Friday Morning In Strobe Alley

“Ya wanna see Edgerton’s lab?”

I had to chuckle at the way the question was posed, under her breath casually as if she had flashed the inside of her raincoat and said “Ya wanna buy a Rolex cheap?” But coming from Cheryl Vossmer, one of my students at New England School of Photography and a sergeant with the MIT Police Department, I knew those few words were ripe with possibility. Asking a photographer if he would like to see the workspace of the guy who made all those iconic stop-action images of impossibly fast-moving objects was like asking a short-order cook if he’d like to see where they invented the ham and cheese omelet.

“What do you THINK?!!” I whispered back conspiratorially, presumably so that jealous students in the class wouldn’t organize and riot.

“Friday morning. 8:30. Talk to Heratch”.

She smiled, slipped out of the room and was gone. I could only assume that Heratch Ekmekjian, my friend and colleague at NESOP, was in on the scheme and would have been at home that very moment polishing his lenses in giddy anticipation. A quick phone call, a few e-mails and a couple of days later, we pulled up 10 minutes tardy in front of MIT Police headquarters bearing a dozen hand-cuts from Ohlin’s in Cushing Square. Cheryl was waiting outside with her boss, Chief John DiFava, looking at her watch.

“How often do you get to bring donuts to a bunch of cops?” Heratch apologized.

Groans followed, handshakes were exchanged, and the hand-cuts were left inside at the dispatcher’s desk. A 15-minute walk in the brilliant early October sunshine brought us to Strobe Alley, Doc Edgerton’s suite of classrooms and labs in a building just east of the MIT dome.

Harold E. “Doc” Edgerton didn’t invent the strobe light or the electronic flash, and he wasn’t the first photographer or scientist to explore the potential of using strobes to stop rapid motion on film. But his genius transformed the strobe from a laboratory curiosity into an important tool for science, industry and photography. In their biographical memoir of Edgerton published in 2005 by the National Academy of Sciences, J. Kim Vandiver and Pagan Kennedy laid out his legacy in a paragraph:

“He made flashing light cheap and portable, and found endless applications for it, from the airport runway to the office copy machine. But despite his importance as an innovator, Edgerton is best known for the photographs he took: the drop of milk exploding into a crown, a bullet hovering beside an apple, an atomic blast caught the instant before it mushroomed, a smudge that might have been the flipper of the Loch Ness Monster. His strobe photographs illustrated scientific phenomena in a way that was instantly understandable to millions of people. Later in his career he developed sonar tools that revolutionized marine archeology, again using images to explore the unknown”

Joining MIT’s faculty in 1932, one of his earliest contributions to the science of photography was the introduction of argon gas into electronic flash tubes, a technical achievement that enabled brighter, faster flash output than had previously been available. Indirectly, this development would contribute far more to the esthetic of photography and to the popular visual perception of time and motion. Many of his experiments with high-energy, high-speed strobe lights took place in the room in which I was now standing, a room that looked more like a gadgeteer’s crowded basement workshop than a prominent point on the star map of the history of photography.

Vandiver and Kennedy described the place:

“The hallway echoed with the report of gunshots. Flashes jumped across the walls. Boxes spilled wires, capacitors, barnacled wood. By contrast, other wings of MIT seemed downright sterile. Strobe Alley, the hallway that cut a line between Edgerton’s labs, sucked visitors in and invited them to become part of the action. To make his lair even more inviting, Edgerton hung displays all along the hall: photographs, framed bits of equipment, buttons to push. [Former student and side-scan sonar expert Marty] Klein, who wandered into Strobe Alley as an undergraduate in 1961, loved the tantalizing smell of the place. It reminded him of the junk shops in lower Manhattan, the perfume of ‘connectors and coils and motors— sometimes motors that have burned out.’”

