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| One of my innumerable grab-shots of
Adrienne in our East 5th
Street apartment, summer 1967. The negative, part of the film
salvaged from the rubble a year after the 1983 fire, was wormed and
pinholed by water damage, but Gimp photo software's combination of
spotting, contrast adjustment and sepia toning enabled me to heal
most of those wounds. I don't remember the lens-and-camera
combination, but it was most likely one of my VT Canons, probably at
1/30th of a second with the 35mm f/2 screw-mount Summicron wide open;
the light was late afternoon sun reflected into the windows from the backs of buildings on First Avenue.
The film was Tri-X, given the year, no doubt in Diafine at 1200.
Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013.
*
|
THOUGH I WOULD realize it only now, two
days before my 73rd birthday – and my epiphany the result of
watching a young single mother cuddle her tiny infant daughter on a
crowded bus as I cursed myself for not having a camera with which to
record this potent visual haiku of universal femaleness – the
defining conflict of my adult life has always been a who-am-I
struggle between the two hemispheres of my brain.
Sometimes my right brain prevails, as
in my passion for the poetry-as-a-verb Zen of making photographs, or
in how I relish the exquisite sensuality of seeing, or in my fondness
for visual art in general and for music of nearly any unhackneyed
form, or in my compulsion toward the agnostic but nevertheless
faithfully pagan spirituality summarized in the phrase She Who
(maybe) Is, and – perhaps most of all – in my powerfully
emotional, sometimes desperate need for the sanctity and sanity of
true country, for any modern equivalent of northern Lower Michigan's
pre-electrification Au Sable region, specifically the South Branch,
the river and the adjacent woods east of where, in the time of which
I speak, 1944 through 1955, the two-lane M72 blacktop turned abruptly
to gravel. Maybe two miles later the road crossed Smith Bridge.
North – downstream – was the blessed realm of troutly water and
sweet-fern scented air that was the only sanctuary my disjointed
childhood ever allowed.
At
other times my left brain dominates,
as in my equally desperate need to live in The City, New York, not so
much where I was born, Brooklyn, but in the borough of Manhattan, the
one place my intellect has ever been accepted and
honestly critiqued and thus encouraged, nurtured, expanded, not only by
the bohemian
women who were my friends and/or lovers or by the bohemian men who
were my friends and colleagues but even by a few well-placed
representatives of the powers that be. It is my left brain from which
I write, a mode of expression that never rises above intellectual
exercise because it is always dragged down to (mere) rationality by
the imperative but nevertheless cripplingly self-conscious battle
against dyslexia thrust on me by bad genes. Formerly, during my
years as an investigative reporter, it was my left brain at work in
the always calculated, often clandestine process of exposing outrage
or scandal, or in far more apparently benign reportorial quests that
included extensive research into the psychological and psychic
wellsprings of the old Counterculture – the forever lost text that
supplemented the also-lost thousands of frames of Tri-X and High
Speed Ektachrome “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer” – or the
never-named book-in-progress about the anomalous archaeological
evidence of a prehistoric Minoan/proto-Celtic/North African presence
in what is now the United States, data that abounds throughout North
America including here in the Pacific Northwest, but is nevertheless
aggressively suppressed by USian scholars.
Ultimately my struggle had but two
focal points. One was whether would I live my life amidst the
intellectual safety and comfort of Manhattan (which, exactly as
James Baldwin labeled it in 1962, truly was Another Country),
or whether, in the name of my spirit quest and its need for
wilderness, I would instead endure the manifest cruelties and
sometimes-wrenching loneliness that define the intellectual barrens
of The Lands Beyond the Hudson. The other was figuring out who I am:
photographer or writer.
For a long while, it was easier for me
to label myself a writer. For one thing it was cheaper to be a writer
– I needed no cameras, which were always prohibitively expensive,
in fact I required nothing more than a typewriter, this lack of
mandatory prerequisite expenditures a major consideration, as there
was never a time in my life I was not financially poor, often
desperately so. For another, writing was a field in which it was
infinitely easier to find work: even in the 1950s, ours was a nation
so illiterate, the basic skills of grammar were alien to the vast
USian majority; the educational system was already hell-bent on
hammering the nation's children into submissive, reflexively
conformist drones, which among other atrocities demanded the
deliberate suppression of natural human curiosity. But the very
wounding inflicted on me by my savagely dysfunctional family bred in
me the cynicism and determination that enabled me to escape the
wounds of ignorance and apathy that dumbed down the masses. The
result – or so it seemed to prospective employers – left me
ideally qualified to be a reporter. Hence I had my first daily
newspaper job at age 16: half a copy-boy, half a stringer writing
stories for the sports department and the Sunday youth section. It
was November 1956. I turned 17 the following March. Within two
months, May 1957, I had landed a summer job as full-time
sportswriter.
