Eight Girls Taking Pictures (3 page)

Seattle was raw, unfinished and barely begun; surely no one could miss Cymbeline’s hayseed aspect as she wandered the gardens and city squares and wide boulevards, alternately fixated on her environment while unaware of the people within it. There was something fabulous about walking along the Elbe River instead of gazing out across Elliott Bay, or spending her days going largely unnoticed in a college class of men, or hearing only German and no one talking to her in class or on the street, leaving her unsure about her conversational skills. It was as if she had willed this dream into being then forgot to make herself visible.

Additionally, she was now cursed with all the time alone she never felt she could get enough of back in her stateside life. So novel was this situation that she barely knew what to do with herself. She tried to list the advantages of being overlooked, chief among them having to be concerned only with herself; then she would see something funny or provocative or puzzling, and, without someone with whom to share the
funny/provocative/puzzling thing, her aloneness would come to her all over again.

The Advantages to Being Alone list had a single entry—that of having to be concerned only with her own desires, which pretty much exhausted the upside.

As a photographer, Cymbeline was drawn to the pictorial photograph. She loved the softness of Käsebier, the manifesto of Stieglitz, the dreamy, blurred beauty of Baron de Meyer—these pictures that could be paintings. She believed, as others did, that a camera was good for more than recording the world. A photograph wasn’t a response to something; it was something. (After Berlin, after marriage, she would say that she “shifted her own artistic expressions along less sentimental lines.”)

There was no one in Dresden she knew well enough to pose for her. No friends or models to arrange in biblical allegories, or tableaux of Greek gods and goddesses. So, on a dry autumn day, Cymbeline stowed her boxy camera in the little black leather suitcase, along with a handful of dry plates, and went into the street. If she was to be invisible, then she may as well use that invisibility.

 • • • 

It wasn’t long before Cymbeline came to a massive mural made of tile. Even if it was placed at street level and not well above the sidewalk, and below a bank of windows on what looked to be an important building, the thirty-foot-high picture would still dwarf whoever stood beside it. The illustration was a parade of theatrically dressed men, some on horseback, others on foot, all resembling finely drawn ink etchings on white, with a yellow background. There had to be a hundred figures, many with names written below and just above the bottom of the ornate border that framed the entire scene.

There was no way to photograph the whole mural; the building across the street threw shadows, and photographing straight up, or when standing at one end of the hundreds-feet-long mural, caused distortion.

Cymbeline, the open suitcase beside her, camera in hand, was trying to gauge the shadows and distance when a voice said in faintly accented English, “Why don’t you photograph real people instead of drawings of people?” She was so accustomed to being unseen, it didn’t occur to her that she was being addressed, even in English. “It isn’t the original mural, you know.”

This time Cymbeline turned to see Julius Weisz, her photochemistry professor.

“
Fürstenzug, The Procession of Princes
—a history of local royalty—was first carved into the wall about three hundred years ago. When the years faded it to almost nothing, a nineteenth-century artist named Wilhelm Walther decided to carve it back in.”

“Wilhelm Walther?” asked Cymbeline.

“I suspect many people wondered who he was, so he etched himself as the last man in the procession. Like a ‘hanging on,’ yes? A hundred years later his painting was replaced with tiles,” he said as he was already reaching for her camera. “May I?”

He held the camera for a moment, then opened the hinged flap that protected the ground-glass viewfinder, which he turned vertically and horizontally before adjusting the bellows. “It’s a good weight for street pictures,” he said.

“You know, I do photograph real people, not lately because . . . That is, I did work in a portrait studio for the last two years. Mostly, I made prints and negatives.”

“Is that how you came to be interested in your platinum paper experiments?”

“I think there’s a way to use lead to increase the printing speed. The whites will be sharper, and the result, I think, will be more beautiful.” She stopped. “Anyway, I came to that on my own. Not from the man who ran the studio.”

“You didn’t like this man?”

“No.” She sighed. “Being well-known made him arrogant. My lessons came from his assistant, who did everything.”

“And what did you learn about people when you worked there?”

“You mean about portraiture?”

He said nothing as he studied her from behind the wire-rimmed glasses that were exactly like hers. “This bad man influenced you to stop taking portraits?” His hair was longer on top and close on the sides, and he had a small beard. His informal attire was pretty par for a scholar; her discerning eye caught the quiet money in the cut and fabric, and something else: an unexpectedly stylish quality. His face and figure were pleasing; funny how she had never really noticed that he was, well, rather handsome. For someone in his early forties, anyway.

“I don’t know anyone here,” and in that moment she could have sworn that he understood the isolation of being an American girl walking around Dresden, on a day off from class but without the company of a single classmate.

“And I’m to be somewhere.”

“Oh, sure, of course,” said Cymbeline, “I didn’t mean to keep you.”

“But you didn’t keep me.”

He seemed genuinely reluctant to leave. “May I take your picture? A souvenir of this great bathroom wall of German princes and their shameless friend, Wilhelm Walther.”

