Pow!
The murals hit me hard. First came terror, then awe. It was only after I’d taken them in that I began to feel their immense power.
‘The Locust Street Murals,’ as we later called them, covered all four walls of that little room, and the strange menacing figures all seemed to be staring at me, meeting my eyes with theirs, following me as I turned from one to the next. Clearly, they told some kind of story. I had no idea what the story was, but from the first I knew I had to uncover it. I was equally determined to discover who had told this story, the name of the artist who’d painted these figures.
I’d been photographing the interiors of abandoned houses for a couple of years, sneaking in at night, looking around, finding something interesting and poignant, then setting up my camera and using my miner’s headlamp to paint it with light. These long slow exposures were parts of a project I called Leavings: The Things They Left Behind, which I later hoped to assemble for exhibition, and, if the images were strong enough, publish together as a book.
There were so many abandoned houses in the city that the project took on a boundless quality. My close friend, Hannah, after looking at a huge number of my images, kindly suggested that perhaps it was time for me to stop. ‘You may have a problem with repetition,’ she told me. ‘You need to decide when you’ve made your point.’
She was right: I was repeating myself. But I wasn’t ready to call a halt. There was something missing, I told her, something I was after, and I didn’t want to stop until I found it. I shrugged when she asked me what this something was. ‘I wish I knew,’ I said.
Whenever I entered a house, I had a pretty good idea what I was looking for: the detritus folks abandon when they hurriedly leave a place – upended furniture, unwashed dishes, gunked-up cooking equipment, torn bedding, unlaundered clothes, the scattered food containers out of which they ate their final at-home meal. I often found broken toys, discarded school books, crumpled newspapers open to the Help Wanted pages. But I was after the unusual object that spoke of the anguish of people who had left in a rush because their mortgage was underwater or they couldn’t make rent: a final eviction notice, heap of unpaid bills, dented old tuba wrapped in soiled high-school band uniform, perhaps a treasured set of drums that unhappily hadn’t made it into the family car.
Best of all, I’d discover oddities, the images of which I treasured most because they seemed so telling – a painting on black velvet of a movie star hanging crooked on a wall, a ragged stuffed donkey tucked neatly by a child into a crib. In one house I came upon a rusted gynecological examination table with stirrups, suggesting the place had been an unlicensed abortion clinic. In another I slipped on the scattered beads of a rosary, perhaps ripped apart in despair. And, too often, I found messages of anger and contempt directed at mortgage lenders and landlords: smashed toilets, paint flung at walls, pet excrement and opened cans of food deliberately set out to attract vermin and flies.
Always I’d ask myself: What went wrong in this house? Who used to live here? What made them leave? It was a melancholy quest I was on.
I harbored the notion (perhaps naïve) that such abandoned objects told stories of the people who had left, their anger, despair, feelings of having been beaten down by life. And when I photographed them, I didn’t try to aestheticize the way some photographers do when they shoot pictures of decayed buildings, reveling in mold and peeling paint. I did not, I told my students and colleagues, view myself as that kind of artist. I’m a documentarian, I told them, using still lives to tell stories of broken hardscrabble lives, and, by extension, the breakdown of our rust-belt town, Calista.
As always, we’d chosen the house carefully. Tally, my former student at Calista Art Institute, had scouted it out.
‘There’s this boarded-up gothic place standing apart on Locust,’ he told me as we lunched together in the cafeteria at CAI. He passed me his cell phone. I liked what I saw. There was a small square gazebo perched on top, with a little railing around it, like a widow’s walk on a coastal house, except there was no coast in sight.
‘Looks untouched,’ Tally told me. ‘Most of the places around have been torn down. I thought you’d like the turret.’
‘I do,’ I told him. ‘I also like that it’s on Locust. Is there a way in?’
‘Yeah, there’s a way,’ he said.
We went to see it on a warm June afternoon. I knew the area, an eclectic neighborhood of houses in different styles, most set far back from the street. Many of the abandoned ones had been bulldozed in accordance with the city’s Tear Down the Blight program. There’d been talk of giving the land beneath these tear-downs to local residents for use as community gardens. I’d yet to see one. I’d only found broken foundations, piles of rubble and empty bramble-choked fields.