The pushbuttons, photographs and showcased exhibits of equipment are all still much as they were when Edgerton walked the hallway. On my left, I had immediately noticed a very old and possibly homemade device sitting on a workbench, looking like a prop from a 1950’s sci-fi flick. It also bore a passing resemblance to the Speedotron power packs that I once used to light countless bread-and-butter catalog photographs. But this thing was bigger, blacker and scarier looking with its knobs, dials, toggles and ammeter, and was plastered with various labels warning of the dangers of working alone with high voltage. I understood what that was all about. Years ago I was shooting in a studio with another photographer, who decided to straddle a 2400 watt-second Norman pack and rearrange its cables in order to change the power ratio of the flash heads he was using. Brazenly ignoring the standard practice of turning the pack off and dumping the energy stored in its capacitor before disconnecting a flash cable, he yanked on one of the thick black leads and the pack promptly responded by arcing and exploding in a flash of yellow light and white smoke between his legs. When the roiling mushroom cloud dissipated against the high ceiling a few seconds later, there he stood, scared stiff, still holding the cable in his hand and covered from head to toe with soot and pulverized electrical insulation. The misshapen power pack lay on its side a few feet away from where it had been. Fortunately, with injuries to nothing but his ego, I am pretty sure that to this day he follows directions carefully when working with electricity.

My thoughts were brought back to the here and now by a bearded, casually-dressed fellow welcoming us from the opposite corner of the room. Dr. Jim Bales is the assistant director of what is now known as the Edgerton Center, and the warmth of his greeting made it obvious to us that Cheryl and Chief DiFava were old friends. Heratch had told me earlier that we were not just going to be able to see the lab, but that there was a good chance we would actually see a demonstration of how Edgerton made his stop-action photographs of bullets piercing various objects. We were to bring along our cameras, tripods, and some “targets”.

“Ya know...” he started with the same two words that he has opened countless conversations with in the past, “...a Boston Cream donut might make a pretty good target.” It was an observation that I had enthusiastically agreed with at the time and which I now presented to Dr. Bales when he asked us what was in the small white box tied with string that I was carrying.

“You’d be surprised”, he said. “The bullet goes in and out and the donut absorbs all the energy and just sort of folds around it before any of the cream squirts out. We’ve never really gotten a very good shot of a bullet going through a cream donut.”

“Right, right, of course, that’s pretty fascinating.” I tried to make it sound as if I had never really believed the donut would work. In that moment the door to the enormous warehouse of topics that I don’t know the first thing about but venture a comment on anyway opened just a crack. Heratch shot a look at me; he knew that I had been planning to title this essay “Time To Shoot The Donuts”.

Jim showed us around the lab a bit and introduced us to the other scientist in the room, Dr. Bob Root. Bob told us that his company, Prism Science Works, designed and built the small strobe unit we would be working with. Its flash duration was astonishingly short, somewhere in the neighborhood of one-third of a microsecond, literally faster than a speeding bullet. Jim and Bob explained how a small microphone, positioned a few inches from the target, captures the sound of the shock wave (a miniature sonic boom) that precedes a supersonic projectile and fires the strobe as the bullet enters, is inside of, or exits the target, depending on where the mic is actually placed. With the room completely darkened, a digital or film camera with its shutter held open captures the infinitesimally brief burst of light and the scene that it illuminates; in one-third of a microsecond, a bullet and any ejected debris from the target appear to be stopped in mid-flight.

“And the thing that you shouldn’t forget” Bob continued, “is that your eyes are also a camera. Once you get used to what is going on, you will actually see the bullet stopped in midair the same way that your camera will record it.” The principle is the same as what happens when a strobe light is turned on in a darkened nightclub; fluid movement on the dance floor turns into what looks like a really bad Quicktime movie.

