Jack O'Connell - The Skin Palace

She towels her face dry and moves out into the kitchen, opens the refrigerator and grabs a half-full bottle of white Burgundy, pulls out the cork and takes a long draw from the mouth of the bottle.

She walks out the back door and leaves it open. She walks down the stairs to the cellar and locks herself in the darkroom.

She turns on the safelight and the room goes red. She sits down on the step stool and just closes her eyes and takes another sip off the bottle. She takes some deep breaths and tries to calm down, but she starts to get dizzy so she opens her eyes and puts the wine bottle down on the ground. It dawns on her how much she’s had to drink today — the absinthe in Schick’s office, a Pernod, then a glass of wine at Der Geheime Garten, and now the Burgundy. She never drinks this much, especially not during the day. She realizes she has no idea what time it is. And that she doesn’t really want to know. She doesn’t want to do anything right now except sit here in this darkroom and be alone.

Of course, finally, she looks up at the pictures. She lets herself stare ahead, at the drying line, at the photos still hanging there in front of her. The Madonna and the child in the ruins. She looks at the whole run of photos, takes them in together, as a whole, a set, a series of connected images. She wonders if she laid them on top of each other and then fanned them fast with her thumb would she detect any movement of the figures? Would she get any sense of motion, something minute, a barely shifted arm or leg? And if she did, what more would this tell her?

She stops looking at them as a series and focuses individually, left to right, down the line. And in this way they remind her a little of the Stations of the Cross, of going to the Stations with her mother when she was maybe seven or eight years old. How many Stations were there? More than seven. There was all that singing, that chant-like song. Kind of a dirge, really, Stabat Mater. How did that translate? She can still hear it, the mournfulness of it. The sadness inherent in that sound.

What are these photos? The Stations of what? What did Terrence Propp want me to see when I stare at them like this? Or am I an idiot thinking he had that much of a plan, that extensive a design? Maybe it was just instinct. Classic artistic inspiration. Maybe Propp just let the mood of the day hit him, move him. Maybe he simply set the mother and child up in this awful, broken-down setting and started shooting film. Maybe he wasn’t thinking beyond the next exposure, beyond the click of the shutter. Beyond the image at that instant.

Maybe Terrence Propp wasn’t thinking about me at all.

She gets up off the stool and moves over to the dry line. She stands with her face about a foot away from her first photograph. She brings her hand up to touch it, but stops herself. She wants to make up her mind — what’s the first thing that strikes her about the picture? What’s the premier image? What is it that first draws and holds the eye?

She wants to say the Madonna’s shoulder, the smoothness of its slope, the tone of the skin, so white. Or maybe it’s the relationship of the shoulder to the neck, the sleekness and the perfectness of the bend. Whatever the dynamics of the attraction, it’s the Madonna’s shoulder.

But then there’s the infant’s hand, so small and yet so absolutely detailed by the focus. It reminds her a little of pictures she’s seen in magazines and on billboards — hyperclear shots of a fetus inside an amniotic sac, parts of the body still vague and unformed, the eye looking a bit fish-like, but other parts, like the hand, the fingers, the fingers specifically, so absolutely developed, the fingernails already visible. The infant’s hand in Propp’s shots reminds her of those fetus shots, it’s so stark somehow, so intricately delineated, out there in the air as if it were waving to her, as if it were signaling the viewer, look closely, take notice.

She takes a step to the side and stands in front of the second photo and now it isn’t the shoulder or the hand, but the rubble of the floor in the background. It’s the lack of focus here that does it, makes for a maddening obscurity, makes her wish she could change the focus of the photo herself, at this late date, bring the emphasis off the humans and onto the inanimate clutter of the ground. She wants to sweep the earth for clues as to exactly where the photograph was shot. She wants to zoom in until she can see recognizable evidence, signs of a time period and a location. She wants to turn the dim glint in the far right corner into a Kennedy half-dollar that dropped from Propp’s pants pocket as he scouted the setting. She wants to be able to follow the old support columns up to the roof and nail them as Doric or Ionic. She wants to know why here, why this field of disintegration.

And as she studies the third photo, she focuses on the lighting itself, the way it descends from the top of the shot, the way it shines in beam-like shafts and catches faint storms of dust without eclipsing the sharpness of the mother and infant.

She gives up. She walks back to the step stool and remounts it. She wishes that she could have been there the day Propp did this shoot, that she could have just stood to the side, maybe even out of sight, behind one of the columns, just watching and listening. She’d love to know what he said to his subjects, what directions he gave. Did he tell the mother to drop her shoulder a quarter inch, to loosen her shawl and expose more skin, to pull the infant closer and let it suckle? What was his voice like, low and encouraging or bossy and bullying, intimidating the Madonna into the perfect position?

Or maybe he didn’t use his voice at all. Maybe it was all gesture and signals. She can imagine that. She can accept how perfect the silence of this setting would be, Propp’s decision not to violate it, the only noise being the murmur of the infant and the ongoing click of the shutter invading the cool, decayed silence of the hall.

And maybe gesture wasn’t even necessary. Maybe Propp and the mother knew each other in a way that precluded the need for instruction, the way longtime band members intuit each other’s musical changes. Some photographers work with the same models for years. This could be one of those arrangements, artist and subject drawn into an instinctual sense of one another’s needs and wants, something like telepathy constantly in the air around them.

Sylvia has never known anyone in that complete a way. Except maybe her mother. And she’s more than a little doubtful that Perry and she will ever get in sync. She thinks about his face at the moment that he threw the remote and the tears well up again and she puts her hands in her jacket pocket and touches the magazines that Gaston gave her.

She pulls it out and holds it in both hands. It’s a small journal, about six by eight inches, but pretty slick, center stapled, with good quality paper and professional typesetting. She thumbs through it to the end. There are only a dozen pages, but all of them crammed with two columns of small print. She turns back to the cover. The letterhead reads

Underexposed

A Journal of Terrence Propp Studies

Published bi-yearly by Propp-Aganda Ltd

and underneath it there’s a line drawing of what looks like an old Brownie camera. She opens to the table of contents and reads a few article titles. Trajectories of Longing in the Bleicherode Exhibit. The Zurau Flea Market Find: Trickery of Treasure. Of Curves and Slopes: The Physics of the Early Nudes. The last item listed on the contents page is Through My Viewfinder: a Column by Rory Gaston.

She turns to the last page of the magazine and there’s a small photo of Gaston in the upper right corner. It’s a close-up head shot and he looks more professional than sensual. Under his byline, in italics, are the words an ongoing explication of what we know so far. She starts in: