The Only True Genius in the Family

When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a ballerina because I had seen the pink leotard and shoes of the girl who lived across the street. My mother took me to the shoe store where I was normally fitted for saddle shoes and Mary Janes, and the shoe man brought out a slim box that held the little pink slippers. They rested together like sleeping fairies, and I was hooked. Every week, I put on those shoes and my leotard, whose color was so exactly right, and I did what my instructor asked me to do. I put my feet here and there, bent my knees, reached for the sky, spun around in a circle. It was heaven.

A few years later, I wanted to be Peggy Fleming. I wanted to look like her, I wanted to move across the ice like her, and I wanted to wear a homemade chartreuse skating dress on the cover of Life magazine, with a gold medal draped around my neck. When my mother suggested that I could take skating lessons at the town rink, I was horrified. I knew how to skate on a frozen pond—how to race around it, and do double spins with my friends and hold hands with a boy I liked for a few thrilling seconds as he tried to fling me across the ice—but the idea of having to work to transform the raw stuff of reality into the polished stuff of Peggy Fleming was far too daunting. Even then, I had the sense that people are born to be one thing or another—a ballerina, an ice skater, a nurse, a schoolteacher—and that our job was to figure out what it was. If I wasn’t already Peggy Fleming, I wasn’t going to be Peggy Fleming—a realization that made my adoration of her all the more intense.

I am certain that had it not been for Harrison’s encouragement, I would never have become a food photographer. He not only believed that I was good, which was pivotal in my coming to believe it myself, but he did for me what he did for his clients, which is to say that he took my career on as a cause. It happened eight years ago, after an epic argument. He said he could no longer stand to see me so callously ignoring the basics of business: How much is going in? How much is coming out? What is the worth of your product? All I cared about was taking the pictures, but he had made me see that I wouldn’t be able to do that for very long without a sound business practice.

I closed my eyes and tried to picture it. “I have a studio at home,” I said, “filled with amazing light, and I have a great crew. And I never have to send out my portfolio because all the top editorial directors and advertising agencies call me because they know I can make anything look good.”

Once we named the thing I wanted, Harrison helped me redesign my logo, establish a new fee structure that would actually make a profit, wrote a marketing plan, and then sent out pitch packages to my wish list of clients. He was like a force of nature, with limitless ideas and the energy to make them happen. I watched him do all this work for me with complete awe. From the moment I met him, I knew he was an entrepreneur and someone who made it his business to inspire other entrepreneurs, but until he took me by the scruff of the neck and dragged my career out of the doldrums, I didn’t really know exactly what it was he did, or how good he was at it. Because of Harrison, I was shooting chocolates for Oprah Magazine the week my father died, and was a month away from doing a cookbook of cupcakes for Martha Stewart. I had become my own version of Peggy Fleming, after all.

The idea for the chocolate shoot was simple and elegant: to arrange the finest chocolates alongside the finest gems, as if the alchemy that caused one were as mysterious, ancient, and transformative as the alchemy that caused the other. I was inclined to believe that it was true. There are certain things that pull people out of the daily-ness of their lives—the sight of the sun going down hot and orange into the sea; the sound of someone playing the guitar and singing a song about a broken heart; the taste of an almond roasted to perfection, dipped in a bittersweet chocolate and dusted with sweet cocoa. Who could fail to feel more alive in the presence of these things? Our photo shoot would tap into that reality. Truffles would be set amid loose diamonds, chocolate bars would be stacked atop gold bricks, cocoa powder would be captured in a crystal champagne flute. Through light made to flash at just the right moment, light made to shine in just the right direction, light made to highlight the texture, shape, and color of the gems and the confections, we would make people pause—if only for the thirty seconds it might take to gaze at a page in a magazine—and we would make them remember that they are alive.

Chocolate is notoriously difficult to shoot. You can get three or four shots off, at most, before it starts to sweat under the lights. There’s not a whole lot of room for error. We had the whole thing sketched out on story-boards, but since we had rescheduled the shoot to accommodate my jaunt to Driggs, we only had the jewels for two days instead of the original four. We had to move particularly fast.

The whole crew was in the studio on the designated morning, waiting for the jewels to arrive. Peter was in charge of all the equipment, from cameras to computers. Digital photography had become so high-tech, and the equipment so expensive, that managing it was a separate profession. I owned a Canon G9 pocket rocket for family photos and scouting work, but I made my living on the $80,000 Hasselblad H1 medium-format camera kit that Peter brought to my studio whenever we had a job. For the chocolate shoot, we had Ramie working on props, and a food stylist named Francesca, with whom I had recently worked on a Martha Stewart picnic feature story for which we’d taken three shots a day for three straight days and every meal was a feast fit for kings. The magazine that had hired me to do the chocolate shoot had sent out a creative director named Susannah, who knew exactly how she wanted to position each shot in relation to the headlines and copy block. She had a binder with page-long descriptions of mood, layouts, and color swatches to guide the stylists. When the truck arrived with the diamonds, rubies, and gold dust, we all walked from the studio out to the street as the two guards, guns at their hips, brought in the briefcase filled with gems.

