1.

In my last year of high school, I took a photography class. I’d wanted to take one for some time – it was what all the cool kids did, snapping moody photos of each other between classes, disappearing later into darkrooms to develop their relationships. But I had spent the last three years distracted by a misguided devotion to music, culminating in the purchase of a pickup for my violin that only served to amplify my hopelessness, so it was only as a senior that I finally admitted a kind of interest in the visual arts.

For most of the year I used a big black Minolta SLR that my mother had given me. She had lugged it around Italy and carried it to parties and school functions and finally decided that, impressive as the object itself was, clear and striking as the photographs it produced were, it did nothing that a much smaller digital camera – a silver Canon, sleek, practically pocket-sized – couldn’t do. Unlike her I liked changing the lenses, the aperture, the shutter speed. I liked the bulk, the extra baggage. I liked the sense of control the camera gave me. I could choose to make a photograph blurry, to overexpose it, or, even more fascinating, to clarify a high-speed object, to freeze a runner, which was the most artificial thing of all: to suspend forever something that, in everyday life, was never suspended for more than an instant. Later in the darkroom were other opportunities to interfere with the image. By taking a photograph out of the developer too soon, you could create the illusion that the photographer had only been half-present, that her attention had been elsewhere; the foggy, not-quite-there quality made it seem like a dream, like a Renoir or a Monet, everything viewed through an impressionist haze. I liked the process of developing film (gently groping in a blacked out room), of making contact sheets. I liked the chemical smell, the faint glows of light, the clinical precision.

For my end-of-year project, I took photographs of things I found washed up on the shore. It was a short series – three, maybe four black and white images, each item (driftwood, half a styrofoam cup) alone, against a sand backdrop, quite close up, framed carefully. I printed them in the darkroom on 8.5” x 11” paper and matted them on foam board. The Minolta – built more to look impressive than to withstand the pressures of use – broke shortly before the project was due, so I shot the series on my grandfather’s old Nikon. This was a beautiful object: black and silver, simple, small but appealingly heavy in the hands. I took it down to the beach; I took my photos. It was a very bright sunny day. I shot just one roll of film, taking one or two photos of the sea itself, not for the series, but for personal context, perhaps. Context for the memory of the day.

The photographs turned out better than I could have hoped. I don’t mean that they were technically very great, or compositionally even competent. I don’t know about that. I am not and never have been a Photographer, though I am, as so many are nowadays, a photographer in some sense – a documentarian of my own life. What I mean is that these were the clearest photographs I had ever taken. Whether it was because the Nikon was made better than the Minolta or simply that the way it felt to handle my grandfather’s camera made me better at taking pictures, I don’t know. Either way, the photographs were, in their own austere, adolescent way, rather beautiful. I mounted them proudly; I don’t think I had been particularly proud of any of the work I had done that year, although I had enjoyed it, but I was proud of this series. You could feel the heat of the day, though you had no idea what sort of day it was really.

2.

On a recent family visit to New York, I read this:

“Photography is a medium of inescapable truthfulness. The camera doesn’t know how to lie. The most mindless snapshot tells the truth of what the camera’s eye saw at the moment the shutter clicked.”

It’s from Janet Malcolm’s profile of the German photographer Thomas Struth, which appeared in the September 26, 2011 issue of The New Yorker. I find it an unusually, almost disturbingly aggressive article – it’s as if Malcolm the interviewer is actually Malcolm the interrogator. At one point, describing his education with the artists Bernd and Hilla Becher, Struth says: “For example, a typical thing Bernd would say was ‘You have to understand the Paris photographs of Atget as the visualization of Marcel Proust.’” Malcolm responds:

‘”I don’t get it. What does Atget have to do with Proust?”
“It’s a similar time span. What Bernd meant was that when you read Proust that’s what the backdrop is. That’s the theatre.”
“Did you read Proust while you were studying with the Bechers?”
“No, no. I didn’t.”
“Have you read Proust since?”
“No.”
“So what was the point for you of connecting Atget with Proust?”
Struth laughed. “Maybe it’s a bad example,” he said.
“It’s a terrible example,” I said. We both laughed.’

