Eight Girls Taking Pictures Read online

  Her solitude forced her out into the Dresden streets—curiosity too, laced with loneliness—pushed her out into this place that felt as insubstantial as an invented story with its impossibly romantic architecture, grand concourses, perfectly arranged gardens, and fountains. There were churches and palaces. And all of it as elaborate as expensive pastry. While she was in transit, being unattached was exhilarating, but the moment she stopped, so did the high.

  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 meet
ing 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.”

  “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.

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sp; 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.