All of it like one of those Kodachrome photographs from the 1960s: colors so intensely unrealistic, so vividly assaultive, they dazzled the eyes.
The job was meant to be only temporary. That actually increased my stress over the whole affair, because I felt I didn’t have that much time to figure out how to do things right. I’d spend a long time with the camera, framing the shot, then suddenly I’d feel everything was wrong, that I’d be leaving this family with nothing to remember their dead child by. So I’d compulsively start all over again adjusting, readjusting, my fingers shaking and sliding off the controls.
Invariably I’d take too long and the family’s understandable nervousness would increase tenfold. They’d suddenly be anxious to let go of this child or they would slip over some invisible line and would act as if they might hold onto him or her forever. The mothers, mostly. The fathers would usually just be irritated, but most of them started out irritated, angry. They were being asked or pressured into doing something they weren’t really sure they could do.
Liz could see what was happening. She let me struggle a little at first, scoping out the boundaries of my difficulty, and then she finally stepped in, talking to these parents, letting them know what to expect, helping me set up, letting me know what to expect, by example teaching me what to say, what to look out for, how to pace things so the experience wasn’t too much, wasn’t too little.
Despite all my worries, I never took a bad picture for any of these people. Oh, some shots were better than others, certainly, but I don’t think I ever took a really bad shot. As morbid as it sounds, I had found my subject.
And my subject had found me.
Taking pictures of dead children — well, as I’ve said, the work generated the expected tension in both the families and the photographer. I’d spend so much time trying to get a pose that looked natural. Sometimes I’d be working so hard to make everything look just right that I’d forget why these people were looking so sad and I’d catch myself hoping that the baby would wake up and look at the camera.
And when one of them finally did, I went on with what I was doing and took the shot without a thought about what had just occurred.
Then minutes later — I stood up and looked over the camera at the couple and their tiny, tiny baby. Dead baby — I could not have imagined that a creature so small who looked so like a miniature human being could have survived our comparatively brutal, everyday air.
The couple looked at me uneasily. Finally the man said, “Are we done here? Something wrong?”
Everything’s wrong, I wanted to say. Your baby is dead. How much wronger could things possibly get}
“No,” I said. “No.” And I looked closely at this child, hoping to see that it was sleeping, but immediately knew it was not.
Dead children, at least the really small ones, have an unformed, stylized quality even though there may be nothing missing anatomically. Their tiny bodies recall some unusual piece of art, perhaps of an animal that’s never been seen before, some part-human, part-bird thing, or some new breed of feral pig or rodent. They are like remnants of the long, involved dream you just had, mysteriously conveyed to our waking world. They are like hope petrified and now you have no idea where to put the thing.
That was what sat perched against the young mother’s swollen breasts, a sad reminder of her fullness craving release.
Of course I decided almost immediately that what I was sure I had seen hadn’t even happened at all. One of the things that occurs when you spend a great deal of time staring into a camera lens is that stationary things appear to move, moving things freeze, and a variety of other optical illusions may occur. Things appear, disappear, change color and shape. Of course you don’t have to use a camera to see this — stare at almost anything in the real world long enough and these kinds of phenomena occur. That’s true enough, isn’t it? I mean, it isn’t just me, right?
The great photographers are great because they see things differently from the rest of us. So from our perspective they see things that aren’t there. I’ve long had this notion, not quite a theory, that the world changes when a great photographer looks through the lens.
As I said before, I’m not a great photographer. But when I took those first rolls home and developed them I think I got just a glimpse of what the great photographer sees. In three of the shots the baby’s eyes were open, looking at me.
I admit that upon occasion I do fall prey to a certain suggestibility. I’m wound pretty tightly at times. I get somewhat anxious in the darkroom. I’m interested in shadows in an aesthetic sense, but I’m also uncomfortable with them. Unexpected sounds can make me jump out of my skin. I don’t care for scary movies. And I’ll believe almost anything that comes out of the mouth of a well-spoken man or woman.
So I wasn’t about to let myself believe what the pictures were telling me. Not without a fight.
“Liz, did you ever notice the babies’ eyes? How sometimes they’re… open just a little?”
I don’t know if I expected her to ask me if I’d been drinking, or suggest that I get more sleep, or maybe just stare at me with that evaluating look I’d seen her give some of the patients. But I didn’t expect the calmness, the matter-of-factness. “Sometimes the eyes don’t close all the way. When they get to the embalmer, sometimes he’ll sew the lids down, or glue them maybe. Whatever seems necessary for the viewing. Occasionally I’ll warn the parents, if I think it will upset them. Why, has it been bothering you, or is it just something you noticed?”
Relieved, I almost told her what I’d been thinking, what I’d been imagining, but I didn’t. “I just noticed,” I said.
So for a while I refocused myself on just taking the pictures, trying to relax the couples (or in some cases, single moms, and in one very complicated case, a single dad, who seemed angry about the whole thing, and frowned during the picture, but still insisted that the picture with his son was something he had to have. Liz was obviously nervous about that one, and hung around outside the room while I hurried the session.) My composition got better; the pictures improved.
Sometimes there would be something different about a baby: a certain slant to the shoulders, a small hand frozen in a gesture, an ambiguous expressiveness in the face that tugged at my imagination, but I withheld any response. I knew that if I brought any of these details to Liz’s attention she would give me some simple, calm, rational answer, and I would feel that I was only making myself suspect in her eyes.
Yet I felt almost guilty not to be paying more notice to these small details, as if I were ignoring the appeals of some damaged or frightened child. And what did I know of these things? I’d never been a parent, never hoped to be a parent. I knew nothing, really, of children. I had learned a little about grieving parents: how they held their dead babies, how they looked at the camera, how they held themselves.
And I could see clearly, now, the way the eyelids sometimes loosened a bit, sliding up to expose crescent-shaped slivers of greyish eyeball. I’d seen this look in people who were napping — there was nothing unusual about it. But I still didn’t like seeing this in the babies. For in the babies it didn’t look like napping at all — it looked like additional evidence of their premature deaths.
I had become more relaxed in my volunteer work. I didn’t expect any surprises and no surprises occurred. And yet still I would occasionally take those special pictures out of their folders and examine them. And it did not escape my notice that the babies in the pictures, the ones who appeared to be staring at me, had eyes which remained wide open, with an aspect of deliberate and unmistakable intention.