Shutter(61)
“Hey,” Megan said again.
“So, what are you studying?” I tried again while I unpacked my bags.
“Medicine,” Megan said and lit a cigarette, then sprayed a blast of air freshener to cover up the smell. “No. I paint. This one is mine.” She pointed to a giant black-and-white portrait of Robert Smith from the Cure. The portrait was well done.
I sat on the bed and took out the new Nikon box. I opened it slowly, watching it unfold, and pulled the new camera out. The plastic was smooth and perfect. I took some film from my bag and loaded it into the back. I could hear the mechanisms moving and turning inside. I was so used to turning and spinning that tiny wheel to load the camera that the automation of the Nikon F5 had me marveling.
Megan stubbed out her cigarette on the small coffee table that separated our beds, yanking me out of my admiring reverie. The room was small and uncomfortable, and now it was filled with smoke and cinnamon apple spray. But this was my new space. It felt wonderful and terrible all at once to be in this tiny room with this girl and her dark, depressing psyche.
“Can I take your picture?”
“Why?” Megan fished around for what I assumed was another cigarette.
“Because you’re interesting,” I answered.
“That’s the first time I’ve ever heard that. Shoot.” Megan stared blankly into my lens as I took her picture. Then she asked, “Want a cigarette?”
How could I say no?
I SPENT ALL my spare time in the chemical smell and dark red of the photography studio. I loved to watch the images reveal themselves in the developing tanks. The film racks, tongs, squeegees, and dryers became my life.
Over the first two semesters, I maintained above-average grades in my required classes, but only really devoted myself to my film and photography classes. Megan had managed to get me completely addicted to nicotine. She took me to strange experimental film events around town and introduced me to her unsavory love castoffs. I never did take the bait, but I was able to get some great photos of Megan and her punk rock love monkeys she paraded around town. There were a lot of Native and Mexican punk rockers in Albuquerque. I began to develop a collection of portraits of them, especially taken at the rundown Sunshine Theater, where many of them ended up every weekend. The club was dark and had a cheap miniature bar with three lonely red stools and ten plastic chairs. The plumbing was terrible, so the whole place smelled like a urinal cake, but the drinks were cheap and some of the best punk bands would come through the club. Sunshine’s black-painted walls and chain-link fence motif ended up being the backdrop for a lot of my work.
Photography classes lasted six hours every Tuesday and Thursday. I learned a lot about both the process and the art.
“I like this one,” my journalism professor said when I presented the portrait I took of my grandma sitting in her kitchen with the scarecrow clock. The class all stared at it for a while. “If you can capture her spirit, then you can capture anyone’s spirit. You just haven’t done that in the work you’ve been doing here.”
I had to agree. My work had become sloppy and uninteresting. I was shooting the photos, but I wasn’t getting to the humanity inside of them. Between my photojournalism class and my portrait class, I still had a lot to learn.
With only a few days left in the workshop, I wandered the city looking for “the shot,” to no avail. I sat and had coffee, and as the café filled, I began to shoot the movement of the city, the commuters, the cars and taxis, the bicycles, the baby strollers. I stayed in that café until it was dark, walking past the cemetery on the way back to the dorms.
The cemetery was one of the oldest in the city and had survived the fate of having a freeway or an apartment building built over it. During the day, I cut through the graves to get to the 7-11 on the other side of campus. The gravestones were dated from the early 1800s, when Albuquerque was still part of the Wild West. It had been a hard life, I was sure.
This was the first time I’d walked through the cemetery at night. The moon was bright, illuminating all the gravestones in the older part of the cemetery. I pulled out my Nikon and framed what looked to be fireflies hovering over cracked gravestones. I had never seen anything like it. They danced for me and my camera in the moonlight.
When I went back to the photography studio the next day and developed my work, I was shocked to find the hovering flashes of light in the photographs. Some of the lights streamed, some just floated, but they were beautiful. The spirits had come to visit, and I was lucky that none of them wished me harm.
My professor took one look at my last images and told me they were “tragic, but in a good way,” and wondered how I got that light to work in the cemetery. When I told him I did nothing to alter the light, he didn’t believe me. He just laughed and gave me an A. I went home two days later with a box full of photographs to show Grandma, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that my favorite photographs and stories would not be shared with her. She would be horrified if she knew where I had been.
MY GRADUATION WAS only a few months away when I realized that finding a job wasn’t going to be easy. I’d known all along that it would be a miracle if I could find a way to make a living taking photographs. I applied everywhere: newspapers, local magazines. No jobs came my way. At graduation, all I could think about was how I was going to take care of Grandma and how we were ever going to fix up that house. Not that it mattered either way—Grandma didn’t even want me back out on the reservation. I was going to have to figure out a way to maintain my life here and save money for Grandma.