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Photographs | So you did it

A week before the operation, Roger called me— he and Brooks were anxious to be photographed with the 8x10. Where had I been all summer? We agreed to meet the day before I was scheduled to go in. I gathered my equipment, which had been idle for three years. My ground glass was broken—there wasn’t another to be found in time. I convinced myself, utterly wrongly, that any old frosted glass would do. I taped in my broken ground glass. A third of the scene would be missing. Two hours before the shoot, I reached for my tripod in the tiny apartment on Perry Street that had once been Thomas Merton’s—or maybe his was on the floor above and I was listening to the echo of his footsteps across the years. I ran to the parking lot on the river where I kept my camper. Number two tripod also broken. The head on number three would work—but in order to level the camera, I would have to use the legs of the tripod. I drove to Wall Street. As I sat nervously at a red light on Broadway, a van smashed into my camper. The driver of the van, which had a hundred dents, got out and offered, “You know how it is, a van in New York…” I agreed. It took me forever to set the frame. My patient subjects went off to get hot dogs. As soon as they got back I made the picture, guessing with the broken shards they were in focus. The operation revealed that I had sarcoidosis, which sounds terrible but usually is not. In the hospital, I played a trick on Byron. An hour or two after the operation, I found I was able to walk. Seeing him coming down the hallway on rounds I ducked behind a pillar. I stayed behind as he walked into my room and stared at the empty bed. —he became my physician for the next 35 years. Eleven years before all this, I learned I had Von Recklinghausen’s—another “you may never know you have it, or it can kill you” condition. Now I had a new boogeyman: sarcoidosis. I decided I’d better get to work.
After she wrote a letter of recommendation for me for a Guggenheim, I remarked the formality of language used by the Foundation: "Your communication of 20 photographs has come to hand. It will receive due attention". She sent her postcard after she learned that I had indeed been fortunate enough to receive a Fellowship. Ever since I have felt that I owed everything to her. It is sometimes said that the world may be divided between the tender hearted and the tough minded. She was both. She mentored me: I would hand her a stack of contact sheets: "this one is shit, this one is shit, this one is shit, this one's good, this one is shit". I didn't always understand why but I witnessed the importance and means of tight editing. I went photographing with Helen. I was to walk on the other side of the street and hang back a bit to provide security. If anyone needed protection it was I. It was great to see how she melded into life on the street--it reminded me of the Clay People who dissolved into walls in early episodes of Flash Gordon that I had seen on television as a child. I believed that she had learned tight editing from Evans but there was an unstated rule that you didn't ask about Walker Evans--and I never did. However, in my final meeting with her before I went out on the road I was desperate for all the help I could get. "Tell me about Evans" I heard myself saying. She was silent for what seemed like two or three minutes and then she said, "Well, he was a genius". That was all she said. You too Helen, you too.
Part 2 I was still working in the same spot half an hour later when they came down the road heading back to the field, only this time he was carrying a small table upside down, balancing it on top of his head, and she was walking ten paces behind, struggling in her oversized shoes. I don't think they were Roma but it seemed like a step was being taken. I think about moments when a life can change: what happens when you set out towards an open field at the edge of civilization with a table? He had a key ring but no keys on it, were those needle marks on her arm? I thought about fate: did the money I gave them affirm for them that their newly found love was lucky, that there would always be coffee money? And tables for the asking? Or were they agents of my fate: a good picture, a book, a show? Are we all, even in small moments, acting upon each other's fate, sometimes dramatically, other times less so. Could life be better if we were all conscious that this were so? I hadn’t realized...
After I first began to photograph in color in the late 1960’s there came a period of years during which I struggled to understand this unexplored medium. What were its highest or most important uses? For that matter, what were its uses, period? I had decided to work in color because I was interested, to put it mildly, in the seasons and in seasonal change in the landscape. However, once I began to work, I found that I was interested in everything. I could go through all my film in an hour. For pragmatic reasons if no other, I had to develop a hierarchy of interest and of aesthetic criterion. Eventually I arrived at this formulation: in the good or successful color photograph the definition of the picture, or the meaning of the picture, will somehow arise through the use of color in the frame. This can operate in many different ways, but when I was driving down the street in Washington, D.C. on a very hot afternoon in August of 1974 and saw, going in the opposite direction, a couple in a turquoise blue 1957 Thunderbird, and I realized that the person in the passenger seat had managed to acquire perfectly matching sunglasses, I immediately made a U-turn. Luckily, I caught up to them at the next light, I and was able to make this picture. What is their relationship to the car and to each other? We can’t know from the picture, but the turquoise of her sunglasses is suggestive of some possibilities.​