Blind Exposure

The Weight of Light

Chapter 17: Blind Exposure

She had not picked up the Leica in three years.

It lived in the closet of the archive room, in a padded bag she had carried through fourteen countries, a bag made of waxed canvas with leather straps that had darkened and softened with use, that had been soaked with rain in Beirut and dusted with concrete powder in Aleppo and stained with the red earth of a refugee camp in Jordan, and the bag held the camera the way a reliquary holds a relic, with a care that was not practical but devotional, the care of a person preserving an object that has outlived its function, that has become symbolic, that represents not what it can do but what it once did, what it was part of, the life it participated in.

The Leica M6 was a mechanical camera. No batteries. No electronics. No autofocus. No light meter, except the simple needle meter visible through the viewfinder, and the viewfinder was useless to Elena, was a window she could not look through, but the camera did not need a viewfinder to function, did not need eyes to operate, needed only hands, hands that knew the controls by touch, hands that had loaded film and set aperture and adjusted shutter speed ten thousand times in the dark, in the light, in the field, hands that could operate this camera the way a pianist operates a piano, without looking, by feel, by the muscle memory of a craft so deeply practiced that the practice had become the person.

She opened the bag on a Saturday morning in mid-October. She sat on the bed in the archive room and she unzipped the bag and she took the camera out and she held it.

The weight was the first thing. The Leica M6 weighs 560 grams without a lens, a weight that is distributed through a body of brass and zinc alloy, a weight that is deliberate, that is engineered, that is the product of German precision and the understanding that a camera must have gravity, must have substance, must feel like a tool and not a toy, and Elena held the camera in both hands and the weight was familiar, was intimate, was the weight of twenty years of her life, the weight of the instrument that had been between her and the world, the mediating object, the thing that translated seeing into recording, that took the light her eyes received and fixed it on film, that made permanent what was temporary, that stopped what was moving, that held what was passing.

She touched the controls. The shutter speed dial on top, the raised detents clicking under her thumb as she turned it -- one-thousandth, five-hundredth, two-fiftieth, one-hundred-twenty-fifth, sixtieth, thirtieth, fifteenth, eighth, quarter, half, one second, B for bulb -- each click a station, a known position, the haptic alphabet of exposure. The aperture ring on the lens -- she had left the 35mm Summicron mounted, her favorite lens, the lens she had used for eighty percent of her work, the lens that was wide enough to include context and sharp enough to render detail and fast enough to work in low light -- and the aperture ring clicked through its stops: f/2, f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6, f/8, f/11, f/16. The focus ring, smooth, without detents, a continuous rotation from close focus to infinity, the ring she could not use by sight but could use by scale, by feel, by the distance markings engraved on the lens barrel that she could read with her fingertip, the raised numerals that told her: three feet, five feet, ten feet, infinity.

She loaded film. She had kept a supply in the refrigerator -- twenty rolls of Tri-X 400, the black-and-white film she had used for most of her career, the film that was forgiving and versatile and that rendered the world in the tones of silver, in the grayscale of a medium that did not need color to tell the truth, that told the truth through the relationship of light and shadow alone, and Elena had always preferred black and white because black and white was honest in a way that color was not, because color seduced, color distracted, color offered beauty as a substitute for meaning, and black and white refused the substitution, black and white said: here is the light and here is the shadow and what lives between them is the truth.

She opened the camera back. She loaded the film by touch, threading the leader into the take-up spool, feeling the sprocket holes engage the sprocket teeth, closing the back, advancing the film with two blank frames to reach the first exposure, the actions automatic, sequential, the body performing them without the mind's supervision, the way the lungs breathe without instruction, the way the heart beats without command.

She closed the camera bag. She put the strap around her neck. She felt the camera hang against her chest, the familiar weight, the familiar position, the camera resting over her sternum the way it had rested there in Sarajevo and Kabul and Aleppo and in the streets of New York and the countryside of Provence and the markets of Istanbul, the camera in the place where other people wore crosses or amulets or the hands of Fatima, the talisman that she carried against the world, the instrument of her attention, the tool of her seeing.

She put on her coat. She clipped Kodak's harness. She left the apartment.

The waterfront was a twenty-minute walk from Hawthorne, down to the river, to the Eastbank Esplanade, the path that runs along the Willamette from the Hawthorne Bridge to the Steel Bridge, a path she knew by sound and surface, by the change from sidewalk to asphalt to the textured concrete of the esplanade, by the sound of the river on her left and the traffic on her right and the cyclists calling "on your left" as they passed and the runners whose footfalls had a different rhythm than walkers' footfalls, faster, lighter, the percussion of recreational exertion.

