Hold Still

by Sally Mann

  Making a photograph in these conditions is a challenge, even for modern film, and the resulting image often appears to have been breathed onto the negative; a moist refulgence within deepening shadows, details dissipating like those in a painting by Turner. I loved that effect, and, with a hectic flush of near heatstroke, would load up my equipment as the humidity rose and the sun sank, heading to the hills in the eventide. To whatever extent it is possible to photograph air, I was going to try to do it, and to whatever extent photographs can reveal the dark mysteries of a haunted landscape, I set out to make them.

  It was the same goal I had when I wrote, decades before:

  Recovery of the small truths; the upper fields,

  the smells, sounds: The local.

  This much is not sentimental;

  … To recover and clarify the deposits,

  their grace so fragile, so various.

  When I was well into the pictures of the local Virginia landscape, I was asked by the High Museum in Atlanta to participate in a commissioned project with the self-explanatory title Picturing the South. Having seldom done commercial work or commissions, I was a bit unsure about working within a defined concept and under a deadline, but it seemed to dovetail nicely with my renewed interest in the southern landscape, so I accepted it.

  However, I wanted the work for Picturing the South to be different from the images I was making in Virginia. Having never quite gotten over the aesthetic blow that the Michael Miley glass negatives dealt me twenty years previously, I looked back to them for inspiration. I got way more than I bargained for. His pictures completely changed the direction of my work for the next fifteen years.

  This simple Miley landscape, for example:

  Look at the subtle solarization of the lower half of the image and the crisp leaves in the upper, the soft light glowing through them. And those edges! Where, nowadays, do you see that white flare on the edges? It’s not fogging, but some mysterious incursion of ghostly radiance creeping in all around. Try getting a picture like that with conventional film or, even more unlikely, with a digital camera or your phone.

  And yet I did get a picture like that, forty years after my aesthetic consciousness absorbed that remodeling wallop from the Miley negatives.

  And when I held this miraculous 8 × 10 inch negative up to the light, the fixer dripping down my forearms, and saw those radiant edges, I was transported back in time to another attic, the attic at the university where the 7,500 Miley glass negatives were stored.

  I had run across them entirely by accident in the late summer of 1973 while searching for some arcane piece of darkroom equipment. Pushing up into the topmost level of the journalism building at Washington and Lee, my adjusting eyes dumbfounded me with the sight of a floor untraversable for the piles of glass negatives. They appeared to be many different sizes, from 2 × 3 inches to mammoth plates of 16 × 20 inches, and were stacked like badly shuffled cards or leaning against the walls, unsheathed, coated with dust, scratched, and sometimes broken, glass shards scattered about the rough-hewn flooring. Having worked with the 5 × 7 inch view camera for the last year while abroad, I wasn’t intimidated by the size of the plates and began sorting through them, blowing off the dust and holding them up to the motey light coming in through a round window in the eave. Mostly they were portraits of students from the local schools, but occasionally I ran across an image unlike anything I’d ever seen.

  Like this one:

  Apparently Miley, in addition to photographing Robert E. Lee, enjoyed traveling around Rockbridge County taking pictures, in many cases damn near the same ones I was taking a century or so later.

  Several of the pictures I recognized as my own farm, the exact river scenes I had known since childhood.

  Although he didn’t have quite the bizarre cast of characters that Mike Disfarmer of Arkansas or Charles Van Schaick of Wisconsin had, Michael Miley still took some eye-popping portraits:

  What was this nameless, pain-haunted woman entrusting to the untender indifference of time? When I first printed this image in 1973, that question inspired a series of poems, Early Pictures, which became part of my master’s thesis for my creative writing degree at Hollins College.

  The print is pinned above the typewriter.

  Her molten eyes press for my attention

  … behind them

  the appalling plunge of promises…

  She dressed in the black lace of lost nights

  and her eyes

  lunged toward the lens.

  Many of Miley’s pictures were memorable like this, and I realize now how often I have retrieved them from my deep pictorial reservoir to unconsciously reinterpret them.

