Chapter 10: Art Photographer

“DORA, HONEY, I need just a little more pucker for this pose. No. Not a big fake smoochy face. Think of that first caress of your lover’s lips. Just meet him as he touches your lips. Yes. That’s it,” I said. I took the picture and it was damned sexy.

“Nate, let’s take it just a step further,” Anna said. “Dora, the gown is lovely, but we need to loosen it up a bit. You don’t mind showing a little of the lovelies, do you?” Anna started to unbutton Dora’s top.

“You embarrass me, Anna,” she whispered.

“Oh, honey, just between us girls, you have nothing to be embarrassed about. Would you rather have Nate do this? I promise, he’s very good at it,” she said.

What? The idea was that Anna would help her with costume adjustments. I wasn’t supposed to get too close. But Anna set it up and I couldn’t help but feel it was a test of me more than of Dora.

“Honey, let’s just relax,” I said as I approached Dora.

I lifted my hand and stroked her cheek. It was easy to forget that Dora was actually my roommate, Devon. She was really cute. She was about five-five and wore a blonde wig that hung in curls around her face. Her makeup was exquisite. Her delicate hands had painted nails that matched the polish on her toes. She was still in an open-toed high-heel sandal that did wonderful things for her legs.

“Um ... Nate ... You don’t have to...”

“Shh. This top is truly beautiful, but it’s hiding some of your best bits. Don’t worry. We won’t completely expose you. I know you depend on your mystique. But really, honey...” I ran my finger down the center of her chest and pushed her blouse aside to show her lacy bra. “We can tantalize your audience with just a little more. Now, let’s try putting your right hand on your left thigh. Can you feel what we’re doing? People who see this picture will be straining to see if just a hint of your nipple is exposed. Don’t worry. It just enhances your cleavage a little. I promised not to expose you.”

The effect was great. Crossing her arm over pushed her right breast up and out a little so she looked like she had modest but definitely desirable boobs. Behind her, Anna gave me a surprised look and smiled.

I went back to shooting pictures, coaxing Dora into different expressions, and then having her turn to show her back. From this view, I could see what a lovely back she had and I reached in to unfasten her bra.

“Hold this in front so you don’t expose your pretty little titties,” I said.

She clasped the bra in front of her and I tucked the straps under her arms. She had a bare back down to the G-string that parted her butt cheeks. She turned to look over her shoulder at me with a smoky gaze that just sizzled with anticipation.

When we finished the set, Anna moved in and helped refasten her bra and pull her dress back together. We wrapped up the session and Dora left.

“Great work, ladies,” I said. “Dora is going to love this set of photos and will get great publicity with them.”

“What does she do that she needs publicity photos like that?” Theresa asked. Elizabeth and Anna about lost it and couldn’t control their giggles, turning away to force me into answering the question.

“She’s a drag queen,” I said. “If you’ve been Uptown, you might have passed Augie’s. It’s just a little bar with a bright sign in front advertising the show and performers. Dora is opening there in December.”

“Wait. Um ... That means ... You mean ... You treated him like a girl!” Theresa said.

“It’s how she wanted to be treated. But we didn’t cross any lines. I just tried to make her feel as sexy as any other model who comes to Attic Allure,” I said.

“And you did great!” Elizabeth said. “I really didn’t know how you were going to pull it off, but you did. Literally. Her clothes came off and those were some of the sexiest poses I’ve seen in your gallery. I love you!”

“You really surprised me,” Anna said. “You just accepted her for who she is and helped her through the whole process. I could feel that I wasn’t getting the result either you or she wanted. And you just stepped in and took care of her like any other model.”

“Well, as long as Devon doesn’t think there was anything more there than there was, I’m good with it all. The pictures will be great.”

“What? Devon? As in your roommate?” Beth screeched.

“Yeah. I hardly ever saw him until a few weeks ago. He thought I was scary and stayed away from me,” I laughed.

“He hangs around with that chick who’s always trying to get a protest started,” Beth said. “She’s just down the hall from me.”

“So far, I’ve managed to stay out of her clutches. It seems like she is constantly on the lookout for some way to use a photographer in her protests. She went so far as to suggest that we rent some police uniforms and stage a scene of protesters being beaten. Absolutely not!” I said. “We’ve got enough of that happening for real without staging fake protests and beatings.”

We finished cleaning up the space and headed out. Elizabeth had come through again and we had tickets to see Plaza Suite at the Blackstone Theatre at eight that night.

