Far and Away

I * L O V E * Trafalgar Square.  You never quite know who you'll meet there, or, sometimes how you'll communicate with them.

This is a lovely Japanese woman, whom I met on the Square.  She was bravely traveling alone without a word of English in her vocabulary.  Somehow, we managed with what I like to think of as international sign-language and the photos we'd logged on our cameras that day.  She was making her way across London, photographing herself in front monuments, buildings and bridges. I had on my camera what a friend calls "vacation snaps", only not my vacation.  A visual log of conversations missed or started.

When I was a student in college, in the early 1980s, I used to take off for the hills on weekends.  Literally.  The hills of Appalachia.  I'd go as far as half of my pocket money would take me, end up in some small town, and sit myself down in the public square with my camera.  Even when it had no film (and there usually wasn't film - I couldn't afford it), I'd point it at the passing traffic. Invariably someone would stop.  A conversation would pick up.  I'd be invited off for dinner and hard liquor. 

I can't tell you the number of times I heard, from those who took me away and gave me a room for the night, that I was incredibly stupid.  I suppose that the Silence of the Lambs was a possibility.  But, it struck me that if you invite a stranger into your house, the stupidity was mutual.  — It strikes me now, this is a person I've hidden from almost all of you.  Something about a photo of a woman whom I really couldn't talk to reveals it.  Maybe it's just age, with its impulse to review what is written in, as a preacher I met called, "The Lord's little book of light".

I met all sorts of people.  Grannies who lost sons to the big cities up north or on the coast, and, who just wanted to feed someone.  Single men who wanted to talk about life far away.  Some were sailors, the closer I got to the sea.  I was taken in by couples, who wanted to talk about red-neck music, or, who spoke a language I barely understood.  Sometimes, we went to backwoods bars that smelled of beer on oak floors.  Then, there was Nate, the fellow who lived on a tobacco farm — had several barns in which to dry staked shoots — converted one into a disco.  A disco in the middle of nowhere, complete with mirrored ball and choreographed colored lights.  We kept in touch, infrequently.  I learned last year, he died in a car crash, broadsided at the intersection of two roads crossing a flat field in Indiana.  He had to cross the Ohio River on a ferry from western Kentucky to ride to his death; there's something poetically ancient in this fact.  There was the lesbian couple who'd been together for ages.  I remember they ordered what would be my first Hawaiian pizza.  The delivery boy knew them both well enough to come in for a Coke.  This was a time when the broadsheet of America outside small towns would have run them out.  There were good up-standing Christian women, and, small-town bankers, and, students from local colleges.  The latter wanted to talk about life in the "sin city" I'd come from, some thumped bibles, others were liberal with weed and dreamed of moving on.  I met police and undercover cops.  The undercover boys — they were always young — would come sailing into the public square like they owned it.  They wore tight fitting jeans and shirts untucked.  It was the black shoes and white socks, gave them away.  Then, there were the conflicted, usually male high-school teachers and seminarians, who just wanted to talk all night about nothing in particular.  Soft drinks were their choice of beverage; they needed a clear head, unless they took an impulse to action.

I wish, now, that I'd had film in the camera.  Their stories would come back to me the more easily if I had had photos to linger over.

Generations (above).  The elevator on Trafalgar Square is a glass cube.  With reflections of cloud cover imposing themselves, it seemed they might sail away into the sky.

Incidental Realities

"The majority of correspondence that we receive on this topic," were the first words I heard when channel surfing recently, after moving to the United Kingdom. It was a voice from the States that had seemed to follow me here. Sally Jesse Raphael was summarizing the statistics of alienation. "Four of five people," she said, "suspect that they were adopted, displaced at birth, or ..." were otherwise apart from the family that claims them. I am one of those people.

When I was eighteen, I sent my parents a postcard from a long trip to France. "Home is where the heart is," I wrote, "and, I feel so at home here." My mother would tell me, not long after my return, that she feared I would not come back. She had been aware of my isolation. I was forever, effortlessly seeming to prove my differences from my siblings.

Long before that on warm summers' nights, my brothers would join my father on the front porch. An earphone connected them via their transistor radios to the Reds game, whether downtown or away. Being there was as mandatory as was tossing ball before the sun went down. My escape, then, came in the form of a shortwave radio. After initially listening in on a game I didn't understand, I tuned in at first to English Canadian and British broadcasts and, later, to Quebecois and French. I'd become a traveler, if the only thing that connected me to far off places were the clear skies that carried the signals.

