The strap on her designer handbag appeared to be styled, twisting and looping just right, as though featured in a glossy magazine advertisement. There were glassine bags and paraphernalia perfectly placed. The beautiful girl, my own girlfriend, lay on her back, needle in her hand. Her arm tied up with her underwear, pulled tightly with her teeth. She was unconscious. Apparent overdose.
 
I grabbed my camera and took a photograph of the scene—stood on the sink releasing the shutter. Narcan in the medicine cabinet behind me, telephone in the kitchen. The sun was warming her pretty summer dress decorated with a dandelion print, her smooth legs relaxed and natural. She doesn’t appear strung out, or near death for that matter. Strands of hair cover her left eye. But that eye, that right eye—mesmerizing tiny pupil, like a dot at the end of a sentence—perhaps pleading, unable to blink. She wore flawless mascara and eyeliner.
 
She was ready to go out.
 
Seeing the life-size print in the gallery would send the viewer down into the iris, through twisting, spinning tunnels, and into an experience of those long last moments of darkness and light.
 
When the explosive vest detonated, the suicide bomber’s head blew off intact, like a dandelion bloom flicked from the stem by a child’s thumb, “Mommy had a baby and her head popped off.” The head landed on the parched earth only two meters away. I went to the ground and snapped the shutter at minimum focus—flames and chaos behind the crown.
 
The image captured an eye yet filled with life, no matter that the head was disembodied.
 
An exploration of the iris was a trip deep into a vessel from which the last moments were drawn.
 
The sky was black behind the pines on the far side of the valley. The scene was front lit through a hole in the sky. A woman was hanging on in a storm swollen river. I snapped the shutter on her last breath, an unlikely twinkle in her eye as death’s hand pried her fingers from the tree branch. She looked directly at the lens as she was swept away. The curtain closing on the sun.
 
I had resolved some time ago to steel myself for these moments. As a university student I studied photojournalism. I had a police and fire scanner in my room and responded to emergency calls. My arrival coincided with, or often preceded that of the fire department.
 
At an apartment building fire, I photographed the chief as he surveyed the scene. Trucks parked and crews readied the hoses, hydrants were opened, and rescue teams in full regalia entered the building. There was smoke pouring from the upper floors. I took a few photographs to establish the layout and to check out my camera. I recall being surprised when I saw a couple of my classmates on the scene. We hadn’t gotten to that lesson yet.
 
There was a woman in the window of an apartment on the fifth floor. She was holding a baby at arm’s length to escape the smoke.  I captured a couple of decent images.
 
There was an explosion that sent a shower of glass to the street. In that moment, the woman lost her grip on the baby, and the infant tumbled through the air. I sprinted and dove, catching the child and rolling over to soften the impact—destroying my camera in the process.
 
One of my classmates got the shot—the baby tumbling through the air, flames licking at her toes, the screaming mother, and her desperate outstretched arms. The photo, a prizewinner, was picked up by the wire services.  
 
I was able to salvage a shot from my broken camera of the chief pointing at the flames. A photograph for which I received a below average grade. And even worse, the local chamber of commerce presented me with a selfless act of bravery award.
 
But, there was something there in my photograph. The fireman’s thought process was captured. Experience weighed on his face. I was encouraged to get closer, go deeper.
 
Upon graduation, I went wherever it was hot.  I made a name for myself as a combat photographer—a war tourist. A photograph of a weeping woman before a pile of rubble no different to me than a shot of girls in short skirts on the streets of Rome. Death and despair were the coin. Flames in the shot meant publication.
 
For the gallery show, the three photographs were printed life-size and displayed ground level. A thirty-five millimeter camera was mounted on a rod screwed into the floor. To view the photos, one had to lie on the floor, grip the camera, and peer through the eyepiece.
 
To experience the moment that the shutter was depressed required not only lying on the floor, but lying in a two by three meter landscape representing the terrain conditions at the time. This meant burnt earth and charred branches, hard, dry, blood-spattered desert, and for the bathroom floor photo, it meant standing on a sink and leaning out over the print—the camera on a rod suspended from the ceiling.
 
I had my assistant set up a v-flat and a video recorder in the far corner of the gallery. I wanted to record people’s experiences with the photographs. My assistant interviewed them standing in the narrow corner of the two flats, their faces illuminated by a rice paper lantern hanging from a c-stand. I wanted to record the gallery patrons quietly and immediately after viewing the photographs, with out preparation or influence from others.  
 
