THE PHOTOGRAPH
“Ronnie, we’ve been thinking that someone should be in charge of taking pictures this summer”, Rick said has he approached me. Rick was the leader of our group of twenty-five students and young adults that summer in Zinapécuaro, México in 1962. He was an engineering major at Stanford, twenty-four years old and approaching graduation. A little overweight with a paunch, he had curly brown hair already balding on the top and starting to recede above his forehead. He wore large glasses that were always perched on a ridge in the middle of his pudgy nose like it had been carved there just to hold the glasses at the level he liked to wear them.
Ernie joined him, and said, “We decided you could do it”, as he began to fumble with the cloth sack he was carrying. Ernie was a twenty-five year old seminary student who had been studying for the priesthood near Sacramento. He was short and thin like a wire with light hair that flowed into a wispy beard. He was a quiet and serious person with soft blue eyes.
“Why me?”, I began to resist. It was early in June, just my second day after my arrival in the village. I was barely nineteen. A couple of minutes before I had just splattered a two-inch long light brown scorpion climbing up the middle of the wall next to my cot with the heel of my shoe. My mind was trying desperately to fly back home to San Francisco, like a jet plane screaming into the distance. I had been sitting on my cot trying to calm myself down by focusing on something else. I had just begun to put some of my things away when they had approached me.
“Don’t worry about it. Ernie will show you how to use the camera,” Rick said.
“But …” I looked up at each of them and took a long breath.
“We need an official photographer for the summer”, Rick continued. His voice became more serious, like a teacher giving instruction to a student. “We need to keep a good record of what our group does, our experiences, and accomplishments. For publicity back home. To raise funds next year. We’ve decided you’re going to do it.” He smiled and turned slowly to walk away.
“This is the camera”, Ernie said. He sat down on my cot, and motioned for me to come closer to him. I sat at his side. He opened the dark cloth sack he had been holding, and pulled out a black Nikon 35 millimeter single lens reflex camera. He took it with both hands, and passed it to me like it was a precious jeweled gold case. I held it in my hands, felt its weight, and looked at the dials and levers.
As I was examining it, Ernie continued, “There’s a regular 35mm lens on it now, and we’ve also got this telephoto lens.” He carefully took the longer telephoto lens out of its small carrying case like it was a fragile piece of crystal glass, and, holding it with two hands, gave it to me.
I held the camera and lens in my lap, and began to try to figure how to use the focus, F stops, and shutter speeds. Here I was, one of the youngest members of the group. I was eager to fit in, to be useful and accepted, like a teenager on a first date. This mysterious camera with all of its dials and levers made me feel nervous. I liked the idea of being given an important job, but I didn’t know all the implications. What if I didn’t do it right? Would it be like fumbling the football in an important game in high school? I didn’t want to have that desperate feeling again.
Ernie briefly showed me how to operate the camera, and then emptied the cloth sack onto the cot in the space between us. There were several rolls of film, about half black and white and half color. Some rolls were regular speed daylight film, and others were fast film that didn’t require as much light. “You can develop a roll or two here in the village to check out your work, but you should develop the rest of the film back home because it will be less expensive there.” That was Ernie’s final instruction. He smiled at me, and went into the next room.
I sat on my cot fumbling with the camera, and aimed at several items in the room to get a feel for the focus and lens settings. The little yellow boxes the film came in instructed me on the different lens openings and shutter speeds determined by whether the picture was in full sun, cloudy, or full shade. There was no flash attachment, so it looked like all my work would have to be outdoors in the daytime when there was enough light. I was excited to have this magic black box to play with, but I also felt some stress. I felt like I had to be constantly alert to the opportunities to take good pictures. Ones that told the story of who we were, and what we were doing there that summer in Mexico. I couldn’t miss photographing some important scene. You didn’t get a second chance, because this stuff was all live action. I had to be like a crack newspaper photographer, I thought, always in the right place at the right time, always prepared to frame the important shot.
It happened toward the end of our time in Zinapécuaro that summer, toward the end of August.
I’ve got to get this picture, I thought. Can’t let this go by. We had been taking a leisurely walk through Zinapécuaro that late afternoon, and we had come upon some little kids sitting together on the side of the dusty street by a tree. By that time I had gotten used to always having the camera with me. It hung on my chest from its strap wrapped around my neck. As soon as I had seen these seven or eight children, I knew I had to take their picture.
