The Art of the Kiss

by Holly Schindler

  As stories always should.

  ~Photography Fact~

  Sharon Minyard’s

  Black and White

  Photography Class

  1998

  So much of photography these days is sheer trickery. Mostly because it’s getting easier and easier for anyone to manipulate their captured images. All it takes is a computer program. A few clicks of the mouse.

  That’s what has me so excited, to a great extent, about this class. As a photographer, you should explore every single tool available to you. But here, we’re getting back to basics. Black and white film.

  I’ll admit, black and white felt like my element from the very start. Some people work in watercolor, some prefer clay. For me, it was black and white film. Yes, the kind you develop in a darkroom.

  You’ll find your own perfect medium. Maybe in this very class. Maybe black and white will fit you like it fit me. Maybe not—maybe you’ll still wind up gravitating toward a bit of the new digital trickery. That doesn’t mean you won’t take some of the more traditional methods you’ll learn here and apply them to your own work.

  Promise me this: you won’t allow trickery to define who you are as a photographer.

  Images can get less and less clear the more you try to play with them. And by less clear, I don’t mean they lose their visual sharpness. I’m not saying, for example, that the objects in your pictures can get blurry when you try to enlarge them. I mean they lose their emotional punch. They no longer have the same impact. Because by that point, they’ve lost their original context.

  For me, it’s why so much photographic trickery falls flat. It may be kind of fun to look at for a few seconds—for instance, at the stormy sky that doesn’t match the sunny day below. The kite flying when the tree below isn’t rustling in the wind. The gurgling water fountain in the desert. But what is the real context? What is the story?

  What will those images say about us—or to us—tomorrow?

  Think about it.

  ~Sharon~

  My kiss pictures grabbed me. Redirected me. Refused to let go.

  I was no longer just waiting for Michael to be at the radio station. I was leaving at all times of the day, offering no explanation other than the “Closed” sign turned toward the street. I was inspired. I was chasing that inspiration.

  And I was determined. Michael’s words, his bit about old women being nothing more than fairy godmothers, had smacked me right in my face. Stared me down the same way those men had back in the tattoo parlor in what seemed like a lifetime ago.

  I couldn’t stand to be “sweethearted” back then, and I wasn’t going to be “old ladied” now.

  I wasn’t done yet.

  I could still do this.

  Just watch me.

  But how did the whole thing really start to take off? With the couple on the square?

  Or had it been the Fairyland bus station?

  When I got to the bus station, it didn’t feel like anything was taking off. I just kind of paced around aimlessly, not sure where to stand or even what I wanted to do. And probably looking plenty suspicious to the guard.

  That is, until I heard the final call for Bus #82—Fairyland to Chicago, leaving in two minutes. I zoned in on my subjects quickly: a young man and woman, facing each other and holding hands, heads turned mostly downward, struggling through a reluctant goodbye. A college couple? Seemed the spring semester should have ended about a month ago, but then again, maybe they’d been trying to hold on a little longer, relish a few stolen summer weeks together.

  It was impossible to know the true details of their story, but from where I stood, I could feel the sadness pulsing between the two. The obvious uncertainty—perhaps they would never be together again—combined with a wish to pause time, or to roll it back. As they stared at each other, I raised my camera. I watched through the viewfinder as they drew still closer, his hand touching her cheek, her hand finding his waist…

  And then—a kiss.

  I pressed the shutter button.

  They pulled away from each other as the flash exploded, both of them turning to glare at me. I made the same offer I’d extended to the older couple, to send a print. But only one, to one address. Which meant that if the picture was to be shared, there would have to be another meeting.

  My offer softened the air around them. Desperation wasn’t as black and suffocating as it had been a moment before.

  With the girl’s name and address in my purse, I thought again about the contacts I’d made with others who still loved using actual film. Two people this young should have hated the idea of snail mail. Of a print. But somehow, judging by the looks on their faces, it appeared my offer seemed special. Maybe, to them, I was even saying their moment was special, or their story was. Maybe that was what they heard.

