Paul Theroux - Picture Palace

“Ever hear of Alfred Stieglitz?” I asked a taxi driver the next day.

“Who? Look, lady—”

“Just testing,” I said, and satisfied with this proof of his obscurity I gave him the Madison Avenue address of An American Place.

A Saturday: the place was jammed. Weekends are for photographers, since most photographers are amateurs who spend the rest of the week working in offices to pay for the equipment the job prevents them from using. The ones at Stieglitz’s were bent nearly double with cameras around their necks, as ludicrous a sight to me as museum-goers studying paintings and sculpture with sticky brushes, mallets, and chisels. I cannot remember much about the exhibition: Imogen Cunningham’s Magnolia Blossom must have been there — it was everywhere; some Walker Evans billboards — how that man liked a mess; a Berenice Abbott traffic jam, some of Strand’s peasants, maybe Steichen’s shadblow tree, an Edward Weston weather report (partly cloudy, scattered showers, bright patches later) and some of his peppers and seashells, some Käsebier dames in gowns made out of Kleenex, Oursler’s Admiral Byrd (glacial features, ice-blue eyes), and soft-focus Stieglitzes — hairy rose petals, nipple studies, and chilly little things that could not qualify as nudes since they didn’t have bellybuttons. There were some untitleds deservedly anonymous, too many fire escapes and quite a lot of photojournalism from the WPA slush-bucket (rivets, steam shovels, leaf-rakers, grease monkeys — the photographer’s keen embarrassment with manual labor). And the usual photographic clichés: Abandoned Playground, Rainy Street, Lady in Funny Hat, Torso with Tits, Shoeshine Boy, Honest Face, Drunken Bum, Prostitute in Slit Skirt Standing near Rooms Sign, Mr. and Mrs. Front Porch America, Flock of Pigeons, Vista with Framing Branches, City Snow, City Lights, Haggard Peckerwoods, Every Hair of a Bushy Beard, Spoiled Brat, Good-Humor Ice Cream Man, Country Road Leading to Bright Future, Muddy Field in Europe, Lovers on a Park Bench, Picnickers, House with Broken Windows, Sand Dunes, Obviously Unemployed Man in his Undershirt, Dog Lover, Wrinkled Eskimo, Mother and Child, Jazzman with Shiny Instrument; in other words, no Pratts.

You could see more exciting things — in its simplicity, one of the most devastating pieces of art criticism imaginable — by sticking your head out the window.

Instead of asking for Alfred at the front desk, I marched through the crowd of shufflers and pushed the first door I saw marked PRIVATE. I was full of confidence as I shoved it, as if this were one of the last doors I’d have to open to arrive at recognition. Room to room: in the last I would find Orlando waiting. I entered a rather gloomy back room. I was certain from its smallness and its shadows that the people in it were photographers.

“—smudgy life studies that are a dime a dozen,” I heard, and saw beyond the speaker, who was a tiny man with very red ears in immaculate overalls, and beyond a woman dressed as a man, and a man in yellow spats — beyond this bunch, Stieglitz himself at a desk heaped with the scrolls of curled-up pictures. He moved — not his head or the fist at his cheek, but his black eyes. The speaker turned slightly and hooked his thumbs in the straps of his overalls. Seeing that I was of no importance, he made a face and went on with his story.

Stieglitz stared at me, and before he opened his mouth I could see what it was that gave him so much authority. He was dark and displeased-looking, with a millionaire’s modesty, a dangerous edge to his silence, and a grim little tyrant’s bite he had cut his mustache to match, as if he had patterned a template of hair to fit his sneer.

I had seen his camera as a magic box. It suited him, for his scowl was that of a bad-tempered magician who considered no audience worthy to observe him at his tricks. But there was more to this cardsharp and rabbit-grabber than that, because in his look of unconcealed disdain there was a blink of suspicion. It emboldened me. Any sign of weakness in others made me brave. I could endure this disdain, for it was minimized by a suspicion I knew had to be fear. So this was the bluffing coward who wouldn’t hang my pictures!

“Are you looking for someone?” It was the red-eared man who had been faltering in his monologue ever since I entered. He was fussed and umming.

“I want to see Mister Stieglitz.”

“Out to lunch,” said the man.

“I have reason to believe that he is in this very room.”

“Who are you?” This was the lady in the pin stripe suit. In her trousers and tie and slicked-down hair she looked madly attractive.

“Gosh, you wouldn’t know me,” I said, and thought: If they recognize me I’ll tell them everything and beat it. “But I am very interested in photography and I’ve heard ever so much about Mister Stieglitz. Gee, he’s not just a photographer — he’s photography itself.”

It was like smelling salts, this flattery. The dark man at the desk wrinkled his nose and tossed his head and said, “I am Stieglitz.”

“Gee.”

“I was telling a story,” said the red-eared shrimp.

The woman lit a slender cigar; the man in spats crossed his legs and kicked.

One look from Stieglitz froze them. He snorted and they were still. In that interval I had time to look around the room. Newspaper clippings, posters of past exhibitions — Stieglitz’s name on most of them — some pictures the color of turpentine of mousy Whistlerish women in plumes pining at bay windows, a few virginal girls coyly tormenting some rapist off-camera, Steerage ; and snapshots — very bad snapshots which for all their gloss had more guts than anything else on view. Snapshots are the only true American folk art. I found fault with the intrusive gangway that bisects Steerage and moved on to the mementos and antiques, a burnt-out flash holder, a freckled daguerreotype, medallions of the sort I had seen on beer cans, and a very old and beautifully made wooden camera that looked like a Fox Talbot. Off to the right, in an otherwise empty corner of the room, was the magic box, an eight-by-ten plate camera on a tripod. Even from where I stood I could see it was a banger, standing not quite straight, all chipped, with a dangling rubber bulb on a pink perishing hose.

“Gosh.”

“What do you want?” said Stieglitz.

“I want to take your picture.”

This brought a frank honk of derision from the lady, and the other two were silently guffawing in that struggling way, as if they were straining to lift something off the ground. But Stieglitz wasn’t laughing and when they saw he wasn’t they stopped their nonsense.

“You forgot your camera,” he said gruffly, perhaps wondering whether his leg was being pulled.

“Left it home on purpose,” I said. “But I’ve got plenty of these.” I showed him the loaded film holders.

“You need something to stick them in.”

I gave him my sweetest smile. “I thought I might use your camera, Mister Steiglitz.”

From the expression on the others’ faces you would have thought I had asked their bishop for his jockstrap. The very idea! they were thinking. How could she!

But for the first time since entering the room I saw the traces of a smile on Stieglitz’s mustache, the flattened ends rising and curling with interest, his mouth a wrinkling phrase between reluctant but definitely mirthful parentheses.

“That’s a pretty big camera.”

“I’m a pretty big gal.”

He nodded and passed his hand down his mouth, restoring his mustache to its former sneering shape.

I noticed that he had ignored the other people. It occurred to me that he disliked them and was willing to demonstrate this. He got up and, one shoulder higher than the other in a resentful slouch, went over to the beat-up camera, and walked around it, eyeing it sideways, as if he were preparing to stick his hand in and pull out a bunny.