The kids, nearly all little girls, none more than ten years old, were all sitting around one little girl holding a baby in her lap. This wasn’t unusual. We always saw young girls being in charge of and taking care of a baby sister or brother. Children of the poor had to grow up quickly. They grew up fast. They often had to care for a baby brother or sister as if they were the parent. The adult parents were too busy with work and the daily, unchanging, monotonous, struggle for survival.
I looked at my two companions, Judy and Jack. Judy was my age, a very open and loving young woman with straight brown hair and large, soft brown eyes. Like me, she had finished her first year at the University of California in Berkeley. Judy was always a welcoming, positive, accepting person. The guys in our group thought she was a person so full of love that it radiated out from her like an energy field. If I had known of them at that time, I would have thought of the flower children of the Hippie era of the mid to late 1960’s.
“Hola. Que tal?” She greeted the children with a smile, and sat with the little girl holding the baby. “Can I hold him?”
The little girl, without smiling, offered her baby brother to Judy and let her hold him for a little while.
I looked at Jack, my other companion that afternoon. Actually by this time that summer, a lot of the members of our group had already gone home. Jack, Judy and I had become good friends. Jack and I were always together, working each morning to try to finish the paving of our basketball court project.
“Buenas Tardes”, he said to the group. “My name is Juan.” Jack had become a popular person in the village. He had thin, red hair and a light red beard that were both curly. His blue eyes had a sparkle in them. He was average height, and thin, always quick to laugh. He was another person older than I. Jack taught English to a small group of young women. I used to tease him that they were all his girl friends.
“Oh no”, he would say laughing. “This is just part of our work. Anyway, I bet they’re much more interested in you.”
I was taller and more athletic looking than Jack, six feet tall and 195 pounds. I had thick dark hair and brown eyes.
Already a high school teacher in Vallejo, Jack was twenty-five. Like Joe Spagña before, Jack had become a role model and mentor for me.
Judy held the baby in both arms, rocking him a bit. She wiped his nose with a bandana she had taken out of her skirt pocket. She raised his head up with the crook of her arm to look at his eyes. With a clean part of the cloth, she began to dab at the edges of his eyes, trying to clean away some of the dirt and yellow puss that had dried at the corners. Moving her head from side to side she peered into his ears, then tried to wipe them a bit. She shot a brief glance at me, her eyes saddened as if they were those of an older woman who had suffered a great deal. Then, she returned her attention to the baby. She centered his head again in her arms, and kissed him on the forehead. Then she placed him back into the lap of the caretaking sister, smiled at the rest of the girls, and sat behind them. As the little girl was holding her little brother once more, I decided it was time to do my job.
“Me permiten sacar una foto?” I asked the group. Ernie had taught me from the beginning always ask permission before taking a picture in order to respect the privacy and dignity of the people.
Four of the girls smiled their assent, so I moved closer. The camera carried a roll of color film that afternoon, so I knew I could get a good image of this scene that could be used both as a print and a slide. Also, the telephoto lens was attached, so I could get a good close up without having to get on top of my subject. By that time, I knew how to operate the camera and its various settings.
As I began to look through the viewfinder to focus the camera, I took a closer look at the baby the little girl was holding in her lap. I saw more clearly what had first made me feel I had to have this picture. The baby’s body and clothes were caked with wet dust. His head rested down and toward his right on his shoulder and chest, hanging there as if dead weight. His stomach was distended, round like a melon. His short black hair was spotty and dirty. His upper lip was becoming covered by yellow snot again, oozing slowly down from his nose. Flies hovered unmolested around his eyes. Somewhere between eight to twelve months old, he was the too-personal, right-in-my-face reality of a statistic that shouted out the effect of poverty in developing nations. He would be one of the fifty percent of the children born in this village who would not reach their fifth birthday. I figured he wouldn’t even live much more than a few months. And worst of all, no matter what we thought, what we felt, what we might try, we couldn’t do anything about it.
I to focused on the baby’s face, and looked through the camera at the children surrounding him. His big sister, maybe five or six years old, looked off to one side, black hair, chubby cheeks. The expression on her face was at the same time both determined and sad, that of a much older person.
Two other little girls on each side of her were looking toward her and at each other. Their black hair framed their faces and hung down in front of them in braids. Their brown skin, high cheekbones and dark eyes were features of the P’urhepecha indigenous people of the region. They stared out at each other and at the baby with an expression that was vaguely familiar. Suddenly, as I fine- tuned the focus on their faces, I remembered what it was. They gazed in the same way, with the same look, that I had seen every day in the church at the top of the hill in the village. By far the largest building in the town, the church contained a striking picture of the Virgen de Guadalupe / Tonantzin to the left of the altar. Beneath it, the small flames of several votive candles in dark red glass vessels were always flickering. Every morning when we went to Mass, and any other time we visited the church, there were more villagers frequenting that side of the altar than any other part of church. It was like the faces of these two little girls were opposite sides of the face of the Virgen looking toward this child and his big sister from right and left. There to witness their suffering. There to console them. There to remind them that the ancient goddess of the earth would never abandon them, these children. Or any of us, in our need.
