The Portfolio

The Weight of Light

Chapter 25: The Portfolio

A portfolio is an argument. It is not a collection. It is not an album. It is not a random assortment of the photographer's best images arranged in the order they were made. A portfolio is a sequence, a progression, a narrative told in images, and the sequence matters the way the order of words in a sentence matters, the way the arrangement of notes in a melody matters, because the same images in a different sequence tell a different story, make a different argument, produce a different effect in the viewer, and the choosing of the sequence is the last creative act the photographer performs, the final exercise of the judgment that began with the first exposure and that ends here, with the ordering, the arranging, the composing of the body of work into its final form.

Elena taught this on the first Tuesday of November, the week before the final portfolios were due, standing in Room 214 with the rain on the windows and the fluorescent lights humming and Kodak breathing under the desk, the steady, unconscious breathing of a dog who had heard every lecture and slept through most of them and who was, in his canine indifference to the content, a kind of control variable, a reminder that the human preoccupation with meaning and sequence and the correct arrangement of images was a species-specific concern, that the universe, represented by the sleeping dog, did not care about the order of the photographs, and that the caring was therefore a choice, a human choice, and the choice was what made it art.

"You have been making photographs for eleven weeks," Elena said. "You have made hundreds of images. Some of them are good. Some of them are not. Some of them surprised you. Some of them disappointed you. Some of them showed you things you did not know you were looking at, and some of them showed you nothing at all, showed you only the surface of things, the literal content, the what-is-there without the why-it-matters. This is normal. This is the ratio. For every photograph that matters, there are fifty that do not, and the fifty are not failures, they are the practice, the preparation, the approach shots, the circling, the photographer working toward the image the way a sculptor works toward the form inside the stone, removing what is not the sculpture until the sculpture remains."

She paused.

"Your portfolio is the sculpture. Your portfolio is what remains when the not-sculpture has been removed. And the removing is the hardest part, because every image you made cost you something -- time, attention, effort, the particular investment of the self that every act of seeing requires -- and the cost makes you reluctant to discard, makes you want to keep everything, include everything, present everything, because discarding feels like waste, feels like the loss of the investment, and the feeling is real but the feeling is wrong, because a portfolio that includes everything says nothing, and a portfolio that says nothing is not a portfolio, it is a contact sheet, and we have discussed the difference between the contact sheet and the print, between the raw data and the interpreted statement, and the portfolio is the interpreted statement, the final print, the commitment."

She sat on the edge of the desk.

"I am going to work with each of you individually this week. We will go through your images. You will describe them to me -- yes, all of them, or as many as we can get through -- and together we will select and we will sequence. Selection first: which images belong in the portfolio. Sequence second: in what order."

She scheduled them. Half the class today, half on Thursday. Fifteen minutes per student. She would sit with each student while they described their images, and she would listen, and she would help them hear which images were alive and which were inert, which images had the weight that a portfolio image needs and which were merely competent, merely present, merely there without being necessary.

Marcus came to her desk at ten-thirty, when his slot began. He sat in the chair beside the desk, the chair that Deb usually occupied after class, and he placed his laptop on the desk and he opened it and Elena could hear the small sounds of the machine waking, the chime and the fan and the click of the trackpad.

"Show me everything," she said. "Not just the ones you think are best. Everything. Start at the beginning."

He began to describe. Elena listened.

The early work was what she expected -- the teacup in isolation, the counter, the window light, the precise, controlled, technically excellent images of objects rendered with documentary accuracy. Marcus described them quickly, with the efficiency of a person who knows these images are not the ones that matter, who has moved past them, who can see now that the early work was practice, was the necessary precursor to the later work but was not the work itself.

"Skip ahead," Elena said. "Go to the first image you made after you visited the apartment with me."

Marcus scrolled. Elena could hear the trackpad clicking, the small sounds of navigation.

"This one," he said. "This is -- this is the first one I made of her. My grandmother. After we talked."

"Describe it."