The suggestion itself was enough to make Cymbeline feel better than she had in weeks as she stood there, posing against a backdrop of blond brick, well below the image of Mr. Walther, the mural almost too high on the building to capture anything but the decorative border, boots, and horses’ hooves that hovered above Cymbeline, even with Julius Weisz standing across the narrow street. She imagined how the pair appeared to those walking by: two tourists, maybe lovers, spending an afternoon together.

“I really do have to go now, but I will see you again.” He returned her camera.

Was he asking to see her again? Was he interested in her? Her experience with men was so thin that she couldn’t quite read him.

“At school?”

“At school,” she agreed a little too enthusiastically in an attempt to hide her misunderstanding of his words.

As he walked away she realized that during the train trip from Seattle to New York; the week spent in New York City; the Atlantic crossing to Liverpool; her five days in London and the following three in Paris before arriving in Dresden, she had taken pictures of prairie and farmland, country train stations, monuments, museums, cathedrals and gardens, fellow travelers and other strangers, rivers and boats, and zoo animals, but not one photograph of herself. She was a kind of nonpresence in her own adventure. Her absence didn’t occur to her until Julius Weisz suggested taking her picture. It was as if he knew what it was to be apart and on one’s own, as if he knew her. Much later, she wondered if all love begins with these sorts of simple understandings, you know, just one person seeing another.

The encounter with Julius Weisz at
The Procession of Princes
changed everything. Having that a casual meeting on a random street meant that Cymbeline was someone living in a city where she could have a casual meeting on a random street—only that street was in Dresden and not in Seattle. This ordinary thing made Dresden more of a home to her than anything else ever could. Which set her to thinking about home and familiarity and belonging. It also had her studying Julius Weisz, if only to convince herself that she hadn’t imagined she’d once had his undivided attention. She tried to ignore the reasons why this mattered.

When she was growing up, Cymbeline’s father, a forward-thinking man enamored of the spirit world, vegetarianism, and his daughter’s education, named his daughter for a Shakespearean king—“Not a queen,” he said, “not a girl” (years later it was Leroy who delighted in the coincidence of his name translating to “king” in French and hers being the name of a king, just more evidence that they were meant to be)—instructed her in Dante, Theosophy, American Transcendentalism, Latin, and the
Encyclopaedia Britannica,
since it offered a “foundation for everything.” He made sure she had art classes in the summer though her large family could barely afford them.

But it was when she recited Homer that she realized she wouldn’t
want to return once she had left, a thought that had more to do with watching her mother labor in a home where she barely had enough time to sleep, let alone pick up a book or meditate on the spiritual beliefs of Madame Blavatsky. Life on their Seattle farm was so very hard in all the ways that a rural life, where the money seemed to come and go in proportions so exact that growth and debt canceled each other out, is hard. She loved her parents and her brothers and sisters, but, for now, in Dresden, she loved being away more.

 • • • 

Everyone in Julius Weisz’s class was expected to attend the International Photographic Exposition. Cymbeline had been twice already, looking again at Stieglitz’s work—his pictures taking on a more personal meaning now that she herself was studying in Germany, much as he had twenty years before—but the work that really held her belonged to Baron de Meyer: all that glamour, all those elegant dreams embodied in still lifes and portraits.

Julius Weisz said, “There is an arrogance in the demand for the viewer’s attention.” He went on to say that if the photographer isn’t going to pay attention to the picture he is making, that if he thinks the camera is just a machine and not an avenue of expression, then he has no business asking anyone for anything, let alone their time and interest. Don’t show the world, he said, invent the world.

In this regard, the soft-edged beauty of the de Meyers was extreme. His graceful universe was like seeing life on a star. The fashions worn by the models always went one luxurious step, one extravagant diamond and pearl necklace, one highly stylized headdress or sleeve further. Her favorite picture was of two hydrangea blossoms, their stems suspended in a drinking glass, bending over the side as if they meant to fall: the glass, the water, the table, the wall ethereal. At first glance, the photograph was as simple in its subject and composition as his pictures with people were baroque.

It was at this very photograph at the exposition where Cymbeline and Julius Weisz caught up with each other.

“What do you think about photographing flowers?” she asked.

“It depends if you’re talking about living flowers or cut flowers.”

She was about to ask him about the difference when he said, “One is memento mori, so to speak. Its life is ended, its appearance in rapid decline. As a photographer you have a completely different set of problems to solve when you photograph cut flowers.”

“Like this picture with the reflection of the water and the table and wall?” she asked. They were looking at de Meyer’s hydrangea blossoms.

“Sure, okay. Let’s take this picture. There is the problem of the light bouncing on the reflection of the water, the glass, the tabletop, and the wall. But any picture could deal with the problem of light. The problem with this picture is greater than that of reflective surfaces—it’s one of death. You invite a profound theme into your work when you choose cut flowers. You are talking about mortality and time moving forward. You are saying that everything, everything we see and experience and love happens uniquely and happens only once. When you take a picture of a flower in a glass you are, paradoxically, capturing evanescence. You are also showing the indifference of Nature. There is no mourning in a flower photograph, only a shrugging of the shoulders.”

“I think it’s beautiful.”