I slowly pressed down on the button of the camera to take the picture. I saw the lens opening dial through the viewfinder telling me the light setting was right. I pressed further, and the view went black for an instant, as always happens with a single lens reflex camera. In that very brief time of blackness I thought, I am going to live and that child is going to die only because of where each of us was born. Nothing more. I was no better a person than him, no more deserving. He had as much a right to a future as I did. The only difference was that by pure chance I was born into a privileged spot.
Staring into the blackness of the camera, I felt a slight shift in my being. Something changed. I felt dizzy for an instant, like the ground below me stirred. All of a sudden, all sounds seemed to cease, and I remembered how it was quiet just before the lightning struck the boulder near me a on the mountain the month before. I didn’t know what this feeling was. All I could sense was that something was different. Then, just as suddenly, the scene came back into focus. The picture had been taken.
Judy, Jack and I were slowly walking back along the road after we said good bye to the children. Each of us held our thoughts for a while. I looked down at the cobbled street. There was the smell of dirt, and the dried excrement of donkeys, cows and goats that had traveled the road before us. There was a long adobe wall along one side of the road, about six feet high in the center. The ends gradually tapered down from the center high point in an uneven way to about four feet tall at each end. Some of the individual rounded adobe bricks in the wall were outlined by dark shadows, like there were small caves in between them. Over the top, we could see the tassels and deep green upper leaves of the stalks of corn in the small field that spread out behind it and along its length. A small milpa that was probably the main staple to feed a large family. A soft breeze flowed around us and shuffled through the corn. The shadows lengthened as the sun fell closer to the western horizon.
After a little while, we stopped walking for a bit. Judy turned and looked at Jack and I.
“We’re coming back, aren’t we”, she said.
“We’re damn well going to”, Jack said.
“Yeah,” I was quiet.
I didn’t know it then but the image captured by that photo would never let me go.
“Ronnie, we’ve been thinking that someone should be in charge of taking pictures this summer”, Rick said has he approached me. Rick was the leader of our group of twenty-five students and young adults that summer in Zinapécuaro, México in 1962. He was an engineering major at Stanford, twenty-four years old and approaching graduation. A little overweight with a paunch, he had curly brown hair already balding on the top and starting to recede above his forehead. He wore large glasses that were always perched on a ridge in the middle of his pudgy nose like it had been carved there just to hold the glasses at the level he liked to wear them.
Ernie joined him, and said, “We decided you could do it”, as he began to fumble with the cloth sack he was carrying. Ernie was a twenty-five year old seminary student who had been studying for the priesthood near Sacramento. He was short and thin like a wire with light hair that flowed into a wispy beard. He was a quiet and serious person with soft blue eyes.
“Why me?”, I began to resist. It was early in June, just my second day after my arrival in the village. I was barely nineteen. A couple of minutes before I had just splattered a two-inch long light brown scorpion climbing up the middle of the wall next to my cot with the heel of my shoe. My mind was trying desperately to fly back home to San Francisco, like a jet plane screaming into the distance. I had been sitting on my cot trying to calm myself down by focusing on something else. I had just begun to put some of my things away when they had approached me.
“Don’t worry about it. Ernie will show you how to use the camera,” Rick said.
“But …” I looked up at each of them and took a long breath.
“We need an official photographer for the summer”, Rick continued. His voice became more serious, like a teacher giving instruction to a student. “We need to keep a good record of what our group does, our experiences, and accomplishments. For publicity back home. To raise funds next year. We’ve decided you’re going to do it.” He smiled and turned slowly to walk away.
“This is the camera”, Ernie said. He sat down on my cot, and motioned for me to come closer to him. I sat at his side. He opened the dark cloth sack he had been holding, and pulled out a black Nikon 35 millimeter single lens reflex camera. He took it with both hands, and passed it to me like it was a precious jeweled gold case. I held it in my hands, felt its weight, and looked at the dials and levers.
As I was examining it, Ernie continued, “There’s a regular 35mm lens on it now, and we’ve also got this telephoto lens.” He carefully took the longer telephoto lens out of its small carrying case like it was a fragile piece of crystal glass, and, holding it with two hands, gave it to me.
