A CERTAIN RATIO

THE TREES

PAS DE DEUX

LENS MAN

On any given afternoon or evening when I’d find myself in Hell’s Kitchen for a meal or post performance from some nearby theater, I’d inevitably find myself at this local espresso joint on 9th Avenue. There’s nothing particularly special about it, no real sense of décor or ambience, the furniture is granny bad, the art is wallpaper, the pastries are boring, yet the coffee bears a reasonable facsimile to something palatable and there’s nothing corporate about it, so they get my business sometimes, even if I feel like I should be making sock monkeys or popsicle stick birdhouses whenever I sit down in there.

After a few times coming to The Café That Shall Remain Unnamed, I began to notice a guy who oddly enough was there every time I was, usually at the counter facing the front window and sidewalk, or one of the tall tables near the back wall not far from the entrance. I got it pretty quick this wasn’t some amazing set of coincidences but that he was perpetually there, enough so that I told Cara about him and if she was with me, we’d stop in and make some sort of pointless bet whether he was there or not because 99 percent of the time he always was. In one of those locations, inevitably assuming the same positions. Always fiddling with a laptop, always working on some website or looking at photographs in some preview application. More often than not he was talking with a young woman in her 20s who (and I’m being on the conservative side) was easily half his age. When he wasn’t chatting these pretty young clients or clients-to-be up, he was most certainly checking out the tail walking by like he had a camera mounted to the end of his face.

I figured him out pretty quick, a certain kind of commercial photographer, the familiar auteur who shoots glossy head shots for local talent, and whether they’re young or in their late 40s or early 50s like this guy, they’re usually single, lonely, friendly, affable, knowledgeable and use their profession any chance they get to be near young, attractive women, and with persistence, get them into the studio with the sole intent of getting them photographed. It’s some kind of weird semblance of possession that makes me think the denizens of the Solomon Islands had it right to refuse photography to protect their souls when anthropologists visited.

As an Art Director, I’d met my share of photographers over the years, and was always amazed in a way at the brazen methods of seduction almost all of them had mastered. Telling enough impressionable young women, or men, how beautiful they are with enough convincing art speak never failed at one point or another in building up some prized volume of snapshots, carefully bound and brought out, proudly displayed to me as the trophied results of persistence: nude, nubile things with perfect skin and teeth, each posing with the single unified belief that whatever they were doing with their clothes off in this person’s studio, in front of that camera, was in some way for the ultimate benefit of their career, one that seemed to need all the help it could get. Truth is a lot of them didn’t even need a career to advance, it’s a societal norm these days that if you put a lens of any kind in someone’s face there’s a good chance you can get most of them to do anything in front of it. It works both ways.

There must be hundreds of thousands of these kind of artifacts going back eons, these secret and not-so-secret collections. But honestly, who as an artist hasn’t indulged the benefit of the craft. I enjoy drawing a nude model as much as anyone, the luxury of the body natural is one of the beautiful benefits of the artistic pursuit. I have images on paper rendered in charcoal and lead, others have film.

But that’s all besides the point, for the strangest thing was one night coming home on the A train, and getting off at my usual 181st station stop, and walking out into the night and heading home, I saw someone walking nearby on the other side of the street, someone I recognized. A quick glanced told me it was true, it was him, all the way from Hell’s Kitchen to Washington Heights where he must lives a well. A strange coincidence.

I’ve seen him again after that, a regular in my scenes, at that cafe and in my neighborhood, where’s he coming home alone, toting a case on wheels, something big enough for a camera or computer.