The old master – Lara McKinley

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.

Once upon a time there was a photographer. His name was Brian. He was old-school, a physical man of film and negatives who took pride in the way he could coax light and shadow from paper and chemicals.

When he saw an Ansel Adams print for the first time, he wept. It had tone he could only aspire to, a presence no digital print could ever match. He looked to the dead masters: Dorothea Lange’s gritty realism of the Great Depression, the magic of Cartier-Bresson and his Decisive Moment.

For years he resisted the ephemeral pull of the digital world, everything so fast and complicated; a place where even a photograph – especially a photograph – was not to be trusted.

He romanticised his shrinking business, clinging to his craft the way he imagined clock makers or blacksmiths had in times gone by.

Every day he reassured himself: through mastery of the old traditions, he would be the last of his breed, the holder of wisdom. His prints had beauty and a poetry born under a red light, not with the click of a mouse.

He was a technological dinosaur, and proud of it. He knew nothing of pixels and certainly nothing of curves and levels. He didn’t even like computers.

Slowly these reassurances started to fade. Gloominess set in: You are too old to learn, he thought. You deserve to be extinct. He didn’t feel his actual size, but diminished and smaller, no longer a master craftsman but out-of-date and used up.

One day, he started to say to himself, perhaps I will take a course. One day, was always tomorrow or next week or next year. The step from master to apprentice too big a leap to make; because of that he put his camera away.

His world – once a place of delight and whimsy, truth and power – became grey and unstudied.

In effort to understand the ways of the new world he went to a university end-of-semester exhibition.

It only made him feel more out of touch – the prize-winning print had been given to an out-of-focus, photoshopped montage of a boy soccer player and a disinterested panda playing goalie.

A cheap gimmick and a load of crap, he thought. The judges thought otherwise: A homage to Breton and his notion of surrealist dislocation.

He closed up his dark room two weeks later and retired.

To fill his time and stop the slide into sadness, Brian established every day rituals: A walk, a cappuccino at the café around the corner and a trip to the library to read the newspapers. The mornings gone, he only had to fill the afternoons with chores. Evenings were for reading and crosswords.

It was in his local library, he had his own decisive moment; a perfect coming together of circumstance and timing that taught him a new way to take photographs.

He met Alice.

He was 72, she was 31.

In front of him were the collected works of Sebastião Salgado, a Brazilian economist turned photographer who had set himself the goal to tell the big global stories of work and migration.

Refugee camps looked like biblical paintings of the apocalypse, places of terrible beauty.

Brian had sought out these books wishing to be moved; it was the sort of work he had aspired to doing, but never quite achieved. It was both unique and universal.

Alice arrived at the shared table just as Brian was about to leave. She had her own bundle of books, a healthy eating guide for toddlers sat on top.

She sat down and started to restack her books – which served her needs of the moment but none of her passions. Not surprisingly, she was uninspired.

As she saw the books Brian had spread across the table, Alice stilled.

Brian only felt curiosity, wondering how this suburban mother would respond.

Alice ran her had across the photographs, unaware she was being observed.

A small sigh escaped her lips. Oh.

She looked at the old man next to her, embarrassed.

Brian moved his chair closer, and gently pushed away Alice’s books as he flipped the page.

This is my favourite, he said.

The pair sat together, slowly turning the pages.

Brian watched her with his photographer’s subtle eye.

He saw the light slicing through the window and her look of wonder.

He framed the scene, and took a photograph with no film and no camera.

It was the first of many, and it was just for him.

 

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