THE ADVENTURE WITH THE PHOTOGRAPHER

It was the early Sixties and I had joined Bob Scriver’s life very quickly because he had an infected eye that meant he might go blind.  His sight was saved, but by then we had formed a partnership to make his sculpture famous — him, too, of course.  In those days the women of the partnership were never famous, but they got to go along.

In college I had learned to carefully read the Arts section of the NY Times.  Of course, you couldn’t buy that paper in Browning, MT, but you could in Great Falls at Val’s Cigar Store, a tiny emporium where the privileged hung out.  I saw that the pinnacle of cowboy art was — strangely enough — in Manhattan and talked Bob into sending work to the major exhibitions there.  The bronzes were easily accepted and helped make sales because art buyers are snobs and needed reassurance that they were buying valuable art.  I didn’t quite understand that Western bronzes were the tail of French representational  lost-wax bronze casting and closely related to monuments of the military.

Then I began to read “American Artist” magazine (also at Val’s) and understood that Bob’s work should be included in the thinking of that genre.  I wrote an article, sent it, and the editor said that if we had decent photos, they would print it, but our photos were no good.  “Who IS a proper photographer?” we asked.

Paul Juley had photographed the greats.  He was maybe eighty.  He agreed to come just because, he said, “it’s so outrageous and unexpected that anyone would expect me to fly to Montana — not even first class — and take photos of bronzes no one ever heard of.”  It was even more outrageous when we loaded his big box containing his 8X10 camera into the bed of the pickup and drove the 120 miles to the Blackfeet Reservation.  

His secret was taking big negatives in time exposures of unmoving objects.  This created photos of minute detail and considerable depth.  He would stay overnight so I cooked dinner in our tiny galley.  He had more or less demanded/expected alcohol and soon exhausted our small supply, sighing over the low quality.  Then he comforted himself by staging an assault on the cook who was easily cornered.  No finesse — just grabbing and a tongue in the mouth.

Bob didn’t protest.  Anything was fine so long as the photos got made.  Just as I despaired, there was a phone call.  It was the photographer’s wife.  She guessed what was going on.  “Please don’t make a fuss,” she begged.  “He’s having such an adventure and he doesn’t mean any harm.  Just indulge him.  He won’t really cross the line.  He’s a child.”  By bedtime he was too exhausted and tipsy for anything but a long night’s sleep.

The next day it was snowing and we got to Great Falls just in time to make the flight to New York City.  But by then the blizzard was too intense to get back to Browning.  We had to stay in Valier, halfway, with Bob’s daughter.  For some reason her husband was gone so I slept in her bed on what was usually his side.  Their smallest son arrived very early, as was his baby custom, and settled between us before it dawned on him that the woman very like his mother but not his mother had replaced his father.  He was astounded.

We made it back home, but the point of the story is not the adventure of travel on the prairie.  Rather I took with me the puzzle of how my private allowing of at least a shallow intimacy had become a “coin,” an exchange that I didn’t consider professional and that was certainly not about photography.  And it came out of my account which was not in my control.  I was a commodity.

This was not part of my family’s understanding of what someone’s sexual body was in terms of uses and value.  These were country and even homesteading people who thought force and damage were just part of life, doing marginally dangerous things with machinery and large animals.  As far as they were concerned, the risky drive in a blizzard was just part of doing business.  The sleepover at Margaret’s was entertaining enough that no one wondered about where her husband was.

But sex was off-limits, only possible in a committed relationship, hopefully marriage.  It was just the first penetrating edge of the sexual revolution made possible by the contraceptive pill.  The beautiful teacher in the apartment next to me was besieged by male teachers both single and married.  They demanded access.  They felt they were entitled.  She broke down halfway through the year and left.

By allying with Bob I went under his protection.  He was a judge, he was physically powerful, and he “owned” me.  I didn’t quite grasp that, but I was grateful not to have some forlorn basketball coach pounding on my door in the middle of the night.  In return I pushed his career and learned how to help in the foundry, but it never occurred to me that I would have to allow sexual access.

When I became a minister, I was similarly naive.  No one ever suggested that clergy should sleep with members of their congregation, except that there were rumours that it happened, veiled by the notion of true overpowering love which some people cynically spelled as sex.  Others talked of religion as a kind of prostitution.  Though I thought of preachers as special and desirable, and knew that some women sat in the pews considering how to get into relationship with the pulpiteer, it never occurred to me that anyone would propose anything sexual with me. Me?  Marriage, maybe, but not a motel.

Again I was blind.  The kicker was that the women who went after male ministers were the elite desirable ones, looking for privilege.  The men who went after female ministers were losers trying to prove their worth.  The illusion of power they both had was obsolete, an illusion.

And so we all stumble through the world, making mistakes and grasping at ghosts.  At least in some cases it results in a body of fine work, like Scriver bronzes, instead of little imaginary pots of ego salve.