I got this email from my friend Quito a few weeks ago:
"Dear ones. My friend Hyla who works in the photo studio in the Met can let us into the Met on a Monday. If you've never been to the Met without people, I can tell you: it is one of the more special experiences you can have. So quiet. So much art. If you are available to share this rare experience with me, say yes, and make requests: we will have to plan our route carefully. We only get an hour and then our guide has to go back to work."
Then she wrote me a special little note mentioning what a great Never Done activity this would be.
I was intrigued. I had certainly never been inside any museum when it wasn't open. I started thinking about art I would like to see in private. I knew I wanted to see brushstrokes up close. I checked to see if the Met has any Chagall. I love Cy Twombly. I thought it would be lovely to be alone in a room wit the impressionists. I looked up the exhibits at the Met right now. I was intrigued by the Stieglitz, Steichen, and Strand photo exhibit. Also, the Miró. And it wasn't only going to be up to me; we were going to be a group, and for just an hour, so we'd need to make some choices. I told myself I would do some research, and come up with my #1 choice for the time there.
Instead, I got busy with my full life, and I completely ran out of time, and ended up telling myself that it didn't really matter what I would see -- that truly, seeing anything alone in the museum would be amazing.
The day came, and in the end it was just me and Quito and Hyla. The first thing Hyla asked us was, "What do you want to see?" It suddenly seemed vast and overwhelming, and I lost my resolve that seeing anything at all would be amazing. I suddenly feared that I would waste the opportunity. But then I looked up, and saw the massive staircase, with nobody on it, and thought, "OK, this really will be amazing."
Quito had been to the museum just the day before, whereas I hadn't been since Patricia and I went to see Big Bambu on the roof. Quito said she wanted to see a courtyard. I mentioned the Stieglitz show and Hyla said it was a great thing to see on a closed day, because when it's open it's really hard to get up closet to the photographs.
Before I say more about the museum, I want to say that both Quito and Hyla are wonderful photographers. With websites even. Click on their names, and see the magic.
So off we went, up empty staircases, through empty corridors, past some wonderful photographs that are part of a different show. We stopped to look at some of these, and ran into a friend of Hyla's who is a photography fellow at the museum, who it turned out curated the exhibit we were looking at. An image of the moon -- a photogravure, made from two different plates in 1895, caught my eye. It reminded me of images I grew up with -- moon and Mars images that were taken with cameras my father had designed, or helped design. I started to feel the power of having a solitary experience in a museum -- as I read and looked, looked and thought, thought and imagined, and nobody jostled me out of the way, or coughed quietly to speed me up.
When we ourselves were ready, we moved on to the Stieglitz, Steichen, and Strand show. Hyla brought us right over to her favorite photo Stieglitz had taken of Georgia O'Keeffe's hands -- one in a series of photos he took of her between 1918 and 1937. These were extremely intimate photos, and to be able to see them in an intimate environment was really quite precious. I fell for a simple photo of a branch of wet apples in front of a gable -- it turned out to be a shot he took later in life, and had mounted on a card to give to Georgia, after he could no longer take photographs.
When Hyla and Quito were talking, I ducked into a room that had nobody in it. Nobody else. Really, nobody. I quickly said the Shehekhianu, and then felt a thrill as I looked at shots of police firing on Russian revolutionaries in 1917, and city scapes, also from 1917, that were reminiscent of the imagery from the film Metropolis. These weren't the most moving works of art in the exhibit, nor in the museum, but they were my private pieces -- the ones I came upon at the moment I happened to be all alone.
When we were done with this exhibit, we went off to find a courtyard for Quito. Riding the elevator with a couple people who worked in the museum, Quito asked them where a good courtyard was, and a woman said to go to the Astor Court -- a recreation of a Ming Dynasty-style Chinese courtyard, conceived of and funded by Brooke Astor. So off we went, past exhibits of Korean art, and Buddhist art, and long glass cases of ceramic ware, and jewelry, and past a gigantic Buddha, and finally to Astor Court. You duck through a round entryway, and you're suddenly in another world -- a world with beautiful light, growing green ground cover, bamboo, and rocks. If I had more time to write this post, I would write about the light -- and what it felt like to be in this space, with vast sky lights, and also carefully designed un-natural light. But just like then, when our time in the museum was running out, I also must run out to another appointment, and can't keep writing.
I don't think I've done a particularly good job of writing about how meaningful this was -- especially the deep connections I made with my father's personal history as a photographer and a camera designer, which was actually the deepest part of the experience for me. A self-portrait of Stieglitz holding a copy of Camera Works Magazine was like a portal directly from Stieglitz's world, to my fathers, and to mine. I guess if there is a lesson to be learned from the experience, it might be something about saying yes to friends with big ideas. Or to have big ideas and make them happen. Or to be open to any eventuality once big ideas are afoot. I don't think I could ever have imagined, when Quito first suggested we go to the museum, and I was sure that I wanted to see brushstrokes, that I would have ended up with such a reconnection to my father. Or alone with a giant Buddha.
My dad was also a prof.photographer!
ReplyDeleteI was an intern at the Met in 1977-78. The Met on Mondays was my privilege. I got sooooo spoiled. Then it was a guilty pleasure. Security being much more lax than nowadays, I kept using my expired ID for years to get into the museum on Mondays. I got to go into storage areas too, and realized that there were more things in storage than on display. I soon found out that the museum was populated by academics, not artists, and that it would not be a good career for me. But after that I never got over my distaste for crowded exhibits. I did pick up something important though: My husband. He sold the admissions buttons. And the rest is history!
I didn't write about it, but the PhD candidate photography fellow academic guy we met stuck with us when we went to the Stieglitz etc exhibit, and was super knowledgeable about the artists' biographies and camera techniques. What kind of photographer was your dad?
ReplyDeleteMy dad was a well-known portrait photographer among the super-elite of the wealthy Jews in the NY area, like the Lehmans, Bendheims and so on. My current FB pic is from one of Dad's albums of us. You can see others from that series in my photos. What kind was yours and what kind of cameras did he invent? Dad shot mostly with Rollis and Yashicas 2-1/4
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