Locust Street fascinated me. The old Kenyon-Garfield Observatory stood on a rise at one end surmounted by the slotted dome that had once housed its fine Schmidt telescope. It was an anomaly in the neighborhood, a reminder of better days. The telescope had been relocated years before. The observatory building, long abandoned by Calista State University, had so far escaped local vandals due to a high-security fence and live-in watchman.
There were the two famous crime scenes near the other end of Locust that gave the street its notoriety: a house in which a middle-aged couple had imprisoned a young Latina for nearly a decade, and a murder venue just a block away to which a skinhead serial killer had lured black prostitutes for slaughter.
The imprisoned woman had been abducted on her way to school, then chained up in the attic to be used as a sex slave. As for the serial killer, when he was finally caught, the cops started digging around his place. They found four bodies buried in the crawlspace and seven more in shallow graves in the backyard. After that, TV anchors and reporters at local stations referred to Locust as ‘Street of Horror.’
Tally was right. The gothic place did seem different from its neighbors, and the turret on top gave it the look of a classic haunted house. There were even decorative spikes protruding from the roof of the gazebo like a structure in a macabre cartoon by Charles Addams.
We slowed down as we passed, circled the block, then passed it slowly again.
‘Best not to hang around and show interest,’ Tally said as he picked up speed.
He had, he told me, checked it out three nights in a row.
‘No one’s lived there in years. Water, electric and gas all turned off. It’s not considered abandoned ’cause the taxes are paid up. There’re loose boards on a cellar window round back. Wouldn’t be hard to jimmy,’ he said.
‘How do you know about the taxes?’
He glanced at me. ‘Hall of Records. You know I always check, Jase. Listed to a corporation with an address on Doverland. I checked it out. Turned out to be a CPA’s office in a shopping strip.’
‘So somebody’s paying taxes, but there’re no utilities. What makes you so sure it hasn’t been touched?’
Tally shrugged. ‘Just a feeling. Maybe someone’s been in there once or twice, but there’re no signs it’s been used as a crack house or occupied by homeless.’ He glanced at me. ‘Something about it, isn’t there?’ He stopped the car in front of the observatory. ‘An aura. Like Stay outta here! We mean it! And for some reason the locals are respecting that.’
‘I think you’re being a little mystical,’ I told him.
He shook his head. ‘Maybe something spooky happened there once and people don’t wanna mess around in it. Anyway, there’s no one living near. A patrol car passes around midnight. Otherwise, it’s real quiet. I spent a couple of hours in the bushes behind. Parked here then walked back. Didn’t see a soul.’ He paused, gestured toward the observatory dome. ‘No moon tomorrow night. What’d you think?’
I wasn’t sure. Going in through a cellar window could be risky if that was also the only way out. What if Tally was wrong and I encountered someone inside – crack user, copper thief, maniac with a vicious dog? Tally waiting outside would have my back; we’d be in contact texting back and forth … but still …
‘Could attract attention if my lighting shows through the boards.’
‘Boarding looks tight,’ he said.
I thought about it. ‘Let’s try tomorrow.’
He grinned. ‘Yeah, I kinda thought you’d go for it.’
We’d been working together on Leavings since I conceived the project, an odd pair of urban explorers, as we liked to describe ourselves: me, the white late-forties former conflict photographer, now instructor in photography at CAI, and Tally, my talented twenty-something former student, eking out a living as a wedding photographer in the African American community.
We’d worked out a partnership: I’d take the pictures; Tally would handle scouting, protection and transport. His battered Honda ran well and didn’t stand out in poor neighborhoods. We’d split anything we made from print sales or a book, but money wouldn’t be the point. We both loved the combination of photography and risk, plus Tally had special feelings for his home town. ‘It’s about the busted American Dream here, isn’t it?’ he asked when I first proposed the project. Yeah, that’s what it’ll be about, I told him, adding that it was great that he got it right away. ‘I know why you want to do this, Jase. You need the rush,’ Tally said. I was glad he got that too.
