About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory

by Barry Lopez

  I don’t know how long I lay there, a half hour perhaps, but when I was through, when I’d answered these questions and was satisfied that I’d recalled the sequence of events precisely and in sufficient detail, I got up, dressed, and went to dinner. Remembering what happened in an encounter was crucial to my work as a writer, and attending to my cameras during our time with the bear had altered and shrunk my memory of it. While the polar bear was doing something, I was checking f-stops and attempting to frame and focus from a moving boat.

  I regarded the meeting as a warning to me as a writer. Having successfully recovered details from each minute, I believed, of that encounter, having disciplined myself to do that, I sensed I wouldn’t pick up a camera ever again.

  It was not solely contact with this lone bear a hundred miles off the northwest coast of Alaska, of course, that ended my active involvement with photography. The change had been coming for a while. The power of the polar bear’s presence, his emergence from the snow squall and his subsequent disappearance, had created an atmosphere in which I could grasp more easily a complex misgiving that had been building in me. I view any encounter with a wild animal in its own territory as a gift, an opportunity to sense the real animal, not the zoo creature, the TV creature, the advertising creature. But this gift had been more overwhelming. In some way the bear had grabbed me by the shirtfront and said, Think about this. Think about what these cameras in your hands are doing.

  Years later, I’m still thinking about it. Some of what culminated for me that day is easy to understand. As a writer, I had begun to feel I was missing critical details in situations such as this one because I was distracted. I was also starting to feel uncomfortable about the way photographs tend to collapse events into a single moment, about how much they leave out. (Archeologists face a similar problem when they save only what they recognize from a dig. Years afterward, the context long having been destroyed, the archeologist might wonder what was present that he or she didn’t recognize at the time. So begins a reevaluation of the meaning of the entire site.)

  I was also disturbed about how nature and landscape photographs, my own and others’, were coming to be used, not in advertising where you took your chances (some photographers at that time began labeling their images explicitly: NO TOBACCO, NO ALCOHOL), but in the editorial pages of national magazines. It is a polite fiction of our era that the average person, including the average art director, is more informed about natural history than an educated person was in Columbus’s age. Because this is not true, the majority of nature photographers who work out in the field have felt a peculiar burden to record accurately the great range of habitat and animal behavior they see, including nature’s “dark” side. (Photographers accepted the fact back then that magazines in the United States, generally speaking, were not interested in photographs of mating animals—unless they were chaste or cute—or in predatory encounters if they were bloody or harrowing, as many were.)

  What happened as a result of this convention was that people looking at magazines in the 1970s increasingly came to think of wild animals as vivacious and decorative in the natural world. Promoted as elegant, brave, graceful, sinister, wise, etc., according to their species, animals were deprived of personality and the capacity to be innovative. Every wildlife photographer I know can recount a story of confrontation with an art director in which he or she argued unsuccessfully for an image that told a fuller or a truer story about a particular species of animal in a layout. It was the noble lion, the thieving hyena, and the mischievous monkey, however, who routinely triumphed. A female wolf killing one of her pups, or a male bonobo approaching a female with a prominent erection, was not anything magazine editors were comfortable with.

  In the late seventies, I asked around among several publishers to see whether they might have any interest in a series of disturbing photographs made in a zoo by a woman named Ilya. She’d taken them on assignment for Life, but very few of them were ever published because she’d concentrated on depicting animals apparently driven insane by their incarceration. I remember as particularly unsettling the look of psychosis in the face of a male lion, its mane twisted into knots. I could develop no interest in publishing her work. An eccentric view, people felt. Too distressing.

  So, along with a growing political awareness of endangered landscapes and their indigenous animals in the 1970s came, ironically, a more and more dazzling presentation of those creatures in incomplete and prejudicial ways. Photo editors made them look not like what they were but the way editors wanted them to appear—well-groomed, appropriate to stereotype, and living safely apart from the machinations of human enterprise. To my mind there was little difference then between a Playboy calendar and a wildlife calendar. Both celebrated the conventionally gorgeous, the overly endowed, the seductive. I and many other photographers at the time were apprehensive about the implications of this trend.

