La Macchina Fotografica

I often find myself out on a limb—way off on a tangent. It’s a borderline condition, not enough OCD for medication, but I do obsess a bit much on my art projects. Then—poof—they burn out like a pop of flash powder. So is it with my window-reflections series.

I have no idea from where these things come. Such is the mercurial nature of creativity. I suppose my fascination with shop-window reflections originates from an early and consistent love of the Eugene Atget. His Parisian windows are among the most haunting images I’ve ever known. He was reportedly a shy man who preferred to photograph a deserted Paris in the early hours of the day. His loneliness shows in most every image and proves to me that what we choose to photograph is really, and ultimately, ourselves.

And so it is that today I end my recent adventures down the rabbit hole of reflective images. Readers of this blog have suffered enough. Tomorrow it’s back to the rock-solid world. The earth shall be firm under my feet. Everything will be clear and understandable. Life will make sense. The camera shall reveal all. Goodbye reflections.

Poof.

A good photograph is like a good hound dog, dumb, but eloquent. – Eugene Atget

It’s a brisk day in Northern California. I pull my coat collar tight up to my neck. This stops the downward draft that goes all the way to my waist. The overall visual effect makes me look like one of those little spies in Spy vs. Spy (Mad Magazine, circa 1968). On this day, I feel like the black spy waiting for the white spy’s engagement. I prowl the sidewalks on the balls of my feet—the way cats do.

I look at a shop window and into my reflection. I’m missing my fedora, a dandy Borsalino that I found in Verona on a distant day when I was then, too, cold and brooding. Today I wear a baseball cap, a feeble substitute. I wonder why I don’t wear the fedora more often, but, elegant hats in America just don’t seem right. My reflection looks less like a spy and more like a typical Marin County male just past his prime.

I shake myself of my self-absorption long enough to notice a woman. She’s also looking at my reflection.Given that I’m wearing sunglasses I don’t think she knows that I’m looking back at her. It is an eery encounter. I lift my camera gently, focus…and squeeze the shutter release. She’s still staring so I make five more images.

I walk off. And I wonder about her and her life’s story, figuring we’ll never cross paths again. Then I return to my spy fantasy and look for another window and another reflection. By now my collar has fallen so I pull it up again. The draft is yet again uncomfortable.

Outside looking in. Fourth Street is dead on the Monday of a three-day weekend. There is a sterile scent of nothingness in the air. I escaped from the studio to see the world and the world stayed home. I’m just slightly out-of-sync on the tail end of a twilight-zone holiday.

President’s Day weekend is among the strangest long weekends. Not exactly the birthday of any one president, it is little more than an excuse for ski weekend. No one seems to even think of Washington or Lincoln or anyone other president. On the way to San Rafael I did see one of those tea-party guys hang a pathetic little “Impeach” sign on a chain-link fence along Highway 101. I give him credit. At least he was thinking about presidents on President’s Day. But his creepy little sign just added to the weirdness of the abandoned day.

Outside looking in. There’s nothing left to do but smoosh my face against empty shop windows. Every light in every window is off. Dark. I come upon a closed, glass door. Inside is a stairwell littered with old magazines and phone books. I ask myself why they’re there. Then I imagine one of those old black & white TV shows from my youth where some guy (me) is about to realize that there was a nuclear war and he’s the sole survivor. I wonder how old the magazines are.

Right around noon a couple shops open. The world transforms from monochrome to color. I awaken from my B-grade fantasy and realize that I haven’t given one thought to a single president, dead or alive. The day remains a mystery as do the old magazines behind the glass door. Outside looking in.

The camera makes me feel like a skulking voyeur. Pointing the damned thing at people makes them nervous. Therefore, I oftern walk around with my camera as if I were a cat tiptoeing on a sheet of aluminum foil. Cat owners who have actually seen their feline doing this will appreciate what I mean. More times than not, I want to be invisible.

When I feel myself getting shy or paranoid I start photographing my reflection. I’m a willing subject, even when I’m cranky, and I really don’t care what I look like in my images. Sometimes the worse I look the better the image is.

Besides being a convenient method of self-portrait, the reflection deepens the complexity of an image and reveals the elusiveness of reality. Children intuitively grab at reflections like they do soap bubbles. Both are elusive. Children understand the multiple planes of reality.

A reflection is so deep and complex that each viewer sees something different in it. Whether our own reflection is bouncing back at us or not, reflections are mirrors of our soul. We see into them what we must. And so I photograph them as often as I can, especially when I feel that blasted aluminum foil under my feet.

A lot of my early work, especially the reflections, was about what I call the surrealism of everyday life…picking out the strangeness in the world we live in. Those doors are doors that could lead you to other worlds, or what is behind what is in front of you. – Stephanie Torbert

Suburbia. It feels like a dream in which a towering mountain of wet wool buries my sorry soul deep within it. In that dream I poke my head out of the suffocating mass of animal fur. I am nearly decapitated by a black SUV as it rushes past me. Some crazed woman is taking her child to piano lessons…and she’s running late. Welcome to my suburban postcard from hell.

Deep within this mass of conformity there are pockets of resistance. Yesterday, emphatically not in a dream, I meandered around downtown San Rafael. I stopped in my tracks and blinked. No, I really was awake.

“Curious about…pole dancing?” asked the little handmade sign in the shop window.

Not only was there a book on the art of pole dancing, there were several intriguing outfits of the garter-belt variety. Feeling warm in my overcoat, I looked around to see if anyone was watching me. I stared at the window and deeply into my imagination. A daytime dream emerged. This one has me in a crosswalk. Suddenly one of those SUV mothers ran me over and then got out of her black, suburban-warfare tank. She was dressed in a pole dancing outfit and asked me, “Curious about…pole dancing?” I blinked and shook off the daymare.