Although it is a false image, I picture this conversation taking place in a tutor’s rooms at Oxford, Struth the student upon the settee, sleepy and hungover and possibly very brilliant but unable to overcome the vast chasm of academic hierarchy. “So what was the point for you of connecting Atget with Proust?” is the tutor’s way of inviting but not inviting a commentary, a way of curtailing freedom to speak by tempting it. Naturally the student nervously concedes the point, and they both laugh about it. I feel an automatic, undeserved sympathy with my fictional version of Struth and an even more undeserved animosity towards my fictional version of Malcolm.

Struth’s photograph of the inside of the SolarWorld factory outside Dresden has been reproduced for the article. ‘How will your pictures show that what is being produced at SolarWorld is good for mankind?’ Malcolm asks Struth:

‘”Just by the title.”
“So photographs don’t speak.”
“The picture itself is powerless to show.”’

I observe the image. It makes very little sense to me; I don’t know what’s happening, except, in a broad sense, because of the caption, that solar panels are being manufactured. The photo is quite small on the page, surrounded by thick blocks of text. It is industrial and futuristic; lots of horizontal lines, blues, whites, silvers. I feel virtually nothing when I look at it; but as I continue to look, I get the impression that I want to like it, and the reason I want to like it has nothing to do with it and what it means. No; I want to like it in spite of Malcolm, a woman I do not know who has written an article about a photographer I had not even heard of until today. I choose this reason arbitrarily, and it is no doubt influenced by external factors: I have had more coffee than usual, it is unseasonably warm for October, I am broke, I am a writer, searching for something to write about, I am on holiday. All of these things which have so much to do with me and virtually nothing to do with the photograph. A medium of “inescapable truthfulness” – but what kind of “inescapable truthfulness”, exactly?

3.

A few days later, I encounter the question of context again, this time in a midtown gallery. The exhibit – “Beyond Words: Photography in The New Yorker“ – is a selection of photographs that have appeared in the magazine, curated by former visuals editor Elisabeth Biondi.

“Every picture in The New Yorker, even a portrait, makes an editorial statement,” Biondi writes. “When published, the pictures are bound to the written word, illuminating and strengthening the context of the magazine. After publication, strong images assume a new life, beyond their original context.” Even this exhibition is not devoid of context, of course; someone has placed certain pictures in certain places, created an invisible narrative. But I deliberately do not take a copy of the guide, so that I can view the photographs, at least at first, without any extra insight.

I pause next to a portrait of Agatha Christie in her old age. My eyes are drawn to her thick, elderly ankles, juxtaposed with Amy Winehouse’s fragile-thin legs, bent under her as she smokes a cigarette on a hotel bed, in the next photograph. And there are the Romanovs (I have to consult the guide later to identify them) in a rowboat, seemingly quite adrift. And there is Gertrude Stein, at her desk, looking like she’s in an Edward Hopper painting. In some instances there is no context even to be offered by the guide: anonymous children in an anonymous park, blurred as they leap over a wall; men, women, rooms without names.

Later that day we visit the International Center of Photography, but I am all photographed out. I spend an hour on a bench, taking advantage of the free wifi, checking emails on my phone, sending tweets to friends I want to meet up with while I’m here. My shoulder hurts from carrying the extra weight of my DSLR. I have hardly used it; the only photos I seem to take nowadays are with my ubiquitous iPhone. And maybe that’s the fairest way for me to photograph things now: using the device with which I communicate, consume and create, often simultaneously, seemingly constantly. The real camera feels artificial. The photographs I take with it do not reflect my experience, only what’s there on the other side of the lens; they reflect back to me what, as Malcolm writes, “the camera’s eye saw at the moment the shutter clicked,” but what the camera’s eye saw does not always have anything to do with what I saw, just as what is there to be seen does not always have anything to do with how it’s understood.

I’m reminded of a conversation I had in the summer with a friend of mine, a skilled amateur photographer who finds the proliferation of high dynamic range imaging applications for smartphone photography a little disconcerting.

“It’s practically defying the laws of physics,” he told me. “A camera shouldn’t really be able to do that.”

“Yes,” I said, myself an avid user of just such an app, “Maybe. But sometimes – often – that’s the only way for me to capture what it is I am seeing.”

4.