Jim told us that he would start by firing at the thin edge of a playing card, attempting to capture an image of a bullet tearing the card in half. He asked for a volunteer to help him sight down the bore of the rifle. Skip Hoyt, another photographer friend of Cheryl’s and an acquaintance of Jim’s from MIT’s Lincoln Labs, stepped forward to help. For the first time, I noticed the .22 caliber target rifle strapped along the length of a gray wooden sawhorse positioned next to a workbench on the far wall of the lab. I don’t know why, but I had thought the setup would be fancier and maybe just a bit safer. Jim stuck a Joker in the folds of an old felt blackboard eraser resting on a stand in the center of the room, and with Skip’s help, positioned it perfectly relative to the immobilized rifle. On the other end of the rifle range, a gaffer’s tape-covered metal cylinder about the diameter of a coffee can and twice as long appeared to be lined up to catch the bullet. From rifle muzzle to coffee can, our shooting gallery measured less than 8 feet in length. Anyone scoring a “Maggie's Drawers” in here would have some explaining to do to whoever happened to be in the room next door. Doc Edgerton’s safety issues had been even more serious; for some of his pictures he had used a .30 caliber military rifle firing heavy bullets at nearly 3 times the speed of sound.

“The first thing you should be asking, Skip, since you’re standing in the line of fire, is ‘where’s the bolt?’” Jim stood up from sighting-in the rifle. The bolt is part of the rifle’s loading mechanism and contains the firing pin. Shaking his pants pocket he said “Don’t worry, the bolt’s right here.”

At that point we arranged our digital SLR's in a tripod-mounted scrum a couple of feet away from the playing card. The squarish white strobe, about the size of a lunch box, was perched on a light stand to the left of the cameras. A small black box containing the microphone was suspended slightly to the left of and below the playing card, poised to trip the strobe as the bullet tore the card in half. The sawhorse holding the rifle was to the right of the whole arrangement, about 3 feet away from where my camera was and where my right ear would soon be. As we all fumbled with the settings on our cameras, Jim tripped the strobe by clapping his hands once near the microphone so we could determine the proper f-stop to set on our lenses.

“I always wanted a clapper strobe”, Heratch quipped, beating everyone else in the room to the obvious.

Finally, it was show time. Jim distributed headphones and protective eyeglasses to everyone as we all crouched down in a little huddle behind our cameras, right index fingers poised on shutter releases. Being closest to the rifle, I felt the nerve endings tingling on the right side of my face as Jim got into position. After checking to make sure everyone was ready and where they were supposed to be, he started his very deliberate countdown.

“OK. Bolt’s in the pocket. Eyes and ears on? Loading. Loaded. Lights out.”

The lab was plunged into total darkness. Remembering what Bob had said about trying to see the bullet with my eyes, I stared at where I thought the card was.

“Shutters open.”

The sound of 5 camera shutters snapping open came faintly through the protective headphones.

“3...2...1...BANG!”

For the briefest instant imaginable, I saw the perfectly bisected white card brilliantly illuminated less than 4 feet in front of my face. Suspended in space on its left side was a jagged field of bits of torn paper, and, perfectly frozen against the blackness just beyond, the unmistakable oblong shape of a dull gray bullet. I saw it with my eyes, and a few seconds later I saw it again on the LCD screen on my Nikon D200. That instant digital preview appearing on the back of our cameras was the one fundamental thing that differed from Doc Edgerton’s experiments 70 years earlier. How hard it must have been for him to have to wait while his film was processed and printed! How lucky we were! We all knew it, and the room erupted in spontaneous, amazed laughter.

“Shutters closed. Lights on. How’d we do?” Surely Jim had seen this reaction a thousand times in his years at Strobe Alley, but he smiled nonetheless as he checked the thumbnails on each of our cameras. We repeated the process 7 or 8 more times, firing at more playing cards and each other’s business cards. At one point Heratch, realizing he didn’t have a business card with him, started looking through his wallet for a photo of his family. Jim stopped him.

“Sorry. We don’t do pictures of people or pets. No ex-wives. It sends the wrong message.”

