Free Joyce Carol Oates - Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart by Because It Is Bitter, Because It Is My Heart

daughter Iris were posing for his camera-on the white wicker love seat, that piece of furniture graceful as the s in calligraphy, a favorite prop of the photographer'sLeslie said in an outburst of candor that his vision as an artist was to photograph every man, woman, and child living in Hammond, New York: "every soul sharing a single instant of time."
     
     
He'd spoken passionately. His pale eyes had a yellowish flare.
     
     
A shaving nick on the underside of his jaw glistened red.
     
     
Persia Courtney cut her eyes at him and laughed.
     
     
"God, Les. Why?"
     
     
Leslie's scratchy old phonograph is playing bright music from The Marriage of Figaro. Still, Iris can hear their voices.
     
     
"He said.
     
     
"Yes, he would. That's... his version." were the one to ask him to leave. And now.
     
     
"Did he pay you back? Or is that another of his lies?"
     
     
"Yes, I'm sure he did... sure he did."
     
     
'Ah, now you're lying!"
     
     
Iris lets the book fall closed, photographs of H. CartierBresson.
     
     
Wanders out of the room. Long-legged as a yearling horse, and restless. They aren't going to miss her.
     
     
There's a lot to look at in Uncle Leslie's "bachelor's quarters : on virtually every square inch of wall space he has hung framed photographs, his own and others', prints, antiquated maps. The interior of a skull crammed with too many thoughts.
     
     
A sly stink of wet sand, brine, fish penetrating the walls. But after a while you don't notice.
     
     
Leslie Courtney has rented the store and the three-room apartment to the rear at 591 North Main Street, Hammond, New York, for the past twelve years, since moving to Hammond from his family hometown in the southern part of the state. First his brother Duke, newly married, moved to Hammond... then Leslie. You would conclude the brothers are close.
     
     
The photography studio itself is small and perpetually cluttered with equipment. Leslie is always buying new cameras, or new camera attachments, or props for his portraits... and not throwing anything out. It's a room lit with a single muted light except when a, blaze of lights is turned on. Thus to Iris, who has seen it since a time when, in the most literal terms, she was incapable of comprehending, let alone remembering, incapable even of comprehending herself as a being of consciousness and identity, the studio has an air familiar as a dream she has visited numberless times yet, awake, has not the power to recall. But there is the sharp razorish odor of chemicals from the darkroom, that odor fierce and familiar.
     
     
A low platform like a child's idea of a stage... the heavy dark velvet drape hung over a plywood partition... the tripod...
     
     
the props... the work counter and shelves crowded with equipment.
     
     
Above the work counter a dozen negatives are clipped to a wire: ghost figures that resolve themselves into human shapes, faces, pairs of eyes, trusting smiles. At what do we smile when we smile into the lens of a camera? Why this trust, this instant's elation? Iris peers at the negatives without touching them-she knows better than to touch them-sees that the subjects, a hand-holding young couple in Sunday clothes, are no one she knows. They have luridly black faces and arms... meaning they are "white" people.
     
     
Iris's uncle once remarked to her that he never took selfportraits as so many other photographers did (Iris had been looking at a portfolio of moody self-portraits in an issue of Camera Arts) because he was always embodied in the photographs he took of other people... even of landscapes, whatever. You couldn't see him, but he was there.
     
     
An absence, he said, but there.
     
     
Iris said she didn't understand... but then, no one understood Leslie Courtney when he talked "serious." Leslie said he didn't understand either, exactly. But that's how it was.
     
     
Leslie Courtney's most representative photographs, accumulated over a period of nearly thirty years,