"She's sitting in the chair by the window. The chair is wooden, a kitchen chair, not comfortable, not meant for sitting for long periods, but she sits in it for hours. She's looking out the window. The light comes from the left, from the window, and it falls on the left side of her face. The right side is in shadow. Her hands are in her lap, holding the teacup. The cup is in shadow, mostly. A little bit of the window light catches the rim of the cup, a thin line of light along the edge. And the wall behind her -- the photographs on the wall -- you can see them in the background, out of focus, and the glass of the frames is reflecting the window light, and there are these small bright spots on the far wall, the reflections I told you about. And her face --"

He stopped.

"Go on," Elena said.

"Her face is -- the light shows everything. The lines. The texture. The topography, like I said before. And she looks -- she looks like a landscape. Like a landscape that has been weathered by time and by distance and by the crossing of an ocean and by the raising of a family in a country that is not the country she was born in, and the weathering is -- the weathering is beautiful. Not beautiful in the way that beauty magazines mean beautiful. Beautiful in the way that -- in the way that light on an old wall is beautiful. The cracks and the stains and the marks of time, lit by light that is indifferent to beauty, that is just light, that falls on the wall and shows what is there, and what is there is the history of the wall, and the history is beautiful because it is real."

Elena was quiet for a moment. She was listening to Marcus the way she listened to a photograph developing -- patiently, attentively, waiting for the image to fully emerge.

"That is the photograph," she said. "That is the center of your portfolio. Everything else will orbit around this image. Everything else will lead to it or away from it, will prepare the viewer for it or extend the viewer's experience of it, but this is the center, this is the gravitational body around which the portfolio revolves."

"How do I sequence it?"

"Tell me what else you have. Not all of it. The images that you felt something when you made them. The images where the seeing happened."

Marcus described. He described the light-reflection photographs, the ones he had made of the small bright spots on the wall. He described a photograph of his grandmother's hands on the teacup, shot from above, the hands filling the frame, the veins and the knuckles and the thin skin and the teacup beneath the hands, the cup a circle of pale green inside the frame of the hands. He described a photograph of the kitchen window with the grandmother's silhouette, her profile dark against the bright window, the contre-jour lighting that Elena had described in the darkroom lecture, the figure defined by its edges rather than its surfaces. He described a photograph of the apartment door from the hallway, the door closed, the number on the door -- 304 -- visible, and the hallway empty, and the fluorescent light in the hallway flat and institutional and completely different from the window light inside, and the door the boundary between the two lights.

"That is your sequence," Elena said. "Start outside. Start with the door. The door is the threshold. The viewer opens the door and enters the apartment. Then the window -- the light source. Then the light on the wall -- the reflections. Then the hands on the cup -- we are getting closer, getting more intimate. Then the face. The face is the center. Then pull back. End with the silhouette, the grandmother against the window, the figure in the light, the person defined by the light around her rather than the light on her. Start outside, move inside, arrive at the face, then step back. The sequence is an approach and a retreat. The sequence is the movement of a person entering a space, finding the person in the space, seeing the person, and then stepping back, giving the person room, leaving the person in the light."

Marcus was quiet. She could hear him thinking, could hear the synaptic processing that was not audible but that she imagined she could detect, the faint electrical hum of a mind integrating new information.

"That makes sense," he said. "I wouldn't have -- I wouldn't have thought of the door first. I would have started with the teacup."

"Because the teacup is where you started. You are thinking chronologically. The portfolio does not need to be chronological. The portfolio needs to be emotional. The emotional sequence is: approach, discovery, intimacy, retreat. The emotional sequence takes the viewer on a journey, and the journey has a shape, and the shape is the portfolio."

He nodded. She could feel the nod in the slight movement of air between them.

"Go make your prints," she said. "The six images, in this sequence. Print them well. Take your time in the darkroom. Dodge the grandmother's face -- open the shadows on the right side, let the viewer see the detail in the shadow. Burn the window in the silhouette image -- make sure the window is bright but not blown out, let it glow. Trust the chemistry. Trust the paper. Trust the process."

