Fairy tale #3

From a very young age, I loved taking photographs. For my birthday, my father gifted me an old Leica, and I rarely parted with it since then. I photographed everything: people, animals, the sky, trees, leaves on trees, dewdrops on leaves, and even specks of dust on the dewdrops. Every time I pressed the camera button and captured a moment of life, I felt like a powerful wizard, a master of time, able to steal pieces of the temporal continuum without asking. All my pocket money went into my new hobby. After a year, I had accumulated so many films and photographs that my father cleared out the junk in the garage and put in a spacious cabinet where I began storing the developed films and photos.

When I started photographing, color photography had just appeared and wasn’t widely available, so I made do with its black-and-white predecessor. I don’t know if any of you have ever developed photos yourself, but for me, this process was always part of the same magic related to the power over time. In the dark, under the dim red light, I would immerse sheets of photo paper in the developer solution, smoothing them with my fingertips, not fearing that the chemicals would burn them. I savored every developed frame. On weekend evenings, my father and I would sit by the fireplace, and I would lay out the photos I had taken and developed over the week. This was our tradition, part of that invisible glue that bonds a father and son for life. My father would pour himself a glass of Scotch, light his favorite Cuban cigar, and, immersed in this mix of tobacco and expensive alcohol scents, we would start naming the photos. This was like a word game for us: photo names couldn’t repeat. I would write the name on the back of the photo, and my father would enter the same name in a special notebook so that if there was ever a dispute about the uniqueness of a name, we could always check the records without rummaging through the voluminous archive of originals.

It was during this period that I felt like not just a photographer mindlessly pressing the shutter button, but an artist-creator. Now the moment didn’t create my photo; now my photo created the moment.

I finished school, then university and got a job at Morgan Stanley. Digital photography had already peaked, but I, like a loyal dog, continued to serve the black-and-white deity, revealing its image to me every time my fingers touched its glossy iconostasis submerged in the developer solution. Despite the boom and accessibility of technology, I still had to develop and print photos myself. Whenever I tried to hand over the camera for printing services, they would return it with a blank exposed film. It was as if the camera knew that unfamiliar hands had touched it and deliberately spoiled the works it stored.

As before, I spent every weekend at my parents’ house, where, sitting with my father by the fireplace, we would come up with names for the photos I had taken over the week. Still keeping strict records of each given name, we were approaching the milestone number of 100,000. The titles of my works were no longer limited to two or three words. Sometimes their names resembled poetic epithets: “The Squirrel’s Leap for Happiness,” “The Snowball’s Flight Around the World,” or “The Snail Dreaming of Becoming a Trolleybus.”

But once, after dumping several hundred photos I had created over the week onto the table by the fireplace, my father, lighting his cigar, picked one up and, along with the question “What is this?” handed me a photo of a boy riding a skateboard missing a front wheel.

I took the photo in my hands and saw nothing unusual in it.

“Turn it over,” my father suggested.

I obediently turned it over and felt a chill down my spine. The photo was signed.

I looked at my father in fright, but encountered a gaze as confused as my own. I lowered my eyes and read aloud the title written in my own handwriting: “Not Yet a Scooter, Not Quite a Skateboard.”

“Did you write this?” I asked my father, hoping to hear an affirmative answer and laugh together at a successful prank. But my father just shook his head.

Then I picked another photo from the pile, and this shot was also signed in my handwriting.

“When did I manage to sign all of these,” I thought to myself, flipping photo after photo and reading the names written on their backs aloud.

We went through all 158 shots, and my father, as always, meticulously entered the name of each photo into our registry. I felt he was slightly upset with me that evening, not believing my claims of not being responsible for the mysteriously appearing names.

The following weekend, the same thing happened again. This time, before laying out the new photos on the table, my father and I checked the back of each one: there were no inscriptions. The matte side of each was blank.

Father took a sip of whiskey, lit his cigar, took the first photo that came to hand, and pondered a name.

“I suggest we call it ‘Quarter To,’” he proposed, handing me a shot of an anniversary cake with the number 85 that I had taken through a bakery window on my way home from work.

I nodded in agreement, took the photo from his hands to sign it, and my jaw dropped when I saw “Quarter To” already written in my handwriting on the back of the photo.

I stared helplessly at my father.

“This is some kind of mysticism,” he muttered, picking up another photo from the table and turning it over. The shot was signed.

“But how can this be?” I couldn’t stand it. “We checked them all!”

“I don’t know,” my father replied.

He took another photo and, looking at the stroller with a baby doll that was hugging an empty beer bottle with its plastic hands, whispered: “Child Alcoholism Is Incurable.” He then turned the photo over and, pale, handed it to me. The name he had just uttered was already neatly written in my handwriting on the back.

