The Age of Light

by Whitney Scharer

But back then, that first summer in Paris, she didn’t yet know the power of pictures, how a frame creates reality, how a photograph becomes memory becomes truth. Or Lee could tell the real story: the one where she loved a man and he loved her, but in the end they took everything from each other—who can say who was more destroyed? It’s this story that she’s locked up tight inside herself, this story that she was thinking about when she hid all her old prints and negatives in the attic, this story that makes the delicate teacup tremble in her hands.

truth. Or Lee could tell the real story: the one where she loved a man and he loved her, but in the end they took everything from each other—who can say who was more destroyed? It’s this story that she’s locked up tight inside herself, this story that she was thinking about when she hid all her old prints and negatives in the attic, this story that makes the delicate teacup tremble in her hands.

Their gaze made her into someone she didn’t want to be.

Lee has never been very good at being by herself: left to her own devices, she can easily sink into sadness and inactivity.

Her third set of prints, though, was actually in focus, and looking at those small black-and-white images, conjured not only from her mind but from a unique combination of light and time, Lee filled with an excitement she never felt when painting. She had released the shutter, and where nothing had existed, suddenly there was art.

She is drunk, but not drunk enough to consider smoking opium. That was her mother’s pastime—morphine, actually, the little blue vials lined up on the window ledge in her dressing room and glowing like sapphires in the sun.

“It’s all right,” he says. “You’re fine. I’m sorry he scared you.” “I’m not scared. I just want to leave.” “I understand. If you ever need anything, you can look me up. I’m Man Ray.”

Lee sets down her cup. “I don’t want you to take my picture. I want to take pictures. I want to be your student.” “I don’t take students. I don’t know what Condé told you. But you’re luminous, truly. I can see why Vogue wanted you. I’ll do you for free. You can put it in your portfolio.”

There’s no way to get the focus right on a shot like that.” Of course not. Conviction and confidence, in an instant, replaced by the wide void of all she does not know.

But Lee knows a few things too, and right before Man goes under the camera hood, she tells the woman, “Relax your eye muscles when you smile,” and after a moment’s hesitation the woman does so, her face suddenly more natural. When Man emerges from the hood, he looks at Lee and gives her a nod of approval. She nods back, feeling the way she has hoped to feel since she left New York, as though she has managed to set something good in motion.

She agreed before he even told her a number. When he did it was shockingly low. But she doesn’t care. It is a beginning, a launching point into what she wants. The idea of working for a famous photographer is so appealing she probably would do it for free.

He is like a crow bringing shiny treasures back to his nest, and Lee finds she likes the clutter his habits create.

In the afternoons, she assists him in the studio or in the darkroom, and these are by far her favorite hours of the day. Man insists he is a terrible teacher and that she’ll learn nothing from him, but on the contrary, Lee finds him informative and patient. He’s warm, surprisingly open with all the tricks he’s learned. He tells her that photography is more like science than like art, that they are chemists doing experiments in a lab, and it does seem that way to her, as much about the

technical work in the darkroom as it is about the original artistic vision.

Sometimes the pictures are so beautiful Lee pauses in her work just to stare at them. Like the portrait of the dancer Helen Tamiris, whom Man shot dressed in a loose kimono, lying on the ground with her hair teased into a giant black cloud around her milk-white face. It is good, good work, and it is an honor just to be holding it, to know that she will one day develop prints in the same darkroom where it was made.

A church destroyed, but a typewriter balanced on the

rubble before it, perfectly unharmed. A statue completely decimated except for one beseeching arm. The wicked side of her loves the lawless nature of the blasts.

Both mother and child stare at the camera with the blank expressions the long exposure time required.

Lee can’t imagine having children. Nothing seems further from what she wants to do with her life.

It surprises her to hear him say he could give it up. If she had his talent she’d never stop taking pictures.

If I had my way, I’d go back to painting full-time.” “Well, why don’t you?” He holds up one of his bulky shopping bags and smiles wryly. “Because painting does not pay for trips to the Vernaison.”

An older man and woman bundled up in coats sit on the train’s far side, watching them as they enter. To them, Lee and Man must seem like a

married couple, he carrying her packages and leading her solicitously by the arm. There must be nothing odd about it to them, clearly old and married themselves. Man must have acted similarly with his wife, all those years ago. The thought of how she and Man look together is a strange one, and makes Lee strangely happy.

