He laid down a contact sheet, then made a few quick test prints, confirming his initial suspicions. This single roll of film would yield several excellent prints. And yet, as strong as the shots were, their main impact was to give him ideas for other, potentially even more interesting, ones. There was so much he wanted to do, all of a sudden – both in terms of new angles on the shots he’d already made and shots of areas of the complex that he hadn’t yet fully explored. He decided that he would have to go back as soon as possible, this time with a map of the area, more lenses, and a fully formed plan of attack.
On his first return trip, he used up five rolls of film. On his next visit, it was seven. Then twelve. Undeveloped rolls began piling up in his refrigerator, crowding out cartons of eggs and expired milk. There was something about the project that made him fearful of missing the slightest opportunity to capture the right image. In the days that followed, he found himself being unusually careful when crossing the street. He didn’t want to meet an untimely end and leave the work unfinished, a mess of uncatalogued and unprinted negatives that nobody would ever bother to sort through – inert and unrealized. It was ridiculous, he knew, a possible sign that he was beginning to lose it, but it didn’t change how he felt.
He kept going, piecing together his silent narrative of the place, getting it all down on film. He created panoramic images of warehouse exteriors, made up of overlapping individual photographs that circled around to provide a complete 360-degree view. He shot close-ups of ancient walls, pock-marked and blackened with age, the bricks like cells in a leaf as seen through a microscope. A shot though a window of an abandoned office interior, with a steel desk turned upside down in the centre of its green linoleum-tiled floor, empty beige file folders scattered around like windblown leaves. An image of a flower – some kind of wild daisy – poking through a rusting chain-link fence.
After several weeks of visits, resulting in dozens of rolls of exposed film, he saw that it was time to move the project into its next phase. Soon, he would need to return to client-driven work – there was rent to be paid on both his apartment and studio, and his bank balance had dipped worryingly low. With an eye to wrapping things up, he went into the darkroom and pushed ahead with the long process of developing, selecting and printing his images. He would need to make hundreds of individual prints from dozens of different negatives in order to achieve the result he was looking for. It was the biggest project he had ever undertaken, the most ambitious both in scope and thematic ambition.
But still new ideas continued to pop into his mind – when he was in the shower, when he was on a work shoot, in the middle of the night – and he would have to go back out into the field to try them. He knew that he was getting into borderline-compulsive behaviour, reminiscent of Garry Winogrand – the great New York street photographer of the early 1960s. Winogrand was noted among photographers not only for his talent but also for his compulsive shooting. He had left 2,500 undeveloped rolls of film behind when he died, not to mention thousands more unproofed negatives and contact sheets.
No sooner had Stephan acknowledged this alarming precedent than he found himself back out in the field, shooting piles of rubble in abandoned courtyards, rusting oil drums stacked three high against a blank cinder-block wall, spider-webbing cracks in ancient concrete floors. In the end, he simply gave up trying to fight whatever it was that was driving him. There had to be a reason for such a deep and powerful impulse. And for all of his worries, doubts and revisions, the project seemed finally to be coming together. He was beginning to see it from above, as a single entity with a defined scope and form. He was getting there.
One morning he came upon a doorway, boarded up with a piece of plywood, at the back of one of the brick warehouses. It was located in an out-of-the-way spot that he’d neglected to closely investigate, until now. He slipped his fingers in around the edge of the plywood, where the doorknob would have been if there had been a knob, and tugged. To his surprise, the plywood sheet bucked out towards him, shucking off a couple of the rusted nails that were holding it in place. The wood was rotten, apparently, and already beginning to disintegrate. He gave a second tug, harder this time, and the entire right side of the panel peeled away from the wall. One more pull, two handed this time, and the whole thing came right off. It fell to the ground with a dull thud, cushioned somewhat by the air beneath it.
He took a flashlight, an item he carried whenever he came out here now, out of his pack, and stepped carefully in through the opening. Inside it was completely black, but by jabbing the light’s weak, milky beam around in the darkness he was able to make out that he was in a huge, empty warehous space, its multi-storey ceiling supported by a series of huge wooden beams. By this stage of the project, he had come to imagine himself – in his more fanciful moments – as a sort of urban Indiana Jones. Traveling to the darkest uncharted corners of the concrete jungle, he risked life and limb in pursuit of exquisite, long-lost photo-archaeological treasures. And now here he was, delving deeper than he had ever gone before.
After getting his bearings in the space, he started out with a series of formally composed shots using a tripod and flash. He disliked working with a flash and avoided doing so when natural light was available, but here he had no choice. He did his best to the set up the camera for a good result, with a long exposure time and as much depth of field as he could afford, since it was too dark to focus easily. When he actually snapped a shot, it was impossible to know if he had anything. A digital camera, he had to admit, would have been a far better tool in that respect. He could have reviewed each image simply by glancing at the LCD view screen. It would have been nearly effortless. Effortlessness, however, was not the point of the exercise.
