Eight Girls Taking Pictures (4 page)

“That would make de Meyer very happy to hear.”

Across from the de Meyers were some photographs of gypsies, dressed in a kind of exotic finery, though Cymbeline’s practiced eye could still make out their scratch living. Next were pictures of New York, so beautiful they could break your heart. Except Cymbeline had been to New York, walking herself to exhaustion during her five days there, and all its beauty could not blind her to the immigrant slums she saw, the overcrowded darkness of some parts of the city. It was her habit, as a photographer, to constantly observe the light, natural or artificial. The poor in these neighborhoods were so crammed together that one of the luxuries they were forced to forgo was sunlight. Strange to think that money bought the sun, which rightfully belonged to no one. Cymbeline slightly amazed that the wealthy would find ways to keep and control something that shouldn’t have been anyone’s to control.

Maybe it was because she had grown up from a poor girl into a young woman who had to watch every penny that things like this often crossed her mind.

“What are you thinking?” asked Julius.

“I’m thinking, Did the photographer set up the shots of the gypsies or were they allowed to be themselves?” She had not forgotten some of the artificial poses the famous portrait photographer in Seattle imposed on his Native American sitters, not to mention the antiquated costumes he forced them to wear.

“Ah, the bad man you worked for at home.”

“I’m uncomfortable with the artifice. It feels condescending.”

“You prefer the unartful de Meyers. The flowers in the crystal bowl, the grown woman in a tiara wearing a cloud of tulle, the man with kohl eyeliner dancing in the costume of a pasha?”

She wandered back to de Meyer’s pictures of his moneyed, arty society, which were pure artifice. She sighed, aware of the contradiction. “I love these. I just do.”

Julius, who had followed her, nodded.

She turned to him. “Perhaps my taste lies somewhere between reality and dreamland.”

“Why not meet me tomorrow at the Himmlisch Garten? We’ll talk about people and life.”

“People and life?”

“I mean portraits and flowers.”

She laughed. She liked his teasing.

A young man, somewhere in age between Cymbeline and Julius, and whom she thought she recognized, hurried over. As he slid his body between them, addressing Julius, he subtly forced Cymbeline out. “Julius,
Sie müssen kommen und sehen,
” pulling him by the hand toward the adjacent gallery with Cymbeline hesitantly tagging along.

The trio entered the high-ceilinged room to find a large crowd gathered in the far corner. From their vantage point they had to keep readjusting their sight line to see the man speaking.

“This little camera is affixed like so—” said the man speaking, holding
a pigeon firmly, though not unkindly, in his hands. He held it aloft so everyone could see the tiny camera that was part of the harness buckled to the bird’s breast. There was a sound of birds cooing.

“The Bavarian Pigeon Corps, whom we are happy to introduce to you today, has been taking aerial photos for us since 1903. This camera takes automatic exposures at thirty-second intervals during the bird’s travel. On the wall behind me, you can see the results.” Through the interstices of the crowd, Cymbeline could see the photographs hung on the walls without being able to make out their contents.

The pigeon man, a Herr Neubronner, who, as it happened, was the inventor of the avian camera harness, began handing out penny postcards of the bird-shot aerial photographs.

One of the cards made it all the way back to Cymbeline, Julius, and the young man who stood near the arched doorway of the gallery. As she studied the picture, she marveled at the wonder of seeing the earth from the clouds. The closest she’d ever come to something like that was when she had hiked up a very tall mountain, though it didn’t seem anywhere close to peering down with nothing but sky below your feet. For a fleeting moment she thought about what her father, the animal lover, would have said about these birds being pressed into service wearing this ridiculous apparatus.

As she went to hand the postcard back to Julius, she noticed the young man whispering something in German to him, his hand resting lightly on the back of Julius’s jacket. This single, unremarkable gesture struck her as unbearably intimate; she could neither stand it, nor walk away.

He was saying something that made Julius laugh. Now she remembered: She had seen him once, in profile, when she was passing Julius’s office. He was sitting across from Julius’s desk, laughing and talking. Another time he was drinking coffee in a student café near the school. She had a hard time determining his age, something she attributed to his having the curly hair of a Renaissance angel.

“I am rude. I am sorry,” said the young man to Cymbeline, as if he’d only just now noticed her. “I am Otto Girondi. I teach maths at the school, and I think I may have seen you there.”

“I think I’ve seen you—” The loud, collective ooohhh of the crowd interrupted her. The small flock of pigeons had been released in the room and were diving and climbing as they swept about the gallery. It was difficult to count the number of birds because of their intersecting flight patterns, but there seemed to be at least a dozen.

Herr Neubronner announced in a loud, excited voice that these birds were, at this very moment, taking aerial photos of everyone below! Cymbeline stepped back, taking refuge under the archway, having lived among animals long enough to know that a bird doesn’t care if it’s inside or outside when it comes to its droppings. Julius and Otto crowded in next to her at the first cry of someone on the receiving end of earthbound waste. It was from this vantage point that the three watched a crowd first entranced, then panicked at the amount of scat falling upon them.

One bird landed on a woman’s hat, another on a man’s bare head, his hair worse for the experience; mostly they swooped and made a mess as amazement turned to chaos, with Herr Neubronner alternately trying to redirect the birds and regain the crowd’s attention. No one listened as they fled the room in their now white-flecked clothing, Cymbeline, Julius, and Otto pressing themselves against the outside wall of the adjacent room.

