The Shadow Catcher

You don’t want to be alone in a dark alley with a woman like this and it both frightens and enlightens me to think I may have one of her vintage enlivening my lineage but what captures my imagination most about her and her type of village crone is their ownership, their absolute and resolute assurance that they own the only info, that they’re in the know not only about which village neighbors have been feuding for a hundred years or how to extract oil from olives but also about what Brad Pitt was thinking when he left his wife. The scary thing about this woman and others who talk about celebrities as if they know them personally is that the exercise squanders civic involvement. Unlike voting in a real election, voting in a People poll accomplishes absolutely nothing, but we’re still encouraged to believe in celebrities as modern mythic gods. Modern-day heroic fallacies. Zeus screwing around behind Hera’s back. Icarus getting high on too much ego. Innocent Ledas losing their cherries on the casting couch.

I place my order, pay and am given a white plastic tipi-shaped marker with a number on it. I take it to a booth in the front room in the corner under the poster of Anthony Quinn as Zorba. Behind me the Brentwood kids are still debating the relative merits of Angelina Jolie versus Chennifer, and to hear them talk, you’d think they are revealing secrets about members of their coterie and I start to wonder how this appropriation propagates itself. They sound as if they believe they know these distant entities, these stars, these misnamed goddesses. As if they and the celebrity luminaries were down. Me an’ Angelina. Brad an’ me an’ me an’ Brad, and to that extent, celebrity is a form of identity appropriation, identity theft, not unlike the man in the hospital in Las Vegas who’s appropriated the identity of my dead father.

But, no: a celebrity relinquishes exclusive ownship of his or her own life.

A celebrity doesn’t steal a life, she or he gives her or his life away.

To us average schmoes.

To the great unknowables, the undercelebrated me’s and you’s of the undercelebrated ordinary world.

And that’s one thing for which I applaud my Mr. Curtis — for raising uncelebrated Indian faces to an iconic status.

We may never know these Indians’ names nor how they lived nor whom they loved, but we will know their faces.

Curtis knew his craft, he knew how to commemorate a face, how to make it memorable with shadow, light and shallow focus, because by the time he started driving to the reservations he was a celebrated studio photographer in Seattle who had captured national attention when Theodore Roosevelt asked him to photograph his daughter Alice’s wedding at the White House.

It was the party of the year, that wedding, and Alice Roosevelt was as appropriated and oohed and aahed over as any 21st-century media celebrity. Songs were written about her, a color was named for her and magazines sold out overnight every time Alice graced the cover. The public clamor for details of the wedding — details of the dress, the cake, the guest list — was so distracting from the business of running the country that Roosevelt’s personal secretary issued a formal statement stating that the press was not welcome on the wedding day and that the only wedding photographs that would be made available to the nation’s newspapers and magazines would be those taken by the official wedding photographer who had been chosen expressly by the President, himself.

EDWARD S. CURTIS.

In with The Man.

And one of the things that fascinates me about the life stories of so-called self-made people is how they get from there to there, how one gets born into obscurity and day-to-day economic strain and ends up telling Mr. President smile. Say cheese.

If you look carefully at the portrait that was the official White House release of that happy day, it’s really not a great portrait at all, as a window into the souls of the bride, her shell-shocked-looking groom and her famously boisterous father. Congressman Nicholas Longworth, the groom, poor man, seems to be artificially propped up, barely touching his bride, clutching his gloves in one hand, his glassy expression frozen by the apparent thought, Here I am with this stranger, her acre of dress and The President.

Roosevelt, on the opposite side of the bride, is visibly leaning away.

In the center, Alice plays a subordinate role to the deluge of fabric that swamps more than half of the frame, and the reason I’m so fond of this picture by Curtis is that this is, first and foremost, a picture of something I love, a picture of ATRAIN, Alice’s wedding gown train mounded like an elaborate meringue, its mass diminishing, like real railroad tracks, from the foreground into a distant focal point.