Still Life

In my family we are all photographers. In the same way that some families gravitate to the courtroom or the operating theater, we are drawn to the enlarger, the stop bath, and the proof print. Our thumbs, yellowed from overexposure to developer fluid, have made us notorious in certain social circles. We have been excluded from others because there clings about us, once we reach a certain age, the subtle but unmistakable aroma of photographic chemicals. I can well remember, even now, my hurt at being ejected from the birthday party of a grade school classmate because I smelled funny; and I can remember too how my father gravely explained to me that that was nothing to be ashamed of, because that was who we were. "We're shutterbugs, and you should be proud of that," he said. Sitting with him in the still red light of his darkroom among the semiopaque strips of drying cellulose, it seemed to me a romantic and mysterious and exotic thing to be, almost as good as belonging to a wandering band of Romany fortune tellers or an avant-garde European circus; and I still feel the very same way about it today.

Some time ago my aunt Nina, who has had a distinguished career assembling an exhaustive photographic record of the head shapes of Spanish and Italian bisque dolls of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, set out to research our family tree. The project seemed perfect for my meticulous aunt, who can identify the date, origin, and manufacturer of a bisque doll head based on the length, in centimeters, from the lobe of the ear to the apple of the cheek with an expertise that is the envy of at least one Sotheby's curator. Yet some in the family quailed at the prospect. We had long held, in oral tradition, to the idea—the myth, perhaps—that we not only were photographers, but had always been photographers; and we believed that, even in that unimaginable dark past before the photograph was invented, our distant ancestors were, in some form or another, devoted disciples of the graven image. The stories were told to us children at Christmas, on birthdays, and during certain national holidays. Like all myths of origin, ours was the object of both pride and passion. Suddenly, as Nina took the parish listings, the immigration papers, and the graveyard ledgers in hand, our entire origins were on the line. What if Nina proved us wrong? What if we were not who we thought we were, after all? Her bisque-headed dolls were shot in uncompromising light, regardless of lumps; our ancestors, we knew, would fare the same.

In the controversy surrounding the family tree, things happened of which we are now ashamed. Nina received a bribe; perhaps, in fact, a number of bribes. When these failed there were unsympathetic whispers, even threats. One day a bisque doll she intended to photograph was disarranged from its pose and left in another, rather menacing, posture. Nina shot it that way and sent a copy to each of us in the mail; clearly, she would not be cowed. There were other things as well, worse things; things I will not mention. As I said, we are not proud of what we did; but we did it in the grip of unreasonable fear. What family, in our situation, would not have done the same?

And it appeared, once the family tree was complete, that our fears had indeed been unreasonable. When Nina unveiled her findings, a scant year after beginning her research, our utmost hopes were realized: we were photographers; we had always been photographers; we would always be photographers.

Our history was more than just solid; it was distinguished. We were related, on our paternal grandfather's side, to Mr. F. Talbot, devotee of the camera obscura, who stumbled—brilliantly stumbled, it must be added—upon the idea of photography while sketching tufts of wild vetch upon the shores of Lake Como in the summer of 1833. Although...