Whitney Scharer - The Age of Light

When he has calmed her down, he picks up the stack of photos from her desk and flops on the bed.

“This one,” he says, holding up a shot she took in Paris right after the surrender, a picture of a woman modeling a Bruyère coat in the Place Vendôme, framed through the shards of a shattered shop window. “Jesus, that’s a good one. The way you foregrounded the bullet holes.”

“You really think so?”

“I know so.”

His praise brings the words back into focus. Lee turns around and pounds out a paragraph, only stopping once to worry that it doesn’t sound right. When she is done, she pulls the paper off the platen and hands it to him. He reads it slowly, but this time Lee doesn’t need him to tell her it is good. She already knows. While he’s reading, she eases the window open and grabs a jerry can, fills up two glasses to their brims. It’s not even noon, but lately she’s turned everything into an opportunity for celebration.

One hot July night a month or so after the Patou party, when Man is out again, Lee stays late in the studio. She has been working on her bell jar images. There is a small series of them now, and she is very pleased with them. Their framing makes the model’s head appear to float inside the jar, trapped like a specimen under the glass even though she was kneeling behind it. In a few shots the woman has a dreamy expression; in others she has her eyes closed and her head tilted to one side. In all of them, there is a sense of claustrophobia that feels both provocative and familiar. Lee has started to understand her work in this way: she is consciously evoking a feeling rather than just lucking into a successful image.

Lee decides that if she can get the series done tonight, she is going to show it to Man. It is her best work so far, and she has been waiting until she has all the images printed. Perhaps four of them could be mounted in a frame, or there could be a triptych of them in 221. They work best in a grouping, as if they themselves are a collection of specimens. Maybe, if she ever has a show, the pictures can be pinned to the wall rather than framed, or they can be displayed inside bell jars. That might be the most provocative of all.

Lee moves through the darkroom easily now. It is almost a second home.

When Lee is done printing, she goes back into the developing room. There is one roll of film left from the bell jar sessions, and she is curious to see what it contains. She lines up her tools as she’s been taught and turns off the light. It is still a shock to be plunged into darkness. She has her hands on the film and the church key. She peels open the canister and is getting ready to start dipping the film in the developer when she feels a skitter-scratching run across her shoe and dart up her leg. Lee lets out a shriek, drops the film, shakes her leg frantically, and, in her panic, reaches up and pulls the cord to turn on the ceiling light.

The first thing Lee notices in the sudden brightness is the tail of the mouse as it runs under the table. The next thing she notices is her film, curled in a heap on the table and almost certainly ruined. Quickly she turns off the light. What to do? The chances of the film being salvageable are minimal. But she loves the photos so much—they are the final roll of her bell jar session, the one she thought might be the best of all.

Out of indecision more than anything else, she goes through the motions of developing the film. When the images are finally in the fix, she sees that they aren’t entirely black, as she would have imagined them to be; they are murky, low contrast, fuzzy compared with the others from the session. She feels a crushing sense of disappointment that she knows is related as much to Man and her growing need to impress him as it is to the loss of her work. Hanging from the clothesline to dry, the negatives are like a sad little ribbon of failure, and she goes home immediately, not even wanting to print the other work she has planned to complete. When Man returns, she pretends to be asleep.

The next morning when Lee comes into the studio, she takes down the negatives to inspect them under the loupe. They’re altered, certainly, but when she sees them magnified, she notices that they seem almost reversed, as if the light and dark crystals on the film have switched places. Intrigued, she chooses one and prints it. As the image appears in the developing tray, she draws in a sharp breath. She was correct—there has been some sort of reversal, and all around the image, where the light and dark areas of the composition meet, there is a fine black line, as if someone has traced it with a soft pencil. The image itself is extremely low contrast, which is unfortunate, but paired with the ghostly effect of the black outline, it is like nothing she has ever seen.