Meanwhile I instinctively began to
downplay my skill with a camera: the linear/logical abstraction
required of the writer is the diametrical opposite of the Zen
immediacy demanded of the photographer, which as I had already
learned is a ruinously crippling conflict when one is trying to
adequately cover a story. To succeed as a reporter is to fail as a
photographer; to succeed as a photographer is to fail as a reporter;
to attempt both simultaneously is usually to fail at both.
Nevertheless I had begun to earn a reputation as a competent
photographer too. My father had given me my first camera, a Kodak
Brownie Reflex, as a 12th birthday present, then a fully adjustable
f-stop/shutter-speed Polaroid on my 14th birthday and an Agfa Press
Miniature two years after that. It was with the two latter machines I
shot most of the unposed pictures for my 1957-58 high school yearbook
and made some action pictures that caught the attention of the
Knoxville Track Club. But my early searches for jobs in professional
photography invariably failed; it had no common standards, no
equivalents of grammatical rules, hence was mainly a game of
personalities, a contest I always lost. Writing, I convinced
myself, was therefore my primary medium, never mind the difficulties
– transposed letters, misspelled words, awkward sentences,
mis-remembered names – inflicted by dyslexia. When my editors
assured me I was a “damn good reporter,” that “everybody makes
mistakes on deadline,” my subconscious told me I was nothing but a
phony, that my writing ability, crippled as it was (and is) by
dyslexia, was nothing more than a sham, perhaps even a scam.
That proverbial chicken, actually a
vulture, came home to roost in a 1965 conversation with a woman
named Roberta Tyson, an editor at Viking Press who was then married
to my friend Chris Rawlings. Tyson – a southerner, she had adopted
the curious preference of so many southern women for being called by
their last names – had been a friend of mine for about a year
before I met Chris, and our friendship continued during and after
their marriage. In a lengthy discussion with Tyson about the angst
suffered by great writers, I thought of my own then-unspoken
visual-versus-verbal dilemma and said yes, I understood, but Tyson
suddenly bristled and said “no you do not,” adding that I had no
basis for understanding such anxieties because I myself was nothing
more than a mediocre writer. I was a good reporter, she said, even
(given my eye for pivotal facts), an exceptionally skilled reporter,
but I was no “great writer” under any circumstances, nor would I
ever be. Tyson's words were deeply hurtful, but they were also
rewardingly honest and profoundly clarifying, a poignant example of
how one of the most important functions of a competent editor is
articulation of a writer's – or, yes, a photographer's –
subconscious.
Reason thus suggested I should content
myself with being “just a journalist” and nothing more. My left
brain, it seemed, had won.
But that is of course a lie, just as
my presentation of this entire clash as the triumph of one hemisphere
over the other is also a lie, both lies forced upon me by the
inability of language to deal with the very ambiguity that is the
underlying theme of so many of my photographs. Beyond the confusion
and contradictions and disclaimers and acts of denial, even beyond
the associated disasters like the ruinous fire of 1983 or the
termination of my journalistic career by the odium of the subsequent
clinical depression, it was invariably my right brain, paradoxically
and by the sublime process of knowing via what we label “gut
feelings” or “intuition,” that provided the clues and
directional guidance to unriddle whatever riddles I dared take on.
In this sense my right brain always manages to win the struggle –
though in another far more important sense it is less a victory than
a rapprochement, an abandonment of differences in the name of
cooperation, yet it took that young mother on the bus to bring this
reality into sharp focus. As I emailed a friend after I returned home
that day: “Just had, thanks to Pierce Transit and a rather fetching
young mother with a truly beautiful infant, a stunning epiphany about
the difference between thinking as a photographer (the resurrection
of instinct the scene on the bus demanded) and thinking like a writer
(as the lack of a camera on the bus forced me to do). Bottom line,
the visual is concrete, real, immediate, sensual, impassioned; the
verbal is abstract, a (mere) construct, second-hand, devoid of
physicality, definitively dispassionate. In that instant I perhaps
understood more about myself and my own internal conflicts than in
any comparable moment ever. Let's hope the Muse grants me the
clarity to write about it for OAN.”
