emotions – vexation at
how easily she had ambushed me, anger at her consummate unfairness,
astonishment at the Ku Klux caliber of her hatred, growing fear of
her now-obvious effort to instigate violence, profound shock at how
such a fine productive day had been so suddenly and totally ruined –
now coalesced into pure outrage, and I finally answered her as I
should have answered her from the very beginning, as I would have
answered her had I not been deceived by the deliberate lie of her
falsely pleasant initial approach.
“Look, lady,” I snarled in my most
defiant basso, “I've been Working Press more'n 50 years, long
before you were even born, so don't you imagine for a minute you and
your band of thugs over there can tell me what I can and can't
photograph. You're in a public place, you're fair game. You got a
complaint, go call the cops.”
“I already have,” she shrilled,
turning away, tossing her hair, literally stomping back around the
concrete perimeter toward the men she obviously still hoped she could
draw into the confrontation.
“Good,” I growled. “You people
ever hear of the First Amendment? Maybe the cops'll teach you what it
really means.”
By then of course the woman's
malicious braying had metastasized her hatefulness throughout the
Sprayground. It was clear she had intended
to provoke the selfsame hysteria that spawns lynchings and
pogroms and witch hunts, and now it seemed as if all the parents were
glaring at me and herding their children out of the water.
Recognizing I was potentially in harm's way, realizing
the severe penalties by which Washington state punishes assault on
the working press might no longer protect me in retirement, knowing I
would have no allies here until the cops arrived, remembering all the
lynch-mob horrors vindictive southern white women have sadistically
inflicted on southern black men, wondering if now in Tacoma I would
be the first white male in the United States to be lynched by an
interracial mob, I closed up the Rolleicord and hobbled away. Yet
somewhere amidst all this madness I was also blessed with a single
quick sympathetic glance from a young African-American woman. She was
a mother seemingly no different from all the others, but her
liquid-brown eyes surreptitiously met mine and seemed to grow huge
with deep concern, as if she were saying “yes I've seen all this
before and I pray you don't get hurt.” It was just a fleeting
instant, an impression so ephemeral I later wondered if I had
imagined it, but at the moment it assured me I was not totally alone
after all – never mind this woman (very
wisely, I thought afterward), dared not publicly
defend me.
And now my own blood was up, boiling
with an intensity I have not experienced since my years in the Civil
Rights and Anti-Vietnam-War and Back-to-the-Land and alternative
press movements and my last long-ago encounter with violently
Christian vigilantes, and though within hours I would be paying the
geriatric price of such increased adrenalin – a night and a day
and another night of scary cardiac arrhythmia – I now openly glared
my own contempt and hatred in return. Meanwhile the hair-trigger
white woman and her companions and the other parents she had provoked
to tripwire hostility continued to regard me as a hate-object. Too
bad I had never suspected my presence might evoke such a hostile
response; otherwise I'd have had the proper equipment to photograph
the provocateur in full rant, and we would get to see her nominally
attractive features in all their hate-distorted ugliness, but the old
Rolleicord with its baroque film-advance knob and its independently
cocked shutter and its relatively shallow depth of field is entirely
too genteel a machine for such high-intensity reportage. At least
though my rising anger prompted me to hobble far more slowly in the
defiant hope prolonging my departure would give the cops time to show
up. I am known to the Tacoma Police Department not only as a retired
journalist but as an outspoken member of the neighborhood association
that helped liberate the park from its former gang-banger masters,
and I relished the likelihood the cops would inform the provocateur –
in terms she could understand even amidst her convulsions of paranoid
loathing – that I had every right to be in the park and every right
to photograph as I had intended.
Once I was beyond the Sprayground, I
paused on the adjacent hillside to shoot my last two frames of film,
another act of defiance that wasted good emulsion on prosaic
silhouette-images of a young couple talking under a big maple but
nevertheless made the point I would not be driven from the park. By
then I was probably 100 yards from the provocateur, but behind her
sunglasses she continued to glare at me as if I had not moved a foot
since her initial assault. Her malice remained palpable. For just a
moment she seemed to scowl with obvious disgust at the bare backs of her
male companions, who were now oblivious to my presence; again I
sensed her fury she had not been able to provoke them into lynch-mob
action. Then she resumed her glaring. I glared in return. I considered
giving her the finger but dismissed that as too predictable, too
likely to re-provoke her coterie of males and in any case
insufficiently insulting to be worth the risk. Finally she averted
her gaze. Maybe five minutes later I had hobbled out of the park. The
cops never showed up.
***
In all my years in journalism, whether
as a photographer or reporter or both, I have never encountered
anything quite like what happened in last Wednesday in Wright Park.
Certainly I have been attacked, but always only by the usual suspects
– Klansmen, Nazis, crooks whose scams I have exposed, perpetrators
of police brutality, sundry other fascists, goons and thugs. But not
since the horrors of my (involuntary) years in southern public
schools have I been assaulted merely for being who I am. Though
perhaps I should not be surprised; I have long noted the xenophobia,
the conformity, the anti-intellectuality and all the other depressing
qualities the present-day population of the Puget Sound area shares
with the reflexively hostile public school students I encountered in
Florida and East Tennessee as the Yankee son of a Yankee carpetbagger
in the 1940s and 1950s. Swap the racism of the South for the
socioeconomic bigotry of Pugetopolis, and you've a near-perfect
match. But I never imagined I might someday again be confronted by a
21st Century version of the schoolyard psychodynamics that several
times got me mauled by jocks – this to “put (me) in (my) place”
for saying hello to somebody's prom-queen girlfriend and thereby
crossing some forbidden caste line. Hence immediately after I
returned to my dwelling from the park, I initially assumed what had
happened there was merely another ugly dimension of the so-called
Seattle Freeze,
the defining element of Puget Sound regional culture that –
especially since the death of the American Dream – has escalated
into a war against lower-income people of all
ages and ethnicities.
