Thirty-Six Times Nothing

Photographers all carry regrets about their craft, greater or lesser. Most of the time, it's about photos that were never taken. For me, it's the opposite. Or almost.

For that, I have to go back to when I was fifteen, and to my first SLR, a Nikon FM. Everything was manual, and taking a photograph demanded an entirely different approach. With a limited number of exposures, every click had to be considered. It was a staging, light years from the instantaneity of my wanderings today.

My father, the eldest of eleven brothers and sisters, had not been able to go to school. What he had to do to help feed them would deserve a far richer account than this one. I may write it someday. His own father had been disabled since a wound from the war of 14–18, my grandmother overwhelmed, left with next to nothing, and every day meant finding some way for the whole family to survive.

Dickens could have written a novel about the Veneto of those years the way only he knew how, so dire was the situation. And so my father made do as best he could, working as a man, though he was far from having the build for it. Sometimes, charity and kindness played their part too.

Of all the siblings, only my father carried on his body, for the rest of his life, the physical marks of rickets, caused by nutritional deficiencies in childhood. The reader may see in this a mark of self-denial. At that age, I had no idea of the worth of that attitude, of that renunciation lived out firsthand.

Our moments of complicity were rare. Fits of laughter in the places least suited to them, under my mother's stern eye. One Sunday in April, I asked him for a sitting: a whole roll, thirty-six photographs. He went along with it graciously, accepting every contortion and pose I demanded of him, even the most absurd.

For an hour, I clicked away without counting, I who had weighed every single frame for months. On an FM, the rewind crank turns as you advance the film. With every motion, I watched it stay perfectly still. He could not see that.

When we were done, I revealed the trick I had played on him: I had forgotten to load the film. I had some fear of his reaction, but he smiled at me, then burst out laughing. In hindsight, I believe that smile went beyond simple amusement, as if he recognized in me something of himself, passed on without either of us ever naming it. I only learned later, among other things, of a prank he had played in the past: painting still-green tomatoes red, to make an envious neighbor believe they were already ripe.

That man of few words, denied by circumstance the ability to write, passed on to me then, perhaps without meaning to, a way of being: not to do things for a result or an expectation, but to live the moment for its own sake, and if possible, to laugh about it.

He had given me a gift I did not know I had received, and one I spent years searching for elsewhere.

So you see, papa, only today do I realize that I never wrote to you. Not a single sentence, not a single word. I would like you to know that after tens of thousands of photographs, I would burn every one of them for a single one of those I never took that Sunday afternoon.