She’s locked the Aquinas in the darkroom. She keeps all her cameras down here, though Perry says they’d be safer up in the apartment. She’s not so sure about that. And she likes seeing them all together on a worktable. It’s like pretending she has a studio or something. She remembers back in high school, the first time she saw Antonioni’s Blow Up on TV late one night. David Hemmings as the perfect mod fashion photographer, living in London, driving around in a Rolls convertible. He had that big, funky studio that he lived and worked in. He’d set models up under the lights, those ninety-pound girls dressed in those horrible, glittery smocks. And when everything was set, the man just turned into this whirlwind, just fired off shot after shot and you could hear that great shutter-click sound over and over. He had something like half a dozen cameras spread out on the floor and hanging around his neck and he’d be jumping from one to another, you know, grab a Nikon and click off ten shots, then pick up a Minolta and click off a dozen more, all the time yelling at the girls, the models, wooing them one second and insulting them the next. Sylvia thought Hemming’s character was a jerk, but she never got over all the cameras.
She turns on the safelight, pulls the stool up to the table, sits down and opens the Aquinas case. She takes out the camera and puts it on the table. She picks it up, plants her elbows on the table and brings her eye to the viewer. She’s still got the lens cap on and the dark-slide in. She just wants to feel the thing. She just wants to get used to the weight and the design.
It’s a fairly heavy piece of equipment. Probably around four pounds. Once Sylvia met a wedding photographer who said he’d only work with an Aquinas. He said, “You use the Aquinas, you look at the prints, you can count the circles of lace on the bride’s gown.” The downside was he had to go to a chiropracter once a month from lugging the thing around. “But it’s worth it,” he swore. “That’s the price you pay.”
She pulls out the instruction booklet, adjusts the safe-light and opens to the parts illustration. There are two mechanical drawings of the camera, one illustrating from a front perspective and one from the rear. They’re line drawings, really detailed with the camera taken apart so that every component is visible. There are lines extending from each piece to a number. Below the drawings is an index showing the official name of each numbered piece. There are forty-three separate pieces to know about, things like depth of field preview buttons and winding crank bayonet and exposure value indicator.
She turns from the booklet to the camera itself. She takes off the magazine, the smaller box on the back of the camera that holds the film. She looks at the status indicator, sees the tiny red letters that read LOADED.
She opens the magazine. There’s a roll of half-exposed film inside — old Lumière stock, a pricey import they don’t make anymore. She puts the magazine down and picks up her wineglass, stares at the camera for a minute and tries to think. Is it possible that someone, no, not just someone, a professional, would offer their camera up for sale and not realize they’d left half a dozen pictures inside?
She takes another sip of wine. She reaches up to the shelf and turns on the radio at a low volume. The darkroom fills up with a too-sad piano-and-sax piece. And the next thing she knows, she grabbing the film tank and loading the Lumière.
She moves quickly, trying to keep her mind off what she’s doing beyond the basic step-by-step process of development. She knows she’s got no business, no right, to print up these shots. They don’t belong to her. It’s an accident that they’re in her possession. And processing them is an invasion. But she can’t stop herself. Clearly, the owner has forgotten about the photos. It’s possible the film is blank, just some kind of mistake that happened in the midst of the photographer’s upheaval.
In an hour she’s got a dried strip of negatives suspended between plastic tongs and held up to the safelight. There are seven squares filled with images. The rest of the strip is black. She gets a pair of scissors from the worktable and cuts away the useless end of the strip.
Then she goes to work at the enlarger. She doesn’t have the patience to print a test strip. She simply throws a single-weight 8 x 10 sheet under the easel and instinctively exposes it. She doesn’t bother with the timer. She just hits the switch and stares at the reversed image and when it feels right she shuts the enlarger off and carries the sheet to the pans.
She watches the image start to form under the bath of developer. She takes her tongs and moves the paper around a bit underneath the fluid. Gradually, definition seeps through, shades of black and white arrange themselves, but she still can’t make out the specific image. It’s a dark shot, very shadowy. She looks at her watch. She leans her head down closer to the pan. She jostles the print a bit with the tongs, impatient. She tries to concentrate on the music, checks the watch again, then removes the print and slides it down into the stop bath. There’s no use straining her eyes. She’s going to need full light to make sense of the image.
She moves the print to the fixer, agitates it, then for the next fifteen minutes she paces around the darkroom with the Aquinas in her arms, stopping every now and then to bring it to her eye, look through the lens into the red-darkness of the room.
When the radio finishes playing a scratchy rendition of Disderi’s “Sucker for a Good Joke,” Sylvia goes back to the print, removes it from the pan, grabs a squeegee and runs off all the excess liquid, then pins the print to the drying line. She goes back to the enlarger and starts the whole process again on the next shot.
In all, she comes up with seven photos. When the last print is dripping on the line, she secures everything, turns off the safelight and flips on the fluorescent desk lamp on the worktable. She bends its gooseneck up like a spotlight, shines it at the line of drying prints.
First she stands back at the opposite end of the darkroom and looks at the whole line. Her first impression is that these photos form a series, that these shots are intended to be looked at together, to be displayed in unison, a family of similar visions, variations on a single strain.
There’s a woman. Shot from seven different angles and ranging from a maximum distance of, she’d guess, maybe twenty, twenty-five feet, down to a slightly overhead, rear field shot, all silhouette, looking down over the left shoulder, shadow everywhere. The only unifying factor in all seven photographs is that in every single shot the woman’s face is somehow obscured, either cloaked in shadow or turned away from the camera. The woman is draped in a kind of flowing cape or shawl, some sort of serape-style throw. The shawl covers the woman’s right shoulder, but then trails off the left, as if it had fallen away, and in the closer shots, in a soft, almost misty focus, her left breast is exposed and an infant is seen suckling.
And given this subject matter, maybe it’s the setting that makes the shot so intriguing and disturbing. The woman is perched on what looks like a chunk of stone, possibly marble, in the center of an eerie and cavernous hall of some sort. It’s strewn with rock and rubble, a museum to decay. Some sort of lighting, sun or maybe full moon, makes it through the unseen ceiling and juts down on the woman in well-defined rays, like a storybook depiction of heaven or the voice of God. But the interior of this hall looks bombed out, ripped apart and forgotten. There’s almost a postwar feel to the room, like those stark shots of Berlin and Dresden after the bombing, maybe a bit gentler than that, more like an old church or monastery that’s been abandoned for generations and has started to fall back into the earth. What can be seen of the ground looks like a bed of dark stones and cinder. An occasional larger boulder and pieces of what appear to be scrap wood can be made out in the longer shots. The walls of the hall seem distant and huge. Cathedral walls. And in the longest shot of all Sylvia can make out what looks like the beginnings of a stairway in the far left-hand corner.