She walked south along the esplanade. She could hear the river. The Willamette in October has a particular sound, fuller than in summer, the water level higher from the early rains, the current stronger, and the sound of the river was not a single sound but a composition, a layering of frequencies -- the low bass of the main current, the higher frequencies of water breaking against the seawall, the intermittent splash of debris or fish or the wake of a passing boat -- and Elena listened to the composition and she thought about what the river looked like, what she remembered of the river, the gray-green water and the reflected sky and the bridges spanning it and the buildings on either bank and the trees along the esplanade, the trees that were losing their leaves in October, the leaves falling into the water and being carried downstream, small boats of color on a gray current, and she could not see any of this but she could hear it and smell it and feel the moisture of it on her face, the river's breath, the cool exhalation of moving water.

She stopped. She stood on the esplanade and she faced the river, or she faced where she knew the river to be, based on the sound and the moisture and the slight breeze that came off the water, and she raised the camera.

She did not know what she was pointing it at. She knew the general direction -- west, toward the river, toward the far bank, toward downtown Portland -- but she did not know the specific composition, did not know what was in the frame, did not know whether the frame contained water or sky or bridge or tree or the back of a passing jogger. She did not know.

She set the exposure by feel. The day was overcast, Portland overcast, and she estimated the light level from experience and from the warmth on her face, which was minimal, which told her the clouds were thick, which meant the light was flat and even, and she set the shutter speed to one-sixtieth and the aperture to f/5.6, an exposure that would be approximately correct for an overcast day at ISO 400, and the approximation was the best she could do, the approximation was the condition of the art now, the art practiced without visual verification, the art of faith and estimation and the deep, bodily knowledge of light that twenty years of fieldwork had deposited in her the way twenty years of river flow deposits sediment on a bank.

She set the focus to infinity. She felt the ring rotate to its stop, the stop that meant: everything beyond thirty feet is in focus, everything distant, everything far, everything that is out there in the world beyond the reach of her hands.

She pressed the shutter.

The click was the same. The mechanical click of the Leica's shutter was unchanged, was the same sound it had made on every exposure she had ever made, the same precise, clean, authoritative sound, the sound that said: the shutter has opened and closed, the light has entered and been recorded, the exposure has been made. The sound was a period at the end of a sentence. The sound was a heartbeat. The sound was the sound of her life, the sound that had accompanied every act of seeing she had ever committed, and it was the same sound now, the same click, even though the seeing was gone, even though the exposure was blind, even though she did not know what the light had recorded, what the silver halide crystals had received, what image would emerge when the film was developed.

She advanced the film. She felt the lever under her thumb, the mechanical resistance of the film transport, the slight tension that meant the film was advancing, the sprockets engaging, the next frame moving into position. She raised the camera again. She pointed it -- where? She did not know. She turned slightly to the right, toward what she thought was the Hawthorne Bridge, the bridge she crossed on foot sometimes, the bridge she could hear, the traffic on it a continuous murmur, the tires on the metal grating a particular sound, a thrumming, a vibration that she could feel in the ground if she stood close enough.

She pressed the shutter. Click.

She advanced. She turned again. She pointed the camera down, toward the ground, toward where she imagined the water met the seawall, the edge where the river ended and the land began, the boundary between liquid and solid, between motion and stillness. She could hear the water lapping against the concrete. She aimed at the sound.

Click.

She walked. She walked south along the esplanade and she stopped at intervals and she raised the camera and she composed by sound -- pointing toward the loudest bird, toward a conversation she overheard, toward the clang of a bicycle bell, toward the hush of wind through trees that she could hear but not see -- and she made exposures, one after another, the film advancing through the camera, frame by frame, the latent images accumulating on the strip of cellulose, images she had composed with her ears and her skin and her memory and her faith, images that might be beautiful or might be disasters, that might be perfectly composed or might be photographs of nothing, of the ground, of the sky, of the inside of her lens cap, and she did not know, could not know, would not know until the film was developed and the prints were made, and even then she would not know because she could not see the prints.

She used the entire roll. Thirty-six frames. Thirty-six blind exposures. Thirty-six acts of faith.

She rewound the film. She felt the rewind crank turn, felt the tension of the film being pulled back into the cassette, felt the slight release when the leader disengaged from the take-up spool and the film was fully rewound, safe, enclosed, the latent images protected in the darkness of the cassette, the darkness that was the film's natural state, the darkness in which the images existed as potential, as chemistry, as the invisible record of light that had been.

