Blind Side

by William Bayer

  "Really? How?"

  "Not so haughty, not so proud. You're loosening up. And there's lots more you're going to do for me." I lowered the camera. "Unless, of course, you want to quit.

  " She looked outraged. "I'm not a quitter."

  "You can always leave, you know. Any time."

  "No way," she said.

  "I'm seeing this through."

  "Good," I said, shooting directly down.

  "I like a girl who can stick it out. Now on your belly. That's right." Whap! Whap! Whap! Fourteen shots! "Now writhe, and then look back at me……… She writhed. I stood astride her continuing all the while to shoot. I felt like an animal trainer standing over a tigress. She was recalcitrant; my camera was my whip.

  For a good twenty minutes I ordered her around. Do this. Do that. All the time firing away. Sweat began to nse on her body; it frosted her back, gave a sheen to her flesh. A heady aroma started to come off her too, perspiration mixed with her perfume. I liked it. The smell excited me. But I tried hard not to let on. For all my excitement I continued to treat her like a thing, acting bored with her, preoccupied with problems of technique.

  I wanted, you see, to take her through a full spectrum of emotions, to get to know her face when she was cross, petulant, angry, unnerved. If there really was something in her, I wanted to bring it out. And I wanted to punish her too for her remark about my "being afraid," humiliate her, make her surrender and give up. Then, even if she did decide to quit on me, I could throw her panties back in her face and laugh as she stalked out.

  She was tough. She resisted. And the more I pushed her, the more defiant she became.

  "Used to being treated like this?" She grinned.

  "Like what?"

  "A piece of meat."

  "Oh, that." She laughed.

  "I've been through worse in acting class."

  "So maybe you like it."

  "So maybe I do." She shrugged.

  "That's okay," I said.

  "I can use that too."

  "Sure. Use it. Use everything. That's what I'm paying you for."

  I stood back from her, amazed: she actually thought I was in her employ. "Think you can afford a session with me?"

  "Is it really so hard to take a girl's picture?" she asked.

  "The way you act, you'd think it was torture."

  I stopped then, ostensibly to reload, but really to gasp at what she'd said. Because I was shooting her, for twenty minutes I'd been taking pictures of her face. And I hadn't even thought about the implications of that; I'd been so angry, so wrapped up in my anger at her taunts, I'd banged away at her, and my hands hadn't even shaken. So-she'd won. She'd tricked me into a portrait session, forced me into breaking through my block. All the time I thought I'd been controlling her she'd been controlling me.

  Suddenly I wasn't angry anymore. How could I be? She'd done what no shrink had been able to do: freed me, temporarily at least, from my three-year block against photographing the human face.

  When I resumed shooting I was a lot less hostile, and she must have picked up on that, because she finally started to give me something back. It wasn't much. I burned a lot of film. But it was a beginning, a glimpse at who she was.

  "At last," I told her, "you've dropped the mask. Get dressed and take a break.@'

  "Then what?"

  "We're going out. We're about at the point where we begin.

  I burned two more rolls out on the street, posing her against pedestrian crowds, then telling her to stand sluttish but proud against a harshly sun-lit graffiti-scrawled brick wall. I liked the way she raised her arm to shield her eyes from the sun. Finally, I thought, we're getting somewhere. For one thing, she was cooling down.

  "You say you're an actress. What have you done?" I asked.

  "A few workshops. Some soap operas. Walk-ons mostly, but I've been up for a couple of decent parts."

  "How do you make a living?"

  "I model a little. Waitress sometimes too."

  "You really want to make it, don't you?"

  "Yes, I really do."

  "I've heard that before. Lots of girls here say things like that."

  "I'm not 'lots of girls." I'm Kimberly."

  "Yeah, Kimberly . She nodded, "And that makes you special." She nodded vehemently.

  "I'll say this for you-you're persistent enough."

  "Pays off sometimes. Like here we are."

  "Yeah," I said.

  "Getting tired? Want to quit?"

  "You kidding?"

  "We've just started, you know."

  "So let's cut the talk and get back to work," she said.