Unlike travelers who make their way in planes, on trains and long-distance buses, I was becoming a solitary traveler. The voices I heard on the radio were the first signs of intelligent life a the universe beyond that in which I lived.

Later, as I began to travel in planes or by train, I found that I'd learned to hear the silences amid conversations. And, as I began carrying a camera with me, even in densely populated cities, I began to notices that I was seeing the spaces between the people. In those few instances where a photograph recorded the presence of another person, I was capturing them in their own solitary states where I felt I'd intruded or from behind, as though they'd already left the moment to me and me alone.

My own sense of reserve, if not of reservation, more recently leaves me traveling populated places with a camera that can be concealed. The resulting images, taken without the aid of view finder, aimlessly focused, usually behind me on subjects even I haven't seen, have begun to suggest a world of everyday introspections, seemingly separated within a common space. I've begun to look at them as "found" photographs, incidental realities.

DEPARTURE

 

Awaiting the departure of my plane from the Port-au-Prince airport. I'd been separated from the Haitian travellers and made to wait in the Diplomatic Lounge. There I placed my camera atop the bar and clicked away aimlessly. In the mirror, it seemed to reflect upon a conversation's pause, a still life with human subjects. It was one of those moments in which the camera seemed an intruder.

A VISION IN PORT-AU-PRINCE

I had come to Port-au-Prince, Haiti on work. It had been a fair walk back to my hotel from the National Archives. Evenings of boredom between work days was often spent photographing the hotel's ceiling fans. It had become a joke among my colleagues: "portrait of a ceiling fan, number 43". When I thought I'd prove that my aimless methods could capture something else, I was shocked to discover that the camera found the ceiling fan nonetheless.

RESTAURANT ARC EN CIEL -
THE RAINBOW ROOM

I set the camera on the table and pressed the button.  Though the open-air restaurant not far from the centre of Port-au-Prince was crowded, those of us eating there to disappear in the taking of the image, leaving only the resaurant workers to their tasks.

THREE WOMEN, TURNED

Most visitors to Aruba go to the beach. I sought out the isolation of the Alto Vista Chapel in the north-western desert. Finding that I wasn't alone in seeking solitude, I decided to allow the camera to photograph the view as I waited for the other tourists to leave. While I held the camera behind my back, taking images without intent, the camera found these three women making their own isolation, forming their own solitary contemplations.

THE BLACK AND THE WHITE

Once inside the Alta Vista Chapel (Aruba), I discovered that I was still not alone. Others were there, in prayer.  And, I felt it disrespectful of them to photograph. I hung the camera to my side, and allowed photographs of the space behind me. The floor seemed to describe the aspirations of my father's religion. The doors seemed both to reflect and belie those aspirations.

TROUGH

Again, I'd set out for another location on Aruba that I though would led itself to isolation. When I arrived the Donkey Sanctuary was a solitary place. But no sooner had I taken the cap off of my camera, a bus of tourists arrived. As I lowered my camera, finder still at the ready, the camera captured a world divided between natural forms and man made lines. The interjection of granny-smith-apple green seemed to suggest that the man made was forcing itself upon nature.

RESEARCHER

I had come to London with a visitor who was interested in seeing the mineral collections at the Museum of Natural History. I find myself bored inside museums, I'd rather look at the museum building itself. The building, more than its collections, express purpose. Here, my camera found the perfect sense of purpose within the building.

THE RED HAIRED WOMAN IN ORANGE LIGHT

She had been intently examining the Museum of Natural History collections when I first saw her. Yet, when my camera saw her, it was as she passed from one room to another, alone and in sympathetic light.

THE HUSBAND

A husband goes shopping with his wife. The idea of lingerie may even turn him on. But, once he in the store, he's bored out of his mind for wont of a living model. My camera finds that a husband who follows his wife to the museum may be equally bored. And, so still, he might be one of the camera's specimens.

THE RED LIGHT

Crossing a busy intersection, my camera seems to find the only people who cannot be seen, those closed away in their cars, stopped cold in their tracks.

WAITING

With a queue stretching out the door, it's hard to imagine being in a fast-food restaurant and finding oneself entirely alone. Actually, this is often where I find myself. In that sense, it was surprising to see that my camera had somehow managed to take a self-portrait.