The Silver Age (9 page)

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 concrete 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.

Stephan knew it was time to lay off, but he couldn’t let
go without one last gambit. “It’s not just your business, though, Bill. It’s
also your passion, your calling. Am I right?”

Bill clicked the mouse and turned to face him again.
“Sure it is,” he said. “But let me tell you, my friend, it’s hard to experience
passion when you’re wondering whether your next rent cheque is going to clear.”

As he spoke, the printer leapt into action. After a few
preliminary buzzes and squawks – a kind of digital throat clearing – it began
to grind out a job. Curious, Stephan placed his hand on the device’s plastic
sheath as it worked. There was something about the way it vibrated as it ran
that felt cheap to him, makeshift.

“I just don’t know, Bill,” he admitted. “I don’t want to
be a naysayer, but it seems like a toy, a gimmick. A cool one, I admit.”

“I kind of agree with you, Stephan,” Bill said. “But look
at it this way: back in the early days of photography, Polaroids were mainly
considered a low-quality consumer thing. Then the pros started using them for
all kinds of artful stuff. Colour film, too. When colour first came out,
Stieglitz and that whole group said the colour process was just a cheap way of
‘dyeing’ the shots. They said it wasn’t real photography at all. Only black and
white was real to them.”

The printer paused, then casually spat out the finished
job, as if saying “meh.” Bill picked it up, gave it a brief appraisal, and
handed it over without comment. It was a test page, made up of several images –
a generic baby shot, a smiling woman, a field of yellow flowers, a Venice
streetscape. The quality was more than passable, Stephan had to admit, but you
could tell right away that it wasn’t real film. There was something just a
little bit off in the colours, not that the generic test images were helping
the cause.

“Well?” Bill asked.

“Not my thing, I guess.”

“So you’ll keep shooting film no matter what happens out
there?”

Stephan handed back the print. “I’m sure other people
will do great stuff with digital,” he said, sticking to his guns. “But it’s not
me. Film photography – that’s my craft, not this other… thing.”

Bill smiled, looking wistful. “Well, I admire your
conviction. And don’t worry – I’m still here for you. It’s not like I’m
shutting down our old black-and-white darkrooms or selling off my colour
processing machines. Not yet, anyway. You’re not the only purist among my loyal
clientele, you know.”

“I know, Bill, and I’m grateful. Really.”

“Just remember, the world is never at rest.”

“The river flows on.”

“That’s right. It does.”

*  *  *  *  *

His show’s opening was in full swing, the voices of the
guests echoing off hardwood and exposed brick as they sipped champagne and
jockeyed for conversational pre-eminence. Passersby on Queen Street had a full
view of the yellow-lit enclave within which the event was taking place, through
floor-to-ceiling front windows. Had he still been a newcomer to the city,
Stephan would have felt nothing but annoyance walking past such a scene. Most
likely he would have written it off as nothing but a bunch of unbearable
phonies basking in their own self-described wonderfulness. But now, at the
centre of something, he was content.

His parents had made the trip out from the suburbs, and
he found that he was touched by their obvious pride in his success. (His father
had even refrained from wearing his old Pepsi jacket, much to Stephan’s
relief.) As promised, Pete and Sally had shown up, too. Pete gave Stephan a big
whack on the back as his friend welcomed him, then announced that he was
Stephan’s muse. (“Muses come in all sizes – and genders.”)

A young art critic from the
Telegraph
was also
among the guests. Stephan took it as a good indication of his rising status,
since the
Telegraph
’s space for arts coverage, let alone photography,
had withered away in recent years, and the paper’s editors tended to reserve
what space they had left for established names. She cornered him early in the
evening for an impromptu interview, asking him about his influences and noting
down his thoughts. She was quite cute, as it happened, and he found himself
flirting with her a little.

And of course, colleagues from the photography and
magazine trades had come to drink free alcohol and obscure their jealousy
behind subtle digs at his talent (the ultimate compliment). From
This City
came
Amanda, Carol and Nathan – the latter lightly buzzed on artisanal beers and in
excellent form, reeling off scandalous anecdotes like a kind of hyper-erudite
juke box. And a group from Bullmoose was on hand, including Anne Etherington
and Joanne Hendry (despite the publication’s laddish content, it was staffed
primarily by soft-spoken females). And Saul Lish, the gentle-hearted stunt
journalist, fresh off a stint living in a shack in an infamous local shantytown
and now writing up a memoir of the experience.