What It Felt Like the First Time

Summer time. Summer time! The first time of my life. No sooner do I say these words than a window on memory opens. An image appears — always the first. I am leaning on a cushion on the windowsill in the cascade of gridded light from a fire escape. I am nine years old. It is a summer’s day. A storm is coming. Darkness descending on the Bronx, dims the rocky ball field and the ash piles in the empty lot across the street and sweeps over the elevated train tracks stretching into the distance and beyond over the tenements and hills of the Bronx. …

… Now, nearly forty years later, as I photograph, I often find myself in the same state of suspension as I watch the world shape itself before my eyes. It is as if I move back from where I am and see myself seeing. I am passionately involved, yet distant and objective, seeing all the details and feeling the rush at the same moment. It’s something like being a child and being a grown-up at the same time.

It’s important when photographing to see different things simultaneously. Because there is so little time in the photographic moment, it must be expanded by consciousness to let in as much as can be contained. The photographer becomes the medium through which all the moments that have been savored and measured and found meaningful have passed, and now with the addition of this newest element, all the rest are compounded and recomposed, providing a new vision of the whole.

The photographs you have seen here are the distillation of seven summers. They are my way of taking in and examining with a finer hand the effects that moments in time have had on me. I have arranged them, these fragile paper timeships dusted with information, dense yet clear, so that they might transport me back to that precise morning in July when air and water were one, to that country road, to that walk through the woods to the pond, to that unforgettable piercing look into another face, to that bowl of dewy raspberries in fresh sunlight, to all the promise summer holds as it unfolds.

Summertime, more than any other time of the year, brings me to a state of mind where this dual relationship is fluid, in harmony. In summer, I go back for a while to that other time. I shed my clothes, walk to the water’s edge, and step in. I feel nature all around me. I wear it as a skin. I stare into space as long as I can. I look deeply into other faces. I lie in the sand and in the grass, feeling for what it felt like the first time. Summer is a time for remembering; it’s the time when growing things make the seeds that are their memory. It is a time for taking in.

That’s from an essay at the end of Joel Meyerowitz’s book, A Summer’s Day (1985). [After transcribing this extract from my copy of the book, I find that the full essay is online, here.]

Contrast Meyerowitz’s words with the text used by another photographer who works with an 8×10 view camera. This (below) is from “Childhood House (an excerpt)” by Eric Ormsby that appears at the beginning of the book, Still Time, by Sally Mann:

. . . Somehow I had assumed that the past stood still, in perfected effigies of itself, and that what we had once possessed remained our possession forever, and that at least the past, our past, our childhood, waited, always available, at the touch of a nerve, did not deteriorate like the untended house of an aging mother, but stood in pristine perfection, as in our remembrance. I see that this isn’t so, that memory decays like the rest, is unstable in its essence, flits, occludes, is variable, sidesteps, bleeds away, eludes all recovery; worse, is not what it seemed once, alters unfairly, is not the intact garden we remember but, instead, speeds away from us backward terrifically until when we pause to touch that sun-remembered wall the stones are friable, crack and sift down, and we could cry at the fierceness of that velocity if our astonished eyes had time.

(That is the full excerpt — including the ellipsis — that is used by Mann. I haven’t further excerpted the excerpt.)

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/