The last target we used was a particularly plump green grape perched on top of a plastic film canister. Jim’s first shot was a little low, resulting in an interesting but less-than-spectacular image. He adjusted the height of the next grape by placing it on a wad of bright blue modeling clay, and the ensuing explosive impact left us all wiping grape juice off our faces and lenses while marveling at the images we had made. Packing up my camera as we were getting ready to leave, I looked up above the general area where the targets had been placed and saw bits of dried Jell-O, egg, peanut butter and who knows what else splattered like a gravity-defying Pollack on the ceiling.

While researching Edgerton and his work for this essay, I was surprised to learn that he had once lived down the street and around the corner from my apartment. I was reminded of the time I sat just a table away from Philip Morrison, a principal physicist on the Manhattan Project and a colleague of Edgerton’s at MIT, dining with friends on chicken kabobs at a local Greek joint. My own dinner companions that evening were mildly interested when I tried to explain who the lively old guy in the wheelchair was, but, frankly, seemed more impressed with the nice tomato sauce on their fluffy white rice. The devastating effects of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 haunted Morrison, who went on to become a leading proponent of nuclear nonproliferation. Edgerton, meanwhile, directing his expertise and scientific curiosity toward the same subject, produced unforgettable high-speed photographs recording the awesome, apocalyptic beauty of H-bomb tests in the 1950’s and 60’s with a camera of his own design. Until Morrison became a minor TV celebrity with his popular PBS series The Ring Of Truth, neither of these guys were easily recognizable as they lived their extraordinary lives in our midst. Yet the work that they did became an indisputable part of the iconography of the twentieth century.

Doc Edgerton died on January 4, 1990 after suffering a heart attack at the MIT Faculty Club. “Papa Flash”, as his friend and collaborator Jacques Cousteau had nicknamed him, was 86 years old. “I performed CPR on him”, Cheryl mentioned quietly as we left Strobe Alley. I just looked at her, not quite knowing what to say. But afterwards I found something that he liked to say, and I can’t get it, or the rare privilege of having spent a couple of hours seeing firsthand what few before him had even imagined, out of my mind.

“If you don’t wake up at three in the morning and want to do something, you’re wasting your time.”

I haven’t been sleeping quite as much ever since.

The Anchorwoman, The Assassin, And The Day I Shot President Carter

I’ve learned a thing or two about ambition in my life. It lives in each of us to varying degrees, and each of us do different things because of it. And then it does different things right back to us. Take me, for instance. Or better yet, take Jimmy Carter, Jessica Savitch, or a guy I used to know named Charley. Ambition led all of us to be at the intersection of 8th and Walnut Streets in Philadelphia on the evening of September 23, 1976. Carter’s ambition carried him there to engage President Gerald R. Ford in the first debate of the ‘76 election campaign. Jessica Savitch, the golden girl of the local TV news scene, was there to cover the event live for KYW-TV, the city’s NBC affiliate, and to continue building the persona that appeared to be leading her to a network gig in New York. Me, well, I was there to cover the event for what I was certain would be my future career as a globetrotting photojournalist. And because I wanted to see a real, live president. And because I had the hots for Jessica Savitch, a fascination that had caused some minor jealously just the previous weekend as my girlfriend and I spent one of many lazy Sunday afternoons poking around the beautiful little artist’s colony of New Hope, PA. Charley was there to participate in the debate, too, but in a decidedly different role. I would have to wait another 4 years to meet him, but he'll enter my story here in just a few paragraphs.

As the sun set that evening, bright yellowish quartz lights clicked on here and there as television correspondents did their pre-debate standups. I had wedged myself into a spot next to where Jessica Savitch was now holding a microphone and brushing her hair away from her face, brilliantly lit. Serious looking men with their suit jackets unbuttoned had appeared from nowhere and stationed themselves along the police line every eight feet or so, speaking quietly into their closed palms and staring across the barricades into the crowds. Then, from across the intersection, the sound of cheering grew louder as a tight quartz-lit group of men worked its way through the crowd. As his Secret Service cordon made the turn onto Walnut, camera strobes popped and Jimmy Carter’s hand shot up over the crowd. He had walked the three blocks from his hotel! I saw his trademark toothy grin directed at Jessica and her camera, directed at ME, as he waved again and then disappeared through the front door of the theater. It was almost anticlimactic a few minutes later when President Ford’s motorcade sped through the intersection and I caught a glimpse of him silhouetted in the back seat of his bulletproof limousine, waving casually from the wrist. In between snapping photos of the boisterous scene all around me, I glanced over to see Jessica shouting rapidly into her microphone while trying to look over her shoulder at Carter and Ford and back into the camera at the same time.