  If Michael Miley were peering over my shoulder as I make comparisons between his work and mine, I’m sure he’d be appalled by the shoddy technique of my pictures and the way I am inspired by what, for him, were probably his most embarrassing failures: the overexposed, weirdly stained, solarized, and fogged images that he, for whatever reason, didn’t scrape from the glass. But, not to get all woo-woo about it, possibly I am looking at those failed Mileys with what E. P. Thompson called “the enormous condescension of posterity,” and in fact Miley hadn’t scraped those images from the glass because he hoped that one day someone would hold them to the light, gasping at their percipience just the way I did. Either way, he surely would have forgiven me if he had watched how, throughout the late 1970s, I cleaned, printed, and filed his life’s work, saving it from ruin.

  That time spent studying the wet-plate collodion aesthetic, though not rewarded monetarily, paid dividends when it came time to execute the High Museum commission. Not yet equipped for making actual collodion plates, I found I could mimic them using ortho film, a graphic arts film characterized by extremely high contrast. After a full decade of taking the family pictures, whose aesthetic success depended on technique so precise as to out-Ansel the most meticulous Adams, I decidedly welcomed the careless aesthetic of shooting with ortho.

  I’d never been exactly conscientious about metering the light to the perfect Zone 5 middle gray, but with the unpredictable ortho film and a light-bouncing shutterless brass lens, I now hardly bothered to take readings at all, using my hand and the dark cloth to control the light.

  When the time came to develop the negatives, if there was a tray of used-up print developer headed for the drain I’d just slop the ortho in it; no pre-soak, no painstaking temperature control, no replenishment, and, best of all, no darkness. Ortho could be processed under the safelight.

  I was having fun again, just like those first months with my father’s Leica. The process with the ortho was so much less freighted and required none of that meticulous capital T Technique, which can be, as the poet Charles Wright once observed, like a spider’s web without the spider: it shimmers and snags but it doesn’t necessarily kill. I was hoping to do all three: to shimmer, to snag, and to kill… and have a good time in the process.

  And I did for a while, but after a year or so of working with ortho I found more shimmer than snag and kill, and decided to make the technical and aesthetic leap to wet-plate collodion. This required a complete retooling: an 8 × 10 inch camera set up especially for wet plate with custom-made film holders sized for glass, a traveling darkroom for the Suburban, and a collection of esoteric and explosive chemicals.

  With the help of France and Mark Osterman, who had modernized the old formulas, I slowly learned all the arcana and found that I loved the whole process. Polishing the glass with a compound so ancient that the tin had a thirty-nine-cent price tag on it from a long-extinct hardware store, I welcomed the stupefaction produced by the humble buffing motions. Preparing to “flow the plate,” I would reverently unscrew the collodion bottle and when it emitted its fragrant hiss of heavy ether take in a lungful. Then with the splay-fingered grace of a French waiter carrying a tray, I balanced the glass plate and poured the thick amber collodion onto it, watching for the chilly frisson as the ether evaporated.

 
; The exotically tempting smell of ether—the drug of choice for Rimbaud, Rossetti, and Verlaine, poets of the age of decadence—produced in me a sense of genial well-being and didn’t do a thing to diminish my natural romanticism. It also didn’t appear to diminish my motor skills (though my liver might have taken a beating), or my tendencies toward ritualistic creative expression. When I was shooting with collodion, I wasn’t just snapping a picture. I was fashioning, with fetishistic ceremony, an object whose ragged black edges gave it the appearance of having been torn from time itself. The whole operation had a contemplative, solemn, even memorial feel to it. There was gravitas to the act, as if it were a form of Holy Communion, a sacrament my upbringing had left me woefully unfamiliar with.

