would have paid for it, but my parents wanted me at Blessed Heart because it’s a family tradition.” At that, Grace’s eyes seemed to lose their focus for a split second and her facial muscles shifted. Alexa read her last statement for an exaggeration maybe the woman almost believed.
“We wanted to go to college together, but I went to LSU and she went to Harvard, like everybody in her family does. Then about six years ago, Casey was getting so much interest in her work, she needed someone to organize her life, so I left my job-I was an executive assistant buyer at Bloomie’s-and started working with her full time. Like she needs anyone to organize anything. She’s brilliant and totally focused. Always has been. Oddly enough, I’m the disorganized one, but for her I somehow organize the organized.”
“So you’re Casey’s employee.”
“Technically speaking, you can say I am, but she treats me like her sister. I get a generous salary, but I do work hard and I’m totally dedicated to Casey and her career. Loyalty is something you can’t buy. I’d do what I do for nothing, but unfortunately I can’t devote my life to anything without financial compensation. I’m not independently wealthy.”
“You keep regular hours?”
“I don’t punch a time clock or anything. It’s not set up as an hourly arrangement. I liken coming to work every day to what a priest must feel upon entering the Sistine Chapel and looking up. You’ve seen Casey’s art?” Grace’s eyes brightened.
“No. Are you a fan of Gary’s plays?”
“I guess I’m his biggest fan after Casey. Casey’s art is in a class of its own.”
“I thought she was a photographer?”
Grace frowned. “Her photography elevates the medium to art.”
“I haven’t had the pleasure.” Alexa looked around hoping she might see a portrait that Casey had done hanging in the large room. Counting the torso, there were seven Avedons on the walls-all were Avedon’s portraits that Alexa was familiar with from his books.
“She doesn’t have any of her own work hanging here. She doesn’t have an ego. My apartment is completely done in her portraits. Another advantage of my position is that she gives me whatever prints I want. The frame shop that does her framing does them for me for practically nothing, because Casey uses only one frame stock- which she designed, and has it manufactured exclusively for her photographs. They keep a ton of it in stock for her work only. Nobody else gets any of it but me unless they buy a portrait. Would you like to see?” Grace’s excited eyes were lit up like Christmas bulbs.
Deana had gone to the window and was beating on the glass with a rubber dog toy that emitted a sharp squeak with each blow. This seemed to fascinate her, because she kept doing it. “Eeep, eeep, eeep, eeep.”
“Didn’t you just say there wasn’t any of her work here?”
“Not on the walls,” Grace said softly. She went to the bookshelf and took out a large book and, after removing it from its cloth slipcover, handed it to Alexa. “She owns the most extensive collection there is of the most important photographers, from Brady to Avedon. She has most of it out on loan or donated to museums, or in a climate-controlled storage facility in Manhattan. This volume of her own work just came out two weeks ago, in a very limited edition of five hundred copies. One thousand dollars per. I don’t have one, but I will, because it’s being reprinted in a larger and less expensive edition next month. Casey only got three of these for her own use, because it was completely presold. Gary has one, of course. And Casey has two-one locked up for Deana, and this one.”
“The small edition means she won’t be signing very many copies.”
“She doesn’t ever sign them, because she just doesn’t feel comfortable doing so. She doesn’t think the book is about her, but her subjects. But I expect she’ll pen a note to me in one of the mass-produced ones if I pester her.”
The book, which Grace placed on the coffee table, was roughly ten-by-fourteen, and an inch thick. On it, what appeared to be a photographic print of a young woman had been mounted on the off-white linen binding. An acetate sleeve protected the cloth and the image. The child-woman portrayed in the shot had enormous, almond-shaped eyes that stared into Casey’s lens with the sort of mixture of intensity and revulsion of someone who was studying a spider in the process of capturing a luckless butterfly. The title of the volume was All Together/All Alone: Portraits by Casey West. Not Casey LePointe West, Alexa noted.
Grace said, “This is a show catalog published by the museum in Zurich that hosted the exhibition. The show is going next to the Corcoran in D.C., and then to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. She spent six months working as an intern for Avedon, but everybody thinks she’s far better than he was.”
“I’ll make a point to see it at the Corcoran.” Alexa opened the book and turned the pages gently. Grace put her hands together as if praying and studied Alexa intently as she scanned the introduction penned by Casey’s husband. “A better husband and father never drew a breath.” Alexa had heard a dozen times in investigations. “They broke the mold.”
The foreword was an affectionate critique, obviously penned by a fan.
Medium format camera somehow captures her subjects’ essence-their hopes, dreams, illusions, and fears laid bare for the viewer in equal measure. They say the eyes are mirrors to the soul, and Casey’s art seems proof that the soul exists, and that we-despite our differences-are all variations of a single being. To experience Casey West’s work is to not just see, but to experience our most basic and complex connections to one another.
How one person among millions is touched by the magic so they are able to show us so much about ourselves in others is a question that has puzzled man since the dawn. Art is most often created out of painful experience. Despite her amazing complexity, Casey is somehow able to see simple truths in those around her, and to capture those truths in such a way as to say, through light and photographic dyes, what Leonardo da Vinci said in oils, William Faulkner said with words, and Michelangelo said in marble. As her husband, I have been blessed and privileged…Casey is following a divine calling, following her inner vision armed only with a camera…
If Casey really lacked an ego, Alexa reflected, Gary’s words of praise must have made her squirm. Only love for him could have allowed his worshipful foreword to be connected to her work.
The first portraits hit Alexa with the force of open-hand slaps, each one more powerful than the one before it. The expressions on the subjects in the static and crisp images were like the unblinking eyes of cocked handguns, remarkable in their emotional power. The eyes of each subject-vulnerable in one, sad in another, and furious in yet another-had a hypnotic effect on Alexa. She was awed by Casey’s work. Most photographers would have been lucky to get even one picture the equal of these in the course of a long career, but here were scores of photographic masterpieces, gathered in one collection.
“That one says it all, and then some.”
Grace was referring to a portrait entitled “Husband and Daughter-2003, Monaco,” showing a shirtless and strikingly handsome man holding a small child against his chest, his hand positioned in such a way as to hide her features behind his fingers. Gary West stared into the lens with the naked emotion of a lioness protecting her cub from a gathering of starving hyenas.
“He looks protective,” Alexa said. It wasn’t the smiling man she’d seen in the snapshots of him she’d seen before.
“He didn’t even want that picture of Deana in the book. He lives for Deana and Casey. Protecting Deana is an obsession with him.”
“Does he have any flaws?”
“Well,” Grace said, frowning. “An obsession with anything might be a flaw, don’t you think so? Every person has flaws-only some people can’t see them.”
“Give me that!” Casey demanded as she entered the room-hand outstretched to Alexa. Her cheeks were bright red, and Alexa couldn’t tell if she was embarrassed or angry. Her eyes were red from crying or lack of rest, and the fingers of her outstretched hand trembled.
“This is amazing-” Alexa began.
Deana ran over and held up her arms to her mother, hoping to be lifted. Casey looked at her, placed her free hand on Deana’s head gently. “Just a sec, darling. Mommy has to do something.”
“Uh-uuuuh,” Deana protested. “Ut.”
Alexa closed the volume gently and handed it to Casey, who sat beside her. “Grace, my pen.”
Grace went to a writing desk across the room and brought Casey back a lacquered fountain pen. Casey uncapped it, opened the book to the flyleaf, and carefully wrote something in the page’s center. After Casey capped
