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The majority portrayed young people of various ages and races speaking in sign language. The photos were alive with their vibrant facial expressions, wide eyes and hands moving so quickly they sometimes blurred.
Marta returned, and I picked up the smell of lavender when she passed me this time.
“Now, Peter,” she said, seating herself and spreading the black cover of my portfolio wide. She put her glasses back on the end of her nose, looking over them as she said, “When you speak to me, please make sure I’m looking at you first. I’m hard of hearing.”
That was when I noticed the hearing aids poking through her hair above her ears. I waited until she glanced up. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Just call me Marta. Ma’am is too much.” Her accent made sense to me now. I wondered if she’d had hearing problems her whole life or if she’d developed them later on. “Shall we?”
She motioned at the top photo, a shot I’d taken of Sarah last spring in all her tiger’s-eye beauty.
I nodded.
As Marta flipped through the photos I’d spent hours selecting last night, I questioned my choices. Under her quiet scrutiny, most seemed far from good enough now. Too dramatic. Too juvenile. Way too many of me wrestling with my demons—the demons Adam had gifted me—in abandoned houses, along railways. I’d even included a few heartbreaking nudes.
My gut clenched. There was too much ofmein these. They weren’t art. They were an evisceration of my misery. And wasn’t that what I’d just been saying to Millar? I’d used these photos to contain my ugliness. It was ghoulish.
Sweat popped up on my brow. I was tempted to lift my Leica and take photos of her looking through my photos. A meta moment of sorts. And she did so with no noticeable reaction to what she was seeing. Expressionless, she could have been looking at a black-and-white photo of a sunset.
Then she hit the second half of my portfolio, and everything changed. I remembered why I was here. I remembered I was damn good at this.
Photos of queer joy spread out before her. These pictures captured bright smears of color, laughter, lust, and friendship. I relaxed as I gazed across the desk at the upside-down prints. All those faces were so familiar to me, all the pictures were cataloged in my head, their details summonable at any moment. I should have started and ended with these.
Marta flipped the portfolio closed and sat with her head down, fingers stroking the back of it.
A fresh wave of adrenaline broke over me. My palms were wet from it.
When she looked at me, there was a sharp awareness in her eyes, as if she was seeing something rare.Me—not the photos. “Do you know how often students come to me with an overblown sense of entitlement, certain they’re the next Cartier-Bresson or Helmut Newton?”
I shook my head.
“Too many.” She cocked her head. “The name’s Peter Mandel, you said?”
“Yes, ma’am. I mean, Marta.”
“And you developed all of these yourself?”
“Most of them. Everything past the quarter mark.”
She opened my portfolio again. “This one. Wide aperture or slow shutter speed?”
I leaned forward to see which picture she was referring to and answered once she looked up. “Both.”
She snorted. “All right. Where do you store your film?”
Again, I waited until her eyes were on my face. “The refrigerator.”
“Good.” She flipped between a photo near the back and one near the front. “Growth. The photos at the beginning are amateur, emotional, and melodramatic.”
I winced. Perhaps, but they were representations of my high school agony, so what else could they be?
“Doesn’t mean they aren’t good,” she added. “You’re willing to commit to capturing a raw and intense feeling on film. Most wannabe artists of any type—photographers, painters, musicians—are too scared to be that honest. Especially when it’s about themselves. Most are voyeurs. Happy to snap up other people’s pain, but terrified of showing their own.” She glanced up to see if I had anything to say or add. I didn’t. “And that’s why so many of them fail. They’re cowards. You are not.”
“Thank you.” I realized she couldn’t hear me, but she didn’t look up.
She went back over the photos of queer joy. “These, though, are special. You can see a shift in spirit. These feel purpose-driven on a larger scale. It’s no longer about just you and your feelings, right? You’ve grown to see the bigger picture. How you and your feelings fit into the scheme of things, and you’ve managed to capture not only the men in these photos, but the joy you, as a photographer, felt in witnessing them.” She looked up for my response.
“Thank you. It’s been a big year for me. A lot of changes.”