He had at first been awed by the space, by its sheer size and by the symmetry of its architecture, but after fifteen minutes or so he had exhausted its possibilities. As a photographic subject, the room lacked a proper theme, a central focal point. He shone the flashlight left and right, up and down, looking for something he’d missed. That was when he spotted it, a rectangle of deep darkness against the milder darkness of the surrounding wall: a narrow, doorless hallway leading farther into the complex.
He gathered up his gear and went to investigate. The beam of his flashlight as he pointed it down the hallway flicked over crumbling walls coated in blistered and peeling paint. He stepped into the hallway. The space was bare, featureless, but there was a faint light emanating from beyond a corner up ahead. Something moved suddenly at his feet – a fat, ugly rat, skittering in the dust – and probably that was what caused him to lose focus. He quickened his pace, hurrying towards the light as he tried at the same time to fight off a wave of claustrophobia.
And then, without warning, he was at the edge of a jagged gap in the floor – a yawning manhole-sized opening right at his feet. Flailing his arms for balance, half-panicked, he felt himself beginning to topple forward. On pure instinct, he used his last ounce of physical control to lunge weakly for the far side, but he was off balance and weighed down by his gear. For a nauseating moment he was suspended over the gaping blackness. Then he slammed down hard just past the far edge: he’d made it.
Dazed and in pain, he lay in a ragged heap near the edge of the hole, tangled up with his gear. For a few seconds, he thought he’d broken his wrist, but as the initial shock subsided he found that he was able to move it well enough despite the throbbing pain. He was okay, then, banged up but uninjured. He thought next of his camera gear, and scrambled to check that everything was intact. But that was one of the beauties of the old manual equipment: it was all made of steel and virtually indestructible. Despite a few scuffs and scratches, it seemed to be okay. The only chink in the armour was the lens, but a quick inspection with his flashlight revealed that it was intact too.
No longer concerned about rats, Stephan crawled back to the edge of the hole and pointed the flashlight down into it. He was looking down into some kind of deep cellar. Twenty feet below, its concret
e floor was scattered with debris and flooded in several places with fetid water. He shuddered and turned away. The smart thing to do would be to leave immediately, heed the warning of his near miss and just go, but he was angry now, and unwilling to accept failure. He took another moment to collect himself, then slowly got to his feet and dusted off his clothes.
He was rewarded for his perseverance a half-minute later. Beyond the hole in the floor, the hallway continued for a few more metres, then turned a sharp corner. A few feet farther along there was another double door, its edges picked out by a thin outline of bright light. The doors swung open easily enough despite the creaking protests of their hinges, revealing a small outdoor courtyard surrounded by high brick walls on all four sides. It might have been a quiet place for the workers to have lunch, once upon a time, but not any more. Now the courtyard was filled with hundreds of coils of rubber tubing, of every imaginable size, colour and texture, stacked a dozen feet high, like a huge pile of psychedelic spaghetti, rising towards the open sky above.
He snapped away furiously, his frustration and pain buried beneath a rising wave of exhilaration.
Chapter 8
They’d nearly killed him, but in the end Stephan’s explorations among the abandoned factories and warehouses served him well. He had left no idea untested, no matter how tenuous, and the best of his shots reflected his refusal to compromise. Certain that others would agree that he was onto something good, he soon had initial confirmation of this conviction. Armed with a portfolio of sample prints, he easily convinced one of the better small galleries near his studio to take him on for a brief show in a month’s time, filling a slot conveniently opened up by another show’s cancellation. The project was meant to be, it seemed.
Meanwhile, as he continued to plug away, Stephan found himself repeatedly thinking back to Evans’ plantation house photographs. The absence of people in Stephan’s images, as in Evans’, leant them an eerie, unsettling, vibe. The mock classical flourishes on some of the warehouses, as on Evans’ mansions, made them seem ancient, like the ruins of some long-dead civilization. The deep afternoon shadows in many of the shots in both cases spoke to the vastness of time, the ultimate triviality of the individual’s lifespan and aspirations.
Not that the challenges of Stephan’s own puny project weren’t sufficiently daunting in scale. He still had hundreds of negatives to review, sort and make selections from. That task alone would take him many hours of painstaking work. Then he would have to make the final prints for the show, dozens of them. And he was adamant that he would print everything himself, by hand. It was the only way to make each image as good as it should be, since only he knew the precise look he wanted to achieve in each individual shot.
In the days leading up to the opening of his show, he pulled several all-nighters at the lab. After each of these sessions, he’d arrive home in the gray light of dawn, his belly growling, his mind racing from hours of hard concentration. He’d feed Gamblor, then put together a simple meal, crack open a bottle of beer, watch the news. Then he’d crash in his bedroom, where he’d lined the windows with cut-up cardboard boxes and tinfoil to keep out the daylight. He was reminded by it all of his lifestyle when he first came to the city to find work as a photographer. It was a stripped down, Spartan existence – a life in which he saw little of the sun and even less of other people – but a part of him loved the purity of it.
