The red-light district used to be in Wan Chai, though this is very tame now. Everyone mentions a film about a Wan Chai prostitute called Suzie Wong, though no one seems to have seen it. It is brought up with a certain local pride. In fact there is a bit of a local newspaper subculture here altogether. The Hong Kong Tatler, an exact imitation of the London one, seems somehow unreal. There is that feeling of the place pushing itself, so that an aircrash in which three hundred people died might be reported as ‘Hong Kong man injured in air disaster’. This cultural thing is odd when you come to think how dauntingly big and important the place is financially. It could treat itself more grandly, less parochially, as the equal of the other great financial centres. Then again you could say that American papers are inward-looking also.
Anyway, the red-light action is now centred, as luck would have it, near my hotel in Kowloon. On Nathan Road the signs advertising sex shows run one after the other up the hill. No moving lights are permitted in Hong Kong because they would confuse the aircraft, which come in to land on a narrow causeway perilously close to the residential area. So, just as the big signs on top of the skyscrapers in Hong Kong Central are still, so the signs in the Nathan Road saying ‘Strip Show’ or ‘Live Sex’ are also motionless. There is something odd about looking at a sign saying ‘Live Sex’ that does not flash or glitter. It makes it seem a cool and prosaic transaction. I took a photograph of it, though I’m not sure the reason for this will be clear in the finished print.
Pietro put down his pen and pad as the air stewardess brought drinks. He rummaged through the pocket of his jacket and pulled out a notebook in which he kept a record of the pictures he had taken for purposes of identification. Against the number of the film and the number of each exposure he wrote a date, time and place. He had been too often frustrated by not being able to identify exactly people or places in pictures he wanted to use.
He had begun to take photographs when he was living in New York seven years earlier. There seemed to him something about the city that had not been caught by people who talked about its frenzy and pace. He tried to fix this quality by taking pictures on snowy Sunday mornings, when the office buildings stood empty and the older New York of brownstones and 1930s fittings was more visible. He tried going to parts of the city not so often photographed. He particularly liked the warehouse buildings of the Lower West Side on which the sign-written names of enterprising importers had all but faded through the soot and wear of successive owners. From his first view of Manhattan there seemed to him something poignant in the city that had not been expressed. The amount of endeavour that had been poured into this small island by people lonely, far from their native lands, gave it an atmosphere more heroic and more tender than the usual descriptive phrases allowed. The trouble was that his pictures just showed tall buildings.
He read some manuals on photography and went to a few lectures. He became convinced that if he could have access to development and printing he could make his photographs more accurately convey what he had in mind. Through a friend in SoHo he was allowed into a small commercial darkroom where he was shown the various steps of the process. After three visits they said he could take in his own film and see it right through.
It was frustratingly slow. He loaded the film easily and poured in the developer. The lab technician, an easy-going man called Max, smacked a clock on the table and told Pietro when to agitate the tank. After the stop bath and the fixer Pietro was anxious to see the results, but Max made him wash the film for half an hour before directing him to a drying cabinet. Pietro had no idea it would take such a long time, or that so many precautions were necessary: even the sponge tongs with which he cleaned moisture from the film had themselves to be cleaned first. Still, in the smell of the chemicals and the gloomy atmosphere of the darkroom, he could feel his excitement beginning to mount.
They examined the dry negatives and Max was able to predict merely from the degrees of contrast already visible what the print would look like. Further precautions followed before the enlarger was turned on and Pietro was shown how to make a contact sheet. There were pictures at last, but he restrained himself from peering too closely at the first positive sight of his camerawork. Under Max’s instruction he turned the crank on the column of the enlarger until the image exactly fitted the frame on the easel.
‘You should do some test strips now,’ said Max, ‘so you can see what the best exposure time is. We won’t bother with that today because I can guess from the negative what they need.’
He slid a blank piece of paper under the easel, then stuck his hand under the lens of the enlarger. After a few seconds he whisked it away and smacked the clock with the other hand.
