The job is pretty glamorous, but there are moments that are everything but. People always imagine me kicked back in a chair reading books about Strand and really living the life of the mind - at least when I'm not casually sifting through boxes of his photographs, doing nothing but pontificating on my own expanding knowledge of his practice. Well, that happens sometimes. But more often I'm scrolling through an unindexed journal on microfilm (Here's lookin' at you, Daily Worker!!) trying to find an article that may or may not even exist. Or, I'm cataloguing, which entails the meticulous recording of everything about a photograph from the type of photo paper I believe it's printed on to its dimensions down to the millimeter. That is what I was doing today.
At 10a.m. I spread eight photographs of Alfred Stieglitz out on the counter. All were taken by Paul Strand in the 1920s.
One looked like this:
Paul Strand, Alfred Stieglitz. ca. 1920 (negative and print). Coll. Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Another like so:
Paul Strand, Alfred Stieglitz. ca. 1920 (negative and print). Coll. Philadelphia Museum of Art.
The essay I am presently writing on Paul Strand is about portraiture. Neither of these photographs are among the ones I consider most important, the ones around which my essay will be structured. But I would love to say that as I gazed at these photographs today, I thought about portraiture at least a little.
However, this is not what happened. Instead, I was scrutinizing the color and length of Stieglitz's ear hair tufts to figure out whether the portraits sitting in front of me were made on or around the same day or not.
You see, Stieglitz looked much the same in all of these pictures. His hair was a hot mess in the same precise way. It was thin and grey in the same places. His mustache looked equally dustbroom-like in each. They were printed on the same stock of photographic paper. In a few in which his shirt was visible, it appeared similarly rumpled.
But the problem is that artists are shit record-keepers, and art historians are often just as culpable. The pile of photographs sitting in front of me were variably dated: 1919, 1920, 1920s, ca. 1920, 1925, 1928, 1929. And I had to somehow figure out which of these many dates was the right one. See? See how boring this can be? I'm boring myself rehearsing all of this for you.
So it was off to the races - to the three binders in which I keep thumbnail images of all the Strand photographs in all the other museums, and to my Strand timeline I pieced together after reading his letters. I wrote some cordial e-mails to other photo nerds and got a few responses. I ran up to the library, consulted some books, and came downstairs again. I looked at the ear hair some more. I discovered that one of the pictures was published in Vanity Fair in 1924 and so I crossed off 1925, 1928, and 1929. I read about the photo paper and when it was manufactured and crossed off 1919. Eventually I concluded that 1920 was best but kept the "circa" in there because I couldn't really substantiate this claim with full certainty. Then the real work began.
Every time I change anything in our database, I have to explain myself. I can't just dump "ca. 1920" in there in place of "1928" and move on. I have to write a long note outlining my logic, then sign and date it. That way, scholars of the future times know why I made changes and have a reason to agree or disagree with what I've done. It's an ongoing process, one that involves a lot of justifications.
So there I was, typing over and over again why I thought what, including all the bits about Stieglitz's ear hair. After each such entry, I have to initial and date it. AB07/18/12. AB07/18/12. AB07/18/12. So to avoid looking at the ear hair for a moment, I got lost in those numbers. And the following thought gently elbowed its way to the forefront of my brain and whispered: I think that was my father's birthday, but I'm not sure.
At first it didn't seem true, that I could have forgotten. I stared at the numbers some more. The "18" looked right, but maybe the month was wrong. No, no, I was thinking of a friend's birthday in October. July was right. Or was it June? Was it in summer at all? Could I remember any birthday parties? Were they indoors or outside? Everything was so hazy. My brain ached from trying too hard and I felt clumsy and slow.
I closed the Paul Strand timeline and switched over to the internet. I am a scholar and my research skills would see me through this. I opened up the library server's ancestry dot com subscription and typed his name and place of birth. I clicked "find" and got a smattering of amazingly irrelevant hits. It was absurd, really, how the top search results shared neither his first or last name. I counted backwards on my fingers from 1999 when he was 58 years old. I entered the year of birth and tried again. Same results. I closed the ancestry site and tried google. I typed his name with "obituary" and got a bunch of other people who died. I tried adding the state in which his obituary would have been printed. Nothing. I then tried adding the day he died, a date that is easy to remember because it was my 21st birthday. Again, nothing. I closed the web browser as I anxiously watched my co-worker next to me, wondering how long it would take her to ask "um, so why are you over there googling your dead father?" I turned back to Strand.