  Another concern I had that September afternoon, a more complicated one, was what was happening to memory in my generation. The advertising injunction to preserve family memories by taking photographs had become so shrill a demand, and the practice had become so compulsive, that recording the event was more important for some than participating in it. The inculcated rationale which grew up around this practice was that to take and preserve family photos was to act in a socially responsible way. The assumption seemed specious to me. My generation was the first to have ready access to inexpensive tape recorders and cameras. Far from recording memories of these talks and events, what we seemed to be doing was storing memories that would never be retrieved, that would never form a coherent narrative. In the same way that our desk drawers and cabinet shelves slowly filled with these “personal” sounds and images, we were beginning, it seemed to me, to live our lives in dissociated bits and pieces. The narrative spine of an individual life was disappearing. The order of events was becoming increasingly meaningless.

  This worry, together with the increasingly commercial use to which the work of photographers like myself was being put and the preference for an entertaining but not necessarily coherent landscape of wild animals (images that essentially lied to children), made me more and more reluctant to stay involved. Some of the contemporary photographers I most respect—Lanting, Hoshino, Braasch, De Roy, Jim Brandenburg, Flip Nicklin, Sam Abell, Nick Nichols, Galen Rowell—have managed through the strength of their work and their personal integrity to overcome some of these problems, which are part and parcel of working in a world dominated more and more by commercial interests pursuing business strategies. But I knew I had no gift here to persevere. That realization, and my reluctance to photograph animals in the first place, may have precipitated my decision that day in the Chukchi.

  As a writer, I had yet other concerns, peculiar to that discipline. I had begun to wonder whether my searching for the telling photographic image in a situation was beginning to interfere with my writing about what happened. I was someone who took a long time to let a story settle. I’d begun to suspect that the photographs made while I was in a note-taking stage were starting to lock my words into a pattern, and that the pattern was being determined too early. Photographs, in some way, were introducing preconceptions into a process I wanted to keep fluid. I often have no clear idea of what I’m doing. I just act. I pitch in, I try to stay alert to everything around me. I don’t want to stop and focus on a finished image, which I’m inclined to do as a photographer. I want, instead, to see a sentence fragment scrawled in my notebook, smeared by rain. I don’t want the clean, fixed image right away.

  An attentive mind, I’m sure, can see the flaws in my reasoning. Some photographers are doing no more than taking notes when they click the shutter. It’s only after a shoot that they discover what the story is. But by trying to both photograph and write, I’d begun to feel I was attempting to create two parallel but independent stories. The effort had become confusing and draining. I let go of photography partly because its defining process, to my mind, was less congruent w
ith the way I wanted to work.

  On June 16, 1979, forty-one sperm whales beached themselves at the mouth of the Siuslaw River on the Oregon coast, about one hundred miles from my home. I wrote a long essay about the stranding but didn’t start work on it until after I’d spent two days photographing the eclipse of these beasts’ lives and the aftermath of their deaths. That was the last time I attempted to do both things.

  Perhaps the most rarefied of my concerns about photography that day in the Chukchi was one that lay for me at the heart of photography: recording a fleeting pattern of light in a defined volume of space. Light always attracted me. Indeed, twenty-five years after the fact, I can still vividly recall the light falling at dusk on a windbreak of trees in Mitchell, Oregon. It rendered me speechless when I saw it, and by some magic I managed to get it down on film. The problem of rendering volume in photography, however, was one I never solved beyond employing the conventional solutions of perspective and depth of field. I could recognize spatial volume successfully addressed in the work of other photographers—in Adams’s work, for example, partly because so many of his photographs do not have an object as a subject. Finding some way myself to render volume successfully in a photograph would mean, I believed, walking too far away from my work as a writer. And, ultimately, it was as a writer that I felt more comfortable.