I made myself laugh because I understood that his comment was meant to strike a note of levity in a week that had been fairly grim, but my voice sounded weak. My eyes were heavy with exhaustion. I was no longer sure that I could make anything magic out of a bunch of baubles and candy.

I followed the guards back to the studio, and drank another cup of coffee while Francesca and Ramie set up the first shot. We were going to start with the lavender truffle set on top of a pile of diamonds. We had a glass-topped table positioned against a window getting nice light from the west. Francesca opened a black velvet pouch filled with loose diamonds and carefully poured them onto the glass so that they formed a mound. Using a pair of tongs, she made a flat platform on the top of the mound, and rearranged individual stones so that their biggest facets were facing either out or in. She worked quickly, deliberately. We discussed the height of the pile, the width of it, and the way individual diamonds were arranged. When we were satisfied, Ramie brought a piece of chocolate from the kitchen to stand in for the hero—the truffle she had decided had the best shape, the best sheen, the best overall aesthetics. I walked over and looked through the Hasselblad at the stand-in truffle on its throne. “Don’t ever let anyone take your portrait with one of these babies,” I said to the guards, who were standing at the door and watching my every move. “You’ll see every wrinkle.”

“How’s it look?” Peter asked. He wore a bandana tied around his head, cargo shorts, and leather flip-flops that looked as if they’d been worn to hike the Himalayas. If he wasn’t behind a camera, Peter was in the ocean. Those were his only two states of being, so far as I knew, and they brought him equal measures of peace. Peace is something you need on a photo shoot, because peaceful people have patience. What you’re trying to do, after all, is capture the elusive qualities of food and light, and it takes an enormous amount of patience when things melt or droop or a cloud moves across the sky. I don’t surf, but I understand that the best surfers are the most patient. They wait for the right day, wait for the right wave. It’s as much about waiting as it is about riding the wave, as much about waiting as it is about setting up a shot, and this was something Peter innately understood. I constantly gave thanks that there happened to be no weather in Los Angeles on the day I took a Nikon workshop on digital technology. Peter never would have showed up if the surfing had been good, and without Peter, I wouldn’t be half the photographer I had become.

I peered through the lens, blinked—and froze. The image looked all wrong, but I couldn’t figure out why. Normally, I could read the light as if it were poetry. I could feel the rhythm, sense where it slowed and gathered and where it spilled over into exuberant joy. I could pinpoint exactly where light needed to be added or taken away, bent or colored. But that day, all I saw was a pile of diamonds and a piece of overpriced sugar.

I took a deep breath and forced myself to consider each part of the scene as if I had a checklist—check direction of light, check intensity of light, check color of light, check shadows. It was all I could think to do—but as soon as I started, I could hear my dad commanding me to stop thinking so much, and that, in turn, only made me start thinking even more. “There’s a shadow on the right I don’t like,” I said tentatively. Jim, my assistant, leaped into action as if the words I spoke had been gospel. He moved in a C-stand, clamped on a black flag, and positioned it until the shadow disappeared. I looked through the camera again and shook my head. Something was wrong, but what was it? My crew was poised, waiting for me to speak.

“I need some foil on the left,” I said, just to see what they might do. They had, after all, been working with me for many years. There was a chance they could read my mind, even if all the cylinders in my mind weren’t firing. Jim moved, Peter moved, and within moments, there was another C-stand, a piece of foil wrapped around cardboard, a beam of light directed just so. I took a short, sharp little breath of panic—to think that they had so much trust in me!—and then looked at the image on Peter’s computer screen. I blinked. Would this arrangement of chocolate and light create an image that looked good enough to eat?

“Sure,” I said, and then, “No, wait!” I remembered watching my dad sort through slides one summer when I was in high school. He held each one up to the window, took a quick look, and either placed it on the table in front of him or tossed it toward a metal trash can positioned at his feet. One glance, and he knew whether a slide was worthy of being developed or destined for the trash. I picked up his castoffs and held them up to the light to see if I could see the flaws, but every single image looked identical to me, and identical to the slides on the table. Each one showed a single rolling hill with a black oak tree spread out in the sunlight, its branches reaching toward the four corners of the earth. I could discern no difference between the winners and the losers. My dad tried to show me what he was seeing, and when I said I didn’t understand, he barked at me, “Look at the color of the light, for God’s sake.”