Max tilted the developing tray slightly away from him as he slid in the exposed print, then lowered it so a wave of developer sloshed back over it. ‘OK,’ he grinned at Pietro, ‘here she comes.’
Through the colourless fluid Pietro saw the first markings appear like smudges on the white paper. He was beginning to see some shape occur: the darkness was of a building – no, some steps; the scuffed edge of something feathery was a cloud, a sidewalk tree. At this moment Max flipped the print over with some tongs which he then handed to Pietro. ‘When I tell you, take the print out, let it drain for a moment and put it face up in the stop bath.’ The ticking of the clock stopped and Max said, ‘Right.’
Pietro grasped the print with the tongs and lifted it dripping from the bath. He turned it round so the printed image faced him. It was magnificent. The blank paper had filled with pulsing tones and shadows; the buildings were no longer just tall, but sad and purposeful. Something had happened in the transference of the street, via chemical baths and exposure to a piece of paper: a part of himself had entered into it.
From that day he became obsessed with what could be achieved in the acrid air of the darkroom. He could see potential in things that were technically mistakes. An underexposed negative, with its poor contrast and lack of shadow detail, could sometimes be made to give a more interesting print than a negative with a correct range of tones. By changing the developer or merely extending the time, a different spectrum of contrasts could be brought in. Max showed him the simple trick of push-processing, which Pietro then used even when it was not necessitated by poor light. The over-grainy prints that resulted did not worry him.
He spent Sundays, when the darkroom was closed for business, experimenting with this new world. He liked to overdevelop and print on hard paper then burn in highlights with his hands. He quickly learned all the elementary variations of the darkroom in an attempt to give his pictures depth and surprise.
He was as unartistic, as mechanical as it was feasible for a photographer to be. His ability to see what he wanted to photograph came only after he was confident that he could manipulate the image at a later stage. The problem was that the moving world so seldom offered a correlative for what he felt. He often thought that this was in any case an improper search; that the task of the photographer was to record what he saw, not to project on to random scenes some counterpart of his own inner feelings. He was therefore encouraged when he read an exhibition catalogue in which Stieglitz recalled photographing some cab horses soon after his return to America from his student days in Germany. Stieglitz felt bereft in his native country and experienced a yearning to be back in Europe. Opposite the old Astor House in 1891 he saw a driver in a rubber coat watering some steaming horses. ‘There seemed to be something closely related,’ Stieglitz had written, ‘to my deepest feeling in what I saw, and I decided to photograph what was within me.’ Those words, particularly taken in conjunction with the affecting photograph that had resulted, seemed to Pietro to legitimise his own ambition. Stieglitz was quite emphatic. ‘I felt how fortunate the horses were to have at least a human being to give them the water they needed. What made me see the watering of the horses as I did was my own loneliness.’
With the confidence that his darkroom ability gave him, Pietro became bolder and more relaxed in
what he chose to photograph. He went through the customary phases of looking for new angles, of photographing the crowd rather than the incident, the supporting actor not the star, and so on. But he quickly returned to the main event, and photographed people and scenes head-on. Some visual flair was lacking. He compared his pictures to those of the great photographers and could see that his ability was limited by his eye; he did not have that instinctive feeling for a moment or a composition. However, he did know what scenes could yield something of what he felt, and he also knew as soon as the shutter had fired what tricks of processing, if any, would be necessary to bring out further what he had intended.
He continued to take photographs in every country he visited, but he did not consider trying to make a living from it until he was twenty-seven. He had had enough of odd jobs, the last of which had been in a school laboratory in Oxford. He sent some pictures to a newspaper in London and they commissioned some freelance work from him. With work for magazines and illustrations for books, he almost made a living. When he visited Rome and saw how badly his pictures were reproduced in the subsequent publication, he became interested in colour origination and the way mass printing could be improved.
