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.The first one hit me between the eyes.A skull.A skull hidden behind a model’s face.The skull beneath the skin.The face was perfectly made-up, vacant, a doll’s face.Only upon closer inspection could the shadows be seen as hollow spaces where the eyes used to be.Only at a certain angle did the sharply curved lips cover skeleton teeth.It hit me then.What she meant by saying she wasn’t exactly an amateur.“Oh, my God.I saw your show at the Witkin.” The Witkin Gallery was the most prestigious photography gallery in New York City, which made it the best in the world.I clapped my hand to my mouth.“I can’t believe this.I really loved your stuff.You want to know the truth, I had a pretty bad case of photo envy for a while.I kept thinking, Why am I even bothering to take pictures anymore? I’ll never do anything that good.”She didn’t simper.She didn’t even say thank you.She frowned a little and asked, “You don’t think it owes too much to Jerry Uelsmann?”I laughed.“The mark of a true artist.Never think your work is good enough.There’s always room for criticism.”“Yes, but you haven’t answered the question.”“Well, he does double exposure too, so I guess there’s a connection.But you added color to some of yours, which he never does.You also pushed the envelope of the grotesque.I liked that clown series a lot.Nothing more sinister than a clown.”Now she inclined her head in a gracious gesture and said, “Thank you.It means a lot when people who know what they’re talking about like my work.”People who know what they’re talking about.Nellis Cartwright had just called me “people who know what they’re talking about.” I felt a hot rush of pleasure and pride.“You really like double exposure.”“Yes.I’ve been experimenting with multiple exposures.Sometimes double, sometimes triple.”“How do you do a triple exposure?” My eyes traveled back to the skull-face.I wondered if the model had seen the finished image.If she had, she’d never view her profession the same way again; she’d always be aware that her beauty masked the bony truth of death.One more layer, one more detail, emerged upon that closer look.Out of one of the hollow eyes, a snake’s head peered with beady eyes.Creepy.Seriously creepy.“You double-expose in the camera,” she explained, the tiny smile at the corner of her mouth telling me she’d noticed that I’d noticed.“That gives you a double image on the negative.Then you expose a different negative on the paper, and before you print it, you expose the double negative over that.Triple exposure.”Now I turned toward her.“That must take an enormous amount of control.Preplanning.It doesn’t just happen by accident.”She smiled, revealing tiny, perfect teeth like grains of rice.“It did the first time,” she admitted.“But I found the result so provocative that I decided to play with it a little bit.”She pointed to a photo on the other side of the room, above one of Jerry’s giant speakers.I walked toward it, seeing only a marvelously intricate tree, all twisted and misshapen, the grain revealed by a bleaching wind.As I grew closer, I saw the naked female body in the tree’s trunk.What had seemed to be a knot was a breast; what had appeared to be a knothole was the woman’s vagina.Her arms were outstretched, merged with bare branches.It was a disturbing image.Was the woman one with the tree, a wood nymph dancing in the wind, her arm-branches swaying in ecstasy? Or was she trapped inside the wood, screaming for release?Then I reached the photo itself.The woman’s hair was on fire.Flames peered from the tangled branches, rising upward from the woman’s forehead, mingling with the long wavy hair that billowed upward into the tree.Now the truth was clear.Her undulating body was not writhing with pleasure, but with pain.Or did ecstasy and agony coexist, two sides of the same coin?The tree and the woman were in black-and-white, printed on soft, almost sepia-toned paper, but the fire was almost yellow, almost in color.“It’s a platinum print,” Nellis said.“On handmade Japanese paper.And the flames are hand-colored.”“What do you call it?”“I don’t know yet.Maybe something neutral, like Tree: Number Four.”“I always liked those surrealist names.You know, the ones that have nothing to do with the picture itself.The ones that raise more questions than they answer.”“I haven’t shown it yet.Maybe I never will.”“Too personal?”“Too self-indulgent.Work should be more disciplined.Less—oh, I don’t know.” Nellis ran her hands through her white-blond hair.“Less embarrassing, I suppose.I can just imagine what the critics would say if they saw this.”“You shouldn’t worry about critics.Just do what—”“That’s easy for you to say.” Her tentative tone was gone; she was shrill in her indignant protest.“You don’t know what it’s like to pour your whole soul into your work and have someone come along and dismiss it with a few patronizing words.And don’t tell me that doesn’t matter, because it does.It means the next gallery isn’t going to be as welcoming.It means the next time I apply for a grant, I might not get it.It means I can’t support myself without taking some other job that takes me away from my work.So don’t tell me to forget about the critics.They’re the people who make the difference between my being a working photographer and a—”“Look, I’m sorry.” I raised my hands in a gesture of concession.“You’re right.I don’t know anything about being a professional artist.It was the kind of cliché people say all the time, and I just didn’t think.”“Oh, God, I can’t believe I lashed out at you like that [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]