Stolen Moments of Your Time Were All You Had to Give
Author and photographer Elizabeth Tallent muses on the creative processes of writing and Street photography
1.
Alone in his room at two a.m., Kafka bends over his desk and writes:
You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
He looks down just as a red rubber ball rolls silently past his shoes and thinks Where did you come from?
2.
Not long ago a diamondback coiled in front of the bare feet of a deaf girl in a story I was writing. Before it did, the story had two ingredients: dirt road, lost girl. Though this is a first draft, barely under way, she’s confided a little of her real self: she’s a daydreamer. Her attention is on the sky, whose clouds might be telepathically coaxed into assembling into shade. She’s got favorites among the clouds, and others she only pretends to like, and still others that actually hate her, relationships so absorbing it’s just luck that she happens to look down in time to make out, in the fluently mounting loops, the pixilated diamonds, the tail fixed in a silent frenzy of rattling, just luck she freezes unbitten in one of mind-photographs that come while I’m writing.
When they come, these mind-pictures clot storytelling momentum — that’s one way of seeing it. Another way: they are the story the story isn’t telling. What happens next? is the dirt road underfoot, whereas image: image is the rattlesnake whose head dabs and meltingly swings like a candleflame blown horizontal. Image is an intervention reality stages for sleepwalkers.
I didn’t plan this. Part of why the snake made me happy was because it appeared out of the blue, the blue being everything I don’t consciously know about a story.
3.
The parallel addictiveness of street photography lies in this: every good picture comes out of the blue. It’s unforeseeable, though it may be awaited — even, to a degree, anticipated. The street photographer can hang around a corner where the light is gorgeous, can hope it’s the one day in a million when the phalanx of businessmen has been infiltrated by a guy in a gorilla suit, but, if she’s into candid street photography, she doesn’t make things happen: she leaves that to the world. It’s fantastic having a camera in your hands when the world comes up with some new twist because it’s like holding the widest-awake version of your brain, a version whose f-stop can be adjusted. Minds, too, have apertures. How much world can the writer bear to let in?
4.
Street photography means leaving your room with your stillness intact, taking quietness for a walk through the county-fair’s rock-and-roll soundtrack without knowing what you’re looking for until there it is: down the row of game booths is one whose rear wall is a kodachrome mob of balloons, its ceiling a party of stuffed animals. Within this visual clamor a young woman cradling a baby waits to make change and hand over darts, her cupping of the baby’s head the quietest thing in the entire county fair. A couple of other children play nearby. The scale of the booth is intimate, little distance separates the counter for leaning against while tossing darts from the wall of balloons. Pop a balloon, and a ticket for a stuffed animal will flutter out — to all appearances, the easiest game in the world. Why are there still animals left?
5.
When you begin a story you need to know a little about it but your sense of what you don’t know is by far the more awed and magical relation. As every dream you’ve ever dreamed knows, an image can be the most marvelous vessel ever for what you don’t know. Dreams and photographs have this in common: it’s possible to see things in them. Dreams have no problem being vivid, and neither do good photographs, but writing does. For example, I haven’t yet solved the problem in my first paragraph, of how to make the rattling eerie in its soundlessness. Only repeated revision can turn that soundlessness from rustling assertion into something the reader can feel — for that to happen, I’m going to have to live in that paragraph over and over. Whereas a photograph of a diamondback coiling near a child’s bare feet would be terrible in complete silence. It could only be lived once.
6.
The trick of a balloon is to joyously await doom. Brilliant against the carnival night, it’s a taunting theater of vulnerability — it’s about the shortness of life, this booth. As dart after dart falls short, the balloons’ exuberance seems to be bubbling over — so much gorgeousness, so intact! Two teenagers have been trying for a while with no luck; the young woman makes a sympathetic face. “What to go again?” Turns out it’s the counter-intuitively gentle, under-handed toss whose dart has the best chance. Harder than it looks, which is how she makes her living.
7.
There’s a story about a Cartier-Bresson photograph I like for what it says and refuses to say about images. Cartier-Bresson has caught, in the dullest, most complacent of streets, a boy gazing upward. At what? — at nothing we can see. Only he can, and he’s ecstatic. Years after the picture was taken Cartier-Bresson told the story: he’d been walking for a long while when he’d noticed this boy tossing and catching a ball, doing so with delight, in a world of his own. Cartier-Bresson waited for the instant when the ball flew from the frame, leaving the boy gazing after it.
Most of us think the universe has no age, advises an article about the Universe Clock, but what do they mean exactly — that we think it’s endless, or that we think the sum will exceed quantification? Whatever the nature of our error, the Universe Clock site sets us straight, calculating the time elapsed from the moment something was flung from nothing all the way to troubled 2019. Of the 436 quadrillion, 117 trillion, 76 billion, 900 million seconds of the universe’s existence so far, one-hundred-and-sixty-fourth of a second has been immortalized by the ascent of a red rubber ball.
Of course it’s not the ball. It’s the gaze. The ecstatic gaze at what is bound to fall from heaven into your hot little hands. The photographer’s gaze.
Nobody knows the color of that long-ago rubber ball. The red, writing stole from a song. Writing made that ball thwack down outside of the frame, bouncing through a couple decades till it rolled past Kafka’s feet. Writing hasn’t yet rescued the lost girl, because I haven’t done enough waiting, or been alone enough with the story, which I keep coming back to. No matter how many rounds of darts I pay for, I never believe it’s harder than it looks.
8.
The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
Dear Kafka: I have found this to be truer in street photography than in writing. My head can hold only a head’s worth of world; what the world holds is the world, infinitely photographable. In my childhood church one prayer ended with the words World without end, amen, amen. What luck to go in search of them, camera slung around one’s neck for companionship. You’re not exactly straightforward, K, and the overkill of it will roll in ecstasy at your feet proves how ridiculous I am to believe in the world’s freely offering itself — but then, whether I believe in it or not, it does: the ball flies out of the frame, the young woman tending the carnival booth bends to kiss the baby’s forehead. We may not have world without end but we’ve got all these fractions of an instant. Dear Kafka, did you ever take a picture? Can I see?
Biographical note:
Elizabeth Tallent is the author of a novel and four short-story collections, including, most recently, Mendocino Fire. Her memoir Scratched is forthcoming from HarperCollins in February 2020. She teaches in Stanford’s Creative Writing Program and lives on the Mendocino Coast with her wife, an antiques dealer.
Text and photos by Elizabeth Tallent.
Visit her Street photography Instagram
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