  Maybe, like film, prints weren’t completely dead, either. Maybe a physical object not attached to a screen was special.

  I waited another twenty minutes for an incoming bus. A soldier in fatigues stepped into the depot, his arms outstretched to catch the woman racing toward him. Welcome back, welcome back. Their kiss was filled with hunger and warmth and joy.

  They laughed as they gave me their address. “Can’t wait to see it,” the man said, wrapping his arm around his wife’s shoulder.

  Ever notice how sometimes, when you squat down in a patch of clover, you don’t find one four-leaf lucky sign, you find a whole cluster?

  That’s exactly what happened. Suddenly, after that visit to the bus station, there were dozens of pictures begging to be taken, kisses popping up like clover all over town. A teenage girl and a boy in swimsuits, their fingers clutching the chain-link fence that circled the public pool, shy and smiling their way through an awkward first-ever kiss. Two boys at a car outside the high school, where throngs of summer school students raced out of the building’s exits, unabashedly kissing hello.

  A couple on church steps—white dress, black tux—lips pressed together and hands locked as if in a sign of victory.

  A woman at a playground kissing her toddler on the cheek.

  A Schnauzer in a dog park kissing the tip of his owner’s nose.

  The winner of a 5K run kissing the side of his trophy.

  Kisses were everywhere for my taking. Sweet or passionate or triumphant.

  A mother leaving her nervous child at daycare. A man leaning over a woman on a hospital stretcher—moments before she was wheeled into surgery. I was getting increasingly brazen by then. Telling the couple they’d have something to share when it was all over. Their moment of uncertainty conquered.

  Still, more: A kiss behind a shared book on an afternoon riverbank. A kiss beneath an evening’s streetlight. Two men, two women, children, friends, kisses on cheeks, kisses on foreheads. All of them meaning something different. Passion. Adoration. Unconditional. Uncertain. First. Last. So many stories, so many emotions, all expressed the same way.

  With kisses.

  Back in the studio, I edited the photos on my computer. The results surprised me. Everything surprised me, as I adjusted color temperatures and contrast, as I experimented with layers and effects.

  I could say different things now, couldn’t I? Different things than I had all those years ago?

  It stopped feeling like trickery.

  What did that mean about the first camera? How could it have also worked so well for Heather? What about that story she’d told me about the park? The camera showing her the way? Had that camera done something to me? Taught me something in those early years? How?

  Why was I even entertaining these thoughts?

  I flicked on my small transistor radio, searching for Michael’s voice, wanting to hear what he would say next. Grimacing a bit when I found the station playing yet another rerun.

  I’d been hoping for something I hadn’t heard before.

  I leaned on the counter top, the coolness of the glass seeping into my forearms. But his words were seeping into me, too, as they always had. Even
if I occasionally bristled, they still eventually found their way under my skin.

  Wasn’t that how it had been at the very beginning? Wasn’t that what his words had done to me out there during the Fourth of July picnic, or during our first dance down in Dad’s basement?

  My mind flipped about wildly as Michael insisted, yet again, “...can’t get passed how painfully dull the guy is...”

  Think, Sharon, I scolded myself as Michael’s thoughts about Prince Charming filled the shop. What did he really tell you in Dad’s basement? On that July day when he returned your camera?

  “The girls in fairy tales, all of them, have far more to recommend them,” Michael insisted on the radio.

  And suddenly, I knew. Like I maybe always should have known.

  Back in Dad’s basement, he’d said we’d be good together, of course, but looking back on it, through the lens of time and distance, with Michael’s metaphors dancing through my head, it suddenly felt like he’d been asking me to see him as every bit as capable as I was. That he could rise to the occasion of being with me.

  And not the future me, either. The twenty-three-year-old me, that me in the basement, with nothing yet to show for my efforts. He didn’t see me as a woman who hadn’t arrived yet. He saw me. He was asking me to see him too.

