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Paul Theroux

Picture Palace

From the first moment I handled my lens with a tender ardor, and it has become to me as a living thing, with a voice and memory and creative vigor.

— Julia Margaret Cameron, “Annals of My Glass-house”

PART ONE

1.  Camera Obscura

ALL DAY LONG I had been thinking that I had grounds for believing I was an original. A beautiful day.

Now the light was failing, and the old house had that late-evening fatigue that followed a scorcher, a kind of thirst aggravated by crickets: groans from the woodwork and all the closets astir. Beyond the windmill the moon on white fence-posts made tracks to the shore of the Sound. The rest of the Cape was dark, yet I would not have been anywhere else. Blind love? It was an old feeling in me. It made me a photographer.

Some people thought I began in the wet-plate days. No — and I did not invent the camera, though a fair number of admirers told me I was the first to make it work properly, not only with Boogie-Men, my early negative prints, Pigga, Negro Swimming to a Raft, and Blind Child with Dead Bat, but in the simpler Clamdiggers: Wellfleet and the very steamy sequence of the Lamar Carney Pig Dinner. Firebug, Fidel at Harvard, and my portrait of Ché Guevara were part of the folklore. As for your favorite, Twenty-two White Horses— that received more attention than it deserved: it is seldom one’s best work that brings one fame. But I was still proud of Orthodox Jewish Boys, Cummings in Provincetown, Refugees, Danang, and Marilyn.

“I’ve never seen Marilyn like that before,” a critic once said to me.

“That’s not Marilyn,” I said. “It’s a picture. ”

There were many more.

Where was I? A barnacle named Frank Fusco told me that laid end to end in a retrospective they would tell my complete story.

I said, “Just because I happen to be a photographer, it doesn’t mean I have to make an exhibition of myself. ”

“I want to hang your pictures,” said Fusco.

“Hang them!” I threw open the windmill, my picture palace. “Hang them until they’re dead!”

I was posturing; I still believed in my pictures. And what a posture! Your Walter Mitty dreams of heroism and great deeds. This is not odd, but most heroes and doers I have known dreamed of being Walter Mittys — puzzled benumbed souls with sore teeth and eyeglasses, shuffling through the house in carpet slippers to take a leak. “What’s all the fuss about?” says the American creative genius. “I’m just a farmer. ”

For over fifty years I was a world-famous photographer, but being a woman was regarded as something of a freak. “A credit to her sex,” the patronizing critic often said, calling attention to my tits, which they promptly put in the wringer of art criticism.

But art should require no instrument but memory, the pleasurable fear of hunching in a dark room and feeling the day’s hot beauty lingering in the house. No photograph could do justice to these aromas. And gin and solitude — drawing the cork and decanting the clear liquid and tasting it to hear the ghosts wake in the walls. A camera was, after all, a room.