  At the same time, despite the solemnity, I tried to remain flexible and open to the vagaries of chance; like Napoleon, I figured that luck, aesthetic luck included, is just the ability to exploit accidents. I grew to welcome the ripply flaws caused by a breeze or the tiny mote of dust, which ideally would settle right where I needed a comet-like streak, or the emulsion that peeled away from the plate in the corner where I hadn’t liked that telephone line anyway. Unlike the young narrator in Swann’s Way praying for the angel of certainty to visit him in his bedroom, I found myself praying for the angel of uncertainty. And many times she visited my plates, bestowing upon them essential peculiarities, persuasive consequence, intrigue, drama, and allegory.

  Similar in ways to working with ortho film, I found the wet-plate collodion process could give both freedom of expression and the satisfaction of ceremonial process, as if someone had sewn Jackson Pollock’s paint-slinging arm onto a body controlled by the brain of Seurat. It was the perfect technique, I now realize, for the granddaughter of that sentimental but methodical Welshman to use on her travels to the nostalgia-drenched Deep South.

  And so in 1998, right after bluffing Virginia Farm Credit out of the loan for the farm, I set out on the first of my several trips down into Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. The Suburban was packed to the headliner with coolers of film, smaller coolers with food and booze, nearly identical cylinders of sleeping, film-changing, and tent bags, the lunchbox-sized, primitive cell phone that Larry insisted I take, folders with heavily annotated maps, and in the far back, the darkroom with stacks of frame-quality glass, silver-blackened trays, and explosive, burping bottles of ether-based chemicals.

  Because it was a chilly early spring day when I started out, I drove with the windows rolled up. By the time I’d been on the road for a few hours, I realized that I was drunker than if I’d been knocking back shots of moonshine. Quickly rolling down the windows, I was spared a traffic stop in which I would most certainly have been arrested for driving, shit-faced drunk, what was effectively a rolling bomb.

  So explosive is ether, I was once told by an alarmed pharmaceutical rep, that even flicking on a faulty light switch could cause a canister to blast apart. I had called her to inquire casually about the twenty-liter tank of ether that UPS had dropped, I feared literally, at the house while I was out shopping. When I found it plunked down in the driveway, bare naked like some pudgy unexploded nuke, I had rolled it onto a handcart and hauled it into the shop where the wood furnace that heats our entire compound was burning away.

  The pharma rep so terrified me about the volatility of the ether bomb next to the woodstove that I hung up, ran down to the shop, and rolled it back out to the driveway. Grasping it around the midsection, I placed it gently in the front seat of the car, buckled it in tighter than if it were Baby Jesus, and drove like a little old lady to VMI, whose chemistry department I had alerted to our arrival. Creeping along the parade ground, I was met by cadets dressed in what looked like Tyvek. Stopping traffic, they unloaded my own little Fat Boy and put it in their freezer room for me to draw down into smaller containers.

  I took a number of those smaller bottles, swaddled in bubble-wrap, for the trip south, praying that my rolling darkroom cum bomb didn’t get rear-ended by some meth-head who’d unknowingly met his chemical match. Once I got to the warmer temperatures, I kept the windows down and, sober, made Mississippi by nightfall. That’s when the ecstatic time began, and it had nothing to do with ether.

  In Poetics of Music, Igor Stravinsky distinguishes between the regular old, precisely quantifiable kind of time, and that giddy, bedlamite, psychological time we all know and crave (to varying degrees). For me, once those shotgun shacks began to appear along the road, I broke through into that transcendent dimension of revelation and elation that gleefully eludes Stravinsky’s quantifiable time. The lazy shafts of late evening Mississippi sun heightened this time-unraveling sensation, illuminating vortices of cotton flies, like hundreds of bright, slow-motion tornadoes alighting upon the dark fields. I took lungfuls of the yeasty, essential smells that came in my open windows, the sweet stink of exuberant fecundity.