  I turned to my computer screen, flipping through my kiss images. He’d hurt my feelings going to the radio station. He’d made me angry. But he’d gotten in my head. He’d made me think. In a way I never would have if he’d just come to me. Because we weren’t face-to-face, my defenses weren’t up. Not all the time, at least. Which meant I heard him. Over and over. The words had a chance to permeate. Soak beneath the surface. Once they were there, deep inside, they vibrated. They resonated.

  He wasn’t flat or dull at all, not like the Prince Charming he described. As always, I found him to be the most intelligent, interesting, most thought-provoking, often funniest, most infuriating man in all of Fairyland.

  And I knew, from past experience, that he was the best stupid kisser too.

  His words had pushed me out the door, back into the world, back into my work. Yes, I’d retreated. I hadn’t even realized how far. And he had pushed, with no warning, before I’d had a chance to get myself ready. Sometimes, though, a push is exactly what you need.

  With his voice in my ears and the memories as clear as the images on my screen, Michael came roaring back through me. In the most surprising way. There’d always been love. But this felt different. It reverberated inside of me like a just-struck gong, rather than a gong that had been clanged long ago, growing less and less audible as time passed.

  What was I supposed to do about it? Me, the one who had given away the object that had preserved the moment the two of us fell? The object that Michael was convinced held the magic of our love? That was it, wasn’t it? The magic of our love. Not my success.

  That was why he’d felt it was so special.

  And there was no way to Photoshop that scene into something else. I’d done it. I’d given our magic away.

  Guilt burned inside me, right beside that tender sense of a new kind of reawakened love.

  ~Michael~

  I saw her. Sharon.

  There she was, on the north side of the square, stopping traffic with her camera.

  A smile broke across my face as I hugged my notebook to my chest. I felt it all over again, just like I had that first day on the square. The lunch hour I’d watched from afar as she set up her equipment for the perfect shot.

  She intrigued me no less. I wanted to get closer.

  Especially now. Didn’t she seem energized? Focused in a way I hadn’t seen in so long? What was she working on?

  But there was so much distance between us. Sure, it was a measly twenty feet or so, but it was also decades. Day after day piling higher and higher, and it was filled with dandruff and socks with holes and ant traps in the kitchen and garbage bags and oil changes every three thousand miles.

  It sounds absurd. If I were watching this on the big screen, I’d be shouting into the movie theater, “How hard could it be to just talk to someone?”

  But it is. It is so hard. When you are that tangled up in a person, it is like having to confront yourself. You are staring into someone else’s eyes and seeing yourself at the same time. Your own history and your own tomorrow morning. And the horrible part is, that reflection also has a life of its own, and might just want to walk away entirely, taking the parts of your reflection that you like the most.

  Sometimes, the stack of calendars takes you someplace you never anticipated you’d be. Instead of a groom, you’re an old man with a heart that feels a little like a ghost town. Uninhabited. Desolate.

  I wanted to approach her, but was shackled by everything I had on the line. It had been easier when we were strangers meeting for the first time at Bleeker’s Record Store.

  I daydreamed about her framing these new pieces, hanging them on the studio walls.

  Like old times.

  Maybe Sleeping Beauties didn’t wake up all at once, but in stages. Maybe the first stage was about Sharon waking up to her work. She hadn’t yet reached the stage of waking up to me. To us. To the idea that I was her partner, not her bad guy.

  I squeezed my notebook tighter. And felt the weight of everything unsaid inside my own throat.

  As I watched Sharon disappear around the corner, I was more anxious than ever to get to that radio station’s microphone.

  ~This Story~

  This is the story of a man. And a woman.

  In the midst of a dust storm.

  Everything has been disturbed. Nothing is clear.

  Perhaps you feel they have lost their senses of humor at this point. Perhaps this man and this woman seem more serious now than they did at their once upon a time. Fear isn’t funny. Dust storms aren’t funny. Danger can’t be laughed at until triumph is won.