Ask me anything about Strand and I can tell you. He was 5' 6 1/2", and his favorite author was D.H. Lawrence and he preferred blueberry pie to all others. At age 5 his last name was changed from Stransky to Strand, and everyone calls him Paul but he was born Nathaniel Paul. He once had a cat named Jeffrey and his friends Beaumont and Nancy Newhall had cats named Euripides and Chiquita. In the 1920s he made films to make a living, and two of them were burlesques. His F.B.I. file is 170 pages long. He loved Aunt Jemima pancake mix but hated brie cheese, he was a slow reader, he made bad puns that he thought up long and hard in advance of sharing them with his friends, he had kidney stones twice, he liked Elvis Presley and classical music, he smoked cigarettes his whole life, he loved playing pool. He made very few nudes but a lot of pictures of hands. I have held his pocket watch and his cameras and most of his photographs. I have watched all his films. I know his birthday, and his wife's birthday. Also his second wife's birthday. And the third's.
I walked around the rest of the day juggling numbers, mentally arranging dates in my mind to get the right combination to click. I talked to one co-worker about photography but was mostly occupied with days and months. I listened to another colleague talk about hitting a goose while rowing, which was entertaining but I was still picturing calendar pages, month after month, wondering whether July 18 was really it or not. I thought backwards from his last birthday to the first one I could possibly remember, but came up with nothing. Not one cake, one outing, one present, one card, one drawing I'd made, one ticket stub, it was all a blank.
There are a lot of things I don't know about Paul Strand. Most of these questions are the "why" and "how" ones. I'm glad I don't know these things because if I did I would be poised to write the most boring essay ever. How do Strand's politics matter? Why did he decide to present his work as collaborative book projects beginning in the 1940s? How did his polemical films shape American documentary practice? What was his theory of portrait-making? I have hundreds of questions like this, percolating, spilling out onto pages and pages. Arriving at answers to these is always an amalgam of guesswork and poetics and history and it's the best part of my job.
When my father died it was because a cancerous tumor grew in his brain until it could go no further. During the nine months he was sick the tumor expanded, contracted, expanded again. It pushed his brain up against his skull and devoured it bit by bit until it stopped working. During these periods of growth and retreat my father oscillated between lucid and incoherent. Sometimes he could hold up his end of the conversation, but the subject of these talks were often limited to a certain period of time because he would forget parts of his life. Other times he just talked gibberish. When the tumor wrested away parts of his brain that controlled his emotions, he would become enraged and yell and yell like a child but he was too weak from all the drugs to do much else about it.
Only in the last days did I realize that everything he would ever know about my life would need to be decided now. I watched his morphine drip and told him about how in two months I was going to England and how it would be my first trip to Europe. I told him I would like it in Europe and that maybe someday I would even live there. I told him about how even though I'd dropped out of college a few years back, that I would go back and finish at some point and do something important with my life. I told him about how much I hated my retail job. I pieced together a picture of what I wanted for my life and laid it out there like it was fact. He didn't say a word, but by this point he had lost the ability to speak and maybe also to hear.
He had a mustache off and on but never a beard. He had a tooth pulled in Paris in 1952. He learned how to make enchiladas with Georgia O'Keeffe in Texas in 1918. He was right-handed. Between 1932 and 1948 he wrote letters with a green fountain pen. He had a lisp and a New York accent and used the word "swell" a lot. He grew up on W. 83rd. Street. He never stopped working. He smiled gently.
The facts about Paul Strand stack up in neat rows in my brain. They stand at the ready for when I want to write, for when I give a talk and take questions from the audience, for when I need something to think about that isn't AB07/18/12. They supplant other thoughts that slowly crumble into something unrecognizable and unknowable without my ever having noticed them fall into ruin. And without my permission to do so.
Happy birthday.
