Days were dreary — oh yes — especially in a shop stuffed with gray-white gray-black photographs in cellophane sheets that had been loosely sidefiled in cardboard boxes, tag attached, maybe FRENCH XX or COUNTRYSIDE BRITISH or RAILROADS USA. He had three for trees: bare, leafed, chopped. On the walls, clipped to wire hangers that were then hung from nails, were his prizes, displayed so as to discourage buyers. Successfully. So far. For a decade.
Mr. Gab would have six or seven customers on a good day, which is what he would almost audibly say to them when they entered, making the door ring — well it was a rattle really. His stupid assistant would answer most questions, show them the labels on the boxes, wave at the walls hung with hangers, open a filing cabinet or a case for those who fancied the pricier ones, explain the proper technique for sliding a photograph out of its sheathing, demonstrate the underhanded manner of holding it, or, with palms gently placed at edges as if it were a rare recording, explain how one could be safely examined.
The boxes were mostly of a conventional cardboard. They sat on tables or beside tables or under tables as if they’d sat there already a long time: the ink on the labels had faded; the paper of the labels had yellowed; the corners of the labels were munched. Covers were kept closed against dust and light and idle eyes by beanbags, forever in the family, inertly weighing on the boxes’ cardboard flaps. The nails Mr. Gab had driven into the walls were zinc’d, which made them suitable for fastening shingles, but you couldn’t have drawn one out without pulling, along with the shank, large chunks of plaster. The wire hangers themselves were in weary shape. So the pictures hung askew. As if holding on with one hand.
Mr. Gab stocked several versions of the same photograph sometimes. A round red sticker affixed to the wrap signaled a superior print, a green circle indicated one produced from the original negative, but late in its life, whereas a yellow warned the customer that the sheath enclosed a mere reproduction, however excellent it might often be. His red version of rue Rataud was as fine as the one conserved at the Carnavalet, but on the white rectangles with their softly rounded corners which Mr. Gab had pasted to the bottom of each envelope and where he identified the subject, the photographer, the method, and the negative’s likely residence, he had written about the less genuine image, below a yellow ball that suggested caution, the words “trop mauvais état,” a little joke only scholars might understand and enjoy.
Mr. Gab’s provenances were detailed and precise; however, years earlier an envious dealer had accused his rival (for Mr. Gab was then in a dinky shop across from him on another street) (and whom the envious dealer called “Grab,” somehow sensing Mr. Gab’s sensitivity about his name, though unaware that Mr. Gab had become silent in order to avoid being addressed by anyone as “Gabby”) of accepting or otherwise acquiring (during midnight visits and stealthy trips) stolen property. How otherwise, the envious dealer complained, could one account for the presence, in prime condition, of so many rare and important photographs in such shabby shoebox circumstances. “Shoebox” was slanderous, certainly, though nothing had come of these allegations except a shady reputation, thought actually to be desirable in some circles.
A print’s quality depended almost entirely upon its preservation of details, its respect for values. The fog-white sky of rue Rataud, in the version under its cautionary yellow dot, smeared the end of the street so you could not see how or where it turned, walls were muffled, and a hard light made the outlines of the cobbles disappear; while the red-tagged rue Rataud allowed the eye to count windows far away and discern a distant huddle of buildings. In the latter, the spiky rod, whose use he could not fathom, crossed the street in the guise of a determinate dark line; in the former it was dim and insubstantial, as if obscured by smoke. On red’s verbose information label, Mr. Gab had written that his photograph had come to the United States in the luggage of Berenice Abbott from whom he had received a few prime prints of other subjects. If interested, please ask. About the history of yellow, Mr. Gab offered nothing.