When she puts her eye to the viewfinder she could swear the glass makes things look clearer than her eyes alone can do, and she finds she prefers the world boxed up, contained inside the camera’s frame.

The Rollei is her friend when she is walking, a better pair of eyes she wears around her neck.

The delight of the right gadget.

It is 1943 and British Vogue has a new editor, Audrey Withers,

The second she puts on the uniform she loves it, how shapeless it makes her, how little of her skin she can see beneath all the layers.

If there is one way to make herself feel better, it is by getting dressed up.

Lee doesn’t know—or really care—if she has fully understood what Claude was getting at, but she wants to be how the words made her feel: alone but not lonely, needing no one, living her life with intention.

Man is in professor mode. “Light is our tool,” he is saying. “Film is just a surface for capturing and holding light, but until the film has been developed, extra light becomes the enemy.”

“When you’re commissioned to take pictures of Pablo Picasso and you get what you think are the best shots of your career and then you manage to mix up the developer and stop bath so that not one—not a single picture—is usable. That is the worst thing.”

Rousing herself from her stool, the woman moves behind the bar and bends into the icebox and fills a small glass to the brim with cracked cubes before pouring the viscous liquid over it. The ice pops as it begins to melt.

“But he is photographing you, no?” “No, I’m his assistant.” The woman laughs. “And what does Kiki think of that?” she says. “Kiki?” Lee asks, but even as she says the name aloud she knows who it is: the K of the ledger.

She watches these two strangers as they lie next to each other on the bed, and feels nothing. And all the time, while she is watching, what she is thinking about is Man.

The confidence emboldens her, and her two desires—to work and to be with Man—come together in that moment.

for once her brain shuts off completely, leaving only feeling. The one thought she does manage is that there is no going back from this, and for that she couldn’t be more grateful.

Photos everywhere she looks, compositions formed of horrors. Lee shoots and shoots and swallows down the bile that rises in her throat—even that tasting of metal. Her assignment is to photograph the post-invasion duties of the American nurses, so Lee records plasma bags, penicillin, surgical procedures. She takes pictures of American women working side by side with German nurses, tamps the blast hole of her growing loathing for the Krauts down tight.

Sometimes Lee looks at him as they are eating dinner, or just sitting next to each other, and wonders how she ever thought this might not happen. It feels inevitable.

She likes the serendipity of shooting street scenes, juxtaposing people and objects in weird positions, playing with perspective. Each time she prints one of her photos and Man likes it, she grows more confident, feels more like who she has always wanted to be.

She closes her eyes and wills her mind to stay in it, the good feeling, and it is better than it has ever been for her. And when her mind drifts, it drifts only to their pictures.

She feels her mind operating on two levels and she loves it: she listens to her friend, but there is another track in her brain and it is focused on what she is seeing, on getting the last of the evening light, images composing and dissolving as she moves her gaze around.

The last in a string of men Lee treated badly. As soon as they told her they loved her she never spoke to them again.

When she thinks back on her other lovers, all she remembers is her restlessness, her dissatisfaction. They were always wanting more and more of her and she had no interest in giving it. She would sit across from them at restaurants or lie next to them in bed and most of the time she’d be thinking about how she could get away.

Man smiles and pulls Lee closer. “Yes, this is my love.

The words he used: “my love.” Lee could swear that people are noticing, their glances filled with admiration and envy. Lee is so lucky to be the one with Man, so lucky that everyone knows it.

More manifestos. Talk, talk, talk. Perhaps all their talking makes a difference, but so far Lee hasn’t seen it. She likes the conversations she has with Man about art when they are alone much better than these public shouting sessions, when confrontation and conflict seem to be the point.

she doesn’t quite believe that art always needs an underlying message.

“Why did you leave her?” Lee wants to know because she wants to confirm she is better than Kiki, wants to know all the ways in which the other woman failed. “She was jealous.”

He shows her at least a hundred pictures. When he is done she is still quiet. Man asks what she thinks. Lee hesitates and then says what she thinks she must: Kiki is very beautiful. “Of course,” Man says. “But what do you think of the work?”

Lee eats so much the waistband of her dress is tight when they leave the restaurant.