Today I went to the local art museum hoping to visit a photograph I’d seen. Months ago, when the puckered crocuses opened from dark soil and the northern latitudes tilted toward the sun, I’d stood beside it in the gallery, admiring that particular quality of old film prints, crisp yet soft, like a freshly fallen leaf. I’d passed it with barely a nod.
But this morning, with the sun dwindling toward solstice and the forecast bearing snow, I remembered it and, urged by a sudden craving, decided to blow off work. In my memory, the camera lens peered up out of a winter cave, the overhanging rock just visible along the upper margins. A steep slope of snow tumbled toward me, rolling and bulging as the soft powder smoothed the lines of stone. Above, the trees bent in smooth parabolas beneath their winter-white burden, and beyond them, just visible between their icy branches and the leading edge of the cave, burned a scrap of blue sky.
As I trudged down gray streets to the museum, I imagined the artist, whoever he was, standing there with his camera, adjusting his shutter speed, his position, looking up to gauge the angle of the sun, the way it rebounded again and again off the tumbled snow, casting a rare incandescence down into the rocky depths.
I imagined him standing in the dark room, working to summon the image from film: immersing the long strips of gelatin in their chemical baths, waiting for the cave to appear in reverse, hanging them to dry, waiting, inspecting each, sliding one into the projector, exposing his paper, slipping that into its own sulfate pool, hanging print after dripping print from clothespins on the line. He squints, steps back, squints again. The one on the left lay in the developing solution a few seconds too long, its highlights under-spaced with too much shadow. The one on the right was over exposed on the projector, the winter sun blotting out the dark loom of the cave. He imagines a print just between them, a brief window of balance where his winter-lit scene will rise from the paper like a whale from the depths. He turns again to his work.
What the photographers of the early twentieth century knew that we—with our pocket photo editors—often forget is that great photography is not about color saturation or composition. It’s not about subject or symbol. As he held in his mind those brief rays of sun glancing off a winter forest, rebounding from ice to ice until they reached a glass lens gazing up from the cave, he understood the truth that humans striking fires, charting stars, and building temples to the sun have always known. It’s about light.
I took a traditional photography class in high school. I was terrible at it, with no eye for the subtle interplay of gray and only a fumbling grasp of composition. But I loved the darkroom, a deep windowless place inside the school with black-painted walls and warm red lights. It had a special door designed to stave off the world. Imagine a cylinder set on one end, about eight feet tall and four feet across. On one side was a two-foot-wide gap. Spin the cylinder one way and the gap would align with the door to the photography classroom and the rest of the school. Turn it the other way, and the gap would open to the darkroom.
Sometimes when the boys at my table were laughing too loud, jostling me with elbows and knees, I would rise with my notebook and the pretense of checking my prints or switching out the chemical baths. Stepping into that tall, dark cylinder, I’d slide the door so the gap faced neither the classroom, nor the darkroom. A void descended. My gut dropped in animal terror, a dog cowering before a thunderclap. But after a few moments, my eyes, retinal nerve, and visual cortex grew accustomed to uselessness. They stilled. My ears caught only the muffled groans of pipes and vents somewhere within the walls of the school. My skin felt the soft fibers of my clothes, the heavy stillness of the air. As the electric tides of my mind slowed, something else, some memory long asleep, woke within me, uncoiled from the base of my skull, and sniffed the air. The darkness breathed.
The cylinder creaked as another student came to develop their film, and I turned with my eyes down, pretending I was just returning to class. I slid past them out the gap and back into the bright, bustling world.
The photograph wasn’t there. Where it had hung were a few German etchings from the nineteenth century, which moved me not at all. I settled on a nearby bench. I understand of course why museums rotate their collections, but in these gusty preludes of winter, something inside me needed that photograph. It needed to remember what that picture knew about living in the dark, about emerging into scant, reflected light.
I wonder if the photographer hiked through the cave to that spot. I wonder if, down the passage, he saw a distant gleam caroming off the drifted snow. Did his steps quickened, trying not to stumble on the half-visible stone beneath his feet, his grip tightening on all the precious glass he carried? Did the animal within him heave a sigh of relief when, looking up past the stone and snow and ice-bowed trees, he saw the high blue atmosphere? Did he feel silly for a moment, because of course he’d never really thought the sky, in his absence, would cease to exist? How long did he stand there before, with steady hands, he began unfolding the legs of his tripod?
I can’t help but wonder if he saw what I remember now in that image, some cardinal degree of winter, some understanding of how to live through days when the only light you see comes third and fourth hand, reflected off so much ice and snow. A fire burns somewhere in these sunless days, too far off for us to feel its warmth. We make do, for now, with a refracted gleam.
Maybe someday the museum’s keepers will rehang the picture. Perhaps when they do, I’ll realize my memory was all wrong, that there was no cave, or perhaps no snow, that the gaze cast longingly toward the sky was only my own. Maybe this trip to the museum was doomed from the start.
But its winter here and I’m living on borrowed light—flung out from the sun, reflected off ice, etched into film, cast up in the darkroom, caught now, infinitesimal, in the brief shutter of my mind.