Parallel to the uncertain life of a travelling photographer, he continued to cultivate his interest in the technical side of reproduction. By the time he met Paul Coleman in Evanston he was ready to leave the closing of the shutter to others while he exercised his control of origination and a new-found interest in what computers could be made to do, but for eight years he tried to make a living by taking photographs of the world he saw. His pictures of Hong Kong were adequate for the purpose, though there were aspects of the place he felt unable to capture.
He took up his pad again. He wrote:
I think I have conveyed a negative impression of Hong Kong. This is not fair. It is certainly not somewhere you would want to come if you were feeling timid or unsure. Nor would you want to be too morally scrupulous. The colony was founded on the profits of drug-trafficking and has been kept going by greedy expatriates, many of whom would not have made the grade ‘back in UK’. It has stuck to a creed of profit and personal gain while the rest of the world has turned away – though I suppose it might come back into line.
And yet it has incredible bravura. It is narrow – but not small-minded. They pay themselves more but they work harder. There is a phenomenon here that you never see in England: greed satisfied. The people are happy. They live at the limit of their capacities. They like it here. They are not bored, they are not defeated or depressed. What they call the ‘quality of life’ is high, and if you only have one life I suppose you can’t altogether ignore the simple question: are you enjoying it?
LYNDONVILLE
VERMONT USA 1971
THE TRAIN SLUNK from Grand Central Station in the early evening. Pietro glanced round the compartment as they left the outskirts of the city: people were slumped in their books or gazing, like him, at the flashing landscape. He dozed intermittently during the night and woke finally when the train jolted into a station. For the last half-hour of the journey he rehearsed what he would say to Laura when they met.
It was still dark when he arrived at White River Junction and humped his luggage out of the train. A tall man with a tweed jacket and black hair was visible dimly in the yellow light of the ticket hall. ‘Hi, you must be Pietro. I’m Laura’s father,’ he said, shaking hands and taking one of the cases. ‘Laura’s gone out with her mother but she’ll be back later.’
He threw Pietro’s bags into the back of a station wagon. It was a long drive up the interstate before they turned off north of St Johnsbury. The mountains of Vermont were white, the evergreens obliterated by the sticky snow and the grey swirling fog that lifted off the road. Pietro had washed and changed on the train but still had the taste of tiredness and the alternate clarity and fuzziness of vision that follow a night of too little sleep. Eventually they reached Lyndonville, where Mr Heasman parked the car and went into a hardware store on Depot Street to buy a new shovel. Pietro looked up and down the main street of the little town. His eye was caught by a stately building called the Darling Inn Apartments. What a place for an afternoon tryst, he thought.
The Heasmans’ house was in an exposed position on a hillside, backing into thick pine woods. It was a substantial place with white clapboard walls and a standing-seam metal roof designed to shrug off snow. Its position gave it something of the feeling of a settler’s or pioneer’s cabin; although it was good-looking, it wasn’t built for style but to withstand the elements.
Pietro’s bedroom was under the eaves. There was a large springy bed with a harsh white cover and a fat eiderdown. The sheets were so clean they were almost painful. As he unpacked he could smell a variety of different culinary scents drifting up the stairs. The window opened on a cumbersome contraption operated by a rotating handle. He watched the snow falling over the huge garden below. Beyond were fields, and the mountains he had seen on his way up in the car. He turned the handle so the window closed, and felt the warm air circulate again in the insulated room. There was a hint of paint and dried herbs.
He waited downstairs, drinking a Catamount beer Mr Heasman had given him before vanishing on some further outdoor errand. He picked up a local paper and read the main story, which was headed ‘Covered Bridge Snag Corrected’. Then he read another piece with the headline ‘Sparks Fly Over Traffic Lights’. He was deep into an account of the local council’s renaming of a road when he heard the sound of women’s voices outside. Laura burst into the room and hugged him enthusiastically. He went through some of the words he had practised for the meeting. Most of them had to do with trains and being on time or late so had lost much of their impact. ‘You must come into the kitchen,’ said Laura, taking him by the arm.
