“Huh . . . this chick flipping you off . . . I kinda like that one,” said Richie. “Where’d you take these?”
“Downtown,” I said. “Outside the Starlight Theater.”
We were standing at the counter of Passport Photos. Richie had transferred my photos onto his laptop. “Hmmmm,” he said.
“The light’s messed up,” I said.
“But the blurriness kinda works,” said Richie.
“Yeah, but I don’t know how I did it.”
“That’s okay. You’ll learn.”
“And it’s too dark.”
“It is too dark,” Richie agreed. He spent a few minutes talking to me about light. He even tried to sell me one of those handheld light meters.
“I’ll tell you, though,” he said, going into the back. “You want to take pictures of people on the street? This is your baby.” He returned with an older camera, a Canon. I could tell from the casing that it was rock solid. It was still digital, but much simpler to operate. You could figure it out in a few seconds.
“And then you gotta look at this,” said Richie. He dug around under the counter and pulled out an old paperback art book. It was called The Americans by Robert Frank.
He plopped it down in front of me. “This guy invented street photography.”
The book itself was old and curled up at the corners. I put down the camera and opened it. It was all photographs. One per page. They were black and white, from the fifties and sixties, it looked like. They were mostly people, all different kinds. A cowboy. A nurse. People on a bus. Rich people in tuxedos. Teenagers around a jukebox. They were in big cities, small towns. The people in the pictures seemed to have no sense of a photographer being present. The guy who took them must have hung around for a long time. He’d waited so long that everyone forgot he was there. And then he got the shot.
“What do you think?” said Richie. He was smiling. He could tell what I thought.
“These are great.”
“Hell yes, they’re great. Take it home. Study it. That’s pretty much all you gotta know right there.”
• • •
So that’s what I did. I went home, ate dinner, did my usual bare minimum of homework. Then I got out The Americans. I looked through each picture in the book. Obviously a person could study these pictures in a technical way, the angles and the light. But I didn’t notice that stuff. Not at first. I liked how they made you feel. Most of them were sad or revealing in some way. A bored waitress. An angry factory worker. A tired old person, thinking about the past. It was kind of astonishing how much they affected you. The pictures had been taken half a century ago, and yet they felt so new, so alive.
After looking at that, I went back to my own photos of the girls at the Starlight. They didn’t look so good now. They looked obvious and amateurish, like something a high school kid would take.
Later, though, on a whim, I sent one to Antoinette, the one where the girl was flipping us off. My phone rang five seconds later. “Oh my God,” she said. “That picture is hilarious!”
“I know!” I said.
“They look like they’re from another century. How did you do that?”
“I have no idea.”
“The one girl’s cute. With the skirt.”
“I don’t know if I’d use the word ‘cute,’ ” I said, blowing up that same picture on my computer again.
“Well, she’s no Grace Anderson.”
“Hey, leave Grace alone,” I said.
“At least these girls have some style. Grace doesn’t have anything.”
“Grace has plenty of style. It’s just more . . .”
“What?” said Antoinette. “Mall based? More suburban? Grace is an idiot.”
“Just because someone is from the suburbs doesn’t mean they’re an idiot.”
“Oh yeah? You sure about that?”
“People have to grow up somewhere,” I said. “It’s probably better to grow up in a safe environment—”
“The suburbs aren’t safe. Who told you that? The suburbs destroy people. They rot your brain.”
“They’re not rotting my brain.”
“How do you know? Do you think people know when their brain is rotting?”
There was a click on the line. “That’s Kai,” said Antoinette. “I sent her your picture. Gotta go.”