Back home in England, I assess the contents of my memory card and realize that I forgot to take any pictures of New York. I apologize to people who I might otherwise have bored with a protracted viewing of my holiday photos. I say I was distracted, I was busy seeing my family and my old school friends and telling cab drivers that I was sorry I couldn’t give them directions, but I don’t live in Brooklyn, either.

But this is not entirely true. I did take photographs. I did not take the sort of arty shots that a person like me, who dallies with but has never had enough patience or passion for photography, takes in order to feel that she understands or at least appreciates the form. But I took a blurred photograph at Coney Island of family friends, arms in the air, mouths open in joy or horror, coming down a ramp on the Cyclone roller coaster. I took a photograph of my mother in a green field, bending over her father’s grave, holding a red umbrella against the grey sky. I tried to take a photograph of the deer running through military rows of little white cemetery crosses, but the deer moved too fast; they were not even blurry, they had simply left the shot by the time my finger had found the button. I took a photograph of a painting I liked at the Brooklyn Museum. I took a photograph of some fake-denim leggings (“Chic Style!”) for sale in a CVS, some fishermen on a windy beach in Montauk, a neon sign outside a café where we had BLTs and mugs of sickly sweet coffee.

5.

One morning I come across Andrew Motion’s review of Magnum Contact Sheets in the Guardian. Motion quotes editor Kirsten Lubben:

“The contact sheet…embodies much of the appeal of photography itself: the sense of time unfolding, a durable trace of movement through space, an apparent authentication of photography’s claims to transparent representation of reality.”

I often feel that I have devolved as a photographer, since those first heady days when I wielded my mother’s discarded Minolta and spilled developer on my hands and learned that patience and luck were as integral to taking a picture as a good eye. Then I was eager to explore the science and logistics of the art; now I cheat, I download applications to manipulate images that are being taken on my phone – my phone! – and upload the finished products to the weak and weary acclaim of my Facebook friends and Instagram followers. I have not held a physical photograph for years; I see my own images exclusively on screens, expandable, rotatable, contextualized with my own text. And I don’t know what process professional photographers use to select their images now, but I do know Motion is right about contact sheets – the advent of the digital camera made them “instantly obsolete”.

But then again, maybe my current camera of choice has, in its way, actually improved my photography. My photos are not and never have been very good – not very beautiful, not very interesting, not very thought-provoking, not very well thought out. But now, taken and stored as they are – impulsively, on a multi-use device – they are nothing more or less than a perfect record of my time unfolding, a kind of never-ending, interactive contact sheet.

6.

Now it is winter, or nearly winter. Night falls at 4 pm; rain falls all day, sometimes. It is hard to find the desire, let alone an opportunity, to get out and take pictures. All my photographs of this place are repetitive anyway – always the same views, the Merton playing fields, the Radcliffe Camera (of course: the biggest, most beautiful camera of all), the telephone wires on my suburban street, over and over again. These days I don’t even need to leave the house. I realize I’ve been unwittingly working on a series of photographs for a few months now: shots from my desk, taken through the study window, of the cherry trees and the painted pink wooden chair in the garden, rotting and unstable after a year in the sun and rain.

I mean to juxtapose the photos, to observe the reddening and yellowing of the leaves, the falling of the leaves, the bareness of the branches, happening quickly, in these still shots – to speed up time, or clarify its passing, at least. But I don’t. I don’t need to, I guess, because I know that on my phone, interspersed with shots of the tarte tatin I made the other night and the bit of cornicing that fell from our living room ceiling earlier this month, is this linear, visual representation of the march of time, the change of seasons, the thickening of the weeds in the garden we don’t tend to enough.

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Writers have it pretty hard. I’m not talking about money or status or the sheer hassle of it all – though there’s that too. I’m talking about the way in which they are talked about. To look at the discussion around writers and writing as a writer is to see yourself adrift in a sea of impossibility.

Literature – by which I only mean consumable words, be they in books or articles or blog posts – polarises people, and because it’s consumed so voraciously, so constantly, and so publicly, opinions are expressed vociferously, and often as articulation of fact, not belief.

The question as a writer – and indeed as a consumer of writing – becomes: who do you trust? The critics who say writing should be about writing? The critics who say that it’s all about telling a damn good story? The critics who say it’s all about message and meaning? Or or the ones who say a piece of writing must have all of these components, and more?