The stupid assistant was not sufficiently steeped, so when, as occasionally happened, a customer wished a little history, Mr. Gab would have to hold forth, not reluctantly with regard to the information, which he believed every cultivated person should possess, but reluctantly regards speaking — making noises, choosing words, determining the line of march for a complex chronology. From the box marked DECORATIVE ELEMENTS, for instance, another Atget might be withdrawn, and Mr. Gab could inform his customer that this view of some paneling at the Hôtel Roquelaure had been purchased from Atget by Georges Hoentschel — did he know? — the designer of the Union Centrale pavilion for the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris; and subsequently in an archive of great richness and variety that Hoentschel had catalogued and published in 1908 before it was sold to J. P. Morgan who later donated the entire shebang to New York’s Metropolitan Museum. Someone had dismembered a 1908 catalogue and this image — which you should please hold at its tender edges — is a limb from one of those dismemberments.
Mr. Gab did not usually remark the fact (since some found the fact disturbing) that the door was no doubt long gone, though the photograph was evidence of fine wood and careful workmanship; but because Atget had taken a portion of the decoration’s portrait, the surviving image had increased in value at each exchange and become what Mr. Gab, in a rare moment of eloquence, called “a ghost worth gold.” Nothing touched by this man’s lens was lost, he said, each was elevated by its semblance to sublimity, even the dubious ladies of the XIXe arrondissement, three of them (two leaning one peeking) from the traditional doorway, appetizing if you ate mud, an example of which (not the mud but the unsavory subjects) he, Mr. Gab, had in a box at the back of the shop marked NUES, even though the women were decently dressed.
The light in the store, Mr. Gab’s stupid assistant persisted in judging, “was lousy.” With the shutters closed, you could see how dust-covered the front windows had become, while most of the lamps were simply bulbs housed in coffee cans hung from wires punched through their bottoms. A proper tungsten lamp throwing the appropriately well-wiped light could be found at the rear of the store—“don’t call it a store,” Mr. Gab always protested — where anyone who wore serious eyes could contemplate in quiet a possible purchase. The assistant believed that the entire furnishings of the store: the old oak desk where Mr. Gab presided, the swivel chair, alike in oak, the rose-colored puff upon which he sat when he was seated, the smeary windows, a door which uttered a needless warning, the faded façade from former days, which incorporated a large dim sign spelling P H O T O G R A P H Y in letters that looked as if they wanted nothing to do with one another, the scuffed and cracked linoleum floor, the pocked walls with their swaying trophies, the trestle tables upon which the cardboard boxes stood, or under which they hid, or beside which they huddled, the dumb homely handmade lamps that filled the room with the rattle of tinlight, the tall stool in a back corner where the stupid assistant perched, the rug, instead of a door, which hung over the entrance to Mr. Gab’s private quarters: they were all meant to deceive detectives and most untrained and idle inspection. For the truth was — since the assistant harbored the same opinion as Mr. Gab’s once-a-time rival — the stock was stupendous, of varied kind and exquisite quality, a condition which was quite unaccountable unless the prints had, at one time or other, by someone or other, been pinched.
The assistant, whose apparent stupidity was an effect of his seeming a suitable subject for Diane Arbus, knew, to cite one outré instance, that in a box at the back of the store, and in two Mr. Gab kept in a cleaning closet in his kitchen, were several beautiful pictures set in Sicily and shot in the early fifties by, of all people for Mr. Gab to have discovered, Enzo Sellerio: in particular one from Vizzini of the worn head and shoulders of a woman who had framed herself with a window that in turn was surrounded by rows and rows of descending roof tiles textured to a fare-thee-well — a woman whose gaze was one of total intensity, though her mouth expressed quizzicality, while on the sill lay an aristocracy of fingers, age infecting everything else — her fingers positioned as if she were emerging from the grave of days; then another taken through the flychains of a Palermo doorway so that a seated man, a horse and cart, a church front, and a couple are seen as if scrimmed by a blurring rain of o’s; or the Chiesa Madre’s quiltlike stairway viewed from above as it’s being climbed by a herd of Paternò goats…well, where could this man who went nowhere, rarely to the edge of his neighborhood, have obtained work of this quality without hanky-panky of some kind? Without a lot of miscreation going on behind the back of every member of an honest public.