In the latter stages of the project, however, the strain of the work began to take a toll on him. He saw now that he’d never be able to meet his most ambitious goals, and at the same time, a part of him was becoming increasingly aware that his compulsive pursuit of perfection was becoming a little, well, compulsive. He was burning through materials – chemicals, photo paper – at an alarming rate, and had dipped into his modest savings to buy more. Was it even responsible, what he was doing? Pete was working a steady job, paying down his mortgage, contributing to his retirement accounts, and putting away money for his unborn children’s university tuition. Meanwhile, Stephan was chasing some... what was he chasing, anyway? An intuition? He wasn’t even sure what to call it.
If nothing else, he might have carried out the project in a more practical way. He could have shot everything digitally, for example, with one of the decent digital SLRs that had been coming onto the market in recent months. Had he been using a digital camera, he would have saved a significant amount of money on film, not to mention the time he was spending on developing. Photoshop alone would have spared him weeks on that front. It would have been a comparative cakewalk, and the recognition of that fact made him feel more than a little guilty, as if his insistence on film were some peccadillo, like a curio collector’s predilection for shrunken heads. But no, as he’d said to Bill a hundred times, digital just wasn’t him. He was a film photographer, and the nuances and idiosyncrasies of film were the very ingredients of his art. Without the artefacts of the silver nitrate process, he’d have nothing.
With a week to spare before the show, the prints were mostly finished. Still, there was work to do – some of which hadn’t even occurred to him until now. He needed to get the final prints framed, to oversee their placement and hanging at the gallery, to set an appropriate price for each. And he needed to send out reminders to the invited guests for the opening if he didn’t want an empty room. There were dozens of little details that still needed to be crossed off his checklist.
Penny, his old assistant, came in to help him a couple of days a week, but she had other things on her plate now. She’d graduated from art school in the spring, and had quickly landed a photo internship at a local fashion magazine. There was a boyfriend now, too, a brooding young goth from the art college who had a sly sweetness about him despite his wickedly dark pen-and-ink illustrations.
In the end, Stephan took care of most of the prep work on his own, which was exhausting, yet fitting given how much of himself he’d invested in the project.
On a Tuesday night in the midst of his big push, Stephan arrived at the lab around midnight, expecting to have the place to himself. Instead he found Bill sitting cross legged on the floor in the middle of the lounge, hunched over a large, expensive-looking printer.
“Still fighting the insomnia, I see,” Stephan said as he walked in, his casual tone belying his annoyance at the distraction. Mild annoyance: it was Bill, after all.
Bill squinted up at him. “Ah, Stephan, great timing,” he said. “Mind giving me a hand getting this puppy up onto the table?”
Stephan eyed the printer, as if it were a disguised battle-bot that might attack at any moment. “I guess so.”
“Excellent. You take that side and I’ll take this side. Watch out for the cord, now.”
On Bill’s count of three they heaved at the thing together, and it slowly rose from the floor. About half way through the ascent, Bill’s gut popped out of his AC-DC concert t-shirt, nearly unbalancing the entire operation and sending the printer crashing to the floor. But after a hair-raising moment the gut sloshed back the other way, pulling everything into balance as it did so.
On a second count of three, they were able to raise the printer up to the level of the table and then, with a heroic effort, to lower it gently into place.
“Thank god,” Bill wheezed, once he had caught his breath enough to speak.
“You’re telling me,” Stephan said, massaging his back. “For a second there, I thought I was going to be crushed to death.”
“Actually, I was referring to the printer,” Bill said. “You wouldn’t believe what that sucker cost me.”
Stephan looked down at the device, its exterior an expanse of matte white plastic that revealed no secrets. “So, yeah, it’s a printer?”
“That’s right, but not just any printer. A high-end digital colour photo printer,” Bill said. “Fine-art resolution. They don’t sell these things in Walmart.”
He gave the printer a couple of loving pats, as if it were a prize show dog, then set himself to fumbling with various cables
, plugging the thing in and attach it to a PC that had already been set up on an adjacent table. Stephan looked on, scratching his chin. In light of his recent, rejected hesitations over sticking with film for his current project, this new arrival unsettled him. He found himself digging in his heels.
“So I guess this is the direction you’re headed in, then,” he ventured.
“Yes indeedly.”
“What about a new enlarger for Darkroom Three? The one you’ve got in there now looks like it dates back to World War One. At the latest.”
“Hang on, just a sec,” Bill said, uninterested in taking up the debate. He pressed a button hidden away at the back of the printer and a green LED turned on, accompanied by a faint hum, but otherwise there was little indication that anything had happened. “What do you think?”
“Uh… nice, I guess. But as I was saying…”
“Right, right, sorry, a new enlarger for Darkroom Three. Well, that’s on the list, too, Steph. But to be honest it’s a little further down.”
“I see.”
“Because, honestly, this is where the industry is headed – digital shooting, digital printing. In fact, they’re saying that in another five years nobody’s even going to bother with printing at all. People will just view everything digitally, on their phones or whatever.”
“Come on, Bill, that sounds like science fiction to me. I mean, what kind of graphic quality are you going to get on a phone?”
“All I’m saying is that I’ve got to change with the times, Steph, or I’m a dead man. Perhaps you’ve heard of this system we have called capitalism…”
He turned back to the desk and began fiddling with the computer to which the new printer was now attached. A copy of Photoshop was open on the screen.
The Silver Age Page 10