Surely it shouldn’t matter – write what you want, says the voice of reason, and let the world be judge only after – but the truth of it is that it does matter. I’ve written about this before. It’s easy, even natural, to feel compelled to take some opinion or advice under consideration. No man is an island, as the saying goes, and what another man feels can be integral to the development of a piece of writing. The difficulty comes in discerning what, after all that, you actually feel about your own work. The storm that results when two opposing opinions converge upon a paragraph of yours obfuscates your own beliefs.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. In a Books blog post on the Guardian website from 13th May, Andrew Gallix examines the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet, writing, “The reality of any work of art is its form, and to separate style from substance is to ‘remove the novel from the realm of art’. Art, Robbe-Grillet reminds us, is not just a pretty way of presenting a message: it is the message” (a sentiment which calls to mind Marshall McLuhan’s famous assertion that “the medium is the message”). In this case, simply by choosing to write, the author is making a statement – and a commitment to that statement.

Gallix ends his piece with these thoughts: “Whenever an author envisages a future book, ‘it is always a way of writing which first of all occupies his mind,’ which leads Robbe-Grillet to state – provocatively – that ‘the genuine writer has nothing to say. He has only a way of saying.’ Creative writing classes should always start and end on that note.”

There are several interesting points in these concluding sentences, the most obvious of which is Robbe-Grillet’s “provocative” suggestion that writing itself – not the message or the story – is the true form of art. I’m not sure how provocative this is really – when we read books and poems in school, aren’t we (ideally) taught to look at phrasing, structure, word choice? Literary criticism itself rarely begins with what an author is saying, but rather discovers what the author is saying by first investigating the author’s method – Joyce’s stream of consciousness, for instance, becomes a window into his work.

But it is provocative enough – even radical – in the context of popular culture. Story is often heralded as the be-all-and-end-all of “good” writing (good writing on its own being empty of meaning), or at least publishable writing. So perhaps to be reminded of Robbe-Grillet’s statement that “the genuine writer has nothing to say” is alarming indeed, for it indicates that we have lost our sense of what makes a novel a novel, or even a poem a poem or an essay an essay.

The key is in the second part of the assertion, that, “He [the genuine writer] has only a way of saying.” A way of saying. Superficially, a voice. But contained in that way of saying, that voice, is much more. Meaning, story, urgency. Recently I read a review in the Observer. “There are poets who have nothing to say but a feeling for words,” begins the the author. “There are poets who have something to say but no capacity to say it. And then, rarely, you read poems…that have a tremendous, unshowy intent. The feeling is that they needed to be written.” As one commentator on Gallix’s piece writes, “Style over substance? Affect over story? Count me out.”

For my part, I certainly would not be inclined to argue that we should write simply because we like the sound of our own voices, or that we find a particular phrase too pretty not to share – but to ignore the importance of pretty phrases in the context of a writer’s way of saying would be an enormous shame, because it would be to ignore the medium entirely.

A further interesting point in Gallix’s conclusion comes with the seemingly arbitrary inclusion of “creative writing classes” in his final sentence. In a way it reads as a glib jab at those would-be writers who want to “improve their craft” – a phrase which, by the way, I generally despise, but feel is appropriate here. Certainly the very first commentator on the post, who simply quotes Gallix’s “creative writing classes should always start and end on that note” and adds, “can’t they just end?”, seems to have read it that way. This interpretation seems to be validated by Gallix’s own response to the aforementioned comment. “That would be a more radical solution!”, he writes.

The meaning is appropriately ambiguous – radical in a positive or negative way? a solution to what? – but it does bring up some interesting ideas about the study of writing itself. Classes and courses around creative writing are easy to dismiss as pointless, even harmful. “Can’t they just end?” is a common enough sentiment, often spoken with a tone of intellectual superiority – which may be deserved, I don’t know. The implication here is, again, that writing should come naturally, that it shouldn’t matter what others say about it – write what you want in the way that you want, and it will either be good enough or not good enough.

