Picture Palace by Paul Theroux

fossils—room after room of memory’s live ghosts and events only now detectable and surprising revelations behind each creaking door. It was necessary to pass through these chilly bedchambers and along the corridors and climb blindly to the tower of imagination above its ramparts to look down and comprehend the spin of its whole design. My life mattered more than my work, but my work gave no hint of this.
    The trouble with cameras is that people see them a mile away and they get self-conscious and sneeze out their souls and put on that numbed guilty expression and act as if you are going to shoot them dead. Or worse, they pose like dummies and show their teeth: even your bare-assed savage knows how to say cheese. As a photographer I was embarrassed to be caught with that contraption in my mitts, like an elderly pervert, a distinguished old lady with my skirt around my neck frightening children at play. Later, I was proud of the way I could conceal my intention and, long before the Japanese produced their tiny instruments, I could disguise my camera—as a shoe box or a handbag or as a ridiculous hat that people gaped at, not knowing that I was recording their curious squints.
Orthodox Jewish Boys
, a small group of dark-eyed youngsters with beanies and side-curls—some critics found them a bizarre evocation of alienated Americans ignoring the squalor of downtown Brooklyn and looking skyward toward Jehovah—are just some curious kids looking at my hat.
    I was anonymous, I made no sound, I never got in the way of my pictures. I wanted the viewer to drown among the images without thinking of me. The whole of my craft went into making it easy for the blinking public; I then withdrew and removed all traces of myself, so that the viewer could believe the discovery to be his. Only after studying it for a long time should the viewer realize that in my early picture,
Negro Swimming to a Raft
, the man is handcuffed and the raft too small and frail to bear his weight; then the rainclouds become apparent, the futility of the swim, the desperate motion in the swift current of the Mystic River—there is the municipal signboard lettered small on the far bank (I took this picture in West Medford in 1927; the convict, one Cecil Jerome, was quickly recaptured). People have seen this photograph and thought they invented its importance; it was a personal victory for them, they felt responsible for it, the details were theirs, and I didn’t blame them. Thereafter, everything they saw was new: I had given them my eyes.
    It worked—no one knew me. My exhibitions were occasions for people to think about themselves as they might, during a concert of classical music, remember a compliment or rehearse their marriage, think of everything but the piece being played. And, as I say, people liked themselves a bit better after seeing my photographs. They saw their lives flash before them: for minutes they drowned in my pictures.
    I knew this queer experience. It used to interest me, looking at a picture or a sheet of contact prints, to lose the image and see my own reflection staring back. In something beautiful I saw this pining double exposure. The light would glance on my loaf-like face and print it on the glossy paper, and no matter how hard I tried I could not regain the original image that lay beneath it. The pliable paper was a funhouse mirror of stammering light in which I shimmered and drooped, now softening sadly, now jumping into splinters to be gathered a moment later into a sheaf of features. I lost my nose, I watched my cheeks explode, I was lobotomized by a chance blade of light that flicked away the front of my head. It was not the ordinary frenzy for reassurance that people usually seek in mirrors—indeed, I didn’t want to see my face. But there it was, as ineradicable as the reflected image one gets on the window of a train late at night when, hoping for a clue to how far one has traveled, one looks