We headed downstairs after I got the proofs printed and Levi stopped me on the way out.

“Got a message for you, Nate,” he said. “Guy named Hammer called. Said you’d know who.”

“Yeah. Why’d he call here?”

“Short message. He said, ‘Every high school. Monday morning at eight.’ You understand what it means?” Levi asked. I swallowed hard.

“Yeah. Yeah. I know what it means,” I said. “Thanks, Levi.” I practically dragged Beth and Anna out of the store and down the street.

“What’s going on?” Anna asked. “What does Malcolm want?”

“Who’s Malcolm? For that matter, who’s Hammer?” Elizabeth asked.

“One and the same. Anna knows him as Malcolm. I only ever knew his ... What did you call it? His business name, Hammer.”

“And?” Anna insisted.

“There’s going to be a city-wide strike of high school students, Monday morning at eight o’clock. I need to get hold of Professor Jonas.”

“Professor Jonas? It’s Nate Hart.”

“I don’t normally take calls at home on the weekend, Nate. Is this important?”

“Only if you want all your photojournalism students to have a chance at the kind of tip I got last week. There will be enough action on Monday for everyone to get photos,” I said.

“Something big is happening?”

“Every high school with a black or Latino student body is going to walk out on Monday.”

“Holy shit!” my instructor said. “This is good intel?”

“I believe it. I’ll be staked out to get as many photos as possible.”

“Okay. What school will you be at?”

“Calumet High School. I think it, Harrison, Austin, and Wendell-Phillips are likely to be hot-spots. They’ve all had limited walkouts before. I’m sure they’ll jump at a city-wide walkout.”

“Okay. I’ll see how many of our class I can get hold of and get them in position. I think it would be best not to pass this tip on any further. Too much media interest could alert the police and make for a confrontational atmosphere.”

“I agree, but this time, I’ll specifically be looking for the police informant in the school. At Harrison, he was pointed out to me when the police broke into the cafeteria and started arresting kids who moved in there when they were chased back inside. I didn’t dare stop to take pictures once I was in the thick of things.”

“Infiltrated. We’ll all be on the lookout. Good work, Nate. Keep it up.”

I disconnected and breathed a deep sigh. Elizabeth and Anna collected me by the arms and practically dragged me to the theatre. It was a new Neil Simon play and it was pretty good. We laughed a lot, even though a couple of the scenes were kind of poignant. As soon as the show was over, we went back to the dormitory and collected our things for an overnight. Deke was waiting for us and took us to Elizabeth’s house. We didn’t really fool around much. Beth and Anna weren’t into girl-girl stuff and it was awkward to have one girl waiting around to take her turn. We just all got in bed and cuddled up to sleep.

Sunday, after a long leisurely brunch with Beth’s parents, we piled into the microbus and drove Anna back to Rockford. Then Beth and I returned to the city and I parked the VW in the garage next to Camera Warehouse for a mere $30 a week with in and out privileges.

Monday morning, I was up early, and in the microbus to go stake out Calumet High—for two years, my alma mater. At 8:00 sharp, the doors of the school were flung open and students flooded out of the school. More than in the Harrison strike the previous week, but police were there to try to force them back into the school. There weren’t enough police because they’d been called to every high school and junior college in the city.

I took pictures of a couple of failed attempts by police to force students back, but it was the police who soon fell back. Nearly 3,000 students linked arms and circled the building holding the police out. The strike lasted all day and eventually word came to the strikers that the school board had agreed to ‘read the manifesto.’ That wasn’t really good enough, but the strike ended for the day. All told, over 35,000 students in the city had walked out of classes to protest the poor quality education and lack of integration.

Daley was opposed to extensive school integration. As the black neighborhoods expanded, he had the school board keep redrawing the boundaries for schools until the mostly black schools were overcrowded and understaffed, while the white schools had empty seats and too many teachers. Something had to happen soon or it would simply explode.

“Hey, camera boy!” a voice called to me. I recognized one of the guys headed across from the school.

“Raoul, how are you, man?” I asked.

“Hanging tight. I got a tip to watch for you. Here’s a copy of the two manifestos as rewritten for today. I’ll give you a tip. It’s called Black Monday. And it’s going to repeat. Every Monday until we get action from the school board,” he said. “This is just the tip of the iceberg. Next Monday we’re marching to the school corporation offices. We’re not quitting.”