By the end of the evening, we both knew that each of my photos had a name regardless of whether we came up with it ourselves or just turned the photo over and recorded the found name in the journal. From that day on, our long-standing hobby changed. We no longer invented names for my works but simply turned the photos over and entered the names found on the backs into the log, unanimously agreeing that we couldn’t have come up with anything better.

Soon, our family tradition received a new update. Out of the nearly two hundred photos I had taken over the week, two of them turned out to be untitled. One depicted a Tesla car completely wrecked after a head-on collision, and the other showed a yellow school bus, number 112, climbing up a hill.

“How strange,” said my father, turning the photos in his hands. “There are no titles here. Maybe we need to come up with the titles ourselves, like we used to,” he suggested, handing me the two nameless photographs.

As soon as they were in my hands, I felt a jolt as if struck by electricity. I suddenly remembered that on Friday evening, before leaving my bank office, I was intensely deliberating over purchasing a large portfolio of Tesla shares for one of our VIP clients, and the closing price of those shares on the stock market that day was $112.

“Dad,” I whispered. “I think these photos are trying to tell us something.”

My father had always supported me in everything. Despite my suggestion sounding completely insane, he agreed with me and allowed me to proceed. I called my friends and, putting up my parents’ house as collateral, borrowed a large sum of money from them. On Monday morning, when the market opened and Tesla shares soared by 200%, I woke up a millionaire.

Encouraged by the renewed balance in my bank account, I decided to focus on public transportation. I started photographing intersections, parking lots, taxis, city and school buses, and other means of transportation, hoping to receive another hint and hit the jackpot. But the photos had other plans for my life. They didn’t like me imposing my own rules on them, and at some point, they simply stopped developing. I would immerse the exposed film into the developer, take it out, and find that all the frames were overexposed. It was a terrible feeling. It was like a nightmare where you sit under the Christmas tree, opening your presents, and all the boxes turn out to be empty, one after another, roll after roll. Eventually, I gave up and started shooting everything, as I used to.

And they came back. My little black-and-white friends. 9x12. Glossy. I cried at that moment like a mother finding her lost child in a hypermarket.

That same weekend, my father and I received three untitled photos. All three accidentally captured numbered street lamps. I still remember what was written on them: A503, M805, and Y1212. Have you guessed what it meant? My father and I didn’t think long. I pulled out my phone, opened WhatsApp, added the number 503-805-1212, and the name Amy appeared on the screen. That’s how I met my wife.

It was love at first sight, and soon we had twins, Michael and Elena. We were absolutely happy. There was only one problem: Amy couldn’t stand my Leica.

“Are you still messing with that thing? Are you coming soon?” I constantly heard whenever I was framing a shot, preparing to press the shutter button.

“And now take one of me on mine,” she would say, handing me her latest model iPhone whenever I put my Leica away. That soulless piece of engineering that reduced the triumph of capturing a moment to a numb click on the screen.

“Take another one,” Amy would request, reviewing the photos on her phone. She seriously believed that quantity could compensate for the lack of soul in digital shots.

Often, I had to take 20-30 photos of her from different angles so she could choose one for her Facebook or Instagram feed. Now, I enjoyed even more the moments I managed to carve out to be alone with my Leica. To cover myself with a blanket and in complete darkness, feeling my way, unwrap a new film and insert it into my old camera. The sound of manually winding the frame under my fingertips still haunts me in my dreams.

My life radically changed when Amy decided to become a blogger, and not just another mom talking about the difficulties of motherhood, but quite the opposite. She became a successful blogger with an audience nearing a million. Orders for ads poured in. Our family had so much money that I no longer needed to go to work. From morning till night, I never let go of her iPhone, pressing the drawn circle on the screen a thousand times a day. There was no time left for weekend meetings with my father. The monster unleashed by Apple, tamed by my wife, completely consumed me. Now, to have the opportunity to enjoy time alone with my Leica, I had to lie. I made appointments with all sorts of doctors, met with imaginary friends, stayed late at the gym, and even got into a car accident once just to use the time while the insurance agent was processing the papers to take a few candid shots.

My cover was blown when the doctor I had supposedly scheduled an appointment with turned out to be an old friend of Amy’s. There was a scandal. She accused me of cheating, while I insisted on my story about the camera, naively believing she would trust me. The entire next day, like a punished schoolboy, I stayed by her side. That day, I must have taken at least two thousand photos on her “monster.” When Amy went to put the kids to bed, I seized the moment and slipped into our garage, where I kept my Leica, only to find it missing. I turned everything upside down, but the Leica was nowhere to be found. As I was leaving the garage, I ran into Amy, who was smirking.