But then I opened my email as I always do following a day afield
whether good or bad, and the first item I read told me what a federal
jury had just done to the Oak Ridge Three.
Suddenly, realizing the news from
Knoxville was of a kind with what happened to me in Wright Park, I
was more frightened of my own nation than I have ever been. I
realized the long-feared termination of USian pretend-democracy is
upon us, its death signaled not just by the fate of the Oak Ridge
Three but by the fatal persecution of Aaron
Swartz and the de facto martial law imposed on Boston
in the wake of the terrorist bombings. Indeed the house-to-house
searches conducted by militarized police in Watertown, where
cell-phone and video footage clearly shows that to be a civilian was
to be the enemy, reminded me of nothing so much as the documentary
footage I have seen of the Nazis' rounding up the Jews of Poland and
savaging all the diverse peoples of the western Soviet Union.
Obviously the nominally mindless Right was eerily prescient when it
characterized Obama as a new Hitler. But what neither Right nor Left
dare acknowledge is the extent to which Obama's Hitlerishness is the
true expression of this entire nation's malevolent will. As in Wright
Park, as in Knoxville, as all across the land from coast to coast,
from border to border – precisely as it was demonstrated to me
personally by the Sprayground provocateur and the would-be goon-squad
she nearly recruited to bolster her persecutorial zeal, exactly as if
she were an official jeerleader at an Orwellian Five Minute Hate.
I cannot imagine any other rational
explanation for her vindictively provocative tantrum. Did she think I
was a terrorist? Did she imagine I was a Russian spy? (It is true
many people say I look Eastern European, probably because of my tiny
fraction of Mohawk blood or maybe because, as familial genetic
studies have revealed, my most distant pre-Celtic ancestors were
indeed people of the Steppe.) Perhaps she feared I was a private
detective out to catch a parent in adulterous company or a child with
a forbidden relative. Possibly she thought I was a Jew, as even now
with my formerly coal-black beard and darkest brown hair gone mostly
gray, I am occasionally assumed to be – and therefore
automatically despised by a surprising number of allegedly
“progressive” Puget Sounders, some of whom years ago in
Bellingham and Seattle actually challenged my right to reside in
Western Washington. Or maybe she felt her children weren't prettied
up enough to be photographed. Perhaps she assumed because I did not
have a shiny new digital camera, I was nothing more than a bum. Maybe
she herself is on the lam and is running from an Amber Alert or fears
her picture might show up on Most
Wanted. Possibly – especially considering how she
damned me as a “creep” – her private litany of bigotries
convinced her my gender and age and disability and lack of digital
equipment identified me as some sort of pervert. But that makes no
sense either. If she believed me to be a sex criminal, why did she
reject my effort to prove my identity? Besides, a real pervo would
have been lurking in the bushes, clandestinely shooting from afar
with a long telephoto lens, not obviously photographing in the open
as I had been attempting to do.
All that said, it seems to me
the most indicative elements of the confrontation are
how the provocateur repeatedly interrupted my
attempts to identify myself as a legitimate
photojournalist and refused to allow
me to explain my purpose. This suggests my photographic effort was
hardly the issue, a probability further substantiated by the wording
of some of her assaultive questions – especially “why are you
here” and “why are you looking at these children.” Therefore
my best guess is I was targeted because (a) I am
elderly, (b) I am visibly disabled and (c) I am a male
who conforms to no approved USian stereotype. I
wear a fedora rather than the ubiquitous baseball cap that identifies
the “American” jock-worshiper whether male or female as a
conforming and therefore reliable citizen of the One Percent's de
facto Fourth Reich. I wear Nike sandals, not Nike
athletic shoes. Instead of a team jersey, I like nearly all
photographers of my generation wear a bush jacket to compensate for
the lack of pocket-space in modern shirts and trousers. But Puget
Sounders do not wear bush jackets. Neither do they wear their shirt
collars turned out over their jacket collars, nor do they wear
fedoras. Though I never gave it much thought until now, my sartorial
choices, shaped as they were by work and mostly in Manhattan,
would probably say “outlander” nearly
anywhere in the United States, bespeaking origins in
(despised) realms like New York City or Europe. Mostly I suspect my
lack of digital equipment plus my obvious age and disability
suggested to the provocateur I am impoverished and – in the
malevolent irrationality of present-day USian public opinion –
therefore to blame for all the savagery that afflicts capitalist
society, just as the Jews were allegedly to blame for all the
afflictions of Weimar Germany. In any case I was clearly someone
from Elsewhere, at the very least a Nonconformist, and given
my age, disability and antique camera, obviously one of the hated
poor – the 21st Century USian equivalent of the Weimar Jews.
In the ever-more-Nazi-like atmosphere of
today's zieg-heiled USA! USA! USA! with all its imperial
self-righteousness and witch-hunt fervor, I might well
have been similarly attacked had I merely
lingered too long while walking through the Sprayground
area, camera or not.
LB/8-12 May 2013
-30-
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