Marcus left. Deb arrived.

Deb sat in the chair and she set her phone on the desk and she said, "I have something I didn't expect."

"Tell me," Elena said.

"I've been photographing the table every day. You know that. Every morning. The light through the window. The chairs. The empty spaces. The light in the empty spaces. And the photographs have been -- they've been what they've been. The absence. The light. The negative space. All the things we've talked about."

She paused.

"But last week, I did something different. I bought chairs."

Elena was still.

"I went to a furniture store. Not the antique store on Hawthorne where I found the table. A regular furniture store. And I bought four chairs. They don't match the original chairs. They're not oak. They're birch. They're lighter in color. They're modern -- simple, clean lines, no spindles. They look nothing like the chairs Robert took."

She paused again.

"I put them around the table. In the spaces where the old chairs were. And the table -- the table was full. Eight chairs. A full set. The table was complete."

"And you photographed it," Elena said.

"I photographed it. Same time of day. Same window light. Same camera position, as close as I could get. Same frame. And the photograph is --"

She stopped. Elena waited.

"The photograph is full," Deb said. "The table is full. The chairs are all there. The light comes through the window and it falls across the table and it hits the chairs -- all eight chairs -- and the new chairs cast shadows that are different from the old chairs' shadows, because the new chairs are shaped differently, have different profiles, and the new shadows don't match the old shadows, they don't fit the shadows that I've been photographing all term, and the light that used to pass through the empty spaces is now blocked by the new chairs, the light is stopped, and the bright bands on the floor are gone."

She was speaking carefully now, each word placed, each sentence constructed with the attention she had learned in this class, the precision of description that Elena had taught her, the discipline of saying what was there before saying what it meant.

"And the photograph is -- the photograph is sad," Deb said. "The full table is sadder than the empty table. I don't understand why. The empty table was the photograph of loss. The four missing chairs were the absence, the negative space, the evidence of the subtraction. But the full table -- the table with the new chairs, the chairs that don't match, the chairs that fill the empty spaces but that are not the original chairs -- the full table is sadder because the fullness is a repair, and the repair is visible, the repair is obvious, the repair says: something was broken and I fixed it, but the fixing is not the same as the original, and the difference between the fix and the original is -- the difference is the grief. The difference is what cannot be repaired. The light that used to fall through the empty spaces now falls on chair backs that are the wrong wood and the wrong shape and the wrong color, and the wrongness is the photograph, the wrongness is what the camera sees, the wrongness is the truth."

Elena was very still. She was holding herself very still because the stillness was necessary, because what Deb was describing was not a photograph but a comprehension, a understanding that had arrived through the practice of photography but that exceeded photography, that entered the territory of the lived, the felt, the known-in-the-body truth about loss and repair and the difference between them.

"Describe the light," Elena said. "In the full-table photograph. Where does the light fall?"

"Everywhere," Deb said. "On everything. On the table. On all eight chairs. On the floor behind the chairs. But the light is -- the light is the same light. The same morning light through the same bay window. The light doesn't know that the chairs have changed. The light falls the same way it always fell. And the sameness of the light makes the newness of the chairs more visible, more obvious, because the light is the constant, the light is the thing that hasn't changed, and against the constant of the light, the change is amplified. The new chairs glow differently than the old chairs would have glowed. The birch is lighter than the oak. The light on the birch is brighter, whiter, colder. The light on the oak of the table is warmer. And the temperature difference -- the warm table and the cold chairs -- the temperature difference is the photograph."

"That," Elena said, "is your final image. That is the last photograph in your portfolio."

"But it's -- I thought the empty table was the ending. I thought the light in the empty spaces was the final statement."