"Lost something, dear?" she asked, probably in the same tone the serpent in the Garden of Eden used when tempting Eve with the apple. My legs gave way.

"Where is it?" I whispered, hearing my own heart pounding heavily.

She smirked silently, turned her back to me, and tried to leave, but didn’t make it. I leaped at her from behind, knocked her to the floor, and started choking her.

"Where is it?" I growled, watching her eyes bulge and her breath falter. I loosened my grip just enough to hear her answer.

"Outside. In the trash bin," she croaked, sobbing and rubbing her neck.

Like a mad coyote, I jumped off her and shot out of the house. The bin was empty. The garbage company had done their job promptly and without delay that day. My midnight scream woke up the children and the neighbors. Stunned, I returned to the garage. I felt betrayed. I felt alone. That night, I got drunk and fell asleep on the garage floor, hugging boxes of developed film.

And in the morning, I woke up, quite literally, a new person. Lying on the garage floor, I blinked a few times. Sound of a shutter clicking reached my ears.

CLICK-CLICK!

I blinked again, and the sound repeated.

CLICK-CLICK!

I rose from the floor and headed to the kitchen. My loving wife, feeling guilty about her actions the previous night, flitted around me like never before. But that sound…

CLICK-CLICK!

Every time I blinked.

CLICK-CLICK!

And the image before my eyes seemed to freeze for a second. I spent the whole day getting used to this new sound and the brief pause in everything around me every time I blinked.

The next morning, the doorbell rang. A delivery guy stood on the porch.

"Mister…" he said, stumbling as he checked the order slip.

I provided my last name, and he handed me a hefty package.

"This is for you," he said curtly and left.

The package was labeled “Anderson's Photo Studio.”

Wondering what could be inside, I brought the parcel into the house. Settling in the kitchen, I opened the box. Inside, neatly packed and bound with colorful rubber bands, were photographs. There were many. Over six thousand. That’s how many times I had blinked the previous day. I examined them one by one, unable to believe it. My entire day lay before me in that box, chronologically arranged. I had taken all these photos myself! Simultaneously, I blinked, and the now familiar, almost unobtrusive sound echoed in my head.

CLICK-CLICK!

My head had turned into a camera. The thought flashed through my mind, and I grabbed the package wrapper to read the sender’s information.

CLICK-CLICK!

A chill ran down my spine.

“Mr. Leica,” I read aloud in a whisper. “This is his doing!” I exclaimed. And suddenly, I realized that by thinking this, I was acknowledging that my missing camera might have hands. Fear gripped me.

“Or maybe I’m the camera now?” the thought slipped into my mind on the third day as I was reviewing the newly arrived package of printed photos sent by Mr. Leica.

I called the photo studio and asked them to stop sending me anything. But the next morning, a courier delivered another box of photographs, printed at a different photo lab. Wherever I looked, whatever I examined, as soon as I blinked...

CLICK-CLICK!

In the morning, I would find that photo in the box sent by Mr. Leica.

Driving became difficult. The split-second pause before my eyes after each captured frame made driving unsafe. In the evenings, when twilight set in, the aperture required a longer exposure, and the pause after blinking could last up to five, sometimes even seven seconds. Just think about it! You blink, and the world around you freezes for seven seconds. It would be one thing if it actually stopped moving, but the problem was that it only stopped in my head. Slowly, I began to realize I was going insane. Things had gone too far. I told my wife everything. She contacted my parents. Rather, she contacted my mother. My father had died when I was ten, leaving behind only the old Leica. Together, we decided I needed medical help. I voluntarily checked into a rehab center and, after a month, came out thinking I was a healthy person. But most of you sitting here today know how it goes. You think you’re healthy and can manage on your own, but then you come across a puddle on your way home, a puddle with a gleaming dime, or a lonely rose sticking out of a trash can, and you want to walk past… but…

CLICK-CLICK!

And you’re trapped.

CLICK-CLICK!

CLICK-CLICK!

CLICK-CLICK!

And in the morning, you meet the courier with a box from Mr. Leica. A box containing several thousand photographs from yesterday. Each of you in this room had your own Mr. Leica. I don’t need to tell you.

After the first rehab center, there was a second, then another relapse, and a third rehab center. Medicine is helpless against human helplessness. Only thanks to you, my fellow anonymous photoholics, have I found the strength and wisdom to resist the temptation to endlessly take photos. Only through the 12-step program of anonymous photoholics have I regained the ability to live and enjoy life without photographs.

My name is Sasha Beetle, I am a photoholic, and I haven’t taken a photograph in 5.5 years.