4
Mary Ellen returned to Philadelphia from UNC with a renewed passion for her work. Or if passion wasn’t the right word, determination—to make the best of the lot life had handed her, at least until her retirement funds were vested.
After a few weeks of forced enthusiasm for a logo project she knew was nothing more than a year-end budget-hedging spree, Mary Ellen’s determination began to wane. Getting out of bed in the morning felt like pulling herself out of a tar pit. She found herself putting off projects until the last minute, which was completely unlike her. On her way to her office, she would rush past her team’s cubicles, avoiding eye contact, pretending to be too busy to stop and talk. When her assistant brought her a mug of tea without being asked and awkwardly reached out to pat her hand, Mary Ellen knew something had to change.
“You need a hobby” would have been her father’s advice, so she decided to look into evening classes. The University of the Arts Continuing Ed program offered a number of photography courses, but by the time she got around to registering, there was only one class with any seats left: Agency and Intentionality in a Post-Representational World.
The class was mostly theory, with a long and intimidating reading list, but this suited Mary Ellen’s needs perfectly. She bought a pack of colorful highlighters and used them to illuminate her texts. She came to class prepared with lists of questions and did her best to apply the theory to her weekly photography assignments. Whenever the teacher mentioned an art show she liked, Mary Ellen would make a point of going to see it over the weekend.
She also bought a journal—something she hadn’t done in years. In college, Mary Ellen had bought and filled dozens of the little books, her mind spilling over with ideas and musings. But after graduation, when she started her job, keeping a journal began feeling like a chore, so she’d stopped. Now it felt strange, writing to herself. She barely recognized her own voice on the page. But as the reading assignments in her photography class became more challenging, Mary Ellen found it helpful to take her swirl of thoughts and press them between the pages of the little leather-bound book, where they became more manageable.
The teacher of the course was a fiftysomething woman named Justine who mesmerized Mary Ellen with her effortless aura of cool. She would come to class wearing crumpled suede boots and drapey greige sweaters and uncompromising black-framed glasses. She’d throw down her worn leather satchel, sit on the edge of a desk, and launch into wearily bemused stories of art-world squabbles, scandals, and multimillion-dollar deals. She knew everyone, read everything; she was constantly attending unadvertised art “happenings” in abandoned subway stations and electrical plants.
Mary Ellen would sit in the front row, puzzling over the frayed hem of Justine’s sweater, the almost invisible edge of gray in her part, the Chanel logo on her glasses. She wondered if Justine ate dinner before or after class, out or in, with wine or beer, or a cocktail first and then wine. She’d mentioned she was divorced, so did she go to all those gallery openings alone, with friends, on a date? Mary Ellen tried to imagine Justine running a mundane errand, like getting her driver’s license renewed. Would she leave the house in yoga pants? Did she own yoga pants?
Mary Ellen studied Justine as carefully as she studied the books and articles on the class syllabus. Justine, on the other hand, paid Mary Ellen scant attention, only occasionally offering individual critiques in which she encouraged Mary Ellen to crop, overexpose, and blur her pictures into abstraction. Mary Ellen took this advice, not always understanding it, but determined to ace the class—at least metaphorically, since there were no actual grades given out.
She noticed that Justine responded most to pictures that Mary Ellen could only describe as ugly or disturbing, so she would spend her weekends and lunch hours searching the city for the right sort of subject matter: broken glass, cigarette butts, a pigeon flattened in the middle of the street. She would import the pictures into Photoshop and make them even uglier, tinting them yellow-green, for example, or stripping out the color altogether. Sometimes she would zoom in on an arbitrary corner of the photo, reducing it to nothing more than a few abstract pixels, which she would name after the original picture: “Pigeon, Market Street.”
It wasn’t until the end-of-semester student show that Mary Ellen actually seemed to register on Justine’s radar. A woman who introduced herself as Birgit Paulson, owner of a small gallery, stood for a long time in front of Mary Ellen’s three photographs—colorless, heavily manipulated compositions—and began asking Mary Ellen questions about her process and her portfolio. Justine hurried over and volunteered that Mary Ellen’s portfolio was actually “very interesting,” and that Mary Ellen would be happy to show it to her any time.
“She’s major,” Justine breathed in Mary Ellen’s ear after Birgit walked away. “A very connected gallery in Fishtown. This could be really good for you.”
“But I don’t have a portfolio.”
“You will. We just need to buy some time.”
Justine’s way of buying time, it turned out, involved introducing Mary Ellen to everyone she knew—a blitzkrieg of buzz generation. Justine explained that while word was filtering back to Birgit that Mary Ellen was making the rounds, Justine would suddenly become too busy to arrange an actual meeting. “Trust me,” she told Mary Ellen, “by
