The First Look
A chapter from Do That Again by Joost Vandebrug.
I was 14 and my dad and I had seen an exhibition by Anton Corbijn. We became interested in the blacks in his prints. They were dark without becoming empty. Detail continued inside them as though black were a place rather than the absence of one.
We found the paper Corbijn used and ordered it from London. When it arrived, we discovered that it required a particular developer, also in London. The paper had crossed the sea without the one substance capable of explaining what it was for.
We ordered that too.
The process was slow. An image could remain almost invisible for a long time, then begin changing quickly. You watched the shadows deepen and tried to remove the paper at the exact moment before they closed.
Dad lifted one corner.
We were both looking at the same photograph. This did not mean the same moment had arrived for both of us.
The boy reached towards the tray. A faint line from the rope still crossed his palm.
I stopped him.
“What happens if it stays in?”
“It gets too dark.”
“What happens if you take it out?”
“It stops.”
He considered the two possibilities.
The photograph had become visible, but it was still becoming. This was the part I wanted to keep: the moment after nothing and before certainty.
Dad reached for the photograph again.
The boy took it and ran.
He carried it through the darkroom door while the developer travelled down his arms. On the other side was art school, although it should have been the hallway of our house.
Doors are less reliable in memory.
By then, the photograph had divided into Polaroids, disposable-camera landscapes, city streets and people whose names I have forgotten. I wrote on some of them and painted directly across others. The boy pinned them to the wall before they were completely dry.
He had no system. This was useful because I had recently started calling the absence of a system research.
Foam invited me to make a solo presentation in its library. The library was not the main museum. It was, however, unmistakably inside the museum, which at that age was an important architectural distinction.
We pinned the photographs to the walls. The boy stood on a table to reach the higher ones. Some were landscapes. Some were portraits. Handwriting crossed their surfaces and continued beyond the edges.
The wet photograph was among them, although I could not identify which one it had become. Perhaps it was all of them.
After the exhibition, money began entering the room. At first, it arrived cautiously. Then it came with agents, meetings, travel and people asking whether I was available.
I was available.
A client was considering several photographers and asked whether I could remain available. I became unavailable for work I did not yet have.
The boy and I entered a waiting room. Other photographers were already there. Each had been placed on option and was trying not to accept another job, leave the country or make plans involving a specific date.
A clock hung above the door. I remember it without hands. It may have had hands, but time spent on option did not feel as though it belonged to anyone.
Sometimes a door opened and a name was called. The chosen photographer left quickly, before the client changed its mind. The others remained available until they were released back into their own lives.
When my name was called, we entered a large white room.
The photograph we were there to make was already hanging on the wall.
It had been assembled from reference images, layouts, conversations and several versions of the weather. The person in it looked spontaneous. Her spontaneity had been approved the previous Tuesday.
The boy stood in front of it.
He looked from the image to me, then back to the image. Children are often praised for their imagination, but they can become unhelpfully literal when adults require something to remain complicated.
The room filled with people. There were assistants, producers, stylists, clients, art directors and people whose responsibility became less clear the closer they stood to the monitor. Everyone knew the image we were trying to make. Several people had travelled to another country to make sure it did not become something else.
I stood beside the camera. The boy stood beside the image on the wall.
For several days, people asked what I thought. They moved lights when I pointed, adjusted clothes and brought me coffee. A temporary country formed around the production, and for a few days I was treated as its head of state.
I took the photograph. It appeared immediately on the monitor. Everyone gathered around it and compared it with the photograph that already existed.
They were nearly the same.
This was considered a success.
After the shoot, the temporary country disappeared. The lights were packed first, followed by the cameras, cables, clothes, food, folding chairs and people who had known my name.
The photograph went through a door marked POSTPRODUCTION. The client and retoucher followed it. I remained outside but was copied into their correspondence, which meant I continued to exist in a reduced form.
The boy opened another door and found the waiting room.
We sat down again.
By then, several rivers were moving through my head. One carried the previous job away. Another brought a job that had not happened yet. A third travelled in a circle between the phone and the part of me responsible for believing it would never ring again.
Drinking adapted well to this arrangement. It celebrated the job, occupied the silence and reduced some of the distance between the two. Later it began extending both periods for administrative convenience.
The phone rang. The room emptied. Another country was built, another photograph was placed on another wall and everyone asked what I thought.
Then I returned to the waiting room.
The boy grew older while we waited. For one job he was twelve. For another, he was nearly sixteen. Sometimes the phone did not ring for weeks. I became afraid to leave, because absence might be interpreted as no longer wanting what I was waiting for. I stayed close to the phone and moved farther away from almost everything else.
The boy explored the building.
He found corridors filled with cameras I did not own. In one room, assistants were preparing tomorrow’s light. In another, retouchers were removing things that had been present when the photograph was taken. A group of clients stood around a table deciding which accident should happen next Thursday.
At the end of the longest corridor, the boy disappeared behind a flight case. When he returned, he kept one hand behind his back.
Eventually, I called my agent and said I no longer wanted to be represented. They asked whether I could wait a month. I said yes, then called again several days later and said no.
We left through the door I hoped led out. It opened onto the darkroom. Dad was still standing beside the developer tray. He said I had taken the photograph out too early.
The boy returned it to the developer.
Eventually, there was an atelier around the tray. Cards covered the table. Images moved from paper to paper and formed landscapes belonging to no particular place. Years passed through the room in pieces.
The boy checked the tray occasionally.
For years, the darkroom returned the photograph in altered states.
In some, the water had gone but left its memory behind. In others, fragments of the image survived without whatever had caused them to appear. A few looked complete. Those were usually the furthest away.
I could not return to not knowing. I would have to find another route.
I was waiting for something that could leave the tray without entirely agreeing to have left.
I continued.
One morning, the tray was empty.
The photograph stood upright on the table. The paper had disappeared without leaving. Light passed through it. Further in, the image gathered as though it had not quite decided where to settle.
It finally looked as though it had been found before it had finished becoming.