I wasn’t inside a couple of minutes when I sensed this house was different. Soon as I inspected the main floor I understood this wasn’t a typical residence. The dining table was long enough to accommodate more than a dozen people, and I found a standing gong in the kitchen. Could be a dinner bell, I thought, suggesting a lot of people had once lived there.
I liked houses where it turned out there’d been a lot more going on inside than you could guess from the exterior. Perhaps this one had been an unlicensed boarding house, or group home for the mentally handicapped.
The place was moderately ratty. There were the usual signs of disuse and decay – cobwebs, rodent droppings – but no sign of black mold. One oddity: the words A Caring Place meticulously stenciled on the living-room wall, with a huge 666, the satanic number, crudely spray-painted on top as if to negate the good intentions beneath.
Maybe this was some kind of cult house or splinter church that went bad.
I banded my miner’s lamp to my forehead, texted Tally, then cautiously played the beam on the windows. Tally texted back that no light was seeping out. Relieved, I set down my tripod, battery unit and camera pack, and continued to explore.
The stairs were in OK shape. A couple of risers were missing, and one step started to give when I put my foot on it. I warned myself to be careful, then continued the climb. I counted three bedrooms and a bath on the second floor and one more on the third, with cots and double-decker bunks in each. Also on the third was a master suite with adjoining study and private bath. Bedding and clothes were strewn about. There were towels scattered on the bathroom floors, old toothbrushes and toothpaste tubes in the sinks.
All those beds – definitely a lot of people used to live here …
I remember thinking that this was the kind of house I liked – stuff scattered about and a mysterious backstory suggested by that 666 sprayed on the wall below.
In the third-floor hallway I ran into a hanging rope. Figuring it for an attic ladder drawstring, I checked out the ceiling. My head lamp picked up the outlines of a trapdoor, an entrance hatch to the gazebo structure on the roof. When I pulled on the rope, the trap door dropped open. I pulled on the bottom rung of the attached ladder. It telescoped down to the floor.
I texted Tally that I was going up to the gazebo.
Circle the house and check again for light leaks, I texted. Remember there’re windows on all four sides.
Roger that! he texted back.
The ladder held steady. A musty smell enveloped me as I approached the top. My breathing stirred up dust as I stuck my head through the hatch. I remember thinking: No one’s been up here in years …
That’s when I caught sight of the murals.
No light, Tally texted, but I didn’t respond, just crawled in, then stood still in the center of the ten-foot-square structure and gazed incredulously at the walls.
On numerous expeditions into abandoned houses I’d never come across anything like this: all four walls covered with artwork, on each a row of six painted life-size, head-to-foot people staring out at me … or maybe at each other. These people, men and women, did not appear friendly. There was intensity about them, ferocity in their postures and the sets of their eyes. Gazing at them, I felt them staring back. I knew at once I was looking at something extraordinary.
I texted Tally: Pay dirt! Get settled. I’ll be up here a while.
It didn’t matter that the murals didn’t fit with my theme of ‘The Things They Left Behind.’ I knew I had to document them. The turret room was small, which made it difficult to take good photographs. I’d have to go wide-angle to completely capture each wall. Since there’re distortion issues with wide-angle lenses, I decided to shoot each wall from as far back as I could, then use a normal lens to document details. Later, using software, I could combine the images on my computer.
Full coverage would take time. My head lamp didn’t throw off much light, but it helped that the walls were pale and the images were painted in shades of grays and blacks. Assured by Tally that no light was leaking out, I went downstairs to fetch my equipment. Back in the gazebo, I set up my master lights and set to work on the first wall.
The air in that attic was close. As I made exposure after exposure, standing very still so as not to shake my tripod and blur the images, I noticed that some of the murals were more finished than others. Looking closely, I saw that the figures on one wall and on a portion of another were drawn in a combination of charcoal and black crayon, while the rest were painted with black acrylic. This told me that whoever had drawn them had left behind a work-in-progress – as did a box of charcoal stubs and crayons, several cans of black paint and a vase of brushes I found stashed against one of the walls.