Suburban living has its challenges.

Staring at the edge of the canal I look down into the morning light. Lately I’ve preferred looking at the sky’s reflection than directly at the real thing itself. Sometimes the sky is too much for morning; too bright and too vast. Its reflection is nearer and more intimate—something into which I get lost.

Getting lost is the phobia of contemporary society. We’ll do anything to prevent it. We have Google Maps. We have GPS. We have our phones. Soon we’ll carry with us every song, every book, every bit of contact info, and every Word document we own, at all times. Then, in our brave new world, whatever we do, wherever we go, we simply cannot get lost. We will always know where we are.

I now know why getting lost is so frightening. It is losing control. It is letting go. It is looking deep into a reflection until the reflection yields—and becomes something else. Lately, I’ve been looking into morning reflections. And getting lost.

It is later in the day than normal. I prefer walking after sunrise. By now the sun is too high. There are too many people. The park playground is full of screaming kids and their proud, young mothers. No one notices me. I glide past them like a specter.

Just past the screeches I find the tidal pond. A human-contrived ditch, it has gotten more endearing with the years. I now identify with the water hole. As with me, nature has worn down its rough edges. The pond is a mirror that bounces back to me what is of the day. Today it is the shrillness of the gleeful children. It shines and glimmers and sparkles with noise. But looking into it more deeply, it has a darkness that belies the too-bright sky overhead. I stare into it and find a photograph. I slowly squeeze the shutter for one, sweet click. The muses satisfied, I notice that the screeches suddenly turn to cries of delight. My broodiness is left in the shadows. I am free to enjoy the day.

An egret agrees with my better mood as she flies overhead and skids into the pond, breaking up the dark reflections. I hear a child gasp at the spectacle. Then I realize that the child is me.

Like a snapshot, my reflection catches me in a moment of my life. There was a time when I looked forward to a surprise reflection of myself. These days it merely shocks me to see how much I’ve aged since the last reflection. I shake it off and tell myself to stand up straight. It’s hard to find a flattering reflection these days.

My reflection makes me feel like a ghost. I split off into several entities—the “I” that looks at the strange little apparition that is “me.” Is that old guy really me? Before I saw him I felt like a kid. That’s where the shock comes in.

Lately I’ve been looking at my reflection in the waxed finish of old cars. This particular style of reflection seems more fleeting, more amorphous, more me. There’s a timeless quality to a reflection in an old car. The patina matches my own wear and tear. The entire effect is bigger, maybe better, than life.

These days I walk the neighborhood, looking for old, clean cars that have a good polish to them. The rust is mostly localized and contained. They have the best, most ghostly reflections in them. The old cars, like old me, have habits. I find them in predictable places. I check out the car, it reflects back me. I’m always glad that it’s still running, still making its way to this particular spot in the neighborhood. I smile, make a picture and walk on to the next moment of my life.

When I was a very young boy, a neighborhood kid used to come to our back door, asking me if I wanted to play with him. He always had a big smile and a runny nose. He was a pleasant kid with a bad habit. He would draw telephone poles in my books. For some reason he was obsessed with them. We’d be playing in my room, I’d get distracted, then turn around to find a book filled with crayon-drawn telephone poles. Hundreds of them.

I was a fussy boy who didn’t like my stuff to be tampered with or altered in any way. The telephone poles were very distressing to me. I can remember shedding tears over them. It would have been one thing if my neighbor knew how to draw, but he couldn’t. The poles were not good art. I had, for instance, another friend who, several years later, would draw very convincing, fire-breathing dinosaurs on construction paper. I wouldn’t have minded one of those inside my books. That never happened, I only got the ugly poles.

I hadn’t thought of my friend’s telephone poles for many years. A week ago I came across a reflection of a utility pole during a walk along the old railroad tracks near my house. The memories immediately came back. Reflections allow us to look deeper into something, as if we were gazing into a crystal ball. Unexpectedly, I was looking into my past as I stared at the irrigation canal and its inverted telephone pole. I smiled and thought about the angst I’d felt when one of my books was ruined. It seemed so important back then and so very insignificant now. Wishing that I still had one of my other friend’s dinosaur drawings, I made a photo and walked on, lost in the memories of a childhood.

Back when I was a small boy, old people had gazing balls in their gardens. I still remember the first time I encountered one. It seemed alien, a shiny object placed there by strange forces. And for a small boy raised to be cautious, it looked very breakable. I imagined what the adults would say if I’d somehow caused the thing to roll off its pedestal and disintegrate. I remember thinking that a lot when I was young—”Just be careful.”

The gazing ball turned the world into a panorama of great expansion. I remember seeing myself in the context of the shiny surface. I was certainly there, albeit distorted, but I was oddly integral to a larger perspective. I stared and stared into it again. Back then there was less tolerance for the imagination of a child. Adults were very serious, as I recall, and didn’t tolerate frivolous behavior. “He likes to spend a lot of time alone,” I heard my elders whisper on more than one occasion. Gazing balls were good reason to get lost in aloneness. Too bad the adults didn’t let go of their adultness long enough to join me at the shiny orb. Why they had these things, but wouldn’t stare into them, was a mystery to me. The orb’s pedastal was at perfect height for a small boy to continue staring. So I did.

It has always been that way for me and reflections. Now, I like to look into the birdbath in our yard. In its reflection I can see the sky and the giant oak trees that have been here for hundreds of years. One of the oaks died a few years back, just collapsed one day from its own weight. It was a grievous loss. Now the reflection has changed, with a gap to the sky where the tree once was. The reflection seems to be an ideal place to ponder the loss. The bird bath is at perfect height for an adult to continue staring. And so I do.