My explanation must have been even more evasive than I realized. She got the idea that I was talking about taking photographs, my ‘process’ as she put it.
‘Are you a full-time artist?’ she asked.
‘I’m not an artist at all.’
‘You’ve had photos on exhibition.’
‘That’s hardly a recommendation. Saul Auerbach is an artist. I’m just a photographer.’
‘What do you do then?’
‘Commercial work, movie stills and magazines, that sort of thing.’
While I was describing my latest product shoot, she opened the red notebook and leafed through it, and when I paused she said, ‘A new gig for Mr Frosty, quote unquote. I came across that in the Viewfinder. Why “Mr Frosty”, if you don’t mind me asking.’
‘They’re taking the mickey. The joke is that I’m known in the industry as the frozen moment guy. You know, the moment when things teeter, when they hover and vibrate, just before the fall. Capturing it in the real world is no longer a job for a photographer. Anyone can freeze an instant digitally and tinker with it and thaw it out again. You can take a slice of life and poke holes in it, change its colour, put bits in and take bits out until the cows come home. The results might be spectacular, but the magic is second-rate. We’ve all got the same smoke and mirrors.
‘When it comes to these things, I’m like some old geezer who insists on writing with a pencil. I’m no Luddite, I appreciate the technology, it’s just not for me. I still want to stage it all, to set up something foolishly complicated and get it on film, hoping for a small, unlikely miracle. It’s a craft.’
‘There’s a demand?’
‘Only because it’s quaint. It’s like french-polishing or …’
I went to fetch my magazine portfolio — my life’s work — from the studio. When I came back she had the digicam rolling (in a manner of speaking) and she filmed me (ditto) making space on the table and opening the folder. Then she kindly dropped the camera in her bag and we paged through the pulls. What caught her eye, oddly enough, was a fashion series I did for Debenhams: the model’s in loden green and chunky herringbone, according to the caption, perched in the bow of a Canadian canoe with her elbows on her knees, showing the camera a pouting mouth in which margarine wouldn’t melt, while behind her a punter in a flat cap and a tweed jacket teeters over the water on the end of his oar like an overdressed pole-vaulter. The fall guy. In the next liquid moment, when this one unfreezes, there will be a splashdown. It was a long time ago, but I remember the job welclass="underline" the canoe was supposed to be a punt, but what the hell, the budget was tight. I had to get the shot first time, because the stylist didn’t have a spare suit of clothes.
The photographs I’d shown at the Switch Box, my corner of a group exhibition called Public][Private, were of walls. Janie had seen them there and been struck, she said, by their chilly lack of judgement. She showed me a snap of her favourite on her cellphone — ‘I hope you don’t mind, it’s just for reference’ — a bleak suburban wall pierced by a loophole, through which you can see a grim warning notice beside a picture of a hooded cobra: ‘Snake breeding facility — Trespassers beware!’
I laid out the full set of prints.
‘What’s with the walls?’ she asked as we flipped through them.
I tried to explain my longing for the vanished city. As the walls go on rising, the character of the place grows more and more obscure. The mood of a street or suburb, that unlikely blend of outlooks expressed by the houses and the people living in them, no longer brushes off on you as you pass. You think there is life behind one guarded façade or another, a mind behind the blank stare, but you cannot be sure.
‘It’s creepy,’ she said, ‘I absolutely agree. It’s like those people at Moyo who eat three courses without taking off their shades. You think they must be watching you, and so you watch them, which is the whole point.’
I take comfort in the debris strewn over the walls: the shadows of numbers pilfered for scrap, the unstrung lyres of electric fencing, the armed response signs, especially the old and weathered ones, which fade unevenly depending on how their colours stand up to the sun. Sometimes the names and numbers of the companies have bleached out entirely while the emblems of snarling dogs and charging elephants persist. All that remains on the oldest signs is two black pistols pointed at one another in a perpetual showdown. Their candour is admirable. They’re empty gestures, like snapped wires and dog-eared spikes. The company faded away years ago, but their boards are still everywhere saying, ‘Bang!’
I had photographed walls all over the city, some of them chanced upon during walks, others spotted from the car, focusing on the clutter, the faded threats, the scars of signs ripped from painted surfaces like sticking plasters. There was nobody to be seen in any of the photos except for one, which showed a woman beside a wooden door in a brick wall.
‘And who is this?’ Janie asked.
‘That’s Mrs Magwaza. She noticed me loitering with intent and came out to see what I wanted. She was the first of my thresholders.’
‘Apparently it’s good strategy for the interviewee to ask a couple of questions,’ I said from the sink, where I was rinsing cups for coffee.
‘Says who? Dr Phil?’
‘I read it in Business Report actually, in one of those motivational columns. Best thing in the paper in my opinion. I guess they were talking about job interviews, but I’m sure it applies everywhere.’
‘What’s the idea?’
‘Asking some questions of your own shows that you’re curious, that you’re interested in the world and other people, in a healthy way.’
‘Your egotism has limits.’
‘Exactly.’
There was a pause while I ground the beans and she read about the Ethiopian coffee-drinking ceremony on the package. Then she said, ‘Ready when you are.’
‘Do you like your job?’
‘Some of it. It’s quite varied, mostly interviews, personality pieces or profiles like this one. I don’t really do straight features. And then I’ve got a blog where I review exhibitions and concerts, as well as art and design books, interior design and landscaping, collectables, coffee-table stuff. It’s a great way to build up a library.
‘On the blog I also offer household hints, taking stains out of carpets, dyeing cottons with indigenous herbal teas, mixing your own environmentally friendly air-fresheners. And then stuff like how to make a snow cave and survive if you’re buried under an avalanche or why everyone should carry a surgical glove and a clove in the cubbyhole. The whole blog has this dualism. It’s like the Book of the Week meets Reuben the Screwman.’
A happy meeting, I thought. I said, ‘That’s incredible.’
‘It’s my thing, it’s what I’m known for.’
I was grinning, but she went on, ‘I’ve got the best advice. The tips are definitive.’
‘For example …’
‘Well.’ She scraped some orange pulp off the rim of the glass on her finger and put it in her mouth. ‘Okay. You know how frustrating it is to get the price tags off things? They make them extra sticky so that shoplifters can’t switch them around. They don’t care what happens when you get the thing home. Some people couldn’t be bothered. Ten years later, the bathroom scale’s still got the bar code stuck to it. Other people can’t wait to get rid of them and every last smear of glue must go, even if they have to swab it off with benzine, it’s like a sign that they’ve taken possession. I’m sort of in-between, it depends on the object. If it’s cheap and nasty, I don’t really mind. Anyway, here’s the tip: if you wave the flame of a cigarette lighter over the tag for a few seconds, it will peel off just like that.’ A castanet click of the fingers. ‘Of course, you’ve got to be careful when you’re playing with fire. It works perfectly on glass, I promise, there’s no need to kill yourself scratching the price off a bottle of wine. It works on books too. Just watch you don’t set the merchandise alight.’