The kitchen looked as though the household was preparing for a winter siege. Mrs Heasman, curiously unremarkable-looking, Pietro thought, for the mother of such a creature, shook hands over the scrubbed table and Pietro said hello to Laura’s younger sister Sally. A big woman with red cheeks and grey hair in a bun looked up from where she was peeling a sinkful of potatoes. Mrs Heasman went to stir a pot of soup, the one whose smell had reached Pietro’s bedroom. There were also on the table several plastic butcher’s bags, two geese, and deep bowls of cod, mussels and prawns. The women talked across each other in the bright electric light of the kitchen. Clusters of dried and painted corncobs hung on the wooden beams around the cooker.
At dinner that night Mrs Heasman’s sister and her husband and their two children came to join them. It seemed that almost everything they ate had been grown or killed by the family. No wild goose ventured unmolested over the neighbouring woods; no square inch of the vegetable garden was not silently toiling, even as they ate, to yield up more knotty tubers or fibrous greenery. Mrs Heasman had made her own wine from berries and assorted flowers, though Pietro, having taken a glass out of politeness, yielded to Mr Heasman’s advice and drank some Californian wine with the duck. Laura looked about her, slightly flushed, as she chattered to her family and recounted some exploits she and Pietro had been involved in at school. She managed to make it sound a long time ago without disowning it. She was now about the age Pietro had first thought her when he went into the lower fifth classroom and saw her swinging her legs from the side of the desk.
Christmas was more English in Vermont than in London. Instead of big adolescent boys singing one verse of a carol out of tune on the doorstep and extorting money with unspoken threats, they had choirs of a dozen people, mostly female, who knew all the words and raised large sums for charity. Instead of the weather being rainy and what the man on television called ‘unseasonably close’, it snowed at night and was bright and cold during the day. Mr Heasman had grown his own Christmas tree, a ten-foot beast from the edge of the encroaching forest.
One morning a few days before Christmas Pietro lay awake in his bed, looking up to where the sloping rafters met in a white point. He had reached
a decision. His hankering after Laura had become ridiculous. It was time to do something about it. Nothing in him was going to change so that he suddenly became more attractive to her; nothing would reduce her suddenly to his level. He just had to face the facts as he found them. So he would . . . what?
He had no experience of what he ought to do. He was twenty-one years old. He got up and went to the washbasin, which he filled with scalding water. He wetted his face and squeezed a worm of shaving cream on to his fingertips. He had been made so serious by his fixation on Laura that he had felt old, weighed down with worldly understanding. The truth was, he reluctantly admitted, that he had no experience at all; he was making it up as he went along.
Laura suggested they go into St Johnsbury – St J, as she called it – to do some shopping; she wanted to buy one or two extra things for Christmas, and the stores in Lyndonville were limited. Pietro stood outside, waving directions as she reversed the station wagon past a visiting propane tanker and down the icy drive. Once on the road, she drove the car in surges, fighting with the unfamiliar manual shift.
‘Maybe you should get another couple of cows from the butcher,’ he said, ‘just to be on the safe side.’
Laura looked across from the steering wheel with a slight pout. ‘Didn’t you like your breakfast?’
‘I did. I liked it a lot. But I can’t remember when I’ve eaten so much.’
Mrs Heasman and her silent helper had handed him a plate with fried eggs, muffins, bacon, cheese, tomato and a blueberry pancake. Mrs Heasman kept telling him to put more food on to it. ‘Have some pumpkin butter. You haven’t got any maple syrup on that, have you? Here, let me. Why don’t you have some fruit with it? Laura, pass Pietro the sour cream.’ Out of politeness he ate everything that was offered, forcing down the fresh pineapple and peanut butter with the fried egg. ‘Have a banana,’ Mrs Heasman had suddenly suggested. And when he had finished she said, ‘Perhaps you’d like an ordinary English muffin with marmalade?’ in a hurt but helpful tone of voice as though he had pushed away the plate untouched.