“That’s cool, man. I’ll get this into the newspaper. Speaking of which, I need to get my film processed and hit the office before deadline.”

“It was your picture on Friday that let us get everyone pulled together. They kept saying it was only the rioters in front of the convention the police were beating on. You showed it was anyone who had a backbone. Let me know if I can supply anything else,” he said.

“I’ll do that. When it breaks that you’re planning to walk every Monday, though, I won’t be the only one around taking pictures. I know there are at least eight out covering different schools today. Next week there’ll be dozens,” I said.

“Bring ‘em. The more witnesses, the less the cops can do. We’ve got to break this thing fast or we won’t make it at all.”

“It’s always close, isn’t it?” I asked. It seemed like any kind of movement at all was just an hour from failure before it succeeded. I took the manifestos and headed back to the lab to get my pictures in to the paper with the story. I missed class again all day.

It didn’t make a difference the next Monday. About half the college students in the city walked out in solidarity with the demand for integrated classrooms, more diversity among teachers, bilingual classes, and black history and contributions being taught.

I got pictures as students from every direction approached the school board offices with their demands. As I predicted, there were newspaper and television reporters and photographers crawling all over the city. My run of exclusive photos came to a complete end. Prof. Jonas had a few choice words to say about when news is so well-covered that it ceases to be news.

In class, we moved past news photography and started dealing with other forms of photojournalism, including documenting progress on projects and issues. The idea was to record the history of some contemporary event. That was the big difference between written journalism and photojournalism. A writer could write about the history of an event ten or fifty or a hundred years later. A photographer couldn’t photograph an event after it was gone.

As it happened, I had a client who sought me out to do another series of photos for her and to do a story about her blossoming career. It was a short piece and some of the work was done in the studio, but I followed her backstage the next weekend and used the Hasselblad to capture her behind the scenes. It was an interesting experience, but I didn’t think anything would really come of it.

The next Monday, the school board acquiesced to the students’ demand for a meeting. It was going to be a long slow process, but there was a chance they’d make some gains. What was sure was that the whole student strike issue was no longer news.

And then it was election day.

Nothing too unexpected. For a while there, it looked like Humphrey would pull it out, but Nixon even carried Illinois, thanks to Daley’s August strongarm tactics. Of course, the South, upset over Johnson’s civil rights legislation, went to racist segregationist Wallace. That was a day I just stayed in my room. There was nothing good that could come of this election.

Of course, staying in my room wasn’t actually an option. We still had classes and I was really enjoying the different effects and quality we could get with a large format camera in photo lab. This was definitely going to be on my wish list for Christmas. I’d have Levi start looking around for me. That would involve a whole bunch of new equipment. My current enlargers couldn’t handle that size film and the developing trays were different.

For that matter, the whole shooting process was more deliberate. When I was out in the field using the 35mm Nikon, I could shoot up a 36-exposure roll in fifteen seconds with the motor drive. I tried not to, but by comparison, 35mm film was cheap.

That’s by comparison to 120 film for the Hasselblad. The 12-exposure rolls tended to slow my process in the studio down a little as I didn’t roll off a bunch of photos in a row. The 4x5s I’d worked with in the lab took a single frame of film at a time. The aspect ratio of the film is 4x5. In reality the film is slightly smaller than 4 inches by 5 inches, sized at 100mm x 125mm. In shooting, you lose another 5mm in each direction because of the notches for the film carrier, and are likely to lose more in the enlarger. Yeah. We were going to have a test on it in photo lab this week.

The net result was that you shot one frame at a time and then reloaded the camera. The frames were processed and printed one frame at a time, so it took a while. You just didn’t shoot as many pictures in the studio when you were shooting in large format, so each one had to be perfect. I wondered how that was going to affect my style if I moved to that format. Probably only for portraits and not for Attic Allure photos.

As usual, Friday night was a non-stop party in the dormitory. Beth and I often went out on Fridays so we weren’t around the chaos, but she was in her last couple of weeks of the quarter for DePaul. She had finals coming up and was a very studious person. I tried to focus on my study, but my door was open into the common room and the common room door was open to the hall. I could smell marijuana from someplace down the hall and was always sure the police would break in and start beating people at random for having weed.

“Okay, I’m ready!” Carrie said stumbling into the common room, looking around, and heading straight for my bedroom while stripping off her clothes. “I admit the only way we’ll get people to listen to us is with naked pictures. Do me! Take my pictures now.”