"The light in the empty spaces is the most beautiful image in the series," Elena said. "But it is not the final statement. The final statement is the full table. The final statement is the repair. Because the repair is the truth -- not the loss, not the absence, not the beautiful bright bands of light on the floor where the chairs used to be. Those are the lyric. The repair is the truth. The repair says: I filled the spaces. I bought new chairs. I put them where the old chairs were. And the filling did not fix the thing that was broken, because the thing that was broken was not the table, was not the chairs, was not the furniture -- the thing that was broken was the life, and furniture cannot repair a life, and the photograph of the repaired table shows this, shows the inadequacy of the repair, shows the bright, cold, wrong light on the birch chairs that do not match the oak table, and the showing is more honest than the empty spaces, more honest than the absence, because the absence was clean, was pure, was the uncomplicated grief of a thing removed, and the repair is complicated, is impure, is the messy, inadequate, human attempt to fill what cannot be filled."

Deb was crying. Elena could hear her crying, the same quiet crying as the last time, the tears of a woman who keeps discovering, in photographs she makes of her own dining room, the truths she has been carrying without knowing their exact shape, their exact weight, their exact position in the landscape of her loss.

"Your sequence," Elena said, gently, guiding her back to the work, to the craft, to the concrete decisions that would make the portfolio real. "Start with the full table -- the original full table, the one before the divorce, if you have a photograph of it."

"I have one. From a dinner party. Three years ago. On my phone. It's not a good photograph. It's a snapshot."

"It is the beginning. The before. Then the empty table. Then the series -- the light through the empty spaces, morning by morning, the progression of the light across the term. Then the breakthrough image -- the light filling the absences, the one that made us both cry. Then the new chairs. Then the full table with the wrong chairs. The sequence is: complete, broken, light in the broken places, repaired, and the repair is its own kind of broken. The sequence is a story. The story is your story. The portfolio is the telling."

Deb wiped her face. She laughed the small laugh. "My therapist is going to have a field day with this."

"Your therapist can interpret," Elena said. "You do not need to interpret. You need to see. You need to photograph what you see. You need to print the photographs and sequence them and present them. The interpretation belongs to the viewer. Your job is done when the print is made. Your job is the seeing and the making. The meaning is not your burden."

She touched Deb's arm.

"Go make your prints," she said. "Thursday afternoon. The darkroom. I will be there. Bring your negatives. Bring your courage. Leave the interpretation at home."

Deb left. Elena sat in the empty classroom. The rain tapped on the windows. Kodak breathed. The fluorescent lights hummed at sixty hertz, the frequency of institutional life, the frequency of the building's heartbeat, steady and impersonal and continuous.

She thought about the two portfolios she had just helped sequence. Marcus's: an approach and a retreat, a journey into a space and a person, an intimacy earned through the progression of images from exterior to interior and back. Deb's: a narrative of loss and repair, a story told in the language of light and furniture, in the vocabulary of absence and presence and the terrible, beautiful, insufficient attempt to fill what loss had emptied.

She could not see either portfolio. She would never see either portfolio. But she had heard them. She had heard the images described with a precision and an emotional truth that the images themselves, viewed in silence, might not communicate, because the verbal description added a dimension that the visual image did not have -- the dimension of the photographer's relationship to the image, the dimension of feeling, of meaning, of the human context that surrounded the making and that the making preserved.

She sat in the empty classroom and she thought that this was the paradox of her teaching, the paradox that the committee would not understand, the paradox that the administration could not accommodate in its evaluation forms and its Likert scales: that a blind teacher produced deeper seeing than a sighted teacher, not because blindness was superior to sight but because the blindness required the students to translate their seeing into language, and the translation deepened the seeing, and the deepened seeing produced better photographs, and the better photographs were the outcome, the measurable outcome, the thing that the committee could evaluate if the committee would look at the work instead of the worker, at the photographs instead of the photographer, at the prints instead of the eyes that could or could not see them.

She gathered her things. She walked out into the November rain with Kodak leading and the cane tapping and the rain on her face, the cold, familiar, persistent rain of Portland in November, and she carried the two portfolios in her mind, the grandmother and the table, the face and the chairs, the light in both, the light that was the subject and the medium and the meaning, the light that she could not see but that she carried with her, always, the weight of it, the beautiful, indifferent, relentless weight of light.