Girl in the Sculpture Garden

 

 By Mark Alice Durant

 

After a day of wandering the streets of New York City c.1979, trying to emulate Robert Frank, I sought respite at the Museum of Modern Art.  MoMA was Mecca, I felt intoxicated just wandering the galleries among the Max Ernsts, Yves Tanguys, and Joseph Cornells.  It was also exhausting. Like a sponge unable to absorb another drop I fell into a chair in the sculpture garden.

I scanned the scene; my Leica nestled in my lap.  In my peripheral vision I sensed a child approaching.  I stood up, turned slightly to my right, took a couple of steps forward and pointed the camera in the direction of a girl crossing the walkway over the reflecting pool.  I hardly knew what I was taking a picture of; the camera was acting like a divining rod pointing toward some buried meaning in the scene before me.  I did not even look through the viewfinder, I just held the camera at arm’s length took one exposure and sat back down in a daze.

Because film needs processing there is an extended period of waiting before discovering what was actually captured in the frame.  The unprocessed exposure is called the latent image. A feeling of excitement can pervade your days, and it can be wildly speculative, that maybe somehow you alone were witness to and captured some special, revelatory moment, although it remains hidden even to you until you develop the film.  Walter Benjamin called this aspect of photography’s potential, the optical unconscious; the idea that the camera can capture what is essentially too transient or ephemeral for the human eye.

When I finally had my film processed back in Boston, I rushed home from the lab to start printing. A quick survey of the contact print confirmed that there was only one image on that 36-exposure roll that seemed promising.  When printing color images there is no safelight, no pale yellow or red glow to guide you, so one operates in complete darkness.  But I moved confidently, placing the negative in the holder, raising the enlarger head as far as it would go until it touched the low ceiling.  Flipping on the enlarger light, I searched for the grains of the negative, bringing them into focus like magic crystals.  I adjusted the aperture on enlarging lens, set the timer, take a test strip out of the box of photo paper, and exposed it at 10, 15, 20, 25, and 30 seconds.

20 minutes later, after a variety of adjustments, I pulled the print of the developing tube, holding it under the light, wet and shiny like a newborn universe.  There are many delights in photography but the moment you first behold an image revealing unanticipated beauty has to be the most powerful.  I felt as if I had just signed a contract with the gods of the ineffable. A portal had been opened that I never knew was there.  My squeamish proclamation that I was an artist could now be justified.

So what did I see in my own picture of the girl in the MoMA Sculpture Garden?  This romantic epiphany I describe is the province of the young; it is precious and rare and I will not tarnish it with my grown-up skepticism. Because I had been photographing inside the museum, I still had a small flash mounted to the camera and the shutter speed was set to 1/30^th of a second. This setting is unusual for outdoor photography as is using a flash. Using a slow shutter speed in combination with the flash produces a kind of smearing effect in which whatever was moving within the frame is sharp and subtly blurry simultaneously.  As if the moment were fixed and unanchored at the same time, like a film frame stuck and fluttering in a projector.  The girl is Asian and holding her arm out away from her body, I couldn’t help but see a visual echo with the iconic image from the Vietnam War of the napalmed girl running down the road.  As if it to mimic in sympathy, an adult arm pokes into the frame from the right.

The horizon is blocked by a scrim of trees, providing a darkened backdrop for the twisted rectangle of the reflecting pool whose extreme corners fit exactly within the parameters of my photograph’s frame. In the background we see a body lying on the ground, sleeping, we assume, but strangely inert.  This lifeless human form seems to have gone prone just feet away from Aristide Maillol’s expressive sculptural figure The River from 1943.  Maillol’s sculpture, originally designed to be a part of a pacifist monument, intended the female body to be upright but mortally wounded. Repurposed for MoMA’s garden, it now writhes ambivalently over the dark water, looking up but heading presumably down.  With all of its unintentional connections and blurry / sharp dichotomies, the image provided a way forward as a photographer. I never again matched the thrilling surprise of that experience but like any artist, I tried to recreate its formula over and over, making images that strained to recreate its enigmatic presence. “Cameras are boxes for transporting appearances”, observes John Berger, which is true enough. But what I learned through this picture and what signaled my break with my teachers was the fact that cameras are also devices for transforming appearances.

Excerpt from the book in progress, Available Light: An Anecdotal History in Photography.  Image and essay ©Mark Alice Durant