Ambition. Savitch had once told a friend "I'm going to be a network anchor, and I'm going to do it fast”. Sure enough, within a year or so of the debate she was a correspondant and anchor on NBC’s Sunday evening national newscast, an accomplishment that invited skepticism among some journalistic colleagues. David Brinkley publicly referred to her as “the dumbest woman I have ever met”. Another coworker described her as having had "a nut streak in her, but she also had some kind of energy force behind her eyes. It was like she put on her little custom suit, shot a beam across the room, and zapped you." Meanwhile, 6 weeks after the debate Carter won the election and then proceeded to lose the electorate over an energy crisis, runaway inflation and a Mideast hostage standoff. And within a few hours of standing almost shoulder-to-shoulder with one of them and across the street from the other, I was back at my dead-end job working the midnight shift as a subway train driver. I made my eight round trips that night in the darkened operator’s cab rocking gently on welded rail, lulled into waking dreams of infinite possibility.

And time moved on; things progressed as things always do. By 1980 I had gone from being bored and artistically unappreciated as a subway train driver to being bored and artistically unappreciated as a camera store manager. My own ambition had led me from a dead-end to a false start. Life, for the most part, was flying past me, and all I could do was watch it go by and occasionally take a picture of it as it went.

Until, that is, Charley walked into my store one afternoon and asked if I would like to see President Carter. He was a special agent with the U.S. Secret Service and one of my favorite customers. He had been on duty the night of the debate four years earlier, stationed inside the Walnut Street Theater as I watched from across the street. An avid amateur photographer, he seemed to really appreciate the few hours I had spent with him one night in the store’s demonstration darkroom showing him how to make black and white prints. Afterward, he bought me dinner, and he told me he had served three tours of duty in Vietnam in a Special Ops unit tasked with assassinating Viet Cong officers and politicians. I didn’t know how I felt about that, but he seemed to genuinely like me and was quite grateful for the help I had given him. So when he took my social security number back to his office and returned a half-hour later with a small blue lapel pin with the letter “A” on it, it felt like a thank you. “Be at the Navy Yard on Wednesday at 12:30”, he said. “Make sure you’re wearing this. I’ll meet you there.”

The little blue pin worked like magic, and two days later I found myself parked in the VIP lot adjacent to the base’s administration building, staring at a pair of immaculate green and white Sikorsky Sea King helicopters. Smartly uniformed Marines stood at parade rest at each of the helicopters’ boarding stairways, and men in suits patrolled the perimeter of the lawn. At one end of the field I saw a low platform and a number of press photographers standing around it, about 50 yards away from the helicopters. I grabbed my camera bag and walked over there, hoping that that was where I was supposed to meet Charley.

I was standing there feeling very conspicuous when several unmarked black sedans pulled up nearby, red and blue lights flashing behind their grilles. Charley hopped out of the lead car looking every bit the Secret Service agent in a three piece suit and dark sunglasses and wearing a little ear bud.

“What are you doing over here?” he said.

Oh shit, I thought to myself. I’m too close. “Am I too close?” I answered as apologetically as I could.

“No, no. C’mon.” He led me across the lawn toward the closest helicopter, and as we walked, he told me that he was working the advance team for Carter’s motorcade, driving the same route about 10 minutes ahead of the President. “Checking for open windows in high buildings, loose manhole covers, lone nuts, that sort of thing.”