  I stopped whenever I saw something that felt like a photograph or held some mystery or happened to catch the light in an alluring way: half a baby doll thrown in a ditch around which vultures circled, a cotton-ginning operation sending up spumes of light-struck dust, a burned-down clapboard church. Barely touching the accelerator, I stuck my head out the window, resting my chin on my wrist and watching the scenery crawl by with the calculating attitude of a cat measuring the distance from floor to countertop. Occasionally I’d glance into the rearview mirror to discover a string of cars, their drivers anxiously craning their necks to see what the holdup was. I would continue this until it was too dark to photograph (although one night I made a two-hour exposure, this one on Lake Pontchartrain)

  and eventually find a campground where I could pull in under the murmurous pines and use the cinder block bathhouse illuminated all night by bug-swarmed amber bulbs.

  Early in the trip I met a friendly couple at a lecture in northern Mississippi. I told them what I was doing, and they asked where I was staying. In the back of the Suburban, I told them, then, as a joke, asked them if they wouldn’t happen to have a furnished antebellum house in Louisiana where I could live for a week. Oh, and ha-ha, I wanted this, too: not just a free house, but a free house with killer pictures within a few feet of the back door.

  After sharing a glance, they turned to me with apologetic dismay and said that their family had such a house, but it was in Mississippi, three miles from the Louisiana border. Could it possibly suit anyway?

  Of course I took them up on it, and this, I swear, was the killer picture right outside the back door the very first morning:

  Not only was the key under the mat as promised, but the sheets were clean and the refrigerator stocked. Occasionally I’d come in exhausted and hungry and there on the counter I’d find a still-warm casserole covered with tinfoil. As is the genteel southern custom, a serving-sized spoonful would be missing from it, with a note saying they just couldn’t finish it, and hoped I “might get some use out of it.”

  This gesture, a slice out of the ham or a sliver from the pie, is to ensure that the recipient is not made uncomfortable by the generosity, but in my case, their generosity extended well beyond a casserole, and I was already uncomfortably far in their debt. On the morning I left, they brought me fresh biscuits and homemade sausage.

  Total strangers. The kindness of total strangers: the sweet gestures of blind trust and welcome, the common and miraculous somehow made one. It makes me weep. I weep for the great heart of the South, the flawed human heart.

  The road out of Greenwood, Mississippi, slices through loess hills soft as spoon bread, dropping down precipitously into the black ferment of the Delta. As I made my way down, oncoming drivers laboring up the steep lane opposite never failed to raise from the steering wheel a welcoming forefinger, the universal farmer’s salute. And not just the congenial black faces behind the wheels of the low-slung Grands Prix and Catalinas, but also the good ol’ boys in late-model, multi-antennaed white F-150 pickups, the NRA sticker on the back window just below the shotgun.

  It was just such a truck
that I heard coming slowly across the fields where I was photographing a burned-down ruin of a plantation house; I knew that distinctive Ford engine noise. Not that I could see it; I couldn’t. I was stuck under the darkroom curtains at the back of the Suburban with a newly sensitized plate that I wasn’t about to ruin by looking out.

  The problem was, I was in deep trespassing shit. I had been driving way out in the country, miles from any paved road, when I had seen these siren-song columns, the home they once supported long burned to the ground, surrounded by live oaks trailing Spanish moss. Irresistible. The hitch was that they were behind a fence hung every several feet with No Trespassing signs, and they purported to mean business: “Trespassers will be Shot,” “Violators will be shot, survivors will be shot again.” That kind of thing.

  Like Odysseus untied, tantalized by the vision of these columns, I pushed the Suburban through a gap I found in the barbed wire, sailed right in, and set to work. When I heard the pissed-off sound of that truck approaching I knew I had more problems than a run-over dog. Under the dark cloth I prepared my most ingratiating grin.

  The engine cut off, and everything was silent save the ticking of cooling metal. After a few uneasy moments the door opened, and I heard footsteps approaching. In the pause that followed I imagined a gun barrel being raised by a Bull Connor–ish man to that part of the dark cloth where my back, given the evidence of the legs below, would be.

  “Awful nice day for taking a picture,” the gentlest of southern voices spoke to the dark cloth. Inside it, I couldn’t believe my ears.