“Hey, watch it,” he said. Anger made his face a membrane.
“Ask the top photographers, if you don’t believe me. Stieglitz has one. He tells all his people to buy them.”
“I’m not one of his people,” I said. “Anyway, it doesn’t look very portable.”
“You don’t look like you’re going very far.”
I picked up a film holder, a metal sandwich with German words on the crust. “So Stieglitz has one of these, huh? I thought he was still in jail.”
“That’s not funny. Stieglitz isn’t just a photographer. He’s photography.”
I stepped back unconvinced. The clerk had that sour breath I couldn’t help associating with baloney, the liar’s inevitable halitosis.
“If you believe that, you’d believe anything.”
“Who are you?” he cried.
But I kept my temper and demanded to see the Speed Graphic, and when I found the model I wanted, I said, “Wrap it up — and I’ll take a half a dozen of those,” indicating the film holders.
“I’ve got news for you,” he said nastily. “They don’t fit that Graphic.”
“I’ve got news for you, buster. I said I want six of them and some film, and if I get any more of your sass I’ll have a word with the manager. Now start wrapping.”
It had been Stieglitz who’d refused to exhibit my work in New York — the Provincetown show I had had such hopes for. It seemed to me that Stieglitz in denying me this exposure was trying to thwart me in my courtship of Orlando. Of course, he knew nothing of Orlando, but the fact remained that my sole intention in studying photography was ultimately to persuade my brother that his proper place was with me in my darkroom. Stieglitz had spurned my photographs and in so doing had belittled me as a lover.
If Stieglitz didn’t like it, it wasn’t photography. Though I considered him of small importance — simply a man who had bamboozled a doting group of people with his lugubrious attentions — I knew that when Stieglitz loaded his camera the world said cheese, or at least his sycophants thought so. He was enthroned in New York in An American Place, his own gallery, and no one could call himself a photographer who had not first wormed some approval from this dubious man. I supposed I could be accused of bias, but I believed the clearest example of his complete lack of judgment and taste was his failure to recognize me as an original.
This early absence of recognition — I was now thirty-one — was the mainstay of my originality. I avoided photographic circles, and while students of photography gathered in “schools,” their very bowels yearning for “movements,” I had grown to loathe the cliques and seen them as nests of thuggish committee men, shabby and unconfident mobsters of the art world whoring after historians and critics. I blamed Stieglitz for this. His authority had weakened photographers to the point where they hadn’t the nerve to go it alone — they were resigned to being part of his legend. The movement — so frequent in the half-arts — implies a gang mentality; it is the half-artist’s response to his inadequacy, something to do with pretensions of photography, the inexact science that was sometimes an art and sometimes a craft and sometimes a rephrased cliché. The movements begged money from foundations and put themselves up for grants and awarded themselves prizes and published self-serving magazines. A racket, and poison to us originals.
What got up my nose most of all was that many photographers I respected, and some I idolized, had had their work exhibited at Stieglitz’s various galleries. Even Poopy Weston had bought his forty-pound peepshow on Stieglitz’s advice. Weston had shown me how to use it and had said, “You’ll never get anywhere unless you meet Alfred.”
“I hold the view that the work ought to precede the person.”
“He’s seen your work.”
“And he didn’t like it, so he ain’t seeing me,” I said. “I’m not a Fuller Brush man, Westy, and you can tell him I said so.”
Pride is scar tissue. Mine made me wary of a further rebuff, another wound. Yet I was insignificant. I could turn my back on him, but who would notice? Not him. As far as I knew, his back was already turned. I would gladly have killed that man, if only to be given the chance to say why. In every murderer’s mind must be the innocent hope that he will have his day in court, to say what drove him to it.
This homicidal impulse cheered me up at the hotel as I unpacked my trays and stoppered bottles of solutions. I examined my new Speed Graphic and took it apart until it lay exploded on the bed. I loaded the eight-by-ten film holders and futzed with my equipment. At last I sat motionless in the room I had deliberately darkened for my film’s sake. It was still raining in that applauding way but, outside, the luminous descent of liquefied light crowded at the pinhole of the window shade and cast through this imperfection a perfect cone of calm, an image of the windowy city on the wall that I studied until the day, red as a mallard’s eye, was lost in the blaring pit that sloped from evening into night.
“Ever hear of Alfred Stieglitz?” I asked a taxi driver the next day.
“Who? Look, lady—”
“Just testing,” I said, and satisfied with this proof of his obscurity I gave him the Madison Avenue address of An American Place.
A Saturday: the place was jammed. Weekends are for photographers, since most photographers are amateurs who spend the rest of the week working in offices to pay for the equipment the job prevents them from using. The ones at Stieglitz’s were bent nearly double with cameras around their necks, as ludicrous a sight to me as museum-goers studying paintings and sculpture with sticky brushes, mallets, and chisels. I cannot remember much about the exhibition: Imogen Cunningham’s Magnolia Blossom must have been there — it was everywhere; some Walker Evans billboards — how that man liked a mess; a Berenice Abbott traffic jam, some of Strand’s peasants, maybe Steichen’s shadblow tree, an Edward Weston weather report (partly cloudy, scattered showers, bright patches later) and some of his peppers and seashells, some Käsebier dames in gowns made out of Kleenex, Oursler’s Admiral Byrd (glacial features, ice-blue eyes), and soft-focus Stieglitzes — hairy rose petals, nipple studies, and chilly little things that could not qualify as nudes since they didn’t have bellybuttons. There were some untitleds deservedly anonymous, too many fire escapes and quite a lot of photojournalism from the WPA slush-bucket (rivets, steam shovels, leaf-rakers, grease monkeys — the photographer’s keen embarrassment with manual labor). And the usual photographic clichés: Abandoned Playground, Rainy Street, Lady in Funny Hat, Torso with Tits, Shoeshine Boy, Honest Face, Drunken Bum, Prostitute in Slit Skirt Standing near Rooms Sign, Mr. and Mrs. Front Porch America, Flock of Pigeons, Vista with Framing Branches, City Snow, City Lights, Haggard Peckerwoods, Every Hair of a Bushy Beard, Spoiled Brat, Good-Humor Ice Cream Man, Country Road Leading to Bright Future, Muddy Field in Europe, Lovers on a Park Bench, Picnickers, House with Broken Windows, Sand Dunes, Obviously Unemployed Man in his Undershirt, Dog Lover, Wrinkled Eskimo, Mother and Child, Jazzman with Shiny Instrument; in other words, no Pratts.
You could see more exciting things — in its simplicity, one of the most devastating pieces of art criticism imaginable — by sticking your head out the window.
Instead of asking for Alfred at the front desk, I marched through the crowd of shufflers and pushed the first door I saw marked PRIVATE. I was full of confidence as I shoved it, as if this were one of the last doors I’d have to open to arrive at recognition. Room to room: in the last I would find Orlando waiting. I entered a rather gloomy back room. I was certain from its smallness and its shadows that the people in it were photographers.