Images and memory

Last night I watched the TV premiere of a powerful documentary called Ailey. Two people who changed my life are in the documentary: Judith Jamison, whose performance of Cry I saw in New York in 1971, soon after it was created for her. Never, never have I seen such fluidity of movement and storytelling and politics and history. Her dance became my model of political art. 

The other is Bill T. Jones, who came as a guest to a class I was teaching in Massachusetts in 1992. One of my students asked him, “How do you know if you’re on the right path?” Jones answered, “When I tell the whole truth to everyone I meet, my path is clear.” That became true north for me.

All night I dreamed, slept, dreamed again. I dreamed I was photographing Jamison. Long limbs, muscular lines, power. We were working in a corner: two mustard-colored walls. She explored the corner with face, shoulders, hands, hips. I moved around her, with her, click, click, click, each image in the camera exquisite. I said to her, “Every move you make is the right move; it’s impossible to make a bad picture of you.” She laughed, and a window appeared in the corner, opening to a dark sky. She rose up through the window into the dark and disappeared, laughing. I clutched the camera like a holy grail, filled with those images.

Then I was photographing Bill T. Jones. He was moving on a dark stage, obliquely lit, aware that I was there, making photographs. I marveled at his jaw, his arms, his shoulders, the lines of his thigh and calf in movement, and each movement made a perfect still in the camera. I was astonished at my privilege, to be allowed to see such artistry, to make photographs of it. I couldn’t find words to thank him. I woke with tears on my face.

I had a book to pick up this morning at Powell’s. The sun was shining and I left my apartment thinking about images and memory. Everything I saw was beautiful to my eyes. Like Christopher Isherwood’s character Sally Bowles, “I am a camera.”