  Oh, she was hard-ass! Going to show me how tough she was. That she could take whatever I wanted to fling at her. That I could whap! whap! whap! her a thousand times, and still she'd come back for more.

  And there was something else too, this notion she had that somewhere along the line she'd commissioned me to take her portrait: that though I could strip her, order her around, I did all that with her consent; that in the end I worked for her because she was the one who was going to pay the fee.

  That wasn't the way I looked at it, but it was something to work with-this battle of our wills. We'd gotten through the first level of hostility were approaching something deeper now. I wasn't quite sure what it was, but felt I could make it work.

  When we got back to the studio and she started to take off her clothes, I told her to stay dressed. Then I perched her on a high stool in the middle of the room, lit her carefully, and went to work with the 8 x 10.

  That's a slow examining camera, a camera with a presence. It says to the sitter: "I'm as big as you and I've got this big eye and I can see deep inside your brain. So don't try to fool me because you can't. And maybe, if you show me who you are, I may decide to treat you nice.

  I was working seriously now, looking closely at her, looking to see who she really was. And I saw a lot more than I expected, vulnerability of a special sort. Perhaps some injury suffered in the past had hardened the surface of her, giving her the strength to take the treatment I'd been dishing out, But there was a place, I sensed, somewhere deep inside, that was soft and easily hurt. That was the place I wanted to reach.

  There's a lot of misunderstanding about serious portrait photography-people think photographers want to strip their subjects bare. Some do, but for me it's not so simple. I'm interested in showing the tension in my subject, the war between the face he shows the world and the hidden face within.

  It's that tension, crystallized in a kind of reflective aggression, that can give a portrait real depth. The hyped-up magazine portraits, the ones of the rock stars staring meekly from the welter of rumpled sheets, or the comedians looking sad beside the urinals-for me they're attitudes, much too easy, much too glib. I feel the same about the so-called cruel portraits of Avedon, portraits that say, No matter how high this person's status, inside my studio there'll be no flattery. That's a message that tells me a lot about Avedon, but very little about his sitters.

  That afternoon, as I began to take my first serious pictures of Kimberly, I gave up the last remnants of my disdain. I was interested in her now, interested in the problem she presented. This, I thought to myself, is a girl who has a secret.

  I got caught up as I exposed frame after frame of sheet film, working slowly, trying, with each exposure, to edge closer to that tender place inside. I forgot about time. It was after nine when I finally stopped. She looked at me curiously when I told her we were finished for the day.

  "We're not done?" she asked.

  "Just with the first session. We've still got a ways to go."

  She stretched.

  "How many sessions are there going to be?"

  "As many as it takes. Come back same time tomorrow afternoon. Be prepared to work till eleven or twelve."

  She kissed me briskly on the cheek, then headed for the door. When she reached it, she turned.

  "I learned something today."

  "What was tha
t?" I asked.

  "Two things actually. First, don't ever dress up for Geoffrey Barnett. Second, beneath the nasty exterior the guy's a pussycat."

  She gave me her handsome smile, then disappeared.

  Later that night, still excited about what had happened, I phoned my closest friends to tell them the news. Frank Cordero and his Vietnamese wife, Mai, lived in Galisteo, New Mexico. He was ex-Special Forces, now a photographer. She was a sculptor. I was in love with her once.

  "Well, it finally happened!" I told Frank.

  "You took a portrait?"

  "What else?"

  "Oh, Geof-that's terrific!" He put on Mai to congratulate me too, then came on again.

  "It was a 'she,' wasn't it?"

  "It was a 'she,' all right." I told him about Kimberly, as much as I knew, and how she had even admired the print of his I have hanging on my wall .

  "Thing is," I said, "I don't know how well I did. Or whether I can do it again. I want to keep working with her as long as I can, see how far I can take it. Then, if the results are good, I'll try with someone else."

  "Stick with her, Geof," Frank advised.

  "Don't give that girl up. She may have changed your life."