So now two days before my 73rd birthday
I think about my writing that won me a dozen local journalistic
awards and commendations but ultimately as Tyson implicitly predicted
went nowhere and my now-mostly lost-in-the-fire pictures for which
the publication credits start with Paris-Match and Newsweek
yet were still insufficient to rescue me from poverty. I think of
what Tyson said to me in 1965 and what she said to me in 1969 about
my photographs – that they were “so far out,” so cutting edge,
they were “beyond (her) ability to describe.” I think of the
discontents that nagged me as a reporter and the deep almost physical
gratification that was mine as the social documentarian for New
York's Beth Israel Hospital or as the founding photographer of The
Seattle Sun and I think of all the people who helped me
learn photography and/or critiqued my pictures and/or were
emotionally supportive of my camera work but remained mostly politely
silent about my words – my father and my Aunt Alecia and Jim Newby
and Karen Rowland and Mary Payne and Chris Rawlings and John
Shuttleworth and Emilio Murillo and Joan Condolino and Grace Strub
and Cicely Nichols and Stephanie Wilson and Kathryn Habbestad and
Dick Clever and Melinda Mohn and Tawna Pickens and Rebecca Valrejean
and Jim and Mary Plante and Melanie St. Ours and of course Adrienne
and so many more to whom I owe debts of gratitude – and I think of
how back trouble and arthritis had finally harried me into abandoning
the camera (hence the need for “resurrection of instinct”), but
mostly now as I write this I think of the young woman with her baby
on the bus who by their presence alone at last forced me to
unequivocally answer the lifelong question: yes, damnit, I really am
a photographer – that before anything else.
I thought I had given up photography
nearly a year ago but for some strange reason – fate, astrology,
the proximity of the Muse – I saw and continue to see the woman on
the bus with her infant as I would have seen them had I been
photographing them. I see the visual geometry of their forms in
concert with the implicitly softened form of their new perambulator,
its bulk too filled with baby-care items to be folded under a bus
seat, all this in the context of the hard-edged delineations provided
by the bus itself. I see the ancient choreography of mother and
child. I who think almost exclusively in images of black and white
see the associated colors of this scene with an intensity that is
almost breathtaking. Furious with myself for not having a camera –
never mind I had forsworn photography, never mind I was grocery
shopping and could hardly carry a camera in the ancient olive-drab
canvas 1942-issue ski-trooper rucksack I use to lug food from
supermarket to apartment – I try to describe the mother and her
child in words, but nothing, not then, not now, conveys the iconic
and mysteriously comforting power of their presence. The mother is
paradoxically compelling but scarcely notable. As many young women
do, she wears her hair longish, shoulder-length; she has dyed it a
bright color – red, nearly crimson – and she dresses to match:
a revealingly low-cut purple blouse, form-fitting red skirt, purple
leotard, silver and white tennis shoes with a red and purple motif,
all this topped by a red and purple headband. Her eyebrows and
eyelashes say she was originally a brunette. Something in her face,
perhaps a hint of sullenness and defiance, gives me the sense she
might be what my 1950s teen self would have joyfully recognized as a
fellow “hood.” She has lost nearly all her pregnancy fat, is
attractive, a bit busty but nevertheless well proportioned, already
tanned enough to suggest time under ultraviolet lamps or a recent
trip to some warmer climate. Her daughter is tiny, no more than
three months old – as another passenger said, “hardly bigger
than a pekingese pup.” The soft yellow blanket that wraps the baby
girl is spotlessly clean, and when the infant awakens, we all see she
is truly beautiful – and beautifully content. As the bus rumbles
its herky-jerky passage toward my destination, this transit-system
Madonna-and-child are softly highlighted through the windows by
alternating bands of over-building sunshine, wan with late afternoon
Pacific Northwest latitude and its thin but seasonally omnipresent
clouds, first illuminating the mother's face, then the infant's,
repeatedly, as if Gaia or the Sky Gods could not decide who was to be
haloed. I cannot forget this strangely dappled light nor how the
mother and her daughter glowed in its embrace, how they moved, how by
merely being there they soothed a busload of weary and potentially
antagonistic strangers.
Hence my new resolution for whatever
remains of this old lifetime: I will do as I did in most of the years
after my 1965 conversation with Tyson and before the clinical
depression that followed the 1983 fire; to the best of my ability, I
will again carry a camera everywhere I go, the physical discomfort be
damned. Perhaps I will thus fulfill the initial promise of this
blog, to be – above all else – about photography. In any case I
will strive once more to sooth the craving implicit in what my
parents always said was the first word I ever spoke, “light,” as
if the rest of the sentence were to be the summation of all my
yearnings: “Light. Give me light...so that I may truly know
completion.”
LB/28 March 2013
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