is something hugely civilised about allowing long pauses in a conversation. Very few people can stand that kind of silence.
She lights up, inhales, speaks again. ‘A story is a whole mass of details that come together and form a narrative. Without that coming-together they’re just a lot of wee pieces. So what happens if you take a story and break it into its wee pieces? When you put it back together again, will it turn out the same way?’
‘Like a jigsaw puzzle,’ he says.
‘Exactly. It’s like you’re making a jigsaw puzzle. You cowp this thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle on to a table and turn all the pieces right way up and then you stare at them. Where do you start? But what I’m thinking is that this particular puzzle came in a big plastic bag, not in a box, and there’s no picture to guide you. You don’t know what the hell the picture is you’re supposed to be making. You have to start somewhere, so you look for the bits with straight edges. And the four bits with two straight edges that mean they’re the corners. But maybe it doesn’t have corners and straight edges. Anyway. You find bits that are the same shade of red, the same shade of green, you sort them into separate piles, and occasionally you find two bits, three bits, that actually seem to fit together. And gradually, spread out all over the table, this picture begins to emerge.’
‘That’s assuming you have all the right pieces,’ Mike says. ‘Which means you’re relying on somebody else. Somebody else already made the jigsaw puzzle, the picture, and cut it up, and put it in the plastic bag.’
‘Right,’ she says. ‘Well, that’s okay up to a point. The storyteller has to get her material from elsewhere. But I’m bothered by the idea that somebody else already made the picture. So maybe a story is more like a painting than a jigsaw.
You’re
the creator, but you’re working from life, putting what you see on the canvas but with your own take on it. And when it’s finished, there are all kinds of things going on at once, and you can look at the whole thing or you can look at the detail, but it’s all there, all the parts moving in and out of one another. Like a complex piece of machinery – working, but captured, held. Motionless motion.’
‘Suspended animation,’ Mike says. ‘Like a photograph, in other words.’
‘Aye,’ she says. ‘Like a photograph. Okay. Jigsaw puzzle, painting, photograph. Now we’re getting somewhere. Or are we? It’s complicated, isn’t it? Maybe one shouldn’t analyse this stuff too much.’
Another silence. Mike thinks about the complexity and the simplicity of taking a photograph. The tens of thousands he’s taken over the years, each one part of a narrative, following on from the one before, preceding the next. Could he have taken them in a different order? He thinks about what happens when he selects one
image out of, say, every ten or fifty or hundred he takes. How the narrative is reduced, fractured. How the chain is broken. He thinks about Angus, doing it all before him.
‘Dad would have said,
don’t
analyse. As a photographer you just have to be there, take the shot. He’d have said it was partly skill and mostly chance.’
‘I know that’s what he thought,’ Jean says, ‘but I think he was wrong. I envied him, you know. He didn’t seem to have to try. Yes, you have to be there at the right moment, but there’s something else. That’s why I never liked that phrase, “the Angus angle”. It always struck me as being lazy journalese. It suggests that all he was doing was bending down and getting the angle right, the exposure, the focus, ticking those technical boxes. Well, you can have all the technical skill in the world, but that’s not enough. If you’re really good, there’s an instinct in there too, an extra layer of knowledge. You learn it by experience, but it’s like you always had it deep inside. Do you see?’
‘I used to argue with him in just that
She lights up, inhales, speaks again. ‘A story is a whole mass of details that come together and form a narrative. Without that coming-together they’re just a lot of wee pieces. So what happens if you take a story and break it into its wee pieces? When you put it back together again, will it turn out the same way?’
‘Like a jigsaw puzzle,’ he says.
‘Exactly. It’s like you’re making a jigsaw puzzle. You cowp this thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle on to a table and turn all the pieces right way up and then you stare at them. Where do you start? But what I’m thinking is that this particular puzzle came in a big plastic bag, not in a box, and there’s no picture to guide you. You don’t know what the hell the picture is you’re supposed to be making. You have to start somewhere, so you look for the bits with straight edges. And the four bits with two straight edges that mean they’re the corners. But maybe it doesn’t have corners and straight edges. Anyway. You find bits that are the same shade of red, the same shade of green, you sort them into separate piles, and occasionally you find two bits, three bits, that actually seem to fit together. And gradually, spread out all over the table, this picture begins to emerge.’
‘That’s assuming you have all the right pieces,’ Mike says. ‘Which means you’re relying on somebody else. Somebody else already made the jigsaw puzzle, the picture, and cut it up, and put it in the plastic bag.’
‘Right,’ she says. ‘Well, that’s okay up to a point. The storyteller has to get her material from elsewhere. But I’m bothered by the idea that somebody else already made the picture. So maybe a story is more like a painting than a jigsaw.
You’re
the creator, but you’re working from life, putting what you see on the canvas but with your own take on it. And when it’s finished, there are all kinds of things going on at once, and you can look at the whole thing or you can look at the detail, but it’s all there, all the parts moving in and out of one another. Like a complex piece of machinery – working, but captured, held. Motionless motion.’
‘Suspended animation,’ Mike says. ‘Like a photograph, in other words.’
‘Aye,’ she says. ‘Like a photograph. Okay. Jigsaw puzzle, painting, photograph. Now we’re getting somewhere. Or are we? It’s complicated, isn’t it? Maybe one shouldn’t analyse this stuff too much.’
Another silence. Mike thinks about the complexity and the simplicity of taking a photograph. The tens of thousands he’s taken over the years, each one part of a narrative, following on from the one before, preceding the next. Could he have taken them in a different order? He thinks about what happens when he selects one
image out of, say, every ten or fifty or hundred he takes. How the narrative is reduced, fractured. How the chain is broken. He thinks about Angus, doing it all before him.
‘Dad would have said,
don’t
analyse. As a photographer you just have to be there, take the shot. He’d have said it was partly skill and mostly chance.’
‘I know that’s what he thought,’ Jean says, ‘but I think he was wrong. I envied him, you know. He didn’t seem to have to try. Yes, you have to be there at the right moment, but there’s something else. That’s why I never liked that phrase, “the Angus angle”. It always struck me as being lazy journalese. It suggests that all he was doing was bending down and getting the angle right, the exposure, the focus, ticking those technical boxes. Well, you can have all the technical skill in the world, but that’s not enough. If you’re really good, there’s an instinct in there too, an extra layer of knowledge. You learn it by experience, but it’s like you always had it deep inside. Do you see?’
‘I used to argue with him in just that
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