  My sessions with Kim continued. The city got caught up in a heat wave, the humidity was terrible, the air turned stagnant and suffocating. But no matter the physical discomfort, she always showed up on time.

  When we worked outside, I'd usually pick the location. But when she'd suggest a place, I was happy to go along. Mostly we worked in my studio, and then usually with the view camera. The pace slowed down, sometimes to one or two exposures an hour.

  When we'd finish I'd let her use my shower before I sent her home. Then, after she'd leave, I'd feel a certain emptiness around the loft.

  There was an ideal portrait I was working toward. Though I couldn't visualize it yet, I felt that eventually it would come. Kim was a challenging subject. I was determined to shoot until I got her right. And she was there for me, helpful, obedient, patient when I stood before her, sometimes afraid.

  I tried hard not to reveal my fear to her, and if she sensed it, she kept her feelings to herself. I wasn't sure if she understood what we were doing, how important her presence was. But then the best nurse is always the one who refuses to acknowledge that you're sick.

  I was working toward a major breakthrough, my return to the human face; I wanted to produce a picture that would be better and deeper than any portrait I'd made before. It was madness, of course. I'd never spent much time or film on a single subject. But on the third day, when I realized I was not at all eager for the sessions to end, I felt fortunate to have found a sitter so receptive, and apparently oblivious of time.

  Not that she didn't rebel. She did. Her first attempt came near midnight, toward the end of our third session. She'd been glaring at me angrily for half an hour, while I sat watching her, refusing to shoot.

  "Grimace as long as you like," I said.

  "I'm patient. I can wait you out."

  "Fuck this shit! I'm going home!" She hopped off her stool, looked up at the ceiling, opened her mouth and screamed.

  "Oh, that's nice," I said.

  "Do that again." She cursed me. "Like I said," I told her, "you can go home anytime."

  "It's so enraging when you say that! If I quit now, it's over, right?"

  "If you walk out before I dismiss you, it's definitely all over," I confirmed.

  :'Do I get my glossies?"

  'You get them when I give them to you. I only give them to you when I'm done."

  She stamped her foot, returned to her stool, glared at me, then relaxed, grimaced, grinned, shook her head furiously, moaned and slumped. When she glanced up to see how I was taking her little tantrum, I caught a glimpse of something mischievous, and squeezed off a shot.

  "Thanks, that was nice."

  "Bastard!" she hissed.

  But I was extremely pleased. That encounter made me feel powerful. I was amazed at the speed of my recovery. I was no longer merely pretending to be in control; I felt that at last I was.

  It was 2:00 P.m. on the fourth day when, without my contrivance, she finally broke down. I'd been circling her slowly, catlike, while she sat in her usual erect position on the stool. Suddenly she began to cry. I stopped my stalking.

  "What's the matter?"

  "You're violating me." Her voice was raw.

  I handed her a lens tissue to wipe away her tears. Then I helped her from the stool.

  I led her to my bed in an alcove off the studio, where I keep a ceiling fan. I turned it on. I told her to lie down.

  "Rest awhile. You'll be okay." I patted her head, then left her alone.

  I went into my darkroom. What the hell are you doing? I asked myself. It was as if I thought that by photographing her so extensively I could somehow take her in, that film was blotting paper I could use to absorb her, capture her image and thus make her part of myself.

  Half an hour later I came out, half expecting to find her gone. But she was ready to go back to work.

  "Sorry," she said, smiling.

  "Sorry I acted that way. All part of the process, I guess………

  I treated her more tenderly after that.

  We didn't chatter when I photographed; all our talk took place during breaks. She asked me questions about photography and I gave her my views. When I asked her about her life, she happily filled me in.

  She was from Cleveland. Her father was a doctor. Her mother was a violist who taught at the Cleveland Institute of Music. She had started studying music herself at Oberlin, hoping to make a career as a pianist, but after her second year she switched to acting, then quit college and moved to New York.

  At first it had been a struggle; she'd taken advanced classes, supporting herself by working as a waitress. But lately things had been picking up. Her goal, she said, was to become a star.

  "Not a movie-type star," she explained.

