The one that got away

Here’s a story about three pictures, the two above that I did take, and the one I’ll tell you about in a second that I didn’t but that I’ll try to show you anyway.

I’ve always thought that, at its core, photography as practiced by me and by those whose work I admire most is simply about being able to show people things I’ve seen, and if I'm really successful, maybe a bit about how I felt about them, too. It may mean something entirely different to you, and that is why photography is so damn cool. It’s a big tent, and there’s room for all of us to do whatever we want to with it.

The workflow goes like this. You see something that for whatever reason looks interesting, and may even strike a chord in you somehow. You grab a camera, fiddle with it, try a few angles, snap a few shots, and if you’ve truly seen something interesting and you’ve done everything right, or right enough, you make a print or attach it to an e-mail or upload it to a website and proclaim to the world “Look at what I saw!” Simple, right?

But what about the pictures you see, sometimes with painful clarity, but that for whatever reason you don’t capture with a camera? What about the ones that get away? Is the act of seeing pictures with photographic precision but with only your memory and your words to fix them in time and space sufficient? For that matter, are photographs really any good at all at conveying our unique take on what we see and how we feel about it?

I hope you’ll agree with me and all the other photographers, writers and storytellers in the world that, if you try real hard, the answer to both of those questions is a resounding YES.

There have been many, many incredible pictures over the years that I recorded with my eyes but for one reason or another was unable to capture with a camera. Those failures don’t usually bother me all that much, but they do make it harder for me to share what I saw with others. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why writing has become such a big part of my creative life, I don’t know. In any event, though, the pictures that get away are often the big ones, the money shots, the ones that tie the loose ends together and make you either slap your head in frustration for missing them or just stare slack-jawed in amazed gratitude for witnessing them at all.

If you’re a friend of mine, or if you’ve taken one of my classes at NESOP (that actually makes you both), you’ve heard me tell the story behind the pictures at the top of this post and many others like them at least once before, and I trust that hearing it one more time won’t kill you. If you’re stumbling across me here for the first time, listen up. It’s a good one.

In the first one, the guy in the right foreground is Noel Paul Stookey. You may know him better as the “Paul” in Peter, Paul and Mary. He and his band mates were famous for a song called “Puff The Magic Dragon” which sounded like a kid’s fairy tale but probably was really about the drug culture of the 1960’s. The guy performing on stage in the background is my friend Al Stewart, the Scottish singer-songwriter. He’s famous for a song called “Year Of The Cat”, which sounds like it’s about the movie “Casablanca”, but also has something to do with Vietnamese astrology somehow.

How I came to be standing there backstage in the middle of a muddy field on a rainy Saturday afternoon at an outdoor music festival in Brooklyn, Maine photographing one aging pop star watching another one perform is a very long story, the details of which I won’t bore you with here. Let’s just say that, once upon a time, way back when I was in high school in the 1970’s, a friend loaned me one of Al’s records to listen to. I loved the music, a brilliant folk-rock concept album about some of the pivotal historical events of the 20th century. But it was the black and white photograph on the cover that really left a mark on me; it actually made me want to be a photographer. Years later, after I had managed to do just that, I met him, and eventually shot one of his CD covers, and most recently art-directed and designed another. We became friendly, and nowadays I even get to drive him around to shows every year or so when he’s in Boston. On one of those roadtrips a picture presented itself to me, one that I was unable to capture, but one that will stay clearly in my mind forever.

In early 2002, I drove Al on a 5-day tour of the Northeast, starting in Northhampton, MA, heading south as far as Philadelphia, and finally winding up in New York City. Seeing that our route on the last day would take us through the Holland Tunnel, the approach to which through Jersey City has a long, close proximity to Ground Zero and the ruins of the World Trade Center just across the Hudson River, I mentioned it to Al. Like a wreck on a highway, I thought it might hold the same dark fascination for him as it did for me.

“I don’t want to see that,” he said.

I was a little surprised to hear him say that. After all, this was the same guy who had made a career out of writing songs mostly about the ebb and flow of history and civilization. If anybody would be interested in seeing evidence of a seemingly apocalyptic clash of ideologies, I thought, it would be him. But then I realized that I was probably being a little insensitive. Al would be flying back home to San Francisco the next day from Newark International Airport, precisely where United 93 had begun its flight to infamy only six months earlier. Perhaps if I flew back and forth between New York and the west coast as often as he did I wouldn’t be all that interested in rubbernecking, either.

So we made our way north on the New Jersey Turnpike Extension toward the tunnel in silence. The Statue of Liberty rose from the harbor on the right followed by Ellis Island, the setting for one of Al’s more obscure story-songs. Then, a shock in the middle distance; that horrible pile, still steaming in places, glittered in the cold, bright morning. The musician who for so long has woven songs about the threads that tie civilizations together dozed in the seat next to me, arms crossed and head down. I just stole glances out the side window across his silhouette at the remains of the event that will most likely shape history for the rest of our lives. The juxtaposition of the two was striking, to me at least. My camera was in the back seat, just out of reach. I thought about trying to grab it somehow and committing the scene to film, but doing so at 70mph probably wouldn't have been the smartest move at that particular moment with that particular passenger. And besides, the poignancy of the scene had already been composed and captured by my mind’s eye. The resulting photograph, had I managed to grab it, would have only meant something to me and a few other people who know the whole story. It was one of the ones that got away, sure. But to me, seeing what I saw in that moment was perfectly sufficient and absolutely priceless.

Now, about that second picture up there, the one that obviously didn’t get away...

Like I said, I drove Al up to the Flye Point Music Festival in Brooklyn, Maine last year. He griped about having to do the gig the whole time, mostly because by the time he factored in all of the costs to fly from LA to Boston, hotels, meals, agent’s commissions, child support, etc., he had calculated that he earned about $85 for a 90-minute gig that ate up 5 days of his life. But then he would always end his rant by saying, “So what are you going to do? I figured it’s a good reason to come to Boston to have dinner with you”. Al always finds a way to make me feel pretty important in the grand scheme of things.

After his set, we hung around for awhile in the backstage tent eating and chatting with some of the other artists warming up to go on stage. One of them was Paul Stookey, and as unlikely as it may seem, in 40-odd years of performing these two guys had never met each other. They seemed to admire each other’s work and career, and at one point I asked if I could shoot a picture of the two of them together.

And that’s when Peter, Paul and Mary (minus Peter and Mary) pinched Al Stewart on the hiney. And I was pointing a camera at them when he did.

Top that one if you can.