The Walls

The Weight of Light

Chapter 7: The Walls

Sofia had helped her hang them.

This was in the first months, the months when Elena still had the pinhole, the last aperture, the final narrowing of the visual field that reduced the world to a circle the size of a quarter held at arm's length, and through this circle Elena could see -- not well, not usefully, not in the way that seeing functions for the sighted, but enough, enough to distinguish shape from shape and light from dark and the edge of a frame from the edge of a wall, enough to say "higher" or "left" or "that's level" while Sofia held the frame against the plaster and the drill in her other hand and the pencil behind her ear, the pencil she used to mark the points where the nails would go, the carpenter's pencil, the flat one, the kind their father had kept in the pocket of his work shirt when he built the shelves in their childhood bedroom in the house in Tacoma, the house that was sold now, the parents in a condo in Bellevue, the shelves gone, the pencils gone, the father's hands that had held them thinner now, older, the skin looser on the bones, and Sofia held the same kind of pencil and marked the walls of Elena's apartment with the same careful attention to measurement that their father had demonstrated, the genetic inheritance of precision, the Vasquez insistence on getting the spacing right.

They had spent a Saturday. The whole day. They had started at eight in the morning with coffee from the place on Hawthorne that Sofia had walked to while Elena organized the prints, and they had worked through the apartment room by room, hallway by hallway, wall by wall, and the work had been slow because the work required Elena's direction and Elena's direction required Elena's pinhole vision, which was unreliable, which faded and returned and faded again like a radio signal in mountains, and when it faded Elena would stop and wait, would stand in the hallway or the living room or the kitchen with her hands at her sides and her head tilted slightly, the tilt of a person listening for something, though she was not listening, she was waiting, waiting for the pinhole to return, waiting for the small circle of sight to reappear so she could say "up a quarter inch" or "the mat is crooked" or "that one goes to the left of the Sarajevo series, after the apartment building."

Sofia had not complained. Sofia had held the frames and waited and drilled and hammered and leveled and adjusted, and the adjustments were small, were fractions of inches, were the minute corrections that distinguish a professionally hung exhibition from a casual arrangement of photographs on a wall, and the distinction mattered to Elena, the distinction was everything, because these were her photographs, these were the record of her seeing, these were the evidence that she had been a photographer, that she had stood in the light of the world and captured it, and the evidence deserved to be presented correctly, deserved the respect of proper hanging, the respect of level frames and consistent spacing and the careful attention to the relationship between one photograph and its neighbors, the way an essay requires attention to the relationship between one sentence and the next, each sentence correct in itself but also correct in its placement, in its position within the sequence.

The Sarajevo series was in the hallway between the bedroom and the bathroom. Seven prints. Silver gelatin. Eleven by fourteen. Matted in white. Framed in black.

Elena remembered hanging each one. She remembered because the hanging was the last time she saw them, the last time the images entered her eyes and became information, became the world, and the last seeing of a thing is different from all the seeings that preceded it, the last seeing carries the weight of finality, the weight of the knowledge that this is the end of the visual relationship, that after this the photograph will exist on the wall and in the memory but not in the sight, and the memory is not the sight, the memory is the echo of the sight, the afterimage, the reflection in a surface that is no longer reflective.

The first print in the Sarajevo series was the apartment building with the hole in its south face. Elena had made this photograph in 1994, from the street below, looking up, the Leica aimed at the wound in the building's wall, the hole that was maybe ten feet across, a ragged circle blown through the concrete by a shell, and through the hole you could see the interior of the apartment -- the wallpaper, blue with white flowers, and a shelf with books still on it, and a lamp that hung from the ceiling at an angle, the fixture intact but tilted by the blast, and the lamp was not lit, there was no electricity, but the daylight came through the hole and fell on the lamp and on the books and on the wallpaper and the light was the light of exposure, of the private made public, of the interior made exterior, and Elena had photographed this light because the light was the violation, was the architectural equivalent of a wound that shows the organs, the wall breached, the inside visible, the privacy of the domestic space torn open and made available to the street, to the sky, to the camera, to the eye.