The photographs were printed as true as I could make them, printed full frame with no darkroom manipulation—the image determined at the moment of exposure. At the opening there were no critiques of the photographs, no discussion of color or composition or subject matter, no discussion of print quality or scale, and nothing about having to lie on the ground and get dirty in order to look through the viewfinder. There was only the common theme of being sucked into the iris and experiencing another’s thoughts and last moments.
 
And apologies. There were apologies for spending so much time looking through the camera, apologies for spending so long exploring the eyeball and cranium, for taking time climbing stairs, floating on parachutes and running from unseen beasts while others waited to view.
 
But each person had taken a mere glance though the camera in the gallery. It took much longer to describe what they had seen.
 
The first photograph on view, was taken in Colorado.  A woman had been scouring the burnt mountainside searching for a sparkle of hope in all the sadness. She wore a backpack filled with Lodgepole seedlings.  She was planting them in spots where they might flourish. The burnt forest appealed to me. I was drawn to the battlefield like destruction, but I lamented missing the fire itself. I tried to imagine the heat, and the photographs I could have taken. There would have been no trouble getting flames in the shot. Now, it was charred stumps and fallen pine.  Everything was burned, the ground baked hard, no shade to spare it. Dandelion, fireweed, and a few cones opened by the heat would not hold the rain that was coming. It started lightly, and water ran down the slope, the rainwater forming streams following the contours of the mountain, soon merging into rivers gouging the hillside. With nothing to stop or absorb the flow, the waters tore through the charred forest and gathered stumps and boulders pushing to the valley below with apocalyptic sound and power.  
 
I couldn’t believe my luck—the woman was struggling in a newly formed tributary that was ripping across the mountain slope. Her efforts to avoid being swept away in vain. In her eye and in her mind—a lush valley of Aspen and Pine, flower filled glades, and a dreamlike sky dark at the zenith, snow above tree line. Tiny seedlings, planted with care is all she is thinking about. But the seedlings are spilling from her backpack and are being swept away.
 
The beauty of a summertime mountainside was all people could talk about, standing in the narrow corner of the v-flats. That, and the lack of an outstretched arm.
 
I had silently watched as the suicide bomber arrived on the scene. He appeared at first a large harmless man, but his loose clothing was covering the explosives strapped to his chest.  
 
I took note that the members of the IDF on hand didn’t register his presence as they stood in a small group talking and smoking cigarettes. I watched as the man moved like a dancer and made his way quietly to the most crowded bus and slipped into the doorway.
 
Viewing the photograph of the head, and entering his mind on the gallery floor was described as stepping through an arched passageway that opened to the inside of the skull—a dome decorated in pearl, aquamarine, and ruby. Scores of servants busied about preparing for the arrival of a distinguished guest, a faithful believer in paradise. There was a long wooden table with a place setting for one. All manner of feast was being prepared. Green gardens ran around the perimeter of the dome. Beautiful black-eyed women smoothed dresses that barely concealed their bodies, as they stood quietly waiting to be deflowered.
 
There were opulent staircases curving down to lower levels where more servants scurried around completing some unidentified tasks. The skull was layered like the decks of a transatlantic steamship. From down below were the sounds of a chained-up howling beast.
 
All around were bursts of electricity sparking and misfiring, connections broken and pulsing, some relentlessly burning like a dead short.
 
Venturing deeper inside, several levels down, at the bottom of a steel stair, was an oak door with black iron hardware. Piano music could be heard. Behind the door, a ballet rehearsal space. Girls in leotards and one male dancer were moving with precision and beauty.  
 
The piano music, Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, was being played at high volume. The dance was fluid and filled with joy. The world fell away, the dancer’s only concern the next step. They moved as though dancing with spirits.  
 
The howling beast broke free of the anchor chain links and began charging up from below—overwhelming passageways and bursting through watertight doors, destroying everything in its path. The music stopped as the beast arrived at the door with searing heat and lion’s teeth.  
 
Hearts pounding, everyone pulled away from the eyepiece at that moment.
 
Visibly shaken, people climbed onto the sink to view the third photograph—a glamourous overdose. Leaning out over the print, peering through the camera hanging from the ceiling, they described their own bodies turning to liquid and being poured into the girl’s tiny pupil. Their entire being a teardrop, caught by the feathery soft parachute of a dandelion seed. A beautiful weightless trip, floating down, landing inside of a perfect sphere. It was like lying on the floor of The Pantheon — a circle cut to the sky above. And in a shaft of light, a baby tumbling — and falling, falling, falling.
 
 

© Jon Montgomery 2023