  I MISS MAKING photographs. A short while ago I received a call from a curator at the Whitney Museum in New York named May Castleberry. She had just mounted a show called “Perpetual Mirage: Photographic Narratives of the Desert West” and I had been able to provide some minor assistance with it. She was calling now to pursue a conversation we’d begun at the time about Rockwell Kent, an illustrator, painter, and socialist widely known in the thirties, forties, and fifties. She wanted to hang a selection of his “nocturnes,” prints and drawings Kent had made of people under starlit night skies. She was calling to see what I could suggest about his motivation.

  Given Kent’s leanings toward Nordic myth and legend and his espousal of Teddy Roosevelt’s “strenuous life,” it seemed obvious to me that he would want to portray his heroic (mostly male) figures against the vault of the heavens. But there were at least two other things at work here, I believed. First, Kent was strongly drawn to high latitudes, like Greenland, where in winter one can view the deep night sky for weeks on end. It was not really the “night” sky, however, he was drawing; it was the sunless sky of a winter day. Quotidian life assumes mythic proportions here not because it’s heroic, but because it’s carried out beneath the stars.

  Secondly, I conjectured, because Kent was an artist working on flat surfaces, he sought, like every such artist, ways to suggest volume, to make the third dimension apparent. Beyond what clouds provide, the daytime sky has no depth; it’s the night sky that gives an artist volume. While it takes an extraordinary person—the light and space artist James Turrell, say—to make the celestial vault visible in sunshine, many artists have successfully conveyed a sense of the sky’s volume by painting it at night.

  THE CONCEIT CAN easily grow up in a photographer that he or she has pretty much seen all the large things—the range of possible emotion to be evoked with light, the contrasts to be made by arranging objects in different scales, problems in the third and fourth dimension. But every serious photographer, I believe, has encountered at some point ideas unanticipated and dumbfounding. The shock causes you to reexamine all you’ve assumed about your own work and the work of others, especially the work of people you’ve never particularly understood. This happened most recently for me in seeing the photography of Linda Connor. While working on a story about international air freight, I became so disoriented, flying every day from one spot on the globe to another thousands of miles away, I did not know what time I was living in. Whatever time it was, it was out of phase with the sun, a time not to be dialed up on a watch, mine or anyone else’s.

  At a pause in this international hurtling, during a six-hour layover in Cape Town, I went for a ride with an acquaintance. He drove us out to Clifton Bay on the west side of Table Mountain. I was so dazed by my abuse of time that I was open to thoughts I might otherwise never have had. One of those thoughts was that I could recognize the physicality of time. We can discern the physical nature of space in a picture, grasp the way, for example, Robert Adams is able to photograph the air itself, making it visible like a plein air painter. In Cape Town that day I saw what I came to call indigenous time. It clung to the flanks of Table Mountain. It resisted being absorbed into my helter-skelter time. It seemed not yet to have been subjugated by Dutch and British colonial expansion, as the physical landscape so clearly had been. It was time apparent to the senses, palpable. What made me believe I was correct in this perception was that, only a month before, I’d examined a collection of Linda Connor’s work, a book called Luminance. I realized there at Table Mountain that she’d photographed what I was looking at. She’d photographed indigenous time.

  I’d grasped Ms. Connor’s photographs in some fashion after an initial pass, but I hadn’t sensed their depth, their power, what Gerard Manley Hopkins called “the achieve of the thing.” With this new insight I wrote her an excited note, an attempt to thank her for work that opened the door to a room I’d never explored.

  One of the great blessings of our modern age, a kind of redemption for its cruelties and unmitigated greed, is that one can walk down to a corner bookstore and find a copy of Ms. Connor’s book. Or of Robert Adams’s What We Brought: The New World, or Frans Lanting’s Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape, or, say, Mary Peck’s Chaco Canyon: A Center and Its World, and then be knocked across the room by a truth one had not, until that moment, clearly discerned.