  Perhaps they also seem more concerned with themselves than with each other. But when a storm hits, you forget that anyone else is around. You only know that your own life is being disrupted. The only reaching out you can do is for something sturdy to grab onto. All you can think about is hanging on for dear life, in the worst of the winds.

  But haven’t Michael and Sharon found something? For Michael, isn’t it his radio spot? For Sharon, isn’t it her kiss project?

  With something to anchor them, hasn’t the time come for squinting into the chaos? For calling out to each other?

  What would it take to finally clear the air?

  ~Michael~

  Stories teach us there is love and there is hate, and they are on two separate ends of the spectrum.

  The hardest thing I’ve ever had to learn is how wrong that is. Emotions are never absolute—never simply white or black, either-or, no shades of gray, no shadows in the middle. It’s not like you either love somebody or dislike them with no in-between. You can adore someone at the exact same time you find yourself absolutely resenting them.

  That’s life.

  To some extent, that’s marriage. It’s sharing yourself with someone and still feeling like you don’t completely know them. It’s loving them and watching them act in ways you don’t quite understand. It’s wanting them to know you and not wanting them to see the less than perfect sides of you.

  Ah, but friendship is tricky, too, isn’t it? At least, it was for Amanda. Her heart was being pulled in competing directions as she stared at the doorbell hovering right in front of her, wondering what the brown gunk was in its center. This was Heather’s apartment, after all. That gunk could be anything.

  She began searching her purse for a Kleenex or one of her daughters’ cloth headbands—something to provide a barrier between her fingers and the gunk.

  “Hey!”

  Amanda swiveled, but the parking lot was empty.

  “Up here!”

  She tilted her head back, gazing up toward a second story balcony. As she squinted into the sun, she grumbled under her breath about t
he stupid layout of the place. Heather’s apartment had a kind of castle-meets-storage-unit feel, with sorta-turrets and square chunky sections of apartments. Almost like Aiden had built it with his blocks, and every once in a while, he’d come along to pile on some new addition. It sat on the fine line between avant-garde and down-and-out. Typical Heather.

  But no—the voice wasn’t coming from the second story after all. It had come instead from a wide branch on a nearby oak tree. Darth Billy lay stretched out, his feet dangling down. “Sometimes, she doesn’t hear the bell. She’s in the zone,” Billy told her.

  Sometimes, she doesn’t hear the bell because it hasn’t been rung, Amanda thought as she gave a half-hearted wave to acknowledge his presence. She took a deep breath and knocked. When Heather didn’t answer, she texted her.

  The door flew open.

  “Amanda!” Heather exclaimed, brushing strands of hair away from her flushed cheeks. “You never come here.”

  Amanda held up an armload of clothing.

  “What’s that for?” Heather asked.

  “Suits.”

  “For?” she repeated.

  Amanda sighed, her shoulders slumping. “The big shoot at Murio’s. Of Ryan’s band.”

  “Are you serious?” Heather backed up, letting her inside.

  “Of course. What were you thinking of wearing, jeans?” Amanda chuckled at her own sarcasm. When she saw the embarrassed expression on Heather’s face, she groaned, “Don’t tell me—you weren’t.”

  “I mean, I’ll be working. And it’s a bar. Right? Why would I need to dress up?”

  “Ugh. You cannot wear jeans. You cannot wear secondhand clothes. You’re a professional woman. It’s a good thing I came. The shoot’s tomorrow night. And you…” Amanda’s words trailed off. She pointed through an open doorway. “You turned your bathroom into—what? A gallery?”

  “Yeah,” Heather laughed. “I guess I did. Ran out of wall space. I’ve been trying to develop a critical eye. That’s what Sharon’s after me to do, anyway. I fix my makeup in the kitchen now. That’s why I stuck a mirror to the fridge door.”