She remembered the way the print looked on the wall of her apartment. She remembered the gray tones, the scale of silver from the bright sky visible through the hole to the deep shadow of the undamaged interior, and she remembered the wallpaper, the blue flowers rendered in the photograph as a medium gray with darker gray flowers, the color information lost in the black-and-white translation, the blue becoming gray, the flowers becoming shapes, and the loss of color was not a loss but a distillation, a reduction to the essential, to the light and the dark and the form, and the distillation was the art, and the art was on her wall, in her hallway, where she passed it every day, every morning on the way to the bathroom, every night on the way to bed, and she could not see it but she knew it was there, knew the gray tones and the wallpaper and the tilted lamp, knew them the way you know the face of someone you love, not by looking but by having looked, by the accumulated seeing that becomes knowledge, that becomes the thing itself, independent of sight.

The second print was the woman with the flour. The photograph that was in the permanent collection at the International Center of Photography. The photograph she had described to her students on the first day of class, the woman in the doorway holding a bag of flour and the light coming through a hole in the wall behind her, the wounded light, the light that entered through damage, and Elena remembered hanging this print and looking at it through the pinhole and seeing the woman's hands on the bag, the flour white against the woman's dark dress, the light falling on the flour and on the hands and making them the brightest things in the frame, the brightest things in the hallway, and she had said to Sofia, "That one is level," and Sofia had driven the nail and hung the wire and stepped back and the photograph was on the wall and Elena had looked at it through the pinhole and the looking was the last looking and the last looking was now the only looking, preserved in the memory, fixed in the neurons, developed and printed in the darkroom of the mind.

The third print was the boys playing football in the street during a ceasefire. Four boys, maybe twelve years old, in the street, the ball a white blur of motion in the center of the frame, the boys caught mid-run, their bodies leaning forward, the lean of effort, of play, of the human body's insistence on joy even in the context of destruction, and behind the boys the facades of the buildings, pockmarked with bullet holes and shrapnel scars, the buildings watching the boys play the way the walls of a gymnasium watch a basketball game, impassive, present, the architecture as spectator, and Elena had made this photograph quickly, had seen the boys and the ball and the light on the ball and had raised the camera and made three exposures in rapid succession, the motor drive advancing the film, the shutter clicking, and the second exposure was the one, was the frame where the composition was right, where the boys were arranged in the frame with the accidental perfection that street photography depends on, the moment when the choreography of chance produces a composition that looks intentional but is not, that looks arranged but is found, and the finding is the art.

She remembered telling Sofia about this photograph while Sofia held it against the hallway wall. She remembered saying, "That one was fast. Three frames. The second frame. One-five-hundredth of a second. The ball was moving and the boys were moving and I was moving and everything was moving except the buildings and the buildings were the still point, the anchor, the thing that held the composition together, the architecture that gave the motion its context, the same way a rest in music gives the notes their rhythm." And Sofia had said, "Which one is the ball?" and Elena had described the position -- center frame, slightly low, a white blur against the dark street -- and Sofia had nodded and driven the nail.

The fourth print was the old man reading a newspaper by candlelight. The three-second exposure. The trembling hands. The blur that was not a technical failure but a document, a record of what fear does to the human hand. Elena remembered this photograph with a particular precision because the making of it had required patience, had required her to sit on the floor of the old man's apartment for twenty minutes while the light faded and the candle became the only source and the old man read his newspaper, the newspaper that was three days old because no current newspapers were being delivered, and the man read it anyway, read the old news because the reading was the practice, the daily practice of a man who had read a newspaper every evening of his adult life and who would not stop reading because the city was being shelled, who maintained the ritual because the ritual was the sanity, the anchor, the thing that said: I am still the man who reads the newspaper, the siege has not taken that from me, the siege has taken the electricity and the water and the windows and the safety but it has not taken the newspaper and the candle and the chair and the reading.

Elena had understood this. She had understood it because she understood ritual, understood the way that daily practice holds a life together, the way the repeated action becomes the structure, the architecture of identity, and the old man reading his newspaper by candlelight in a besieged city was performing the same act of structural maintenance that Elena now performed every morning when she put on her shoes and fed Kodak and measured the coffee and walked to the bus stop, the daily repetitions that said: I am still here, I am still the person who does these things, the condition has not taken the practice, has only changed the context in which the practice occurs.