Rushing, Lee prints another few images from the series. In each the effect is subtly different—perhaps, she thinks, because of where that particular frame was positioned when the light came on—but they all have the black outline and the same ethereal quality. By the time Man arrives, she has printed several more and cannot wait to show him.

He comes over and kisses her, but she has no time for kisses.

“Look.” Lee shows him the prints and explains what happened in the developing room. He takes one of them, still dripping wet, out into the light so he can see it better.

“Very curious,” he says. His finger hovers just above the surface of the print and traces the outline along the bell jar. “So you mean to tell me that you turned on the light—the overhead light—in the developing room, and this is what you got? That really doesn’t seem possible.”

“I know. I thought I had completely ruined them, but for some reason I developed them anyway, and here we are.”

“Lucky mistake,” he murmurs, and Lee clenches her teeth in annoyance. He looks at all the other prints, holding up one image and saying, “You know, we could experiment with this. See what would happen if we exposed it to light for longer or shorter times. How long do you think the light was on?”

“Maybe ten seconds?”

“We could try five, twenty—and we could lay the film out on the table purposefully so that the exposure is uniform.” He is moving from print to print as he talks.

“I was thinking that if we underexposed the film to begin with maybe it wouldn’t be so murky.”

“Ah, yes—we should try that!” His face fills with excitement. “All we need are some terrible pictures we can experiment with.” She follows him as he leaves the darkroom. He grabs both of their cameras from the office and throws his coat back on, and then fills his camera bag with extra film.

Outside, Lee poses on bridges, makes funny faces, takes pictures of Man doing the same. Since the goal is to use up the film, they take pictures of pedestrians, shadows, signposts, trash cans, antique store windows. Soon it devolves into a game to see who can do the oddest pose in a shot with a stranger, so Lee goes and sits behind someone at a café, puts a napkin on her head like a babushka, and stares at the camera with a look of surprise. Man leans on the back of a car that someone has just parked; Lee takes a picture of him sticking out his tongue while the driver, not noticing him, opens the car door. For each roll, they experiment with under-and overexposing, making careful notes about which roll is treated which way. After less than an hour they’ve used all the film, and they head back to develop it.

In the studio, they are methodical. There are twelve rolls of film; they make a chart and hang it on the wall, marking out how long they will expose each roll to light and if it was underexposed to begin with. Only one roll of film can be in the developing bath at a time, so they work as a team: Man does the exposures and dips them in the developer; Lee agitates them in the stop and fix and hangs them up to dry. When they speak, they speak only about the work.

“This one is twelve seconds.”

“I think we should mark them with tape once they dry so we don’t get confused, and then we can match that to the chart.”

When she and Man make eye contact, she can tell he feels it too: a sense that they are doing something momentous. To be able to manipulate the negative itself, its chemical properties, the very nature of it, rather than to alter it manually by scratching or cutting—it feels as if they are creating a new medium altogether. She hopes so much that it works, that it wasn’t some weird fluke when she did it the first time.

Without acknowledgment, it seems that they have both decided to wait to look at the images until they develop all the film. Lee hangs them up and marks them with tape without even holding them up to the safelight. Finally, after several hours, all twelve strips hang together on the drying line, and Man rubs her back as they stand there looking at the film.

The three little words come unbidden out of the ache she feels in her stomach. “I love you,” she says.

Man puts his arm around her shoulders and pulls her tight. “I love you too,” he whispers.

It is the first time they’ve said the words to each other, and it should be huge, but it just feels of a piece with the work they are doing together. Lee hugs him back quickly and then moves away, grabbing one of the still-damp negative strips and taking it out into the main room. Immediately, it is obvious that they’ve re-created the effect that Lee produced accidentally. Lampposts glow white, outlined against white streets. Man’s hair against the parked car is traced with a black edge. Lee’s eyes are shockingly dark against her ghostly skin. She feels as if she is looking at pictures from another planet. Together, she and Man choose twelve images, one from each roll, and print them, moving around each other in the darkroom as smoothly as dancers.