I didn’t notice the bedrolls scrunched in a corner until I finished documenting two of the walls. Had the artist been so obsessed that he’d slept up here inside his work? Had he been awakened by someone in the middle of the night, forced to make a hurried departure? Who was he? What had he been trying to say? And how could he have left such a powerful work unfinished?
At first I thought that the figures on each wall were staring across the room at the figures on the wall opposite. But standing in the center of the gazebo while shooting sections, it occurred to me that just as I was staring through my lens at the people painted on the walls, they in turn were staring back at me. This, I realized, could account for the powerful effect of the murals: that it had been the intention of the artist, whoever he was, to draw the people on the walls as watchers, turning viewers who entered the attic room into objects of their inspection.
The eyes! There was no escaping them. They were sharp, hard, and all focused on whomever stood before them. Whenever I moved, the eyes uncannily seemed to follow me.
They were so strange, those people, frozen in space, their postures oddly angular, gestures exaggerated, bodies surmounted by slightly oversized heads. They were posed weirdly too: some in the foreground; others, darker, hovering just behind. And then I saw that in many cases the figures were doubled – the ones perched behind drawn as shadow doubles of the ones in front. The expressions on the faces of the front figures were stern but otherwise without affect, while the expressions on their shadowed doubles smirked, some showing unguarded cruelty, ferocity and deceit.
This, I gathered, had been the artist’s intention: to show the two-faced character of his subjects, the false blank faces they showed the world and their true faces, Janus faces they kept concealed.
And then there was the little girl with the puppy crouching in the far right just behind one of the women’s legs.
Who was she? And what was she doing there? Had she been asleep, heard something, come downstairs to see what was going on, and then snuck with her dog into a corner of the room, from which she peered out fascinated and unnoticed, a witness to the scene?
Sensing the power of these markings, I realized something strongly felt was being expressed, perhaps some sort of malevolent violation. I also knew this wasn’t the time to try to decode the murals.
Concentrate, document, analyze them when I get home.
Tally texted: Cops just passed a second time. Time to get out!
Almost done. Gimme ten minutes, I texted back.
Half an hour later I knew it was time to go. The room had grown hot, I was sweating, my lungs ached, the musty air I’d been breathing was bad and my eyes were swelling with fatigue. I was starting to feel light-headed too.
Checking the walls to make certain I’d photographed every inch of them, I noticed for the first time something that should have been obvious from the start: the windows of the turret room weren’t just boarded up on the outside; they’d been boarded on the interior as well. This told me the walls had been prepped, a smooth surface created on which to paint. It was only after I was back down in the third-floor hallway, pulling the rope that closed the attic trapdoor, that it occurred to me that this might make it possible to detach the murals from the walls if someone wanted to remove them from the house.
‘Man, you were up there four hours!’ Tally whispered as I wriggled through the cellar window.
Once outside, I took deep breaths. I was glad to be out in open air.
‘Worth it. You’ll see,’ I told him, as we replaced the boards that covered the window.
We walked in silence back to Tally’s car. It was two a.m. An owl hooted in the distance. My nostrils caught a feint aroma of smoke. The air buzzed with the sounds of insects. We didn’t see a single soul or passing vehicle.
Tally drove toward the city. When we reached a deserted shopping strip, I asked him to pull into the parking lot. There I pulled out my camera, accessed my last card of photos, passed it to Tally and watched him as he examined them.
‘What is this?’
‘You tell me.’
‘Painted on the walls?’ I nodded. ‘They look big.’
‘Life-size.’
‘Holy shit!’ He turned to me. ‘Who are these people?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘There’s no background? They’re just standing there like they’re in limbo or something.’
‘No need for a background. They’re right there in the room.’
‘Spectacular!’
‘Yeah!’
Again he turned to me. ‘You wanna find out who made this art?’
‘More than anything,’ I told him.
Downtown Calista loomed as we approached on the interstate. It’s generally considered to be an ugly city, but sometimes, approaching from the east, I’m moved by the buildings clustered against the sky. At this hour it was silent except for the distant sound of sirens.
‘Fire engines,’ Tally murmured. His ear could tell the difference between police and fire.
The city was dark except for streetlights, an occasional car, and Calista’s signature twin office buildings, Tower of the Great Lakes and Tower of the Great Plains, lit inside for the night cleaning crews.