But this is rarely the case. Good writing – whatever I may mean by that, and however you may interpret it – is rarely a completely isolated enterprise. On top of the fact that we are often heavily influenced by circumstance, context, experience, and other writers, there is also the simple fact that any author will edit and revise his work, often a number of times, and for better or worse, before publication or presentation. Sometimes, amidst all this, advice – an exchange of ideas, a reminder that we are not alone – can be immensely useful, especially before we have learned to completely trust our own instincts. Moreover, practice itself is valuable, and there are those (myself included) for whom a class or a writing group or a degree is a way to grant themselves permission to practice.

I have my own reservations about creative writing classes – and I say this as someone who holds a masters in the subject. But my reservations are different, mostly rooted in experience. It can be dangerous, for instance, to let too many vultures feast upon the carcass of your confidence. Helpful suggestions are not always helpful when they come too frequently, and too frequently unmediated. Furthermore it is not always productive, as an artist or an advocate or whatever else a writer may be, to overthink things. Too much time wallowing, too many conflicting opinions shared liberally, too much consideration, will ultimately only help you produce a work which is ambivalent at best. So I understand reservations about creative writing classes – I live those reservations.

But still such classes are not something to be eradicated. Consider what Gallix has written about Robbe-Grillet: “Every novel, according to Robe-Grillet, is a self-sufficient work of art which cannot be reduced to some external meaning or truth that is ‘known in advance’. ‘The New Novel,’ as he put it, ‘is not a theory, it is an exploration.’” And if we start to look at writing as an exploration, it starts to make sense that some of us choose to explore our writing in an exploratory context.

What this all really means is simply that, as a writer, you’ll never win. You’ll never be immune to hard-hitting criticism (though why would you want to be?). If you’re too rooted to the past, too ahead of your time, if a sentence is out of place or a particular word not exact enough, you’ll have someone saying so.

The interesting space is the space between these criticisms – and this, I think, is probably why we should write. Between one extreme and the other is a whole world ripe for exploration. It may be that Robbe-Grillet’s “New Novel” has progressed again – “far from representing a rejection of the past,” Gallix writes, “the quest for a new novel was…very much in keeping with the history of a genre which, by definition, must always be renewed”. The new “New Novel” is not necessarily the novel itself but the area around the novel; indeed, the novel has been flattened, expanded, and democratized. Maybe it’s the internet – I can go online and read a blog about a French writer and filmmaker I’d never before heard of and in a matter of hours create and “publish” my own response. We all have a say now; we’re all in a creative writing class, and even those of us who wish such classes could “just end” are participants in it.

So I say again: writers have it pretty hard. They (we?) are standing at the centre of a battleground. It’s noisy and nerve-wracking – but I can’t imagine a more exciting place to be.

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I’m about to be a part of something really cool.  Next month, I’m going to New York with Xander and Ben for a sort of tour 2.0-type thing.  We’re calling it Man (hat on).  There’s even a logo (and the likelihood of t-shirts).  No, I’m not a musician.  My misguided adolescent foray into the world of string instruments is likely as far as I’ll ever go, musically.  But it doesn’t matter.  Because–although there will be music involved (provided mainly by Ben, obviously), this is really a tour about freedom, and doing what you like, and creating things.

We’re playing with this idea of “sustainable creativity”, you see.  It’s about using communities and ideas to sustain yourself, so that you’re able to do what you love doing.  It’s simple, on paper: if you’re a writer, you find a way to write.  If you’re a musician, you find the support you need to play gigs and write songs.  If you’re someone without a clearly defined path, someone who just likes to play with ideas—it means finding a way to do that.

It sounds easy, but it isn’t.  Creative output takes a lot of time, energy, love, and support, not only from the creator, but also from his or her community.  The problem is that many of us are saddled with a lot of extra baggage.  We have bills to pay and debts to pay off.  We have social and professional obligations that rigidly divide our days. Very likely we’re burdened with a “real job”—which we may find intellectually dull and emotionally empty, but necessary nonetheless (I mostly babysit photocopiers and answer telephones grumpily, for instance).

And in an era where time is money, how do you justify spending a few hours every day on your craft?  How do you find a few hours every day?  It’s impossible to underestimate the negative power of financial constraints.  If you constantly spend your time thinking, I should be making money, not fucking around, you quickly become creatively impotent.