The fifth, sixth, and seventh prints completed the series. The market during the ceasefire, the stalls reassembled from salvaged wood and plastic sheeting, the vegetables laid out on blankets, the commerce of survival, the economy that persists because economy is a human instinct, as fundamental as language, as unavoidable as breathing. A child's bicycle leaning against a wall that was half-destroyed, the bicycle intact, the wall not, the juxtaposition that Elena had composed carefully, deliberately, the bicycle in the foreground sharp and whole, the wall in the background broken and blurred by the shallow depth of field, the sharpness and the blur making an argument about what survives and what does not, about the resilience of the small against the destruction of the large. And the last print, the seventh, was a window -- just a window, an empty window frame in an empty building, and through the window the sky, and the sky was clear, was blue, was the blue of a sky that did not know about the siege, and the window framed the sky the way a camera frames a subject, and the frame was the wound, the blown-out wall, and the subject was the sky, the indifferent, beautiful, unreachable sky.

In the living room, above the couch, the Kabul series. Five prints. Color. Sixteen by twenty. The school with the blue door. The women in the market, their burqas a field of blue. The boy on the bicycle -- a different boy, a different bicycle, a different city, the same light of a place where the light has no mercy, the altitude light, the thin, sharp, high-contrast light of five thousand feet.

Elena had shot Kabul in color because Kabul demanded color. The blue of the burqas, the blue of the school door, the brown of the dust, the green of the mountains visible at the end of certain streets, the palette of a city that existed in a landscape of extremes, the desert and the mountains, the brown and the green, the earth and the sky, and the color was the information, the color was the data that black-and-white would have discarded, and Elena did not want to discard it, wanted the blue, needed the blue, because the blue of the burqas was the subject, was the argument, was the thing the photograph said about the world, about the mandating of color, about the beauty that coercion produces, the aesthetic that is also a constraint, and the tension between the beauty and the constraint was the photograph, was what the photograph held in its frame, and the holding required color, required the blue.

She could not remember the blue now. She could remember that the blue was there, could remember the concept of the blue, the idea of it, but she could not see it in her memory the way she could see the gray tones of the Sarajevo prints, because color fades faster than form in the memory of the blind, the chromatic information degrades while the tonal information persists, and Elena's memory of her color work was a memory of shapes and compositions and light ratios without the color, like a musician remembering a song without the key, the melody intact but the pitch uncertain, the structure preserved but the quality altered.

She thought about this sometimes. She thought about the fading of color in her memory and she wondered whether the fading would continue, whether the memory of form would also degrade, whether the images in her mind would eventually dissolve entirely, the way a print left in the fixer too long dissolves, the silver leaching out of the paper, the image fading to white, and the fading would be the second blindness, the blindness of the memory, the loss not just of sight but of the record of sight, and the prospect was the thing she did not discuss with anyone, not with Sofia, not with her therapist, not with Kodak, the private fear, the fear that was not about the present blindness but about the future forgetting, the fear that the photographs on her walls would eventually exist only as objects, as frames and glass and paper, without the memory of what they showed, without the internal gallery that was the only gallery she could visit, and the gallery would close, would go dark, would be emptied by the same degenerative process that had emptied her eyes.

But not yet. Not today. Today the gallery was open. Today the images were present, were available for review, were hanging on the walls of her memory as surely as they were hanging on the walls of her apartment, and Elena walked through her apartment and she walked through her memory simultaneously, the physical navigation and the mental navigation synchronized, the step from the hallway to the living room corresponding to the step from Sarajevo to Kabul, the step from the living room to the kitchen corresponding to the step from Kabul to Aleppo, and at each step the photographs were there, were present, were the record of the seeing she had done, the weight of the light she had carried, the evidence that she had been in the world and had looked at it and had seen it and had captured it and had brought it home and had hung it on the walls and had looked at it one last time through the pinhole and had said to Sofia, "That one is level," and Sofia had driven the nail and the nail held the wire and the wire held the frame and the frame held the mat and the mat held the print and the print held the image and the image held the light and the light held the world and the world was on her walls, the whole world, every city and every conflict and every face and every boy carrying bread, and she could not see any of it and she could remember all of it and the remembering was the visiting, the remembering was the museum, the remembering was the gallery that never closed, the exhibition that had no hours, the permanent collection of a woman who had collected the light of the world for twenty years and who carried it now in the only archive that remained, the archive of the mind, the dark gallery, the museum she could not visit but that she lived in, that she inhabited, that she walked through every morning on the way to the bathroom and every evening on the way to bed, the museum of the walls, the museum of the light, the museum that was her home.