This one guy, every couple weeks it’s these amazing places you can’t even believe, mountains and him standing in water or strung up on a cliff and hanging from ropes. He’ll bring in ten or twenty rolls of film at a time, and it’s gotten so that I look forward to seeing him come through the door. You see the whole world, is how my boss put it when he was training me in. This job is a privilege, he’d say. These people are trusting us with their most private moments.
I’ve always been one of those guys who isn’t much for going places –going places, actually, doesn’t bother me; it’s the being there that I have a problem with. But it is interesting for me to see these other places and to imagine, you know, my own versions of the stories these pictures struggle to tell. One time this guy brought in a roll of film and it was nothing but pictures of dead cows –seven dead cows sprawled around in the dirt. There wasn’t a single person in any of the photos, just the dead cows, and somebody had taken pink paint and outlined their bodies in the dirt, just like they’d been murdered in the movies. And of course you get the pictures of women in bathing suits, and people on the toilet –I’ve seen hundreds of those– and occasionally some actual bare breasts, although we’re not supposed to develop anything that’s “too far over the line,” as my boss says. But I have to admit that in five years we’ve never refused to process a single roll of film that I’m aware of.
My own family never took photographs. I don’t think I ever saw a camera in either of my parents’ hands. These people would come around at school to take photos of the students and I remember bringing home a little packet of those every year but I’m not even sure what my mother would do with them. They didn’t go up on the refrigerator like they did at other kids’ houses, I know that much. My mother didn’t put anything on the refrigerator.
I’m sure people would be horrified to think that we look through their photos, but they must know. It’s human nature, my boss says. I think one thing that happens so often is that people will find an old roll of film still in a camera or laying around the house somewhere –in a kitchen drawer or in the glove compartment of their car– and they’ll have completely forgotten what’s on there and curiosity gets the best of them so they bring them in to be developed. They bring them in because they want to know, and I think that’s when you get some surprises.
People always ask, what’s the strangest thing you’ve ever seen looking at all these photos day after day? And, to be honest with you, that’s not an easy question to answer. I’ve seen so many strange and I guess disturbing things mixed in with the birthday parties and the picnics and parades. More than one person with a gun in their mouth. A dead dog laid out on a kitchen table with a flower in its teeth. This one guy we called the Sign Man, who would take photographs of himself holding hand-lettered signs that said things like, “Tammi, I am not a part of your experiment anymore,” or “I am sick and tired of being taken apart with nothing to show for it.” Unsurprisingly, the Sign Man eventually turned in a roll of film with a photo of himself with a gun in his mouth.
I have seen so many babies being born that it is no longer strange. I have seen a hundred families or more standing in front of Mount Rushmore or shaking Mickey Mouse’s hand. Young couples in formal wear, of course, getting ready to go to a dance or get married. Little children crouched next to their beds with folded hands, saying their prayers. People in coffins and carnival rides and tombstones. Christmas trees, obviously, and kids pointing guns at the camera.
People also take a lot of pictures of food, color photos of turkeys and hams. You see everything, really, pretty much anything you could imagine.
Personally, I like the stuff in the margins, the mistakes and unintentional shots that show what goes on outside the world of what people think of as a picture. I like to study the people who are just standing in the background, looking puzzled and unaware. I couldn’t tell you, really, what staring into those pictures makes me feel. Captured, sort of, I guess, the way I feel when I stand far enough outside myself sometimes that I can see how small I am.
It’s sad when people wish, my mother always said. She’d say, You pray that when you get to a ripe old age you can look back and count the number of really sad days on one hand. Maybe that’s why she didn’t like photos around, because they were like reminders of wishes that never quite managed to turn out like you hoped or expected.
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