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The blur of the otherworldly
Art Journal, Fall, 2003 by Mark Alice Durant
Magic Shop
My friend Calla loves magic tricks, especially simple ones involving coins, cards, cups, and little foam balls. We live in Baltimore and sometimes visit a magic shop in the Federal Hill neighborhood. The shop windows are appropriately scratched and filmy, and behind them clumps of decaying circus artifacts are displayed. Impossibly long and bulbous clown shoes, a life-size model of a seal balancing a ball on its nose, hoops-and lion posters, a yellowing picture of a bearded lady. This magic shop is the kind of place that might be featured in a John Waters movie and makes me glad that I live in a city that has yet to be homogenized by uncontrolled gentrification.
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The store's current owners are a middle aged couple, both of whom are professional clowns, formerly with the Barnum and Bailey circus. The wife is quite short, almost Munchkin short, and runs excitedly around the shop trying to sell you a rubber rat, a whoopee cushion, or spicy hot chewing gum. They have a teenage son who is a bit of a local celebrity. He is a magician and ventriloquist and he is totally Vegas. Like a Diane Arbus photograph of a precocious child attempting to pass as an adult, he is a miniature Wayne Newton with his V-neck black sweater, double-breasted silver suit coat, onyx rings, and chunky bracelets. His father, anxious to entertain and impress the very occasional customers who enter his store, persistently orders his son to perform tricks from his adolescent repertoire, with a barely perceptible expression of insurrection crossing his always-pleasant, made-for-TV face, the son responds like an unquestioning marionette. Pulling up his sleeves, he winks at his audience and unveils his razzle-dazzle.
The last time we visited this little shop of abracadabra, as Calla busied herself with the mysteries held in the glass cases, I noticed the young magician and an unidentified older man huddled in a corner, whispering and glancing in my direction. I tried to ignore the stares and surveyed the merchandise until they approached and bracketed me from either side. With surprising deference they inquired whether I was a certain well-known French-Canadian magician whose first name was Cliff. I said that I was not. They were stunned at the close resemblance and did not seem convinced by my denial.
"He has incredible powers, very eccentric. He is the son of a tailor, and all of his illusions have to do with lapels, cuffs, and sleeves."
They both stared as if expecting me to finally admit my true identity.
"Sorry, I am not the son of a tailor."
The teenager ran off to the store basement to thumb through back issues of a professional magic magazine to find a picture of my doppelganger.
The older man, still deferential, asked me if he could show me his work and then, as if the were uttering some ancient mystical secret, claimed that he no longer considered himself a magician but was now a "mentalist." On the glass display case he spread out his cards and asked me to cut the deck.
"Pick out one card--but don't look at it," he ordered.
We locked gazes, plugging into each other's eyes.
"Now think of a numerical card, not a picture card, a number card."
As soon as he said this I felt as if the number three was physically inserted in the front right quadrant of my brain, where it throbbed like an old neon sign--THREE, THREE, THREE, THREE.
I could not even imagine another number. I tried to pick five or seven or two, but it was impossible, the three insisted, pulsating with my blood.
THREE, THREE, THREE. THREE.
"Turn the card over."
I did as l was commanded--it was the three of spades. A somewhat muffled yelp leapt from my mouth and, just as that pathetic sound hung in the air, Wayne Newton, Jr., returned with a magazine open to a contrasty black-and-white photograph of a man who looked exactly like me.
"Look, it's you," he said.
Dark Chamber
Photography must have dark places. While it seeks the light for its images, it requires the dark for its transformations. Photography flits about the daylit world like a nervous bird, anxious to return to its shadowy nest. Photography pilfers luminescence, stealing a handful of photons for each exposure, entrapping them in the sticky membrane of emulsion. (The nineteenth century wet collodion process was literally sticky.) For spirits to appear, for ectoplasm to emanate, for UFOs to descend, darkness is essential. In light's absence unannounced visitors are free to float in the air like spilt milk and are more agreeable to being photographed. Black cloths and safe lights, apertures and sensitivities, filters and latent images: the glossary of photographic terms is suggestive of an entire world of betweenness. As Marina Warner has pointed out, the very word film resonates with notions of veiling, vapors, of the gauzy barrier between us and a parallel world. (1)
For over twenty years I have taught photography classes in a variety of environments, from community art centers and universities to prep schools and inner-city high schools. I am especially fond of teaching introductory courses because the fundamental alchemy of the photographic process still retains the thrill of discovery. New photographers (at least those working with predigital technologies) become initiates in a society of conjurors, capturing images of the outside world, absorbing and condensing them into little black boxes, impressing life onto a concoction of silver and gelatin. Returning to their dark lairs to dip the freeze-dried souls into various potions, the photographic acolytes add a smidgen of light to catalyze the world back to life.
