But then there’s the infant’s hand, so small and yet so absolutely detailed by the focus. It reminds her a little of pictures she’s seen in magazines and on billboards — hyperclear shots of a fetus inside an amniotic sac, parts of the body still vague and unformed, the eye looking a bit fish-like, but other parts, like the hand, the fingers, the fingers specifically, so absolutely developed, the fingernails already visible. The infant’s hand in Propp’s shots reminds her of those fetus shots, it’s so stark somehow, so intricately delineated, out there in the air as if it were waving to her, as if it were signaling the viewer, look closely, take notice.
She takes a step to the side and stands in front of the second photo and now it isn’t the shoulder or the hand, but the rubble of the floor in the background. It’s the lack of focus here that does it, makes for a maddening obscurity, makes her wish she could change the focus of the photo herself, at this late date, bring the emphasis off the humans and onto the inanimate clutter of the ground. She wants to sweep the earth for clues as to exactly where the photograph was shot. She wants to zoom in until she can see recognizable evidence, signs of a time period and a location. She wants to turn the dim glint in the far right corner into a Kennedy half-dollar that dropped from Propp’s pants pocket as he scouted the setting. She wants to be able to follow the old support columns up to the roof and nail them as Doric or Ionic. She wants to know why here, why this field of disintegration.
And as she studies the third photo, she focuses on the lighting itself, the way it descends from the top of the shot, the way it shines in beam-like shafts and catches faint storms of dust without eclipsing the sharpness of the mother and infant.
She gives up. She walks back to the step stool and remounts it. She wishes that she could have been there the day Propp did this shoot, that she could have just stood to the side, maybe even out of sight, behind one of the columns, just watching and listening. She’d love to know what he said to his subjects, what directions he gave. Did he tell the mother to drop her shoulder a quarter inch, to loosen her shawl and expose more skin, to pull the infant closer and let it suckle? What was his voice like, low and encouraging or bossy and bullying, intimidating the Madonna into the perfect position?
Or maybe he didn’t use his voice at all. Maybe it was all gesture and signals. She can imagine that. She can accept how perfect the silence of this setting would be, Propp’s decision not to violate it, the only noise being the murmur of the infant and the ongoing click of the shutter invading the cool, decayed silence of the hall.
And maybe gesture wasn’t even necessary. Maybe Propp and the mother knew each other in a way that precluded the need for instruction, the way longtime band members intuit each other’s musical changes. Some photographers work with the same models for years. This could be one of those arrangements, artist and subject drawn into an instinctual sense of one another’s needs and wants, something like telepathy constantly in the air around them.
Sylvia has never known anyone in that complete a way. Except maybe her mother. And she’s more than a little doubtful that Perry and she will ever get in sync. She thinks about his face at the moment that he threw the remote and the tears well up again and she puts her hands in her jacket pocket and touches the magazines that Gaston gave her.
She pulls it out and holds it in both hands. It’s a small journal, about six by eight inches, but pretty slick, center stapled, with good quality paper and professional typesetting. She thumbs through it to the end. There are only a dozen pages, but all of them crammed with two columns of small print. She turns back to the cover. The letterhead reads
Underexposed
A Journal of Terrence Propp Studies
Published bi-yearly by Propp-Aganda Ltd
and underneath it there’s a line drawing of what looks like an old Brownie camera. She opens to the table of contents and reads a few article titles. Trajectories of Longing in the Bleicherode Exhibit. The Zurau Flea Market Find: Trickery of Treasure. Of Curves and Slopes: The Physics of the Early Nudes. The last item listed on the contents page is Through My Viewfinder: a Column by Rory Gaston.
She turns to the last page of the magazine and there’s a small photo of Gaston in the upper right corner. It’s a close-up head shot and he looks more professional than sensual. Under his byline, in italics, are the words an ongoing explication of what we know so far. She starts in:
This week’s mailbag brought yet another attempt at subterfuge by one more dim-bulbed prankster with too much time on his or her hands and access to a camera. I’m forced once again to beseech and admonish the faithful regarding the lending of Underexposed. Clearly, back issues have fallen into the hands of some barbarians who have no hope for conversion. I can’t waste my time worrying about their loss of primal sensuality. I’m neck deep in the evolution of my own carnal sensibilities. So I ask you once again to guard the magazine and when you’re done reading, either destroy it or keep it under lock and key.
I don’t want to have to spend another morning like last Thursday when someone other than my letter carrier deposited a plain brown manila mailer through my door slot. There were no markings on the packet and though I attempted to prevent myself from feeling that rush of dizziness at even the remotest chance that contact had been made, my heart surged with both longing and fear as I ran my letter opener along the seal and extracted the contents: a single Polaroid photograph, taken, I’m quite sure, by a Spectra model.
I stared at the image until my eyes went weak. A very simple composition. A portrait. An upper-body shot of an individual posed before the brick wall background. The sex of the subject is undeterminable. S/he is dressed in what appears to be a medieval jester’s costume. The head is encased in a shiny silver fright wig. The face is decorated with oversized red wax lips with two enormous faux buckteeth extending down toward the chin. The eyes and nose are covered with a brand of “Groucho Marx” eyeglasses and mustache. The cheeks are rouged into a clown’s apple-red caricature. A white-gloved hand is in the forefront of the shot, held up and partially obscuring the chestal area. The hand is bent into an obscene salute, the middle finger thrust skyward and directed, unmistakably, at the viewer. Some miniature graffiti was noticeable but unintelligible on the brick background until Wilhelm and the boys down at Duyfhuizen Labs blew me up an 11 × 14 study shot which allowed me to decode the doggerel
I’m an absentee artist
which fills you with strife
but you’ll never possess me
so go get a life
Charming. I’m not sure of the prankster’s intention this time around. Did S/he expect me to swoon and blow the trumpet, announce to my people that Propp has touched down, has deemed to send us a communiqué no matter how seemingly cruel, has consented to show his face, no matter how grotesquely distorted? I have no way of deciphering the buffoon’s designs. But let the hoaxster know this if they happen to appropriate yet another issue of Underexposed: I’ve spent a good bit of this lifetime studying the work of a singular genius named Terrence Propp. I have spent the majority of my waking hours immersing myself in study of the master since that first day when, at age thirty-three, I chanced to view Infant & Mother: Deep Sleep & Dark Shadow hanging in the men’s room of Orsi’s Rib Room. I have been a devout apostle. I have honed my skills. I have tracked every lead, however ephemeral, catalogued every confirmed and unconfirmed piece of work, and assembled the first group on the planet to zealously pursue the ways and means of Proppiana. And so know, without doubt, that it is a waste of both time and effort to attempt to make a fool out of me. If and when Terry Propp chooses to return home, I will know with an unflinching certainty that will confirm the worth of my faith that he has breached the silence, that he has reached out finally and definitively.