selection from my dissertation

Photographer

Hidden interiors of houses and buildings exposed in the glimpses as you pass. The door opens, the lighted interior spills out. The human inhabitant moves from couch to lamp with the monstrous shadow of his bowler hat flaring on the wall.

His hand pulls the (bone white) curtain shut. Ambient light of streetlamp and moon highlight the building’s skin, erasing the pits, dents, and chips. Through fences and shrubbery, one glimpses a yard.

The back yard, a secret, is obscured by the well-maintained turf and hedges of the front yard. Pass through an alley and peek over the fence to see the soul of the yard: the sagging empty clothesline, scattered toys, a forgotten car tire.


The photographer moves through the street with fingers carefully balancing the camera, strap wrapped once, twice, three times around his fist.

A stripe of celluloid caught under the heel. It drags clicking behind him. It unrolls, It unravels, Trailing behind him for many yards. It engraves in the concrete, in the asphalt, through the turf and dirt of alleys and yards, the line of his wandering vagabond journey through the city.

The photographer moves through the street.

He passes a small boy following a red balloon. And a small girl, whose pigtails flare out at 90 degree angles.

His shadow is caught, dancing around the buildings to the left. The movement caught in the stilled camera.

The next day, he quickly climbs out of his bed and runs to the drawing board. He traces the lines of a building across a site map. The site map is covered with the layers of debris and history. Each line is a weight of the years and the accumulation of people. He draws the line of the first wall, a wavering line that will be made from brick and mortar.

The door, the window, the frames onto the passing street and the passing leaves of autumn.

He has built himself a darkroom in the corner of his studio, a building which rises like a corkscrew from the corner lot. The lot that was once an drycleaner, a tailor, and a butcher shop. The wafting orders of the past drift through the vents at unusual times, like when he stops for a cup of tea, memories of his grandmother.

In the darkroom, the negative is damaged. A water spot from the years past. The negative immersed in the fluid of red light. He places it gently o the frame in the enlarger, correcting the focus and the exposure, balanced on the paper.

The light floods the image.

The strips of paper.

Pathologist of butterflies

He induces the surgeon to carefully separate the layer so fat from the belly.

While the pathologist sits to the side creating a salad of orange segments and mint leaves, freshly snipped from the garden near the dumpster.
He mourns the lost antennas and eye lashes
Of the monarch butterflies
Who trace their path from north to Mexican shore

The pathologist scribbles a few words
Then discards them

When he meets the photographer they join hands
Momentarily distracted by the flock of birds
Rising from the white oak tree