Tally drove along Calista River to the Capehart Building, a hundred-year-old six-story redbrick structure in the old warehouse district converted into live/work lofts. Several CAI teachers lived there. To buy into the Capehart you had to prove you were an artist, a rule that infuriated rich folks who longed to live in urban lofts with downtown views. They retaliated by calling it ‘the artsy-fartsy complex,’ and those of us qualified to live there ‘pretentious assholes who couldn’t make it in New York.’ Fine with us! We laughed off their contempt. Calista might not be the Athens of America, but if you worked in the arts, you could live there reasonably well for not much money.
‘Get some sleep,’ I told Tally. ‘We’ll talk tomorrow. We gotta find out everything we can about that house.’
Tally nodded. ‘Those people on the walls, Jase – they’re not real, they’re nightmare people, right?’
‘Sometimes nightmare people can be more real than real people,’ I told him as I stepped out of the car.
I know quite a bit about nightmares, have had my share, always based on a horrible experience in Aleppo. I lived in that hellhole for two months, documenting its bombardment and destruction, the agony of its inhabitants. I became close to a particular family, the Daouds – Ayman, Rasha and their four kids.
Ayman was a doctor who worked in a secret basement hospital, treating people wounded in the bombardment. I spent a lot of time with him and the injured he was tending to. They would look at me and then at my lens, and it was at these moments of eye/lens contact that I’d trip the shutter. The result was my exhibition and later my book, The Eyes of Aleppo, in which every image is of a person whose eyes express his/her perplexity, courage or suffering, and sometimes all three, as they meet the eyes of the beholder.
The Daouds were terrific people, educated and surprisingly optimistic considering the terrible conditions in which they lived. While Ayman treated the wounded, Rasha home-schooled the kids. All four were graceful and full of life, laughing as they played in the rubble on those rare occasions they were allowed outside.
One day, just before the end of my stay, I gathered them in a courtyard for a family group photograph. I arranged them, went back to my tripod, instructed them all to look directly at my lens, then started clicking off images. At first the kids forced themselves to peer at me with gravity, then they’d break into giggles. I got so involved trying to catch the family in different moods that I didn’t hear the screech of the barrel bomb until just a couple of seconds before it hit. Soon as I heard it, I dove for the ground and covered up. The Daoud family took a direct hit. When I finally looked up, I saw their broken bodies, limbs scattered about. All six were dead. The roar of the explosion was so loud I went deaf. I went into shock and then, on auto-pilot, stumbled around trying to photograph what was left of them.
I didn’t know it at the time, but the explosion had broken my camera. Perhaps it was a blessing that none of my images, of the family portrait session and its macabre aftermath, were recorded.
The next day I left Aleppo resolving never to go to war again. My ‘I’ll go anywhere there’s a fight’ reputation, which I’d so carefully nurtured, was blown up by that barrel bomb. I’d gone to Aleppo to be a witness. That was how I always saw my role. I left the city broken, burned out on empathy, finished with conflict photography.
Those unrecorded images of the Daoud family were etched into my brain. They still come to me sometimes while I sleep. It’s always the sound of the kids’ giggles that wakes me. Then I lie in bed, coated with sweat, gasping at images I can’t shake off. The doctors called it PTSD, gave me pills, sent me to psychiatrists. I even went on my own to a hypnotist for help. It’s been ten years since I last worked a war. The flashbacks come less often now. But still they come, nightmares, more intense and more real, sometimes, than the reality of my daily life.
I’d been what they call ‘a war lover’ – a hard-drinking guy in a safari jacket and a bunch of cameras specializing in pictures of carnage and conflict. I’d worked wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya; street riots in Cairo and Kiev; endless chaos in Mogadishu. I was the fearless London-based freelancer, packed and ready to go at a moment’s notice, the guy they called whenever a fight broke out. My JPOE byline on a photo was a seal of authenticity. I took a statement of the great Robert Capa and had it printed on the backs of my business cards: ‘If your pictures aren’t good enough, it’s because you aren’t close enough. You must be part of the event.’
