Leanne Shapton – on photography and surprise.

Toronto, Ontario
October 26, 2000

Dear Christine,

It all started in mid-January when I took the bus to Scranton to visit Jason for a couple of days. We watched Don’t Look Now with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie that night. It wasn’t as scary as I’d thought it would be but I totally fell for the spooky-creepy-seductive totally romantic Veniceness I’d barely experienced when I was there with Nicholas in April. Nicholas got so fed up with the fact that I hated Venice. We nearly broke up there, and then again, strangely, at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, six months later.

There was this one other weird Venice thing: while we were there, Nicholas and I decided to take the train to Milan one day, to go to a gallery opening our friend Sergio was having. We got fighting on the train about something or other, and I remember feeling bad afterwards, and sewing the letter “N” into his Brooks Brothers handkerchief with the needle and blue thread in my travel sewing kit. Then I took a couple of pictures of him while he glared at me, then when he fell asleep I drew him, and the old lady standing by the window.

Back in Toronto when I picked up my pictures from Loblaws I remember looking at them in the parking lot and getting a really creepy feeling when I came to one of the pictures of Nicholas glaring at me. In the background, through a glass doorway, I could make out the figure of the woman I’d drawn in my sketchbook, but beside her there was a very strange face. It looked like a profile of an old man, but the eyes were sunken and black and shiny and he had an enormous curving brow and then this really inhumanly long nose. It felt really Venetian in an eerie, religious, gnomes-and-rot-and-age-and-death bad way. It totally terrified me and I couldn’t look at it for a while.

I showed the picture to a few people and they were all freaked out by it too. Finally I brought it over to the scanning department at work and asked them if they could scan the negative and change the exposure in Photoshop. I hoped they’d brighten it and the face would turn out to be a child holding a balloon or something. Phoebe scanned it in and even on her screen, despite the brightening and tweaking, the awful face didn’t appear as anything different. Charles heard our screaming and nervous laughter and came over. He took one look at it and saw the trick: the creature’s face was actually the side of the woman’s head: the beady eye was her earring, the brow her hairline, and the nose the collar of her coat.

I still can’t look at the picture without seeing the monster though, and I wonder if there isn’t something in this trick of the eye, something about seeing only the bad that reminds me of the fights Nicholas and I used to have. It isn’t that I didn’t understand what was there, but my eyes always saw the monster before the lady.

So back to Scranton. After the movie, Jason and I really felt like making something. We decided we’d plan a hotel-room party at the Marriot Marquis later that week and we made some invitations – one of my drawings of somebody air-guitaring done on a piece of acetate printed over a picture Jason took of an empty hotel room. Jason made about twenty-five prints in the darkroom while I tried to quit my job via e-mail.

We still couldn’t go to sleep after that, so we started taking pictures of ourselves with my camera and the new flash Derek gave me for Christmas. That night we started out imitating Irving Penn shots: He was Balthus, I was Nusch Eluard; he was De Kooning, I was Dovima; etc.; full costume, full hair and makeup, but then I realized there was no film in the camera. So we abandoned that idea and decided to just dance in front of the black seamless we’d set up. We put “Can You Get To That” by Funkadelic on repeat. I found some film, loaded the camera, set it to self-timer, and we took roll after roll of ourselves dancing.

It was 7 a.m. by the time we ran out of film and we were so tired and could barely talk or smoke and so we brushed our teeth and went to sleep.

I developed the film at Loblaws when I got back to Toronto. I picked the prints up before work one morning and I started looking at them while I was driving up the Don Valley Parkway. I nearly crashed I was laughing so hard.

I decided I really wanted to see other people dancing too. We sent out a call for dancing-session participants, and we did one two-day session in Toronto and one one-night session in Brooklyn. We tried to set it up so that people would dance in total darkness except for when the flash went. It was pretty nice to see from behind the camera. Jason and I would be looking into a black void and then one of us would arbitrarily release the shutter: there’d be the satisfying loud pop of the strobe and a flash of white light. In the seconds that followed I could see the picture perfectly in the darkness.

Jason processed and contacted all of the film in Scranton one weekend and sent the stuff up to me. He’d made two copies of every sheet and we went over each of them on the phone. They came out pretty much as planned, but in the end we were a little disappointed. We had been so professional about it, and we’d spent hundreds of dollars renting equipment and buying water and KFC for everyone, but despite all of our planning, or maybe even because of it, there was something about the photos that didn’t feel very fun. Either that or we just got bored looking at them because they weren’t of us.

But there was this one other roll that Jason and I had shot in between appointments during the Toronto sessions: more self-portraits – but of course. Jason would close his eyes and snap the picture while I did whatever in front of the camera. Then we’d switch places and double-expose the film. This roll – surprise, surprise – was much more satisfying.

I miss you,

Love,

Leanne