Voices

The whole thing is hit or miss. I would do this over again and get it right. I have to finish the carpentry that will make it easier to build sets in the studio. Have someone finish. There is just too much to do. I like the unnatural rigidity in the photograph, but the emulsion is too dirty and the angle slightly off. Photographer Failure. I need a window and plank flooring and a room of old furniture to do this right. Why do it at all, though? I don't know. It just feels like something. It is nothing I can intellectualize. Like knowing the photo is not quite right. You just know the moment you look.

Working with the women in the photographs is usually the best part. Lately, they have been professional models who just like my work enough to stop by for a couple hours. They are smart and creative and have all the best ideas. I tell them what I'm trying to do, the mood and tone and atmosphere, and I tell them about the series. "We're making a movie," I say, "and you get to shape the character. How do you want to. . . ?"

Two days ago, I shot with a woman who makes her living modeling mostly in catalogs. And when we were finished, she and her boyfriend didn't seem ready to leave, lingering where they were. I didn't want to shoot up any more of my precious Polaroid film, so I picked up the digital camera. We began to shoot the way she is used to working--quick. Snap, pop, snap, pop. It was like a dance as she went from one thing to another, twisting and bending, making angles. I'd never done this before. It was mesmerizing. Suddenly gasping, I realized I had been holding my breath. I'd sweat through my shirt. It was just like "Blow Up" for me. But digital.

I won't ever use the images I got there, I don't think, but it was fun doing it once. I could string the images to make a short movie that might be interesting. I'll try it one day to see. It makes me laugh when I scroll that quickly through the images in my camera.

It is all foolish, though, I think sometimes, all this messing around. It is self-indulgent and decadent the Puritan in me says. Devil's work. Next thing I'll be running off to live with the Injuns. And sometimes, I listen to the criticism and think to myself that I am really not able to do this well at all. That is when it is worst, when the voices inside and the voices outside are singing together like a church choir, voices in unison like cold flames that make me shiver and feel hollow at my core.

But I have a friend who is an actor in the theater who has had to put up with this for years. He tells me of bad reviews and worse, but he keeps doing it. Why? Because he likes it. And like a devil with a red tail and a long, barbed pitchfork, he tells me to keep doing it, too. Maybe, I think, he likes company of it on sleepless nights when all you can hear is a scratchy old Hank Williams record somewhere in the distance all lonesome, sad, and blue.