The Big Time

A fresh graduate with an arrogant sense of entitlement, it was time to get the job I wanted and make my mark. That’s why I got educated.

Studying and the creative process put me in a zone where I could lose hours working on a project or following a line of thought never able to anticipate where it would lead. I was ready to unleash my creative mind on the workforce.

After finishing my studies and looking through the situations vacant, I realised I was ill-prepared to get a job.

I never considered my experimental photographs using long exposures to capture movement and drawing with light, or self-portraits dressed as characters from Peter Pan, were of little use in the working world. I never thought mastering a homemade pinhole camera from a biscuit tin using film to take photos of roadkill was irrelevant and without meaning to anyone but me.

It’s not that I wanted to be an artist. Other students who imagined themselves the next Andy Warhol deterred me from that deluded childhood aspiration, and the few art exhibitions I attended filled me with social anxiety.

Crammed into a gallery surrounded by people who didn’t seem down to earth, open and friendly, over glasses of red wine, teeth stained merlot, my fellow students spoke of context and juxtaposition, the “expressive reality of the comparative” and “the way the artist really captured meaning.” It was hard to see meaning in a photograph of a leaf wrapped in cotton printed in sepia tone as anything more than a leaf wrapped in cotton printed in sepia tone.

I wondered why some people believed themselves authorities on the artists’ messages and why their opinions were the ones that counted. They spoke in context-learned jargon and rhetoric, using fancy phrases as people in cliques do to prove their place in the pack. What art appreciation amongst eighteen to twenty-year-olds taught me was some people are better than others at learning how to speak like a wanker.

No, it wasn’t my work plan to be an artist. I did not have a work plan. My general misanthropy and limited interactions with industry meant I had no connections to workplaces or people. I had no idea what I wanted to do or how to make things happen. All I knew was the kind of photographer I did not want to be.

A wedding photographer was the art student’s equivalent to a job at McDonald’s with a better salary. Wedding photographers take the same photograph with different actors, and over the years, all that changes are the wedding dresses.

My experience at Photography Productions meant I was no future Anne Geddes – a woman who based her career on photographing sleeping babies perched on pumpkins with sunflowers and pastel backdrops.

And the thought of being a family portrait photographer made me shudder with embarrassment. The awful way families dress the same, especially the white-tee-shirt-with-jeans combo where the family poses on a lawn or leans against a tree. The identically dressed family identically cross their arms and the patriarch stands over his genetic offspring. The poses are forced, the smiles are strained, and at least one of the children is going through “those awkward years.”

The family portrait is hung somewhere easily visible so the parents can show they haven’t yet produced any serial killers. The portrait quickly dates because time highlights frequent changes in children’s growth and fashion and children’s friends come over and laugh.

Family portrait copies are given to grandparents who point out who looks like whom as if needing to reassure themselves of their grandchildren’s father. And it’s creepy. Because families look alike – in itself not weird, but you see the big-nose family, the far-apart-eyes family, the 58 no-chin family or the premature-balding family. The outward lack of diversity reminds me of the inward lack of mental diversity or the insular thinking prevalent in my family and, I suggest, found in many families.

The appealing career was as a National Geographic documentary style photographer because the photographs were a by-product of a great adventure to exotic places. However, lacking the confidence or social skills to intrude and interact with a person and take their photograph, I was never going to be a documentary photographer. And it always seemed slightly cruel to photograph “native” people like they were a museum curiosity, not a person.

Even had I made the decision to be a photographer, I had no idea how to make it happen.

However, I wasn’t completely without work experience. A two-week internship with a central Trenton city photographer taught me a lot about people and the business. Diane used to hire out her studio and for two weeks I observed its daily workings.

Much like the small-time artists I met in Halstead, her clients were unfriendly. Often while the photographer worked, the assistant loitered around the catering table with little to do and ignored me. Maybe their creative inner turmoil made talking to strangers difficult or perhaps they struggled to interact with people not as successful as them. Whatever the case, I learnt what it meant to be insignificant and on the other end of contempt.

So I wandered the studio’s outskirts keeping out of clients’ way and smiled when looked at to convey an impression of friendliness. I must have appeared peculiar because most of the time I wasn’t acknowledged with so much as a facial twitch. Maybe I didn’t understand the “photographers’ code;” maybe the creatives were stressed and fully absorbed in their work and the creative process; maybe they could not decide between the salmon or ham croissants – I admit both looked delicious. It wasn’t as if I was a threat to these people. It was that I was nothing.

My internship in Trenton, New Zealand’s capital city, was a partial success because I got my big modelling break.

