3. Art Gallery of Ontario, May 2011 #2
“I have plenty of examples that it’s not,” Sarah said.
“Tilt shift and fish-eye lenses have no subtlety.”
“Sit down, Durand. I’m pulling out my phone.”
They sat down together on a bench in the middle of the gallery, and she pulled out her cell phone and did a quick image search until she found a photo of a rushing waterfall made with a tilt shift lens and long exposure.
The lens and shutter choice made the waterfall look endless and dreamy, its rushing white foam like the ghostly train of a Victorian wedding dress.
“That’s nice,” Ren agreed. “But only because of the long exposure.”
“All right. Hold on. I’m finding something else.”
She could feel him smiling as she pulled up images of tilt shift lenses used in spooky, haunting photography of graveyards, with faint figures appearing in the mist.
“Okay, that’s interesting,” he agreed. “But I’m sort of done with black and white. It has become so self-serious. Nobody should be allowed to take black and white photos anymore.”
“You make these broad pronouncements just to get me annoyed,” she said.
“Cartier-Bresson was not self-serious.” Cartier-Bresson was one of the first artists that she and Ren agreed on back in school; his gorgeous shots of Paris were popular on postcards and dorm room posters, and Sarah had put up one of his prints as soon as she arrived at school.
“Cartier-Bresson was a sentimentalist,” Ren said.
“Now you’re deliberately being pretentious.”
“Maybe,” he conceded, smirking a little. “I should have said, people should earn the right to shoot black and white photography. It should be like a driver’s license. You have to pass a test.”
“I’ll have all photographers submit their work to you for approval.”
“Please do. If someone takes a self-portrait in profile, looking away moodily with half their face in shadow, they lose the right to shoot black and white photography for a year.”
“There go half my headshots.”
He laughed.
“You know, Paola hates museums,” Ren said as they stood up. “She doesn’t understand the point of art unless you’re going to buy it. She’ll only go to the museum gift shop.”
“I suppose that’s practical. What’s the point of looking at art if you can’t own it?”
He smiled. “She told me she only puts up with me because she can tolerate looking at me.”
“Only wanted for your looks. Shocking.”
“Well, I can’t rely on my personality. Apparently, I’m pretentious.”
An hour later, they were still talking about photography at the museum café, flipping through her website.
She showed him the best headshots she had taken and talked about the challenges of the task: how it was hard to catch people’s real personality, how actors would practice looks in a mirror and then look ridiculous doing them in front of the camera, how rarely people were aware of their best traits.
“None of us are aware of our best traits,” Ren said lightly, looking through the images.
She allowed herself to drink in the sight of him in case this would be the last time they met up like this. His head was tilted down, his black curls tumbling across his forehead. He smiled when he glanced up.
Ren was married.
“These are really good, Sarah.”
“Well, I studied photography. I’m supposed to be good at taking pictures.”
He shook his head. “You do something special with your headshots, though,” he said. “They have a narrative quality, like you’re telling each person’s story.”
“Well, they pay the bills,” she said at last. “Or some of the bills. I have a day job. When I first moved to Toronto, I used to come up with these creative ideas to try to get into galleries and nobody liked them, so I sort of gave up.”
“I’m sure they were great.”
“No. I think I have nothing to say right now,” she said. “I’m twenty-six, and I no longer have any opinions on anything.” Twenty-six felt terribly old to her, like the bitter end of youth.
He gestured towards the pictures. “Well, these say something. They say that you’re fascinated by people.”
“So are you,” she said. “I read your articles in the Star and they reminded me of how observant you are. You always had this way of looking at people like you were missing nothing. I thought you could totally see through me back in school.”
He looked genuinely surprised. “You were one of the smartest people I knew.”
“Not about some parts of my life.”
He frowned and looked down at the table, considering.
“Well, I didn’t have much insight into some things.
I probably thought I did.” He took a sip of his coffee.
“So unrelated question,” he added. “What happened between you and Ivan? I heard you two got back together and then I never heard anything else.”
“Well, that’s a long story, but the short version is, he broke up with me before that party of Kristie’s, if you remember that night.”
Ren nodded, his mouth a straight line. “I remember that night.”
“He had gotten accepted to graduate school in California, and he knew I didn’t want to go because I had this assistant photographer job in Montreal—which turned out to be a nightmare because the guy harassed me—but I didn’t know that yet.
So Ivan pre-emptively broke things off as a way to convince me to follow him.
Like, ‘You’ll lose me if you don’t come to California with me.
’ And when it didn’t work, he begged to get back together.
And I agreed, but once he was in California, I took the coward’s way out and broke up with him by phone. ”
“Why not do it in person?”
“Because he used to say he might kill himself if I ever left him. Which I guess counts as emotional abuse. I didn’t realize it at the time.”
Ren’s eyes widened. “Sarah…”
“Don’t feel bad. It’s over.”
Ren’s eyes were full of pity, and Sarah hated it. “Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “Someday I will be like you and happily married and dazzlingly optimistic. Wait and see.”
He shook his head. “To be honest, I’m not feeling terribly optimistic either. I love my wife, but I think most people are profoundly screwed up. My job hasn’t convinced me otherwise.”