“Um ... Carrie, you’re in my bedroom. Naked.”

“Well? What are you waiting for?”

“You’re naked in the boys’ dormitory. I don’t take pictures in my bedroom. Put your clothes on!” I said.

“You don’t like me naked?” she said, near tears.

I pointed at the open door where half a dozen guys were looking in from the common room.

“Carrie, everybody likes you naked. I don’t think that’s what you want.”

She looked at the guys staring at her and screamed. Then she shoved the door shut in their faces and tried to cover her tits and pussy with her hands. I started gathering up her clothes to hand to her.

“How could you let me do that?” she cried. “They all saw me naked! I’ll have to quit school.”

“You don’t have to quit school. You just need to get dressed and hold your head high as you leave,” I said.

“Don’t make me go!” she said. She dropped her hands away from her body and hung her head a little. “You like me naked, don’t you, Nate?”

“Carrie, are you drunk?”

“No. A little high, maybe. It’s not like you can walk down your hall and not get high. But, if you won’t take my picture, we could do other things, you know. I mean, if you like me,” she said.

“Carrie, I’m a nineteen-year-old guy and you’re a naked girl. Of course I like you. But you still can’t just barge into my room and strip demanding pictures or sex. I don’t take pictures in my room. I don’t have sex with models. Why don’t you tell me what is really going through your mind while you get dressed now,” I said.

“Um ... I can’t believe you don’t want to have sex with me,” she said as she sorted out her clothes and found her panties. She seemed in no rush to get them on and paused several times with her hairy crotch exposed. “You got pictures in the newspaper. I thought maybe you’d get one of me and they’d censor it and then I’d point at it and be able to make an issue about how sexist the newspaper is and that it amounts to repression of women and a violation of our civil rights by the war-mongering right wing that voted for Nixon who are trying to keep the schools segregated.”

“Whoa!” I said. “I’m not sure I can even parse that sentence.” She finally pulled her panties up and grabbed a T-shirt. Like a lot of the college girls, she didn’t bother with a bra. I watched her breasts disappear under the shirt and just kept watching them as they moved around beneath the thin fabric. “It seems like you’re struggling to get a coherent protest together.”

“Yeah. Well.” She pulled her skirt on and zipped it up. It only just covered the panties. “How can I help it? There’s so much wrong in the world! I want to fight for women’s rights and for civil rights and for integration and against the war and for redistribution of wealth and against pollution ... How can I help but struggle for a coherent protest?”

“It’s a problem, but ... um ... Have you ever seen those Indian fakirs who lie on a bed of nails?”

“Well, not in person, but I’ve seen pictures.”

“Have you ever seen one lie on just one nail?”

“They can’t do that!”

“Of course not. When they get all those issues tossed at them at once, people can just lie down on them and sleep. If you only toss one issue at them, they can’t ignore it. There’s no way to lie down on it. Even if you see all these issues—and I agree they’re all important—you have to settle on one to make people really uncomfortable. Right now, you’re protesting so many issues that people can ignore you easily.”

“But I can’t just stop supporting the World Wildlife Fund or SDS or the NAACP!”

“No. You don’t have to. You can support all those things. But you need to choose one to speak out about—to make your cause.”

“What’s your cause, Nate?”

“I’m not really a leader or a protester. The one thing I feel most passionate about is the draft and sending unwilling kids to die in a rich man’s war. You see, that supports anti-war, civil rights, and even feminism if you stop and think about it. But it’s only one thing that I’ll fight for—or against. I want the draft abolished. Completely. Right now,” I said.

“I get it, I think. I wanted you to be a part of founding a chapter of SDS, but that’s not your issue. Even though you’ve been beaten by police, that’s not your issue. Even though you photographed student walkouts for integration and better education, that’s not your issue. It doesn’t mean you don’t care about any of the rest of it.”

“Right. Let me tell you a story. There was once a preacher who preached every sermon on baptism. No matter what scripture he chose, somehow it came back around to baptism. One Sunday he opened the floor to the congregation to suggest a topic for him to preach on and one fellow figured he could get the preacher off the subject of baptism, so he said, ‘Preach about pills.’ The preacher nodded and started right off. ‘There are round pills and flat pills, long pills and short pills. There are red pills and green pills and blue pills. But the most important pills are the gospills, and in the gospels we find important words about baptism.’ The congregation got the point.”