I held the camera and lens in my lap, and began to try to figure how to use the focus, F stops, and shutter speeds. Here I was, one of the youngest members of the group. I was eager to fit in, to be useful and accepted, like a teenager on a first date. This mysterious camera with all of its dials and levers made me feel nervous. I liked the idea of being given an important job, but I didn’t know all the implications. What if I didn’t do it right? Would it be like fumbling the football in an important game in high school? I didn’t want to have that desperate feeling again.
Ernie briefly showed me how to operate the camera, and then emptied the cloth sack onto the cot in the space between us. There were several rolls of film, about half black and white and half color. Some rolls were regular speed daylight film, and others were fast film that didn’t require as much light. “You can develop a roll or two here in the village to check out your work, but you should develop the rest of the film back home because it will be less expensive there.” That was Ernie’s final instruction. He smiled at me, and went into the next room.
I sat on my cot fumbling with the camera, and aimed at several items in the room to get a feel for the focus and lens settings. The little yellow boxes the film came in instructed me on the different lens openings and shutter speeds determined by whether the picture was in full sun, cloudy, or full shade. There was no flash attachment, so it looked like all my work would have to be outdoors in the daytime when there was enough light. I was excited to have this magic black box to play with, but I also felt some stress. I felt like I had to be constantly alert to the opportunities to take good pictures. Ones that told the story of who we were, and what we were doing there that summer in Mexico. I couldn’t miss photographing some important scene. You didn’t get a second chance, because this stuff was all live action. I had to be like a crack newspaper photographer, I thought, always in the right place at the right time, always prepared to frame the important shot.
It happened toward the end of our time in Zinapécuaro that summer, toward the end of August.
I’ve got to get this picture, I thought. Can’t let this go by. We had been taking a leisurely walk through Zinapécuaro that late afternoon, and we had come upon some little kids sitting together on the side of the dusty street by a tree. By that time I had gotten used to always having the camera with me. It hung on my chest from its strap wrapped around my neck. As soon as I had seen these seven or eight children, I knew I had to take their picture.
The kids, nearly all little girls, none more than ten years old, were all sitting around one little girl holding a baby in her lap. This wasn’t unusual. We always saw young girls being in charge of and taking care of a baby sister or brother. Children of the poor had to grow up quickly. They grew up fast. They often had to care for a baby brother or sister as if they were the parent. The adult parents were too busy with work and the daily, unchanging, monotonous, struggle for survival.
I looked at my two companions, Judy and Jack. Judy was my age, a very open and loving young woman with straight brown hair and large, soft brown eyes. Like me, she had finished her first year at the University of California in Berkeley. Judy was always a welcoming, positive, accepting person. The guys in our group thought she was a person so full of love that it radiated out from her like an energy field. If I had known of them at that time, I would have thought of the flower children of the Hippie era of the mid to late 1960’s.
“Hola. Que tal?” She greeted the children with a smile, and sat with the little girl holding the baby. “Can I hold him?”
The little girl, without smiling, offered her baby brother to Judy and let her hold him for a little while.
I looked at Jack, my other companion that afternoon. Actually by this time that summer, a lot of the members of our group had already gone home. Jack, Judy and I had become good friends. Jack and I were always together, working each morning to try to finish the paving of our basketball court project.
“Buenas Tardes”, he said to the group. “My name is Juan.” Jack had become a popular person in the village. He had thin, red hair and a light red beard that were both curly. His blue eyes had a sparkle in them. He was average height, and thin, always quick to laugh. He was another person older than I. Jack taught English to a small group of young women. I used to tease him that they were all his girl friends.
“Oh no”, he would say laughing. “This is just part of our work. Anyway, I bet they’re much more interested in you.”
I was taller and more athletic looking than Jack, six feet tall and 195 pounds. I had thick dark hair and brown eyes.
Already a high school teacher in Vallejo, Jack was twenty-five. Like Joe Spagña before, Jack had become a role model and mentor for me.
Judy held the baby in both arms, rocking him a bit. She wiped his nose with a bandana she had taken out of her skirt pocket. She raised his head up with the crook of her arm to look at his eyes. With a clean part of the cloth, she began to dab at the edges of his eyes, trying to clean away some of the dirt and yellow puss that had dried at the corners. Moving her head from side to side she peered into his ears, then tried to wipe them a bit. She shot a brief glance at me, her eyes saddened as if they were those of an older woman who had suffered a great deal. Then, she returned her attention to the baby. She centered his head again in her arms, and kissed him on the forehead. Then she placed him back into the lap of the caretaking sister, smiled at the rest of the girls, and sat behind them. As the little girl was holding her little brother once more, I decided it was time to do my job.
