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One Thing at a Time

How Becoming a Photographer (Almost) Stopped Me Being a Novelist

I’d make him a writer, I decided. He would live by the sea, somewhere warm. On an island, perhaps. His daughters would return to his sea-bound home after his death. The story of their lives would emerge in pieces, shot through with their memories of this man they’d loved and hated.

A week in to my new book, I changed my mind. How could I have thought that writing about writing was a good idea? The difficulties of producing a second novel are well-known, and I decided, on this question of my anti-hero’s profession, to give myself a break.

I knew he had to be a creative artist of some kind, though. Searching for another medium, I considered and set aside painting, then sculpting, then music. At a loss, I thought through my half-formed ideas for the novel again.

I wanted my tale to be about light, and shadow, and things reflected on water. About swimming, and immersion, and the way images and character echo across the generations of a family. Mine would be a story of likenesses, of rebirths, of imprints, and the development of a child’s identity within a family unit. It was plain as day: my man would have to be a photographer, and one of the old school.

There was a hitch: beyond a passing familiarity with that Robert Doisneau kiss, which had been plastered on the walls of my boarding-school dormitories, I hadn’t the slightest shred of knowledge about darkroom photography.

What I did have, though, was time, access to a very good library, and a ready supply of friends with varying degrees of expertise in the field.

I steered clear of all the novels already out there about photographers, and instead turned to books about the history and the idea of photography. Susan Sontag and John Berger were two of my guides, and Mary Warner Marien’s Photography: A Cultural History, my doorstopper bedfellow. I paced the halls of every exhibition I could find: in New York, I lingered at MoMA, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. In London, both Tates (again and again), the National Portrait Gallery and the Science Museum. When a return visit to New York threw up Harry Callahan, I was hooked on his every shot. Here, in repeated images of his wife, Eleanor, and their tiny daughter, Barbara, I had the beginnings of a narrative: a shutter, closing on a family.

Always different, always the same, Callahan’s works together formed a graphic novel. The plot was simple: a love affair which turned into a marriage, then a family. I found his pictures of his wife’s body (distant and close, naked and clothed) beautiful, but at the same time thought the line they trod between the intimate and the intrusive to be a fine one, and sometimes disturbingly so. What had it been like for Eleanor, I wondered, to wake and find his lens above her face, or to see it almost touching her pregnant belly?

On my last visit to the Met before flying home, I happened by chance on a large-scale photograph of a man in Edwardian dress, his arms folded lightly on his chest, and his forehead pierced by a bullet hole. I had no idea how, exactly, but I knew that that image would find its way into my story.

Edward Steichen’s work also features heavily in my memory of that second trip. At home again, I had looked online and found his Woodbury Soap ad. His shot of a naked woman, reaching over her own back to wash herself, nudged my novel forward: pieces of the jigsaw were falling into place.

By the close of those preliminary stages of looking and reading I’d become sure of the mood I wanted to create, and had acquired an understanding of the history of photography from its beginnings. So far, so good. I had a title, Silver and Salt, and a name for my photographer: Max Hollingbourne. But I realised that if I wanted to write about Max’s craft, I’d have to go several steps further. I’d have to open the door to his darkroom, and find out how it was done.

I approached an old friend, Florence Dollé, who had worked as a professional darkroom photographer. I asked to become her apprentice, and bought a three-month membership of a shared darkroom near her home in East London. Florence took me to specialist shops and we stocked up on supplies. I made notes about everything she bought, everything she rejected, and everything she said. When she explained how she worked in her own darkroom, I drew diagrams and committed her rules to memory. She gave me a reading list. Rather than Berger and Sontag, the authors were practitioners, and the books manuals, not monographs.

I’d known Florence for several years, and though I’d seen her exhibitions, and bought some of her work, I’d never witnessed her making it. We agreed the following terms. The darkroom I’d rented for the three months would be hers to use at all times of the day and night. I could visit when I wanted, taking notes, and asking questions.

Finally, one May afternoon, we were in. My writer’s budget meant I’d had to scour the market for an affordable workspace. Tucked away in premises near Bethnal Green, belonging to an artists’ collective, the one I’d found could at best be described as idiosyncratic, and at worst, life-threatening.

It had formerly been a bathroom, and a small one at that. Crouched on an upturned box by a bathtub, over which a drop-down panel made from an old door acted as a shelf for the developing trays, I watched, enthralled. The light became red, and ghostly images emerged as if from nowhere. I covered the pages of my notebook, becoming ever more beholden to this sorcerer decoding the mysteries of her art.

Partway through my apprenticeship, an incident took place which nearly derailed not just Silver and Salt, but any kind of writing at all, ever again.