So suppose we make things easier for ourselves.  Suppose, to start, we surround ourselves with other, similarly minded, creatively charged people, and become a kind of micro-community based on the idea of mutual inspiration.  This removes a number of barriers, and in their places, provides us with a number of opportunities.  It gives us an automatic audience, a built-in sounding-board, a kind of creativity support group.  It allows for collaborative effort and means that even an ordinary trip to the pub can result in a great idea.  In a way, it combines the social aspect of our lives with the creative aspect, thus gaining us time as well as emotional backing.

Well, that’s good.  That’s a source of motivation and stimulation.  But we’re still stuck with that bland job, those pesky bills, all the worries that get us down.  Even if we have a micro-community of like-minded creatives, we’re still not going anywhere. Not yet.

The next thing to do, then, is to give up the rock star dream.  Forget, for a moment, that you want to be the next superstar of the rock n’ roll, or literary, or art, or whatever world.  And remember why you started singing, or writing, or drawing, or playing with ideas, in the first place.  Innovative solo bass player Steve Lawson writes prolifically, and very well, about this: “I no longer need to pretend to be a rock-star.  The mythology of rock ‘n’ roll is nowhere near as interesting as the reality of creativity.”  And, Steve adds, “The 80s dream of everyone becoming Stadium rock stars has faded, and more and more musicians are looking at fun ways to get to play music in a financially sustainable way.”  And what we’re trying to say is: not just musicians.  Anyone who wants to make anything should be listening to Steve on this point.

It sounds cheesy, but this is an idea about survival and satisfaction, not about making a profit, not about constantly striving, clawing your way up the celebrity hierarchy.  This is an idea about how you can do what you love doing—what you would be doing anyway–and earn enough from it to justify doing it as something more than a hobby.  To earn enough from it to recoup your costs, eat a meal or two.  Eventually, to earn enough from it to pay all those bills, to live comfortably, to buy a new pair of boots (or the male equivalent) when you need to.  But to start, it’s only about getting by.

Luckily, that built-in creative community—even if it’s just a group of two or three people—is the key.  Gone are the days when any artist can continue to cling to the alcoholic outcast myth and hope that her lonely genius will be discovered.  There’s just too much stuff out there for that to be a viable tactic.  There are literally thousands of other musicians writing songs and putting them up on the Internet.  Thousands of other filmmakers uploading clips to YouTube.  Thousands of other writers with blogs.  Thousands of other painters with thousands of canvases stacked up in their basement.  And every single one of them can publicize themselves, advertise themselves, with the click of a button.  Passivity and sheer luck may work for some; but the only way to guarantee a sustainable, creative life is to actively seek one out.

So you start with a tiny community.  A few friends.  Maybe you start at the pub, where ideas can flow unchecked by the ordinariness of daily life.  And you realize that actually, there’s a lot of overlooked potential in the world.  You buy some tickets to New York.  You decide that you’re going to prove this theory by living it.

So we are three people, with different skills and ambitions but a common goal of creating things and doing cool stuff, taking a week off work.  We’re going to pack up our guitars, our laptops, our brains, and head across the Atlantic, where we’re going to do what what love, and what we’re good at, and find a way to survive.  We’re going to stay cheaply (with friends, on couches).  We’re going to earn just enough to recoup our travel expenses, and hopefully have enough left over for a few beers at the end of the day.

There are, of course, one or two things that anybody sensible might want to ask.  Or maybe not.  Anyway, there are some things that I had to ask myself as I wrote this all down:

But isn’t hunger/poverty/whatever a good creative motivator?

Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t (see my post on this here).  But this isn’t about “making it” as an artist, necessarily (though it certainly could be); it’s about literally surviving off your own work.  It’s not about becoming great whilst (or even as a result of) stealing bread and sleeping on the street, but about using whatever greatness you already possess to buy bread, pay your rent, and get by.  It’s simply meant to be proof that you can, if that’s what you want to do.

Okay.  But by making it as much about money as the creative output itself, aren’t you somehow tainting your work?  Aren’t you basically selling out, on a minute scale?

This is really where the word “sustainability” comes in.  This whole idea is fundamentally about sustaining yourself, as a creative-type, so that you can create more.  Ultimately it’s always about the creative output, and the act of creating, not about the money; the money is simply what allows that process of creation to occur unfettered.

This is all very theoretical.  What’s the end result?