“Me permiten sacar una foto?” I asked the group. Ernie had taught me from the beginning always ask permission before taking a picture in order to respect the privacy and dignity of the people.
Four of the girls smiled their assent, so I moved closer. The camera carried a roll of color film that afternoon, so I knew I could get a good image of this scene that could be used both as a print and a slide. Also, the telephoto lens was attached, so I could get a good close up without having to get on top of my subject. By that time, I knew how to operate the camera and its various settings.
As I began to look through the viewfinder to focus the camera, I took a closer look at the baby the little girl was holding in her lap. I saw more clearly what had first made me feel I had to have this picture. The baby’s body and clothes were caked with wet dust. His head rested down and toward his right on his shoulder and chest, hanging there as if dead weight. His stomach was distended, round like a melon. His short black hair was spotty and dirty. His upper lip was becoming covered by yellow snot again, oozing slowly down from his nose. Flies hovered unmolested around his eyes. Somewhere between eight to twelve months old, he was the too-personal, right-in-my-face reality of a statistic that shouted out the effect of poverty in developing nations. He would be one of the fifty percent of the children born in this village who would not reach their fifth birthday. I figured he wouldn’t even live much more than a few months. And worst of all, no matter what we thought, what we felt, what we might try, we couldn’t do anything about it.
I to focused on the baby’s face, and looked through the camera at the children surrounding him. His big sister, maybe five or six years old, looked off to one side, black hair, chubby cheeks. The expression on her face was at the same time both determined and sad, that of a much older person.
Two other little girls on each side of her were looking toward her and at each other. Their black hair framed their faces and hung down in front of them in braids. Their brown skin, high cheekbones and dark eyes were features of the P’urhepecha indigenous people of the region. They stared out at each other and at the baby with an expression that was vaguely familiar. Suddenly, as I fine- tuned the focus on their faces, I remembered what it was. They gazed in the same way, with the same look, that I had seen every day in the church at the top of the hill in the village. By far the largest building in the town, the church contained a striking picture of the Virgen de Guadalupe / Tonantzin to the left of the altar. Beneath it, the small flames of several votive candles in dark red glass vessels were always flickering. Every morning when we went to Mass, and any other time we visited the church, there were more villagers frequenting that side of the altar than any other part of church. It was like the faces of these two little girls were opposite sides of the face of the Virgen looking toward this child and his big sister from right and left. There to witness their suffering. There to console them. There to remind them that the ancient goddess of the earth would never abandon them, these children. Or any of us, in our need.
I slowly pressed down on the button of the camera to take the picture. I saw the lens opening dial through the viewfinder telling me the light setting was right. I pressed further, and the view went black for an instant, as always happens with a single lens reflex camera. In that very brief time of blackness I thought, I am going to live and that child is going to die only because of where each of us was born. Nothing more. I was no better a person than him, no more deserving. He had as much a right to a future as I did. The only difference was that by pure chance I was born into a privileged spot.
Staring into the blackness of the camera, I felt a slight shift in my being. Something changed. I felt dizzy for an instant, like the ground below me stirred. All of a sudden, all sounds seemed to cease, and I remembered how it was quiet just before the lightning struck the boulder near me a on the mountain the month before. I didn’t know what this feeling was. All I could sense was that something was different. Then, just as suddenly, the scene came back into focus. The picture had been taken.
Judy, Jack and I were slowly walking back along the road after we said good bye to the children. Each of us held our thoughts for a while. I looked down at the cobbled street. There was the smell of dirt, and the dried excrement of donkeys, cows and goats that had traveled the road before us. There was a long adobe wall along one side of the road, about six feet high in the center. The ends gradually tapered down from the center high point in an uneven way to about four feet tall at each end. Some of the individual rounded adobe bricks in the wall were outlined by dark shadows, like there were small caves in between them. Over the top, we could see the tassels and deep green upper leaves of the stalks of corn in the small field that spread out behind it and along its length. A small milpa that was probably the main staple to feed a large family. A soft breeze flowed around us and shuffled through the corn. The shadows lengthened as the sun fell closer to the western horizon.
After a little while, we stopped walking for a bit. Judy turned and looked at Jack and I.
“We’re coming back, aren’t we”, she said.
“We’re damn well going to”, Jack said.
“Yeah,” I was quiet.
I didn’t know it then but the image captured by that photo would never let me go.