  It is more than illumination, though, more than a confirmation of one’s intuition, aesthetics, or beliefs that comes out of the perusal of such a photographer’s images. It’s regaining the feeling that one is not cut off from the wellsprings of intelligence and goodwill, of sympathy for human plight.

  I do not know, of course, why the photographers I admire, even the ones I know, photograph, but I am acutely aware that without the infusion of their images hope would wither in me. I feel an allegiance to their work more as a writer than as someone who once tried to see in this way, perhaps because I presume we share certain principles related to the effort to imagine or explain.

  It is correct, I think, as Robert Adams wrote me that day, to believe in a community of artists stimulated by and respectful of one another’s work. But it’s also true that without an audience (of which we’re all a part) the work remains unfinished, unfulfilled. A photographer seeks intimacy with the world and then endeavors to share it. Inherent in that desire to share is a love of humanity. In different media, and from time to time, we have succeeded, I believe, in helping one another understand what is going on. We have come to see that, in some way, this is our purpose with each other.

  PART FOUR

  An Opening Quartet

  14

  DEATH

  MY MOTHER WAS bitten by a black widow on the train from Birmingham to Mobile when she was a girl. She held a potted geranium in her lap, a gift for her aunt, and the spider crawled from its leaves and bit her on the finger. She flung the pot away in the aisle and lapsed into a sweating fright with troubled breathing, the passengers solicitous around her. A man in a light-colored seersucker suit, she remembered, stamped the spider out on the floor, steadying himself against the rhythmic sway of the car with a hand on her seat.

  I saw a black widow in our garage, a one-car garage narrow as a hallway, built for slender cars of the thirties, with a dirt floor. In the kitchen she shouted, Don’t go near it, do you understand me? Don’t go near it. Not until she could get someone to kill it. I didn’t. I hunkered a few feet from its web, a boy with a flashlight craning his head to see the red hourglass, a chalice of poison it seemed.

  I was spanked hysterically when she found me fascinated as a bird over a reflection in water. Another man came and killed the black widow,
swatting at it with a board, missing and missing, the spider running away, the man shouting at my mother to get back, get back. I watched through a living-room window shrouded in curtains.

  He said he killed it. He showed her and left.

  On a shelf at the rear of the garage I found boxes of checks, some filled in with my mother’s cursive. Inside another were checks with no handwriting. We’re rich, Packard, I told my closest friend. You write in whatever you want. I had seen it time and again at the grocery, at the hardware store. I had Packard’s wonder. You can even, I said, write in a hundred dollars. More, a thousand, and go to the bank. They give it to you.

  He said yes, his voice carrying an image of the horizon over the ocean.

  Yes, I said. We just write in these spaces, copying the words from the other checks. One Thousand Dollars and No Cents.

  We put the checks back on the shelf. We had to make a plan. We had to pack the bags that we would tie to the seats and handlebars of our freshly oiled bikes.

  ON A JULY AFTERNOON with a wind riding up the skirts of long-leaved eucalyptus, swirling the leaves and clusters of seed buttons, a sound that by hiding and then revealing the tree, hiding and revealing, made me flush with expectations I could not explain, three men in a convertible ran over my dog. His life ended abruptly, a painting cut open. I rocked his head in my lap and crooned, as if I had the power to give life. Would a bowl of water change it, a bowl of food? And who were these men in the lime green car, a species known to every southern California boy, 1949 Ford, idling now in the middle of the road, top down, brake lights lit up, the three of them looking back over the seats? They got out and walked back, leaving both doors ajar, walked beneath the towering eucalyptus in their neat khakis and short-sleeved white shirts. Navy boys. Mother had a hand on my shoulder but I couldn’t hear her words, every sound but the wind in the trees shut out. The men closed on us slowly, their eyes on the dog. I pulled more of him across my lap. Another man, a neighbor, floated in. They took the dog from me.