it's like a dialogue, only I don't know what they're saying.'
'They're saying, 'Have a nice day.'
'Someday, go walk those streets,' she said. 'Sick and dying people with nowhere to live and there are bigger and bigger towers all the time, fantastic buildings with miles of rentable space. All the space is inside. Am I exaggerating?'
'I'm the one who exaggerates.'
'This is strange but I feel I know you.'
'It is strange, isn't it? We're managing to have a real talk while you bob and weave with a camera and I stand here looking stiff and cloddish.'
'I don't usually talk, you see. I ask a question and let the writer talk, let the tension drain out a little.'
'Let the fool babble on.'
'All right if you put it that way. And I listen only vaguely as a rule because I'm working. I'm detached, I'm working, I'm listening at the edges.'
'And you travel all the time. You seek us out.'
'You're dropping your chin,' she said.
'You cross continents and oceans to take pictures of ordinary faces, to make a record of a thousand faces, ten thousand faces.'
'It's crazy. I'm devoting my life to a gesture. Yes, I travel. Which means there is no moment on certain days when I'm not thinking terror. They have us in their power. In boarding areas I never sit near windows in case of flying glass. I carry a Swedish passport so that's okay unless you believe that terrorists killed the prime minister. Then maybe it's not so good. And I use codes in my address book for names and addresses of writers because how can you tell if the name of a certain writer is dangerous to carry, some dissident, some Jew or blasphemer. I'm careful about reading matter. Nothing religious comes with me, no books with religious symbols on the jacket and no pictures of guns or sexy women. That's on the one hand. On the other hand I know in my heart I'm going to die of some dreadful slow disease so you're safe with me on a plane.'
She inserted another roll. She was sure she already had what she'd come for but a hundred times in her life she thought she had the cluster of shots she wanted and then found better work deep in the contact sheets. She liked working past the feeling of this is it. Important to keep going, obliterate the sure thing and come upon a moment of stealthy blessing.
'Do you ask your writers how it feels to be painted dummies?'
'What do you mean?'
'You've got me talking, Brita.'
'Anything that's animated I love it.'
'You don't care what I say.'
'Speak Swahili.'
'There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists. In the West we become famous effigies as our books lose the power to shape and influence. Do you ask your writers how they feel about this? Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.'
'Keep going. I like your anger.'
'But you know all this. This is why you travel a million miles photographing writers. Because we're giving way to terror, to news of terror, to tape recorders and cameras, to radios, to bombs stashed in radios. News of disaster is the only narrative people need. The darker the news, the grander the narrative. News is the last addiction before- what? I don't know. But you're smart to trap us in your camera before we disappear.'
'I'm the one they're trying to kill. You're sitting in a room making theories.'
'Put us in a museum and charge admission.'
'Writers will always write. Are you crazy? Writers have long-range influence. You can't talk about these gunmen in the same breath. I have to steal another cigarette. You're no good for me, this is obvious. You have a look on your face, I don't know, like a bad actor doing weariness of the spirit.'
'I am a bad actor.'
'Not for me or my camera. I see the person, not some idea he wants to make himself into.'
'I'm all idea today.'
'I definitely don't see it.'
'I'm playing the idea of death. Look closely,' he said.
She didn't know whether she was supposed to find this funny.
He said, 'Something about the occasion makes me think I'm at my own wake. Sitting for a picture is morbid business. A portrait doesn't begin to mean anything until the subject is dead. This is the whole point. We're doing this to create a kind of sentimental past for people in the decades to come. It's their past, their history we're inventing here. And it's not how I look now that matters. It's how I'll look in twenty-five years as clothing and faces change, as photographs change. The deeper I pass into death, the more powerful my picture becomes. Isn't this why picture-taking is so ceremonial? It's like a wake. And I'm the actor made up for the laying-out.'
'Close your mouth.'
'Remember they used to say, This is the first day of the rest of your life. It struck me just last night these pictures are the announcement of my dying.'
'Close your mouth. Good, good, good, good.'
She finished the roll, reloaded, reached for her cigarette, took a drag, put it down, then moved toward him and touched a hand to his face, tilting it slightly left.
'Stay now. Don't move. I like that.'
'See, anything you want. I do it at once.'
'Touching Bill Gray.'
'Do you realize what an intimate thing we're doing?'
'It's in my memoirs, guaranteed. And you're not cloddish by the way.'
'We're alone in a room involved in this mysterious exchange. What am I giving up to you? And what are you investing me with, or stealing from me? How are you changing me? I can feel the change like some current just under the skin. Are you making me up as you go along? Am I mimicking myself? And when did women start photographing men in the first place?'
'I'll look it up when I get home.'
'We're getting on extremely well.'
'Now that we've changed the subject.'
'I'm losing a morning's work without remorse.'
'That's not the only thing you're losing. Don't forget, from the moment your picture appears you'll be expected to look just like it. And if you meet people somewhere, they will absolutely question your right to look different from your picture.'
'I've become someone's material. Yours, Brita. There's the life and there's the consumer event. Everything around us tends to channel our lives toward some final reality in print or on film. Two lovers quarrel in the back of a taxi and a question becomes implicit in the event. Who will write the book and who will play the lovers in the movie? Everything seeks its own heightened version. Or put it this way. Nothing happens until it's consumed. Or put it this way. Nature has given way to aura. A man cuts himself shaving and someone is signed up to write the biography of the cut. All the material in every life is channeled into the glow. Here I am in your lens. Already I see myself differently. Twice over or once removed.'
'And you may think of yourself differently as well. It's interesting how deep a picture takes you. You may see something you thought you'd kept hidden. Or some aspect of your mother or father or children. There it is. You pick up a snapshot and there's your face in half shadow but it's really your father looking back at you.'
'You're preparing the body all right.'
'Chemicals and paper, that's all it is.'
'Rouging my cheeks. Waxing my hands and lips. But when I'm really dead, they'll think of me as living in your picture.'
'I was in Chile last year and I met an editor who'd been sent to prison after his magazine did caricatures of General Pinochet. The charge was assassinating the image of the general.'
