I knew she wanted me to meet her, to say I loved her too. I knew she was giving me a chance to save her—to save myself, she would have said—but I couldn’t lie. I can’t lie about that kind of stuff. This isn’t a virtue. It’s a flaw, just as my seeing the true world is not a gift but a terrible thing. I’ve lived my entire life expecting the worst, knowing it will happen, seeing it happen. Making it happen, people used to think, then photographing it and making other people see it too.
People think they want the truth. But the truth is that people want to be reassured that it’s only there that the horror lies, there on the other side of the television, the computer screen, the world. No one wants to look on the charred remains of a human corpse lying at their feet. No one wants to look on unalloyed grief and horror and loss. I don’t always want to myself, but I won’t deny that I do, and I won’t deny that my photos show you what’s really there. I can’t look away.
6
I had vacation time saved up at the Strand, so I gave notice that I’d be gone for a few weeks. They were surprised, but they also seemed relieved that I was doing something normal—it was the first time I’d taken off in about five years. I spent most of my last days there ferreting through the stacks, looking for anything on Kamestos.
I didn’t find anything, except for that one iconic photograph of her in an Aperture volume on 20th century photographers, a black-and-white portrait taken by her husband, the poet Stephen Haselton, shortly after their marriage. I knew there were other images: a pencil drawing by Jean Cocteau that was on the dustjacket of the original edition of Mors, a sketch by Brion Gysin that looked like Jean-Paul Marat’s death mask.
I assumed that when I googled her, I’d learn more. There was some stuff online, including Susan Sontag’s repudiation of Mors, but little in the way of biographical information except for a thumbnail entry on Wikipedia. Despite her name, Aphrodite was as American as I was, a third-generation Greek who’d grown up in Chicago. But there were no details about her childhood, and only a fleeting mention of her marriage to Haselton.
I don’t know anyone who looked less like her namesake. Aphrodite Kamestos was beautiful in the way a violent storm is beautiful, if you’re watching it from a safe distance. In his photo, Haselton must have caught her unawares. Her head is half-turned, her dark hair falling back from her face, her lips parted and eyebrows slightly raised. Her eyes are startlingly black against her white skin, and the light glances off her cheekbones. The gaze she shoots at the camera is direct yet impenetrable. She looks unafraid, but also unguarded, caught in that fraction of a second before she could compose her face into welcome or annoyance or desire or attack.
It was a strikingly beautiful face, but it didn’t make me think of the Goddess of Love. It made me think of Medusa, someone whose beauty would be turned upon anyone stupid enough to mess with her. That was the power of the photograph. It didn’t make you wonder what happened to her. It made you wonder what happened to the guy who took the picture. It’s almost anticlimactic to know that he killed himself in 1976.
My Google search turned up some of her own images as well, but that was such a depressing experience I wished I hadn’t bothered. I hate looking at bad reproductions of great photographs, and these online images were uniformly lousy. Generation loss—that’s what happens when you endlessly reproduce a photographic image. You lose authenticity, the quality deteriorates in each subsequent generation that’s copied from the original negative, and the original itself decays with time, so that every new image is a more degraded version of what you started with. Same thing with analog recordings. After endless reproduction, you end up with nothing but static and hiss.
This doesn’t happen so much with digital imaging, but what I found online had been scanned from a 1970 pirate reprint of Kamestos’s only two books, Mors and Deceptio Visus, first published in the late 1950s. Anyone who picked up that pirate volume could be forgiven for wondering how Aphrodite’s photos ever saw the light of day. Unfortunately, those horrible reproductions were what had filtered onto the web. They were nothing like the images in the original editions of Mors and Deceptio Visus—I knew that because I owned both books—and those, of course, would be nothing like the original prints.
Her greatest images were vistas—islands, mountains. Highly saturated blues and violets and magentas detailing an impossibly beautiful, distant archipelago that resembled a landscape by Magritte: elusive, irrecoverable. I couldn’t imagine those places were real.
Only of course they were—the pictures were taken in 1956, decades before computers made it possible to twist the world into a pretty shape. That was the year Kodak started hyping the Type C color process. Type C enabled photographers to produce their own color negs without relying so heavily on a lab, and there was some interesting color work done then by people like Nina Leen and Brian Brake. I don’t know if Kamestos was using Type C, but she would have been picking up on some of the press it was generating. You can see in her husband’s photo how those eyes still burned, though her hands looked as though they could handle a garrote as easily as a camera.
It was a suspicion fed when Mors appeared: a catalog of places where terrible things had happened. Suicide, a murder, sexual torture. These weren’t like Weegee’s crime scenes, or Bourke-White’s photos of Buchenwald. Kamestos’s pictures lacked immediacy or historical import; their sense of transgression was visceral because it was so detached. When it first appeared, Mors was dismissed as a form of malign spirit photography, and the 1970 pirate volume only made things worse, with its over-the-top intro by Kenneth Anger. It would be decades before that book’s influence was acknowledged by people like Sally Mann or Joel-Peter Witkin. And me, of course. But no one was listening to me.
The thought of seeing those original photographs is what set my heart pumping. More than the thought of money or escaping the city. More even than the notion that Aphrodite Kamestos had asked specifically for me, or that if I went up there, I might shoot some decent work myself again.
Though I’ll admit, I was curious—more than curious—about what the hell had happened to her. A nervous breakdown? Failure of nerve? Failed marriage? Her husband had been a minor poet, a kind of fringe person in the Beat movement, and my understanding was that he’d been gay. Kamestos met Haselton in 1955, and they married just a few weeks later. As a wedding gift, his wealthy father gave the couple a house on an island off the coast of Maine.
And that is where I was now headed: Paswegas Island.
I’d never known its name before. The thought gave me a weird feeling. It was like I was going off on some strange, creepy pilgrimage; like a Nabokov fan setting out to find the motels where Humbert Humbert slept with Lolita.
Because Paswegas was where Aphrodite shot the dreamscapes in Deceptio Visus. It was a place I’d thought and dreamed about for almost thirty years, a place I’d never quite believed was real. You know how you can look at a painting or picture and wish you could walk into it and just disappear? That’s what I’d always wanted to do with those photos. Now I’d have my chance.
The night after I ran into Phil, I called my father. We hadn’t spoken for a while, and as always, I could tell he was relieved to hear my voice: I wasn’t dead.
“Cassandra. Good to hear from you. Everything all right?”