It was a few weeks in, after a stint when I’d been visiting every day and making notes on the progress of a particular series of prints. To my surprise, Florence beckoned me over to the enlarger. I watched her load up a negative. She told me to put down my notebook and pencil. Then she asked me to place my hands on the enlarger’s dials. Silencing my protestations (‘I don’t know how to do it, I’ll get it wrong, I’ll waste your precious photographic paper, bought at great expense, I’m here to take notes, not to develop prints!’), she flicked the switch.

What happened next was one of the most striking experiences of my life. As the process began and my hands moved on the dials, I felt as though I was standing at the helm of a ship. We were making a test strip. I moved the paper over, and again, counting out the seconds. An actual shiver passed up my spine, and a kind of current rushed down my arms and through my fingertips.

These short-term effects were startling. All my writing life, it seemed, I had been only an observer. I’d taken events I’d witnessed, or imagined, then rearranged them into stories. I’d devoted myself to the art of making things up.

Now, though, I was creating something tangible. Over the hours that followed, under Florence’s tutelage, I developed contact sheets, and test strips. Making as many mistakes as I made prints, I apologised, and said I was ready to stop. Florence insisted I continue, though: mistakes were part of the process. Without them, nothing would be learned. I did what she’d told me to do, excited and inspired. That evening, as I packed up and left, I decided to tackle a new scene as soon as possible.

I walked home with an awareness that something significant had occurred. By accepting Florence’s invitation to participate, rather than watch, I had allowed her to shift my perspective. What I hadn’t bargained for, though, was what would happen the next day, when, back in my study, I sat down to write a new chapter.

Initially, I had no idea anything was wrong. I began my work as I usually did: sharpening five pencils, I flicked through my transcriptions book and read a few perfect sentences by writers I admired. I watched Prince sing ‘Alphabet St.’ on YouTube, then I set my timer for my writing session, and focused.

Nothing came.

This was a new situation for me. It was, in fact, the first time it had ever happened. I stared into space, disbelieving, and willed an opening line to come. Still nothing. It was then that I understood. In that moment of transition the previous day, when Florence had handed me the controls and said, ‘Now you do it’, something else had happened, something much deeper than I’d realised. By altering my role from writer to photographer, and by removing myself from the realm of theory and placing myself, instead, firmly in the actual, I had stopped being a novelist.

The writer’s block lasted only a few days, but the episode had been alarming.

It’s a well-documented thing, the position of writer as passive observer, writer as outsider, writer as onlooker. The work of a darkroom photographer, on the other hand, certainly of the sort done by my Max Hollingbourne, war photographer turned society portraitist, is physically immersive, in a way that writing never is.

There are parallels, though. A photographer is by definition always watching, or, rather, always looking on. In the sort of single-scene short fiction I sometimes write, I will take a close-up, and use a film with a much higher speed than one I’d use for a novel. And with those larger-scale narratives, it’s long exposures all the way, so that things sometimesemerge in the final print I’d no idea would be there when I began.

When I’m writing, I can take my time. Of course there are days when ideas come quickly, and I capture them immediately. When I started out, that seemed to be the only way to work: I had to seize the image, and note the scene, or risk losing it forever.

Now, years on, I’ve learned not to panic-write. Once I’ve seen something remarkable, or heard a conversation that’s made an impression, I can rely on the fact that when I later want to recall it, all I have to do is close my eyes and think back. By hitting ‘rewind’, then ‘play’, on my memory, I can watch the events unfold again.

Did I think about switching medium, in that week of non-writing that followed my spell at the enlarger? I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t, for one moment, thought of laying down my pencils and taking up photography. It was nothing more than a fleeting thought, though, gone as soon as it had come. My darkroom tutor had honed her craft since childhood. I’d been writing stories, I realised, for as long as she’d been making photographs. Like her, I’d become so absorbed in my chosen medium, I’d never let it go.

Now, if I reflect on what happened that week, I think of it as a kind of an excitement-overload: my writer’s mind, being unable to sustain the dual roles of observer and actor, had simply short-circuited.

Preparing this talk, I came across a fragment I’d transcribed into my research notebook. Marc-Antoine Gaudin, a maker of optical instruments, writing almost 200 years ago, expresses better than I can myself the intensity of what I felt. I’ll finish with his words, rather than my own.

Speaking of the excitement following the first public demonstration of Daguerre’s image-making process, at the joint meeting of the Academy of Science and the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris on August 19, 1839, he said this:

We all felt an extraordinary emotion and unknown sensations… Everyone wanted to copy the view offered by his window, and very happy was he who at first attempt obtained a silhouette of roofs against the sky: he was in ecstasies over the stove-pipes; he did not cease to count the tiles on the roofs and the bricks of the chimneys; he was astonished to see the cement between each brick; in a word, the poorest picture caused him unutterable joy, inasmuch as the process was then new and appeared deservedly marvellous.

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