Words were coming fast but it was as if I pressed pause on Ali’s words: It’s lifeless; a photo is lifeless. I looked him in the eye, and nodded respectfully. All the while, the other man was yammering on. I cut in at one point and tried to lighten the mood. I told Ali that was fine, I absolutely understood, and that I always ask people first if I can take their picture. I found my Instagram page on my phone and handed my phone to Ali to take a look. He squinted his eyes just a bit, and began scrolling through the pictures. He stopped now and then, nodded. “Good, very good,” he muttered.
The other man began asking me some questions, I don’t remember about what, and out of the corner of my eye I noticed Ali holding the phone up and clicking something. “Here you go,” he handed the phone back to me.
He took a picture of me, I thought, Oh great, the last thing I want. I hit the screen to open the camera on the phone, and a tiny thumbnail photo appeared in the bottom left. It wasn’t me he had taken a photo of; it was himself; he had pushed the button that turns the viewfinder around and taken a picture of himself. I looked up and nodded at Ali. He smiled in return; clearly, it had been intentional. I thought of saying something, thanking him, but instantly knew better. The other guy would make a big deal of it. So I slipped the phone into my pocket, shook Ali’s hand—“Good night, Sir!”—shook the other fellow’s hand, and went on my way.
Much later that night, 11:30 or so, I went back into the store. “Ali, thank you—thank you for the photo.”
He smiled but he was serious. “I never do that. I’ve never done that for anyone but you. It’s what I say, in Islam, no—no photos, except in your own family. Only family photos.”
“I understand. Thank you again, my brother,” I said.
We shook hands, and I went home.
A MONET OF ONE’S OWN
I slipped away from work one Monday to take my two nieces to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We went to the Garry Winogrand photography show. I doubt there’s a better way to play hooky in New York.
I almost wished I’d brought a thesaurus, because it wasn’t long before we found words failing us. An image of an acrobat caught midleap on a Manhattan street, for instance, struck the three of us as the epitome of “amazing.” So did another photo. Then another. Upon seeing the first few dozen of the more than 175 prints on view we pledged that we would not use that word to describe every single photo. Beautiful, incredible, joyful, strange, very sad—we made it as far as the second room before we were back to the A’s.
“It is just so … amazing,” said Katy, who’s eighteen and an aspiring photographer, as if she’d been rendered helpless by yet another example of the Bronx-born artist’s particular genius for street photography. I nodded in sympathy. In a world plagued by intractable problems—police shootings, Ebola spreading, spiraling civil wars, planes falling from the sky—lacking sufficient synonyms for a work of art seemed a good one to have.
When we reached the last room, I asked Katy which picture was her favorite. She led me back to the one that had stumped her in the synonym department. Her sister, Emily, who’s fourteen and had been off wandering through the Met’s collection of European paintings, then showed me her favorite piece in the museum: a Monet water lily (the first she’d ever seen) from 1919.
This is when I let each girl in on a secret: It can be yours. No different from falling in love with a song, one may fall in love with a work of art and claim it as one’s own. Ownership does not come free. One must spend time with it; visit at different times of the day or evening; and bring to it one’s full attention. The investment will be repaid as one discovers something new with each viewing—say, a detail in the background, a person nearly cropped from the picture frame, or a tiny patch of canvas left unpainted, deliberately so, one may assume, as if to remind you not to take all the painted parts for granted.
This is true not just for New Yorkers but for anyone anywhere with art to be visited—art being a relative term, in my definition. Your Monet may, in fact, be an unpolished gemstone or mineral element. Natural history museums are filled with beauties fairly begging to be adopted. Stay alert. Next time a tattered Egyptian mummy speaks to you across the ages, don’t walk away. Stay awhile. Spend some time with it. Give it a proper name: Yours.
But don’t be hasty. You must be sure you are besotted. When it happens, you will know. A couple of years back, I spent much of Memorial Day at the Museum of Modern Art with Oliver, a self-described philistine when it comes to art. He struggled to see the value in the work of the performance artist Marina Abramovi? as she sat gazing into the eyes of museum visitors. And the enormous, bright red Barnett Newman painting, Vir Heroicus Sublimis, got him all worked up, railing against the pretensions of abstract expressionism.
This was my cue to lead Oliver to another gallery on another floor and steer him toward an early, rose-tinted Picasso. He smiled a smile that even Edvard Munch might have wanted to paint. And he stayed and stayed and stayed, a self-appointed sentinel to Picasso’s Boy Leading a Horse.