And just like that we were standing at the short stairway leading up into the helicopter. The Presidential seal was subtly displayed on the fuselage under the cockpit window, and through the glass I could see the pilot flipping switches. The words “Welcome Aboard Marine One” were embroidered into carpeting on the stair risers. An unblinking Marine guard stared straight ahead; ignoring him, Charley walked me around behind the strut-mounted landing gear to a narrow spot between the fuselage and the tire. The stainless steel railing of the stairway was now right in front of me, close enough for me to touch. One of the enormous rotor blades hung directly over my head.

“You should be able to get some good shots from here. Stay put and don’t move until I come and get you.”

He walked away, leaving me standing there leaning against the polished aircraft that would soon be carrying the most powerful man on the planet. The evidence of that power was all around me, and I especially made note of the sharpshooter teams stationed on the roof of the administration building. The perimeter of the leadership of the Free World was secure and locked down, and I was about to be standing at its epicenter. The sound of sirens approaching brought a heightened state of activity to everyone around the helicopters.

And, perhaps like you right about now, I had to pee.

Only kidding. A column of police and Secret Service vehicles quickly rolled past the first helicopter followed by the familiar long black limousine with flags on the fenders. The limo stopped smoothly at the curb, the doors flew open, and President Carter emerged and stepped up on the door sill so that he could wave over the top of the car. As he walked toward the helicopter and shook hands with a line of dignitaries that had formed to send him off, I started shooting pictures. At one point the strut of the landing gear got in my way, and I took a step back and to my left to shoot around it. I was immediately shoved back into place by a heavy hand on my shoulder belonging to someone who I hadn’t even realized was there, and I muttered “sorry” as I waited for my heart to start beating again. I had a momentary glimpse of a dark suit in my peripheral vision. When Charley said “stay put and don’t move”, I guess he meant “stay put and don’t move”.

Carter bounded up the steps less than three feet in front of me. He paused at the top for a second or two, turned around, and waved. The motor drive on my Nikon was going “clack-clack-clack”. I knew I had a great shot. As he turned back to duck through the door, he sort of looked down in my direction. He was still smiling, not at me but from the wave. There was a really heavy look in his eyes, which made me wonder what was on his mind at that particular moment.

As soon as he disappeared into the cabin, the Marine guard followed him up the stairs and inside. All around me now, Secret Service agents were walking around with their arms in the air like NFL referees yelling “That’s it! Everybody back!” I walked over to where Charley was standing near the limosine and watched as the rotors on both helicopters started to turn. The roar was deafening as their engines reached liftoff power; Marine One swayed a bit on its landing gear and then rose straight up in the air. I could see Carter’s white shirt in one of the windows as his helicopter banked and moved off to the south, the second one following in close formation.

I thanked Charley and said goodbye, and, turning onto South Broad Street, I wondered about the kind of ambition that my friend must have had. He had killed for his country and he would die for his President, both oddly in the same cold-blooded, apolitical manner and neither in the abstract. What kind of person would knowingly sign up for that? I could find no answers that day, nor have I come up with any in the years since.

Three months later John Lennon was shot dead on the street in front of his wife. His murder appeared to be an ominous bridge between the failed, lame duck presidency of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America”. On TV, Jessica Savitch reported that the killer, Mark David Chapman, had dropped down into a “combat stance” when he fired. Charley came into my store the next day, and all he kept talking about was how “the guy shot him from a ‘combat stance’”. He was smiling when he said it.

My story should probably end there, but it doesn’t. It comes with a couple of postscripts.

First off, Charley was right. I did get some very good shots that day, which indirectly led me to be hired a number of years later to photograph former President Carter when he came to Concord, MA to speak to a Unitarian organization. Evidentally, he liked my pictures enough to request a set for the Carter Presidential Library. I couldn’t print them fast enough.

And then there’s this.