She put the camera in the bag. She stood on the esplanade with the river beside her and the city around her and the bag against her hip and the weight of the exposed film inside it, the weight of thirty-six unknown images, and she felt something she had not felt in two years.

She felt like a photographer.

Not a teacher who had once been a photographer. Not a blind woman who remembered photography. A photographer. A person who had gone out into the world with a camera and had made exposures and who was carrying undeveloped film, film that held images, images she had made, images that existed because she had been in a place at a time and had raised a camera and had pressed a shutter and had committed light to silver, and the committing was the act, the committing was the art, and the art did not require sight, the art required only the raising of the camera and the pressing of the shutter and the faith that the light was there, that the light had entered the lens and passed through the aperture and struck the film and changed the silver halide crystals and left its mark, its trace, its evidence, and the evidence was on the film in her bag and the film was real and the exposures were real and she was a photographer.

She walked home. She walked up Hawthorne with Kodak leading and the camera in the bag and the film in the camera and the images on the film and the images were hers, were the product of her attention and her presence and her decision to go to the waterfront and raise a camera she could not see through and make photographs she could not see, and the decision was the art, the decision was the thing that mattered, the decision to make something without knowing what you are making, to commit to the process without controlling the outcome, to trust the light and the lens and the chemistry and the twenty years of accumulated knowledge that told her: the exposure is approximately correct, the focus is approximately right, the camera is pointed at approximately the thing you intend, and the approximately is sufficient, the approximately is the human condition, the approximately is what every photographer works with, sighted or not, because no photographer controls everything, every photograph is an approximation, every exposure is a guess refined by experience, and Elena's experience was vast and her guesses were educated and the education was sufficient.

At home, she put the film in the refrigerator, beside the unexposed rolls, the exposed roll nestled among the unexposed like a sentence among blank pages, a sentence she had written but not read, a sentence whose meaning she would not know until it was developed, and perhaps not even then, perhaps not ever, because reading the sentence required eyes she did not have, and the not-reading was acceptable, was the condition of the project, was the premise of the work.

She sat on the couch. Kodak jumped up beside her, which he was not supposed to do -- the couch was not his territory, the couch was human furniture -- but she did not correct him, did not push him down, because the day had been a day of breaking rules, of doing the thing that the rational mind said was impossible, the thing that the institution would say was unproductive, the thing that the sighted world would say was pointless -- a blind woman taking photographs -- and if the day was a day of breaking rules then the dog could be on the couch, the dog could break his rule as she had broken hers, and they could sit together in the breaking, in the transgression, in the sweet, defiant foolishness of a woman and a dog who did not care what the rational world thought of their behavior.

She reached behind her and touched the wall. She could feel the frames of the Kabul series, the five prints hanging above the couch, the photographs she had made when she could see. And she thought about the roll of film in the refrigerator, the thirty-six frames she had made without seeing, and she wondered whether the blind photographs would have anything in common with the sighted photographs, whether the knowledge that produced the sighted work could also produce blind work, whether the twenty years of seeing had deposited enough sediment in her body and her mind to produce images that were good, that were true, that were photographs and not accidents, that were the product of skill and not of chance.

She did not know. She would not know until the film was developed and the prints were made and someone -- not her, someone with eyes -- looked at them and said: these are photographs, or these are nothing, these are the random artifacts of a blind woman pressing a button, the visual equivalent of noise, of static, of the meaningless patterns that result when an instrument is operated without feedback, without calibration, without the closed loop of seeing and adjusting that is the fundamental process of photography.

She sat on the couch and she did not know and the not-knowing was terrifying and the not-knowing was exhilarating and the not-knowing was the closest thing to seeing she had felt in two years, because seeing had always contained not-knowing, seeing had always been the encounter with the unexpected, the moment when the eye meets the world and the world is not what the eye expected, and the surprise, the gap between expectation and reality, the click of the shutter at the moment when the gap opened -- that was the photograph, that was always the photograph, and Elena sat on the couch with the dog and the exposed film in the refrigerator and the not-knowing in her chest and she felt, for the first time in two years, that the gap was open, that the surprise was possible, that the world could still show her something she did not expect, even if the showing required someone else's eyes, even if the seeing was mediated, even if the photographer could not see the photograph, the photograph existed, the photograph was on the film, the photograph was waiting in the dark, and the waiting was the faith, and the faith was sufficient.