Aleppo was the turning point. I’d gotten too close too many times, and suddenly couldn’t do it anymore. My hands shook. I could no longer hold my camera steady. Maybe it was burnout, or, more likely, loss of nerve. Whatever the reason, I knew it was time to close the heroic photojournalist act with which I’d made my name. My agency offered me a photo-editing job. I tried it, didn’t like it. A friend mentioned an opening in the photography department at Calista Art Institute. I applied, got the job, have been at it now for ten years. These nights the nightmares come less often, and during the day I get to play the grizzled ex-war shutterbug star, teaching kids the photojournalism trade. It’s a good life, and I have my personal projects, the latest being Leavings.
Home from our Locust Street run, I slept a couple of hours, woke at five, sat down at my laptop, downloaded my photos, then started going through them. They were clean. The artwork on the walls showed clear. Reviewing the images, I asked myself: Were these murals really as powerful as I’d first thought, or had coming upon them unexpectedly clouded my judgment? Were they really, as I’d thought, some species of masterpiece, or merely a primitive effort by an unschooled artist? Were the people in them made-up ‘nightmare people,’ as Tally said, or, as I now viewed them, a cathartic vision of actual people the artist may have known or met in some kind of traumatic encounter, which he had then worked to exorcize by drawing them vividly in shades of black on the interior gazebo walls?
I waited until seven thirty to phone Hannah. We’d become lovers shortly after I moved to Calista, were now colleagues and best friends, occasionally ‘friends with benefits’ too. That’s how Hannah sometimes chooses to describe our current relations, though depending on her mood she sometimes calls us, with ironic vulgarity, ‘hook-up mates.’ She knows I hate that expression, which, I suppose, is why she uses it, as in: ‘Hey, Jase! I’m lying up here horny as hell. Mind if I come down for a mercy fuck?’
But aside from these diversions, we remain close. She teaches weaving and textile art at CAI, and is, as I’ve assured her numerous times, among the smartest of my friends. I know her habits, that she likes to get up early, go out for a run along Riverwalk above the Calista River, then return home for a light breakfast before heading over to the Institute.
‘Getting you at a bad time?’ I asked.
‘Been up since six,’ she said. ‘What’s going on?’
‘I’d like to come up and show you something, if you got time.’
‘Sure. Come up. We’ll have coffee. I don’t have class until eleven.’
Carrying my laptop, I took the elevator to the penthouse floor. Hers was the only loft up there, surrounded by terraces on three sides. It was the most luxurious residence at the Capehart, not part of the original building but added by the developer. I once overheard people in the cafeteria at CAI wondering aloud how an art teacher could afford such a place. Hannah didn’t reveal much to colleagues about her background, but I knew, because she’d told me, that her grandfather, a local industrialist, had left her and her brother a pile of money. She was a Calista native who, after years of working in textile design in New York, returned home to receive her inheritance, then decided to stay on to teach.
At fifty-two, she was eight years older than me, a difference that never bothered either of us. I’d been attracted to her from the first time we met at a start-of-school faculty meeting at CAI. Our three-year affair, I liked to tell her, had made it possible for me to adapt to a city I hadn’t started out liking very much … not to mention the fact, as I also liked to tell her, that she was the best lover I’d ever had.
‘Better than all those dyed-blond TV news girls you hooked up with in exotic hotel bars?’
‘Yeah, because they were always in a hurry, and you’re a woman who likes to take her time.’
She liked hearing that, but then she asked, ‘Why aren’t we still together?’
‘I think we are,’ I answered, ‘in our own way.’
‘You mean like fuck buddies, Jase?’
I scowled. ‘I prefer “romantic friends.”’
‘Oh, I know you prefer genteel language,’ she said, ‘but I like the expression on your face when I go vulgar. You always look so shocked!’
She enjoyed that kind of banter, and so did I. We felt it was the best part of our friendship.
She’s looking really good, I thought, as she embraced me that morning at her penthouse door. Her hair was still wet from her shower. She pulled back and gazed at me.
‘Wow, you look like crap, Jase. Been up all night? What’s so important you’ve got to show it to me now?’