I don’t remember who the network anchor was who announced the death of Jessica Savitch in 1983, but the sad news touched me in a way that none of the people I knew at the time would ever be able to understand. Rumors of a troubled personal life had been leaking out for years and were no longer confined to whispers among colleagues; divorces, miscarriages, depression, cocaine-fueled newsroom tirades, and beatings by an abusive boyfriend had caused NBC to pull her from everything except one-minute news updates delivered on the hour in prime-time. Her career had imploded publicly on live TV three weeks earlier when she slouched and slurred her way through 43 seconds worth of news copy read off a Teleprompter through half closed eyes. That near-catatonic performance on October 3 would be her final appearance before a television camera.

She died on a stormy night behind a restaurant in New Hope, PA the same town where I had spent the Sunday afternoon prior to the debate making my girlfriend jealous by talking about her. Her dinner companion, trying to leave the parking lot, mistakenly turned onto the old towpath that led to the Delaware Canal instead. The car went over the side and tumbled fifteen feet, landing on its roof in a few feet of water. The muddy canal bank sealed the doors shut, and Jessica, her friend, and her dog quickly drowned. Neither drugs nor alcohol were a factor in the accident, just a torrential downpour, an unmarked dirt road, and absolutely miserable, rotten luck.

The first sentence of her obituary in Time Magazine the following week put a now-familiar word front and center in laying out the short story of her rapid rise and tragic fall: “Near its end, her life seemed to carry a storybook warning: ambition may lead to power and fame, but the path beckons to a precipice.”

Ambition. Jessica Savitch had it in spades and it left her humiliated and dead in a muddy ditch. I have absolutely no idea where or how Charley ever wound up, but somehow the thought of a simple retirement on a government pension doesn’t fit the picture I have of him. Me, well, I never made it as a globetrotting photojournalist. Never even tried, really. But my days as a subway train driver are far, far behind me. These days I teach digital photography to people whose ambition reminds me of my own so many years ago. And at 82 years old, Jimmy Carter, bless his soul, was on CNN the other night talking about his hope for a hopeless world.

A Safe Harbor

I wrote this essay in July 2001, during a period of great turmoil and introspection in my personal life. It predated our greater national turmoil and introspection by about 2 months, but recounts an experience that has unfortunately become far too common for photographers in the years since.

---

A month or so before the world changed I decided to spend a perfect summer evening down the Jersey Shore. It was right after my Grandmother's 90th birthday party, and I had taken the train down from Boston to spend a long weekend with her and the rest of my family. But after the party I borrowed my mother's car and took off by myself for a few hours. The eerie drive through the Pine Barrens took about an hour, and before I knew it I had crossed the Causeway onto the island where I had spent so many happy days as a kid. I smiled as I sat at a traffic light and stared at what had once been my grandfather's vacation bungalow on East 24th Street, just yards away from the crashing surf. It had been pink for decades, but whoever owned it now had painted it white with black trim.

The light changed and I drove on for another ten or fifteen minutes. On my right I saw the lights of a new amusement park and shopping area that had been rebuilt after the site I had known as a kid was destroyed by fire. This new complex, while bigger and more ambitious, tried to retain the look and feel of the original, the centerpiece of which had been an authentic old schooner. I parked the car, grabbed my camera and set out in search of photographs and memories.

It didn't take long before I noticed that things had changed a bit in the years I'd been away. The new "schooner" (which turned out to be nothing more than a cinderblock building with a boat-shape built around it and a couple of poles stuck on top as masts) housed a lingerie shop instead of the old five-and-ten that sold slingshots, pea shooters, flip flops and skim boards. As I walked past one of the other shops, a place filled with overpriced t-shirts, hats and beach blankets, a sweatshirt tacked up on the wall caught my eye. It was nearly identical to one that my Grandfather bought for me one summer in the late 60's. It even looked old and beat up; the printing on it was faded and cracked, but closer inspection revealed that it had been designed that way. My ratty old sweatshirt had had to endure a couple of seasons' worth of real adventure to acquire the patina that $40 bought one of today's kids instantly. I wanted to believe that my sweatshirt had somehow been more admirable, but if I could have spared the 40 bucks, I probably would have gotten one for myself.