One morning, Diane asked, “Would you like to make three hundred and fifty dollars doing a small photoshoot?”

She said it would be a morning’s work and “just a few headshots” for a medical magazine.

I heard “three hundred and fifty dollars” and “supermodel.” It was perfect. I needed the money to pay my return shuttles from Halstead to Trenton city.

A few days later, the makeup artist arrived and by this time I knew the exact requirements.

“Once the makeup is on,” I said, “I don’t want to look in the mirror.”

With great skill, the makeup artist covered my face with pimples.

I had not practised my modelling looks in front of a mirror; I only had to think about the situation and my face expressed tragedy and pain.

One look I called “Deep Hurt” was the manifestation of my feelings if friends discovered the existence of these photographs.

I imagined a friend or family member sitting in a doctor’s waiting room, picking up a medical magazine for a casual browse and flicking through pages then coming across my face next to an advertisement for Accutane.

“Got acne?” the advertisement would read, “Try extra strength Accutane.”

And a speech bubble from my acne-ridden face, “I never used to leave the house, now I’m declining marriage proposals!”

These thoughts circulated as the photographer clicked the camera shutter and my modelling looks came naturally.

“That’s great,” he said, his encouragement forced. “Now, turn your head to the left.”

Moving from one tragic thought to the next and wanting to “work the camera,” I tried another look.

I was a teenager with acne, my face so awful people in the street turned away and children hid behind their mother’s backs. People peered at the freak show walking the streets that should never have left the house.

A perfect facial formed and the middle-aged male photographer took a photo.

I imagined my high school ball was two weeks away and, desperate to go, I wanted to be asked by a boy, any boy, even the one who talked to himself with the back brace and lazy eye.

And I heard the shutter click.

I just want a face without exploding pus, I thought.

Click.

This must be how a porn star feels.

Click.

Except porn stars get paid a lot more and can buy drugs to make the shame go away.

Click.

Mid photoshoot, I re-promised myself I would never take another demeaning job.

There were other small attempts to work as a photographer.

During photography class, a suit knocked on the studio-classroom door. He was from one of New Zealand’s largest dairy companies.

The suit strolled in and asked with enthusiasm if a student would like a job taking photographs. He was offering an amazing opportunity.

The room fell silent as the suit explained his requirements. He needed someone to photograph the inside of a milk processing factory, which sounded boring and lacked the cachet desired by the many burgeoning artists in the room. But, I thought, it was work experience and money. The mostly-girls class looked around and I was the only one with my hand up.

I got the job.

Mr Suit loitered in the photography block foyer examining students’ artwork. He bent at the waist and leant forward with his hands behind his back peering at the works as I imagined he thought he was supposed to do. He considered obscure black and white images of blurred landscapes taken from a horse’s back, clowns on unicycles, horse jockeys in a changing room, and close-ups of mystery.

Meanwhile, I organised a tripod, grabbed my camera and left mid-class. I got into the suit’s large blue Ford Falcon and we drove to the factory. En route, we discussed his terms and conditions.

I would be paid an hourly wage, the suit would process the films and Fonterra would own the images.

After donning a hair net, white gumboots and a white coat, Mr Suit and I stepped over pipes and grilled runways metres above giant vats. We wandered concrete pathways between walls of stainless steel pipes like we were examining the inner organs of a complex milk-powered robot.

I took photos of things Mr Suit pointed at: interlocking pipes, a clear glass window viewing stainless machinery; a group of small pipes and a group of large pipes to balance the previous photograph.

After my big job, Mr Suit dropped me back at the photography block like he was my father.

I never saw the photographs but got paid and had worked my first day as a photographer.

A makeup artist contacted me by way of an assignment where I photographed friends in ball gowns for a local designer.

The makeup artist organised a model, and at my place I took photographs of the eighteen-year-old half-Japanese girl in front of our retro 1970s oven, which sounds odd, but gave a space-like quality.

The girl was beautiful, the exposures perfect and the makeup artist happy. It felt like things were on track except for the social interactions and pre-shoot dread which started as soon as I booked the work.

The nervous anticipation troubled me. What if the photos looked terrible, what if the lighting failed, what if I got the day wrong, what if I exposed incorrectly, what if the client wasn’t pleased with the outcome, what if I said something offensive and didn’t realise until a day or week later when I ran the day’s conversation through my mind, because this is the kind of thing that happened to me.

Friends told me I had no tact, to which my standard reply was I valued honesty. I had yet to learn diplomacy.

My studies finished, I needed work. And because there weren’t jobs advertised in Halstead for newly graduated photographers or someone with a visual arts degree, I would have to take anything.