Free Forty-One False Starts by Janet Malcolm Page B

reassuring noises, but I knew and he knew that my picture was already on the way to the darkroom of journalistic opportunism.
    During our conversation in the café, Struth received a phone call from the Grieger printing lab telling him that the first test prints of his portrait of the Queen and the Duke were ready for his inspection. Grieger is considered the supreme printing lab for large-scale photography and is the place where many of its practitioners go to have their prints made. At Grieger, we were met by Dagmar Miethke, Struth’s “special person” there, on whose eye and taste he depends for the finish of his photographs. Miethke, an easy and friendly woman of around fifty, pinned the print to the white wall, and the three of us silently regarded it.
    My first impression was of a vaguely familiar elderly couple posing for a formal portrait in a corner of the palatial Minneapolis hotel ballroom where their fiftieth wedding anniversary is being celebrated. The pair were seated on an ornate settee, and my attention was drawn to the woman’s sturdy legs in beige stockings, the right knee uncovered where the skirt of her pale-blue silk dress had hitched up a bit as she settled her ample figure into the settee; and to her feet, in patent leather pumps planted firmly on the fancy hotel carpet. Her white hair was carefully coiffed, in a sort of pompadour in front and fluffy curls on the sides, and her lipsticked mouth was set in an expression of quiet determination. The man—a retired airline pilot?—was smaller, thinner, recessive. They were sitting a little apart, not touching, looking straight ahead. Gradually, the royal couple came into focus as such, and the photograph assumed its own identity as a work by Struth, the plethora of its details somehow tamed to serve a composition of satisfying serenity and readability.
    Struth broke the silence and said that the picture was too yellow, and for the next half hour color adjustments were made on test strips until he was satisfied that the print had reached the degree of coolness he wanted. Then the issue of size arose. The print we were looking at was big, around sixty-three by seventy-nine inches, and he asked that a larger print be made. When this was produced, he regarded the two prints side by side for a long while. It seemed to me that the smaller print was more flattering to the Queen—the larger print made her look larger, almost gross. Struth finally asked that the smaller print be taken away so that he could study the larger print without distraction, and he finally decided on it. Further color adjustments were made on the big print—the Queen’s hands were made less red, the background was darkened, to noticeably good effect—and Struth was satisfied.
    Struth had positioned the settee—upholstered in green silk brocade, with curved gilded arms and legs—at a slant, so that the Queen was more prominent and lit with a kind of white glow, while the Duke receded into the shadows. The Duke is still handsome at ninety, his military bearing intact, but in the double portrait, next to the Queen’s amplitude, he looked a bit shrunken.
    Struth said of the sitting, “When we walked in”—he was accompanied by Hirsch and another assistant, named Carolina Müller—“they were not particularly friendly. No smiles. I was very nervous. I took a few shots and realized I hadn’t adjusted the shutter opening. Then I saw that the pillow behind the Queen was not in a good position—exactly the kind of mistake I didn’t want to make—so I said to her, ‘Excuse me, can you lean forward?’ and I just fixed the pillow behind her back. Then I made three or four more shots. And one of those shots was it. I knew it was it.”
    At his studio, Struth showed me the contact sheets of the sitting. There were the pictures with the badly positioned pillow behind the Queen. In another reject, the Duke