The amusement park at the far end of the complex looked, literally, perfect. The place was packed with people, and the roar of the roller coaster under its high harmony of screams and shrieks drew me in. Amusement parks and circuses are almost universally favorite environments for photographers, and some of my own best photographs were made in places like this in Australia, Europe and around the US. Even though this new place lacked the seediness and authenticity that comes with age and neglect (like that sweatshirt, come to think of it), I was looking forward to finding out if there was a shot or two for me here.

Pictures were everywhere— the lights, the rides, the shelves of kewpie-doll prizes, the odd row of people leaning on their elbows, asses-out, steadying their aim at the shooting gallery. I worked quickly but not hurriedly, patiently waiting for a telling moment, or moving around to find an interesting angle. It was like sketching with a camera, a simple process that filled me with excitement and satisfaction. This was what was missing in my job, what I crave in my life, and what I kept forgetting was available to me anytime and anywhere I was able to just empty my mind and let it all in. And even though I knew better, it really wasn't hard to pretend that this was the same place I had frequented as a child.

I saw the cop as I was walking away from the merry-go-round after unsuccessfully trying to find a way to photograph the reflections in its convex mirrors as they spun around. He was a young guy, an early Ed Harris type with a blond buzz cut and short uniform pants. He was with a couple of other older cops, and had been laughing with them about something just before our eyes met and locked. I thought to myself "Oh, great" as he fell in behind me, then suddenly stepped out to block my way as I turned to the right.

"Excuse me, sir. Are you with the newspaper?" His manner was friendly but firm.

"No."

"...because some people have noticed you here taking pictures, so we have to check it out." His eyes were fixed on mine.

"I'm just a photographer down from Boston— this is what I do." I tried to sound polite but professionally perturbed, as I was expecting a lecture about private-property rights and location fees.

"...because we have a lot of children here, and when we see a man walking around by himself taking pictures, well, we have to check it out."

My shoulders slumped a little.

They all thought I was a pervert.

"You have nothing to worry about," I said quietly.

"Yeah, when I saw the camera you're using I figured you were probably OK. But you should have checked in with us first."

I couldn't think of anything else to say, so I said "Oh". A moment before, this confrontation would have been the farthest thing from my mind, so I wasn't prepared to defend myself. I guess I could have asked him if the local police were in the habit of profiling summer people, and if not when had it become standard procedure to question someone for taking pictures at a tourist trap. I could have tried to charm him, congratulating him for recognizing that my Leica was not just some old-time camera. I could have risked real trouble by raising the constitutional issue— surely, in America, even the worst unconvicted Internet-lurking pedophile taking pictures in a public place hasn't done anything wrong— yet. Or I could have said what I really felt, that I was simply enjoying what I was doing so much that it never occurred to me that people might find my presence alarming. I could have said any of that, but I turned away from him instead. This cop and these people didn't care about me or my nostalgia, about five-and-tens that sold peashooters or the smiling Grandfather who paid for them, or about a time and an attitude toward childhood that suddenly seemed as distant and irrelevant as the old schooner that used to rest in its safe harbor right over there.

I tried to regain my interest in photographing the place, but couldn't help imagining hundreds of pairs of suspicious eyes (and probably a few security cameras as well) burning holes in my back and venting my earlier enthusiasm. I went through the motions of scanning for pictures one more time, but all I saw around me now were scores of perfect parents and perfect children wearing perfect artificially distressed and adventureless sweatshirts. They were all safe once again in their sanitized new amusement park, safe from the man walking around by himself taking pictures.

So I left the place, walking not too slowly out to the street, past rows of oversized Suburban Ubiquity Vehicles with their side impact airbags and satellite navigation systems and rear-facing child safety seats, past another gaggle of laughing cops, and found my mother's old car parked at the curb. I got in, turned the key, and drove away.