Paul Theroux - Picture Palace

“I’d better get back to work,” said Frank.

“You don’t have far to go,” I said. “I didn’t do much in the Sixties. A couple of weeks in Vietnam doing refugees, a stopover in Hong Kong. Some group shots. Keep an eye out for them — they’re to go with my Woonsocket graduation. The whole John Hancock insurance company, every single employee standing in Copley Plaza — I shot it from the roof of the Boston Public Library. I did a lot of other crowds, too — there’s one of Red Sox fans on the bleachers of Fenway Park. They’re beautiful, three thousand faces — you could spend a week with that picture and not get bored.”

“I’ll put them aside.”

“I can’t believe you’re nearly done.”

“It’s shaping up. The show has to open in a month, Maude.”

“But there must be lots more that you haven’t shown me.” And I tried to think what I had not seen — the ones I had done for the National Geographic , the nudes in which I had slipped the back view of a buttocky boy, some of the steamier Pig Dinner ones.

Frank said, “I haven’t hidden anything.”

“I didn’t say you had.”

He looked offended — more than offended: wounded by my simple statement, and desperate, as if I had found him finagling.

“Everything’s in order,” he said, jerking his head at the windmill. “Go see for yourself.”

“Not on your tintype.”

He said — and I couldn’t help but feel he was deliberately changing the subject—“Are you going to write something personal for the catalogue?”

“I’m thinking about it.”

“Only a paragraph or so.”

“Who do you take me for — Ralph Eugene Meatyard? The unspeakable Stieglitz? Cecil Beaton? I’m no writer.”

“It would interest people.”

“There’s only one way to interest people. Something really sensational. Do an Arbus. Take a lot of mad crazy Weegee pictures of people you hate, and then swallow rat poison. Then they’d come flocking. Suicide explains everything.”

“Poor Diane,” he said (I loved his use of first names: Alfred, Yousuf, Maggie, Jill, Nancy — I could hear him in New York saying, “Maude—”), but he looked like a clown grieving in those bizarre clothes, like my picture of Emmett Kelly, the sad face beneath the greasepaint. Frank twirled one of his string of beads. “If you’re having trouble writing you could do what I do when I get stuck. I tack sheets of paper on the walls around my room, then whenever I get an idea I just scribble it down — a word, a phrase, anything. I get a body of thought here, a body of thought there. I put them all together and hammer out my piece.”

“It sounds a bit”—I wanted to say “stupid.”

“Sure, it’s complicated. But it loosens the thought processes.”

“I think I’ll wing it,” I said. “In the meantime, keep digging, Frank, and if you come up with anything unusual, let me know.”

In the succeeding days the pictures he brought me reminded me of the many magazines that had paid my way and finally crashed — dear old Collier’s , the winning Saturday Evening Post , the all-purpose Look , and vividly illiterate Life . I had always liked the big-format family magazine in which a two-page picture could be bled at the margins, and the photograph itself wrapped around your face, your nose in the staple where it belonged. When television sent those magazines into liquidation, photographs were reduced in size. They either had news value or they didn’t count, and ambitious pictures like my group portraits John Hancock and Red Sox Fans became unthinkable.

It was about then, with the folding of Life , that I abandoned my idea for the panning shot with which I had hoped to fill an entire issue: a sequence of pictures taken from South Yarmouth, Massachusetts, to San Diego, California. Cross Country I had planned to call it, every inch of it in tiny pictures. And if that worked I’d do the ultimate panning shot, around the world in a zillion frames.

I stopped working for magazines. I could not bring myself to do the ghoulish photojournalism that was so much in demand — two children failing ten storys from a burning balcony, the seconds-before-death pictures of executions and ambushes and train wrecks: snuff shots, as they were called. Several publishers offered me contracts to collaborate on picture books, with texts by famous writers, as Agee and Evans had done on the peckerwoods. I probably would have done it if it had meant only pictures, but I could not see how forty pages of tortured prose like Jim Agee’s would have helped my pictures. He wanted to make the reader see the pictures, so he described them, every blessed detail, but before I knew it I was in the dark, stumbling among the subordinate clauses and tripping over semicolons, each word calling to mind a thousand pictures, as I was fond of saying.

The beauty of photographs, I told those publishers, was that they required no imagination. They took your breath away, dragged you under and kept you there. The written word was a distraction, and anyone who wrote about pictures was just showing off. No one got fat reading about food — he just got hungry. On the other hand, my Cheeseburger was as good as a meal. Many people burped after they looked at it.

“Nearly done,” said Frank some days after the Pound business. He showed me an interior shot of my own house.

“ Whose Room? ” I said.

“That’s what I was going to say.”

“It’s a sequence,” I said. “Objects have memories. Rooms are psychic.”

“I’d love to hear all about it,” he said. “But I have to go down to New York to check the audio for the show.”

“Audio? I thought this was a picture show?”

“The tapes I was telling you about. Sea gulls and waves. Traffic. It’s a new concept I’m working on — atmosphere.”

“If you’re catching the bus to New York, Fusco,” I said, and looked at his beads and those high-heeled shoes, “you’d better go fluff up.”

He left me with the picture. A parlor; but come a bit closer. Look at the cigar butt in the ashtray, the knitting on the stool, the dents and worn places in the chairs, Papa’s reading glasses, Mama’s handbag — she never went anywhere without it. And more: two flower stalks in a vase, with their petals missing, and out the window a fisherman, obviously a trespasser, making his way to the beach: low tide. It is a poem. Two people have just left that picture.

He died first, of a coronary that killed him by pinching one pipe, then another, until finally all his systems failed. It was not the departure he had wished, “leaving the building” on a moment’s notice. He was kept waiting, and he hated that. When we were together, Mama and I were strangers to each other; and she knew it was her turn. She broke her hip, caught pneumonia and finally let go. Her last words: “Pull up the shades.”

The deaths of Orlando and Phoebe, the loss of my parents, only hurt me on cold rainy days, like a football injury, a bad knee.

Though I still took pictures, and was visited by youngsters — every two years or so there was a photography epidemic and I was rediscovered — I did nothing of any importance. The great picture magazines were gone, the galleries were full of conceptual junk ( Six Bricks, Doris’s Tit, Untitled #82 ) and minimals and people doing it with mirrors. I began to doubt that photography was an art. It was a way of life, the best vocation for a single gal to get out and meet people, find a husband, make a few bucks. “I want to be a photographer” was a plea for love.

I could not be too cynical. Photography had taught me to see. It was harmless enough, but it was only a beginning; blindness had taught me much more about vision. My life had been interesting, I had been lucky, and until Frank arrived that summer I believed that I had been mostly happy and had never hurt anyone.