“Wait a second,” I said to my crew. I bent and looked through the viewfinder again. “I’m afraid the light looks a little lemony. I’d like to see a red filter.” I stepped back and chewed a small piece of skin that had come loose on the side of my pinkie nail while Jim jumped up and arranged the filter.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Something’s not right.” Ramie took the opportunity to discard the first stand-in truffle and bring out another. Francesca and Susannah gamely tried to find something to fix, and decided that one of the diamonds in the front of the pile was too prominent. They went back to the display and, with a pair of tweezers, turned the errant gem a few degrees to the left.

Was I? I wasn’t so sure. Perhaps my dad had been right all along. Perhaps light was beyond my knowing. I was supposed to be the one who made the decisions on set, who made the products look good, who understood the light, but I took a deep breath and decided that if something was really wrong with this shot, Peter and Jim and Susannah would be seeing it, too.

It was a gorgeous thing—a one-by-one-inch dark chocolate square with an intricate white lattice along the top, a crystallized light purple flower bud unfurled in the center, and tiny beads of a darker chocolate punctuating the sides. It looked like a piece of the Taj Mahal, but it was, in fact, a product of a Vermont confectioner who used milk from cows raised on organic grasses and Valrhona chocolate from France mixed with homegrown lavender. Francesca used flat tongs to set the truffle on top of the diamonds, but when I looked through the viewfinder, I saw a tiny hair on one of the gems—a strand of blond. There was dust in the air, there was lint on the diamonds. Instead of getting the shot, I grabbed a bottle of compressed air, reached through all the flags and the foils on their C-stands, and gently blew the diamonds clean. Thirty seconds ticked by, perhaps forty. “Try now,” I said to Peter, who had stepped into position at the viewfinder when I’d given up the post. He bent to look through the camera, but instead of pressing the shutter, he stood up and shook his head.

Things went wrong all morning. By the time we had the second hero arranged, the light had changed. It was too sharp, too close to high noon. We pushed the truffle shot into the afternoon, finally getting it around two. Susannah was on her cell phone to her team in New York, speaking softly, reporting the bad news, and that was even before we started on the gold bricks and chocolate bars three hours late. I’d thought I’d be able to make up time. Limit the reflection on the gold bars. Light them softly. Set an angle slightly below them. But the bars of chocolate looked as flat and dull as an ordinary Hershey bar you’d buy for a dollar at the grocery store. No matter how I changed the lighting—added it, took it away, focused it, or diffused it—the chocolate looked lifeless. The whole point of taking a photograph of something edible is that you want the viewer’s mouth to water. You want it to look irresistible, luscious, primed for a celebration. Everything in my studio that day looked like it would taste like cardboard.

“Marisol said the phone rang off the hook today,” Harrison said. “She left the messages in a stack in the study. The museum wants you to approve a press release, reporters want comments, and everyone wants to know about Bailey and the retrospective.”

“Think of what Jackie O did in the forty-eight hours after JFK was shot,” Harrison said. “She orchestrated a brilliant public relations campaign with some of the most potent imagery this nation has ever seen. She had an amazing instinct for how to secure his legacy.” He turned to look at me. “Don’t you remember watching that unfold on TV? I was thirteen. I had never seen an adult cry before.”

I nodded. The assassination happened not long before my dad left us for the first time. I was ten years old. When the news came about JFK—a knock on the classroom door, hushed voices, a dark rush of fear—my teacher, Mrs. Hutchinson, sent all the kids home from school in the middle of the day. When I got home, my mom was sitting in front of the television set with some of the neighbor wives. She was wearing her office uniform—a sweater set, a plaid skirt, sensible navy-blue pumps—and her face looked as if it had been carved from stone. I dropped my book bag and slipped onto my knees on the rug beside my mother’s chair. She pulled me to her in a desperate hug, but she didn’t cry. Her face remained dry. The next morning when I came out to the kitchen for breakfast, she was listening to the radio while she scrambled eggs for my dad. She had done her hair, put on makeup. She would forge ahead, just like Jackie.

I poured myself another glass of wine, downed it, and then got up to go to bed. I stopped in the middle of the stairway and looked out into the night. In front of me was the black expanse of beach. To my left was the narrow-walk street that ran straight back from the sand and up a small hill. On holidays, all the neighbors would sit out in the gardens and on the decks that fronted the carless little avenue and we would share cold beer and well-seasoned burgers and the happy feeling of living in such a special place—steps from the sand, in a town that still felt like a village, in houses designed as much for their beauty as for their function. Mrs. Jenkins, the silver-haired neighbor directly across from us, would come out on those evenings with platters of veal and a bottle of wine. She had been an opera singer who was the toast of the town from La Scala to Los Angeles, and Barolo and veal Milanese was as down-home as she would ever get. I looked across at her home, dark like all the others, and wondered if she had ever stood in the wings of an opera house, doubting whether or not she could produce the right notes when she opened her mouth to sing.