At the appointed time, I went to the foyer where Claudia Fischhoff stood with a sheaf of papers clasped to her chest. I gathered that her glasses, which disfigured her lovely face like one of those black bars for concealing someone’s identity in a photograph, were a kind of disguise. She wanted to be taken more seriously than she supposed her looks allowed.
Auerbach sloped in through the emergency exit. A dozen heads turned in his direction. I was expecting an old soldier in boots and beret, but his baggy trousers and ill-fitting jacket made him look like an immigrant. If you’d passed him in the street, you might have thought he was a shopkeeper, the better sort of greengrocer. The art lovers, the fans were mainly women, I noticed. The men must be watching the Currie Cup on TV or making potjies. It was all the rage.
‘Good afternoon people,’ Claudia said. ‘Please stand a bit closer. If you can take one of these and pass the rest on …’ The stack of papers listing titles and prices went round the circle.
‘Saul Auerbach needs no introduction,’ she said. The man in question stood beside her, head down, shifting from one scuffed shoe to the other, like a schoolboy summoned before the class to recite some Tennyson. His face was flushed and his hair, which had thinned since our last meeting, stuck out at weird angles. He looked as if he’d been playing football with the security guards in the car park a minute ago.
Despite her opening line, Claudia proceeded to give an overview of Auerbach’s career. While she was speaking, he fiddled with the fringes of his scarf and shrugged his arms inside the jacket, and glanced up from time to time to see whether we were still there. Claudia said that Auerbach was a great photographer, more than a photographer, an artist, a great artist, a colossus bestriding the frontier between photography and art, which had been portrayed as hostile territories too often in the past. After the facts and figures of his life — including his captaincy of the high-school cricket team — she swept through his early career, from his apprenticeship as a wedding photographer to his first documentary essays, which were notable for their gritty realism, she said, before turning to the major periods represented on the current exhibition in more detail. The thread that joined all these works, disparate as they might appear, she thought, was their honesty. The hand may have trembled, but the eye had never flinched.
And with that she thanked us for coming and gave the artist the floor.
Through all of this, Auerbach had been shrinking until the jacket appeared to fit him. At our applause, he started back into his ordinary size, thanked Claudia for her kind words and declared that he was not an artist. He was barely a photographer, he was still learning the craft. One of these days he hoped to take a really good photograph. He could feel that moment drawing closer. Then he thanked us for coming and suggested that we start where he had started, at the beginning. We trooped after him towards the 1950s.
Like many reluctant public speakers, Auerbach was articulate and engaging. Although he started out mumbling into his shirtfront, he grew more at ease with his audience photo by photo, and began to address us more directly. He had much to say about his work and its meaning, recalling places and people in great detail. Some of it smacked of the stage: you could tell that he had said it before. Disarmingly, though, the photos still surprised him, and despite having lived with them for decades, he seemed to discover new aspects of them even as he spoke. Once or twice, he stood staring at an image as if it had been made by someone else and smuggled in without his knowledge.
In every classroom, even one as informal as this, a few people dominate. We had an architect (I assumed) who spoke about the buildings in the photos as if the buildings themselves could speak — this one was glibly articulate, that one made a vertical statement, another declared its intentions in stone. Her language was so familiar to me — the world is speaking, things are mouthing off, they won’t shut up for love or money — that for a moment she looked like someone I knew. Besides this person, we had an earnest young woman who asked questions about the light and wrote the answers in a notebook. The only other man in the group, a pensioner with a startling pelt of ginger and white hair on his head and face and chest, hung back whenever we shuffled after Auerbach, leaned in close to some corner of the work we had finished discussing, until his horned eyebrows were nearly crumpled against the glass, and examined the surface minutely. The gesture reminded me of my optician zooming in with her penlight to shine a beam at my retina.
Would he recognize me? I had been wondering about this ever since I read the notice in the paper. It was half the reason I was here. I found myself pressing forward when the circle formed, foregrounding my face, dangling it there to be snapped. Of course, he had no reason to remember me; we had met just once and I had done nothing since then to distinguish myself. I had changed too, the long hair and the beard were gone, I was ten kilos heavier. But then the man was a photographer with a famously observant eye. I dangled my face hopefully, but there was no flicker of recognition.
We entered the second exhibition room. Another questioner joined the discussion. This particular image, she said, reminded her of Dorothea Lange’s photographs of American workers in the Depression. What did he think of Lange’s work? Was she an influence? Or should one rather look to the usual suspects like Walker Evans?
At last we got to the third room, where the accidental portraits hung. Veronica and Mrs Ditton were side by side on the far wall. We began to circulate in an anticlockwise direction. It was only now that I realized we had been going clockwise in the other rooms. Although the change was almost certainly insignificant, once it had struck me I couldn’t put it out of my mind. It made some subtle difference to my orientation. I tried to figure out what it was, half-remembering something about the circulation of consumers in supermarkets and the optimal disposition of shelves, gondolas and fridges, but the discussion between Auerbach and the art lovers kept disrupting my thoughts. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the ginger man, the one who reminded me of a raccoon although I have never actually seen such an animal, smelling a corner of one of the photos.
People were always complaining that he was overly concerned with buildings, Auerbach said, and insufficiently concerned with the people who lived in them. But in truth he had always been photographing both. If all his negatives were to be classified into those with people and those without, he was prepared to wager it would be an equal split. In any event, the distinction was immaterial, because people made the buildings and buildings shaped the people.
The architect said it was a classic chicken-and-egg situation, absolutely.
It seemed to me that this might be related to the distinction between clockwise and anticlockwise, but I couldn’t think it through because the light specialist was asking another question. On the light, she said, and how he approached it: did he regard the light that struck a human cheekbone in the same way as the light that struck the side of a barn? Say.
The portrait of Veronica loomed. When we got there, I would introduce myself. ‘You don’t remember me, but I was there when you took this photograph …’
The furry ginger man slumped into a corner to examine the brickwork on a Dutch Reformed church.
We stopped at the portrait of a young girl playing the organ. Before Auerbach could say anything about it, a woman who had been quiet until then raised her hand, like a shy schoolgirl, and said, ‘Mr Auerbach, I wonder if you remember me …?’