Cymbeline caught somewhere between amusement and disbelief. “Just when I was worried that taking a decent picture required no greater skill than having a camera strapped to my chest.”

“You don’t need a class,” said Otto, “you need a dovecote.”

“And a raincoat,” said Julius, laughing along with the other two. He barely touched Cymbeline on her shoulder, his hand almost hovering. “The Himmlisch on Saturday,” he reminded her. “Bring your camera. Buckled to your body.”

And just as quickly as she felt the three of them united in their luck at missing the Wrath of the Bavarian Pigeon Corps, she again felt excluded from the company of the men. She couldn’t say why, or how, this happened; she was accustomed to feeling outside the groups of her male classmates, but this was different. This was a puzzle she couldn’t quite put together.

“I want you to see the difference when photographing flowers in the garden.” Julius was coaching Cymbeline as he set up to take pictures of the few flowers still in bloom in the Himmlisch Garten before the season finally changed. She was more interested in the shrubs and the trees, with their variety of leaves and branches.

She sighed.

“What?”

“I can’t attach any meaning to any of this,” she said. “That is, I don’t know why I would want to take these pictures.” Nor could she attach any meaning to his interest in instructing her outside of class, an interaction that left her unable to completely get her bearings.

“We can’t always photograph that which engages us—unless you are a rich girl prowling around for a hobby. Something that you can tell your friends about. Some sort of Kodak Girl,” he said in reference to the advertising posters of a well-to-do girl with a Kodak camera. A pretty amateur. The ad campaign encouraged photography as a harmless hobby, something to do before marriage.

She told herself, He is teaching me. He is a teacher. Not a friend. Not a lover. Yet the tone of his voice and his implication that she was unserious in her pursuit of photography cut her. It was unlike her to be so sensitive to something some man said—she had spent enough time with men in chemistry class and botany labs and working for the famous, awful photographer to disregard their remarks as they often disregarded her. Even an internationally established photographer like Alfred Stieglitz (something of a guiding light for her), whom she’d met when passing through New York, could barely hide his impatience as she confessed her ambition to have a picture appear in
Camera Work.

She had wondered at times why her father bought her art lessons or encouraged her to attend the university. It wasn’t lost on Cymbeline that everyone loved and admired the eccentric heiress, the rich girl who defied societal expectations. It was the rebellious working-class girl they mistrusted; not only should she be working but she should be working
for
them.
Cymbeline had learned from a very early age that money buys things that people with money never even realize they’ve bought, like time and freedom. Because their privilege came to them so naturally, it was unimaginable that others didn’t have it too; that is to say, if others didn’t have it, perhaps that was because it would be wasted on them, the rich always seeming to believe themselves meant for better things.

There was something tough at her core, Cymbeline knew. Was it being singled out by her father, who’d named her for a king, or was it wanting to be a photographer, so much so that she would suffer anything to have it?

After months in Julius’s class, she was seldom invited to study sessions or included in coffee-fueled discussions with her male classmates. They weren’t rude to her; she didn’t count enough for rudeness. True, she was older than most of them, but not by much. And she knew that she wasn’t a common beauty, something that shouldn’t matter yet always does.

The closest she came to any sort of professional camaraderie was when one of her classmates—perhaps the most talented—asked if she would sit for him. He explained that he needed the practice since he planned to open the best studio in Berlin, then said that he’d heard she had some skill in printing, so it was possible that he would
allow
her to print something for him. And, he added, if all went well, maybe she could do even more work for him. No pay, of course, but what a great opportunity for her to hone her darkroom skills, and besides it would free him up to take more pictures.

Cymbeline said, “Maybe,” while thinking about the rustic darkroom her father had built for her during her college years, where she printed by candlelight coming from a red paper box. There were all those botanical slides, not to mention the conceited Seattle photographer and the sheer luck of being able to work with his German assistant, who’d taught her so well and so patiently. There never seemed to be enough hours in the day for her own photography, especially when she was diligent enough to try to get it right.

She thought about the way the men in her class went on and on
about their ambitions, philosophies, and ideas without ever asking her a single question. She thought about the confidence it took to believe that only what you did was important, that a man’s artistic perspective of the world was the only perspective.

It was a funny place for women photographers where they were accepted into the profession (usually taking soft-focus Pictorialist scenes of domesticity)—some were quite well-known—and they were always a half step behind their male counterparts.

So when Julius Weisz made his remark about her work as a hobby, it wasn’t anything she hadn’t heard before. What was new was hearing it from him.

Julius sighed. “You should understand that I’m not asking you to find the thing in a subject that engages you—rather I am suggesting you see that subject in a whole new way—as photographer, see it so that everything will interest you.” He said, “You can do this, Cymbeline.”

Here was the strange thing: She understood absolutely that he believed in her ability, yet his belief had the effect of suddenly making her doubt herself. And something else, too; she had a moment of hard clarity that her life, her woman’s life, would be full of choices—ordinary ones a man might not even see as choices but as “life”—that would constantly be canceling each other out.

“These plants may not mean anything to you because you aren’t ready to understand them. Listen, we are not always meant to get everything all at once. And what I mean is that they may not have any complexity for you right now—not like the cut flowers with their combination of beauty and decay, right? Like trying to hold on to nothing. You need to see that everything has something underneath. The seen and the hidden. Nothing is what it seems to be—the underneath. Do you understand?

“It’s okay,” he said. “Come. I have someplace else to show you.”