The Museum of Extraordinary Things
Page 20

Eddie had set out to photograph every one of these apple trees, some little more than twigs, others quite massive, with thick trunks and twisted limbs. He used the dry-plate process, which included an emulsion of gelatin and silver bromide on a glass plate that gave images a heightened depth, along with an inner light that gleamed. Each tree was an individual, a soldier in the fight against pavement and bricks. In the boughs of one tree a raven had been perched, one Eddie hadn’t noticed until the print was in the developing bin. In another, the wind had come up so unnoticed that he was stunned to see that outside his vision, blossoms had been shivering down to earth as a rain of white flowers, a visual snowstorm in August. Eddie had come to understand that what a man saw and what actually existed in the natural world often were contradictory. The human eye was not capable of true sight, for it was constrained by its own humanness, clouded by regret, and opinion, and faith. Whatever was witnessed in the real world was unknowable in real time. It was the eye of the camera that captured the world as it truly was. For this reason photography was not only Eddie’s profession, it was his calling.
The photographer Alfred Stieglitz had headed a conference in New York so that the business of photography might be elevated and seen as an art form, no longer considered a hodgepodge, half science half magic, but rather as elements that, when sifted together into a photographic image, yielded truth, beauty, and a measure of real life that was often more miraculous than the original miracle of flower or fish, woman or tree. Stieglitz had opened Gallery 291, on Fifth Avenue, which showed photography alongside drawings and paintings, promoting the most avant-garde artists. On that fateful day when photography was seen in the true light of its worth, Eddie had stood among the crowd who’d come to hear Stieglitz, brought there by his mentor, though he was nothing more than an apprentice at the time. He was transfixed by all he witnessed. More than ever, he was converted to his art in some deep, immutable way that struck his spirit, as it had on the night he saw the locust trees in the woods of upper Manhattan. It was there, for the very first time, that he had felt truly awake.
Still, every man had to make a living so that he might afford bread and beer and cheese. Every man was human, moved by human desires and needs. Eddie was too hotheaded to photograph weddings, as Moses Levy had. He could never tolerate clients who shouted out instructions and demanded certain poses, especially those who gave orders to an artist as noble as Levy. As an apprentice, Eddie had often been forcibly removed from a wedding hall when he’d faced off with the father of a bride or a groom. “How dare you tell him what to do!” he would say in defense of his mentor, even as he was being escorted to the street by a group of burly guests. “You’re dealing with one of the greatest photographers of our time!”
On these occasions Levy would have to make apologies for Eddie, then finish the work without an assistant. “Are you such a fool that you don’t understand? You must see what others cannot,” Levy told his wayward helper once they were on their way back to the studio in Chelsea. “In our world of shadows, there is no black and white but a thousand different strokes of light. A wedding is a joyous event. There’s no shame in catching those moments for all time.”
When Levy lay dying, the result of childhood pneumonia that had weakened his lungs, Eddie had wept at his bedside. He was a man of twenty by then, but his emotions got the best of him, and made him critical of his shortcomings. He wished he had been a better man and a better protégé, for he feared that his art failed both his mentor and himself. He yearned for the ability to see into the world of shadows, as Levy and Stieglitz did, for he saw only the light or the darkness, black or white, and all that lay in between was invisible to his eyes.
In the five years he’d been on his own since Levy’s death, Eddie had focused on crime scenes and disasters. He gravitated to street life, perhaps because he’d known this world so well as a boy. He soon had contacts with editors at most of the newspapers in town, though he was certain his mentor would have disapproved of the sheer commonness of his employment, which, by its very nature, focused on the degradation of mankind. Levy wouldn’t hear of it when Eddie had once suggested they might work for the papers.
“We don’t need to make a living off of other people’s pain,” the older man had insisted. “A portrait is one thing. We can celebrate the great occasions in our subjects’ lives and not veer so far from our true calling that we become traitors to our art. But the newspapers want violence, retribution, crime, sin. In short, it’s hell they’re asking for. Is this a place you’d like to enter?”