  "An actress who can play great parts greatly on the stage."

  Such a dream! It must be shared by a good ten thousand girls in the city at any given time, and the denouement for most of them is predictable too: a little spurt in their careers before the inevitable failure to connect. Except, Kim assured me, it wasn't going to be that way for her. She was determined; she had "the sacred fire"; she would never give up. And that was why she was going to make it. Couldn't I see the determination in her face? "Oh, sure, I see it all right. Trouble is-it isn't you."

  "Then who the hell is me?" she demanded to know.

  "When we discover that," I said, "we'll finally have our picture."

  On one of our breaks she questioned me: "What's this thing you've had against shooting faces?"

  "Sorry, Kim, it's not a 'thing.'

  "What is it, then?"

  I shook my head.

  "Be fair, Geoffrey. Tell me about yourself. You're always making me expose myself to you.',

  I agreed she had a point.

  "So what was the problem?" she asked,

  I shrugged.

  "Don't really know. Happened one day in the middle of a session. Got the shakes. Couldn't go on. Canceled. Sent the sitter home. Then it kept happening, always when I was shooting people. Suddenly I was stymied in my work. I'd read about stuff like that, phobic reactions-pianists losing control of their right hands, singers whose teeth chattered, runners fainting at the starting line. So I started going to shrinks. Spent lots of money, got lots of interpretations: I was afraid of being successful, afraid of relationships; I had 'survivor's guilt' about the PietA and all the money I'd made from it. My girlfriend at the time told me I'd grown cold to people-including to her, she said. Shortly after she made that observation she packed up her bags and left. Then a new girl came along who told me I was 'wounded' in 'my spirit." She, in Catherine Barkley fashion, would salve my wound and nurse me back to health. Unfortunately our eye contact was bad, so we never got our relationship off the ground. Eyeball to eyeball-see, that was the
problem. When I worked I couldn't look people in the eye. Can you imagine a photographer with a problem like that? So I fell back on night scapes. You know-my 'turgid empty streets,' my 'boring malaise.'

  Geoffrey-you know I didn't mean any of that."

  "It's all right. You've been long forgiven. Anyway, I like my night scapes. But how many do I want to make? You could have asked the same of Ansel Adams: 'How many of these gorgeous, pristine and totally empty grand landscapes do you want to shoot, Ansel?" He wouldn't have understood-they were his lifework. I don't feel that way. My night scapes are a project. But, unfortunately, there isn't much else I can do these days."

  "You miss the people?"

  "That's just the point. That's what my 'boring malaise' is all about. All my night streets are empty. they cry out for people. The way I cry out. But I can't seem to put them in." She studied me.

  "Not true."

  "What do you mean?" I asked.

  "Don't you see, Geoffrey? You're shooting me. So now, obviously, you can."

  On the fifth day I was seized by a strong desire to photograph her nude. Not to take pictures of her face when she was naked, as I had the day we'd started, but to make serious full-length nude studies of her body, with her features concealed, or at least not clearly seen.

  "But why?" she asked.

  "I thought we were working toward a portrait."

  "We are," I said.

  "This is another approach."

  She raised her eyes to the ceiling.

  "If I'd known it was going to be like this!"

  "Look, Kim-"

  "Yeah, I know-I can quit anytime. Well, fuck you, Geoffrey Barnett! Shoot your goddamn nudes!"

  The nude sessions were trancelike for me. I'd study her, light her, move my camera in and shoot. Then I'd have her turn a different way, or I'd try a different lens, or I'd apply a different kind of light, then shoot her again. As I exposed each sheet, I'd feel an increasing need to expose another. Even as I worked I knew I was obsessed. But still I couldn't stop.

  was it Kim, or the project of shooting her, that obsessed me? I wasn't sure and grew confused. I realized I was exhausting myself, considered the possibility I was losing my grip. But still I worked on, in search of . . . I knew not what. Just mystery, I kept telling myself, the mystery in her, which I felt a need to capture, and by so doing to understand. But why? Why did I feel the need? What was it about her? I agonized.