The end result is whatever you want it to be.  In theory this is a limitless idea.  That’s the beauty of it.  In practice, it may have more limitations than I currently anticipate.  But we’re going to find out, and we’re going to let you know.  In the meantime, please check out the Man (hat on) site, and follow our progress, and be a participant in this crazy idea.

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In the museum, people move with false reverence. What we’re affected by is not so much the painting, the sculpture, the historical or the avant-garde–it’s the way we’re all here together, but all separated by experience.

In front of my favourite Monet (and why should this be my favourite, this image of a cathedral I have never seen, cast in a light I have never experienced?), two women with their studying faces on. One (short dark hair, glasses, very still), hands crossed at chest; the other (longer dark hair, full of nervous energy), hands placed at the small of her back, bag worn across her chest and in front, as if she’s afraid of something, wants to hold her possesions close. They seem to be looking for something in the painting, something, perhaps, in the cathedral itself. Sharing (or trying to recall) a memory that neither of them actually owns. I want to sit in front of the painting, as I do every time I am here (there is a bench placed before it as if just for me) but they distort my view, they may as well have stepped into the image itself, and I’m too fascinated by watching them watch it to pay any real attention to Rouen Cathedral.

Walker Evans’ collection of postcards. Americana distilled. The streets were wider then; no, that’s not right, they were only emptier. People against a patchwork backdrop: LA, Nashville, church spires, telephone wires. Shiny black automobiles, from the days when they could still be called “automobiles,” still had some dignity.

Gauguin’s Tahiti is enough to make anyone crave a warmer place. I photograph it in black and white to see what, when the image is bled of colour, is left. Still something, I’ll tell you that much.

Irrisistible for the artist to make a sketch. One girl, on the floor, cross-legged, pony-tailed, makes a sketch of a lumpy, pasty female nude. Her breasts uneven (the nude, not the girl). A man, in flat cap and scarf, has brought his own folding chair, sits before a scultpure, balances his pad on his knees. People peer over his shoulder; the rendition is good, exact.

Back on the street, the Upper East Side, the sunlight is almost too much after the shadowed light, the light made for looking at things. We squint our way down Park Avenue. There’s nothing to eat in the Upper East. What, I say, do rich people not need to eat? Do they, I ask, as we pass Gucci, Prada, Christian Dior, get their sustenence from expensive shoes and ugly handbags? Do they get off on knowing that we will find their wide-avenued world unpenetrable?

Probably, the Man says, to shut me up. I’m hungry, therefore irrational.

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Nothing here is as it seems. The museum in black and white; it’s not the paintings we care about, really, it’s the people looking at them, isn’t it? Karl Rove in Federal Hall, touring the Lincoln exhibit. (He has a crushing laugh, loud and ugly). The shop that proclaims to be “your 24 hour pot dealer” is really only an emporium for vases decorated with nipples. A barbershop proudly displays posters of boys wearing perfect bowl-cuts, men in mullets. Another features images of men in tight boxer shorts, dancing with their hair straighteners. Am I in a Dr. Seuss book? (Oh, the places–) Unnecessary quotation marks everywhere. How about this one: “free soup” with any sandwich! A plaque tells of a place called The Highway Leading to the Fortification Called Oyster Pasty. A friend takes us up the steps of a church; look closer, he says, so we lean towards the cathedral pillars and see a baby’s head emerging from a vaginal cornstalk.

All the absurdities. A sign that tells us both to cross the street and not to cross the street at the same time; even the signals have become confused, here. The windows of Bergdorf Goodman’s look as rich as any painting in the Met. I find a place outside Trinity Church where the Queen stood in the 1970s; Prince Philip, reads the inscription in the tile, stood nearby. Oh, no photographs, not here, says the woman selling posters at the flea market, and I retreat from her snarls and stumble into a rack of fur coats, brown and white, urban bears. On Madison Avenue, our first night in the city, cold and hungry, we look across the broad street (broad as an ocean) and see the Oxford Café. Seen from a certain angle, the statue of first world war soldiers on the eastern edge of Central Park becomes real; shadowy men pierce a wintry tree with freshly sharpened bayonets (do bayonets need to be sharpened?).

And I have a photograph to prove every single one of these things; but as one placard in the museum points out: “a photograph of an angel is either a miracle or a hoax.” (Even the photograph in this post is merely a reflection).

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