<--
Steve LeHuray is the publisher of iCOM, the movie magazine. He owns a sailboat
and is actually a member of the PLUG.
So there's some left wing womens rights thing going on in Washington, and as card carrying members of the Feminist Conspiracy, Linda and I are obligated to go. A post to my camera club, the Leica Users Group, causes a few DC area LUGgers to boil to the surface. Lead by Dan Honneman, they included Steven Simons, Steve Lehurray, from Annapolis, and Bill who's last name I forgot (sorry Bill).
<--
Steve LeHuray is the publisher of iCOM, the movie magazine. He owns a sailboat
and is actually a member of the PLUG.
The bus ride down with PA NOW is utterly forgetable and best not discussed. Upon stopping in D.C. Linda and I practically flee from the bus towards our meeting place at the East building of the National Gallery. As always, it's easy to spot the LUG, there's a knot of three guys standing out on the cobblestones looking at one another through their cameras. We introduce ourselves. Everybody takes off their camera and passes it one person to the right, looks through the viewfinder, photographs the person on their left, then (this is like a square dance) looks at the person directly across from them and says: "Oh, is that a _______?" Then everybody exchanges cameras with the person directly across from them, photographs the person on their right. There are some steps that go after this, but I wander over to introduce myself to a pair of women who hitchhiked from Boston with a four foot George W. Bush puppet and a big sign that says "Sqwoosh Boosh."
"How long did it take you to get here?"
"Three days. We just got here. Just in time."
Some former hippies stop by, well dressed, successful, and well on on their way to owning a Winnebago and touring the country in their golden years if I'm any judge of character, "I'm glad to see you've taken up the fight," the woman says, "when I was your age, I was protesting the Vietnam war. We really knew how to protest back then. We knew how to do it right." I suspect that she is somehow dissipointed by these grrls and their unusual hair stylings but I can't figure out why. Maybe she's having a flashback.
| Dan had asked, the week before, if I was going to get everybody
press credentials. I think he was joking, but I made some up for he and Linda
and I. They looked like this: ... and hung on bulldog clips from a lanyard. I was quite pleased with them. |
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Steve from Anapolis looks around, frowns, shoves his hands into his pockets and says conspiratorily, "I hear there's some feminists in town today." His eyes move back and forth in a way that makes me think he may have a gun. Somehow in all the emailing back and forth Steve thinks I'm here for Earth Day.
"Let's go find 'em," I say.
All assembled and cameras passed around like footballs, we head off to find the melee, stuffed quietly away behind the capitol building in Senate park.
| Before I go any further, I should chart out for you the political
leanings of myself and the Leica Users Group in general. On the big scale,
they look something like this:
|
So it's a wonder anybody showed up.
Senate Park contains a woefully small number of people, I estimate about three thousand. (On the bus on the way back one of the organizers claims somewhere between 50,000 and 500,000 -- which I can assure you was not the case. Exagerated by an order of magnitude.
There are some largely uninspiring speeches, some largely forgettable music (with the exception of Mary Prankster, who was pretty good), and a lot of people sitting on beach towels.
In
introduce myself to Adriane and a group of Very Young Women splashing around
in a fountian. They've got an unmistakable nuefeministi look about
them. I take some shots, one of which I'm pretty sure is the shot
the one which will be a synedcoche of the whole day, I'm fantastically pleased
with myself. It's Adriane standing in the fountian, framed by two other people
splashing water. About 20 minutes later, I realize that the film counter
says 40+ and it's still going. With a sinking feeling in my stomache I start
to rewind the film and feel the leader slip into the cannister almost
immediately. It's true then, that most gut wrenching of all photographers
nightmares: the film did not go through the camera. I open the camera bottom
and wind it, the rapid loading spool turns only about an eighth of a turn.
I fire the shutter and wind again, the spool moves, but only a little. The
practical application of this being that each time I advanced the film it
traveled only about 1/8 of the distance it was supposed to, quadrouple exposing
images about half a centimeter apart on the film.
The police come along and politely kick everyone out of the fountian, "There are all sorts of chemicals in there that I'm sure aren't good for your skin," they say. Everybody climbs out.
"I consider myself an anarchist," Adriane says then, sitting on the grass, "but they're all so stern. Standing over there with their masks on and arms folded like We're not going to talk to anybody. It's not helping, changing the world should be fun, I think anyway."
I'm amazed at how politicaly aware and active she is. When I was her age I liked to think I was a political actvist, but I wasn't even close, all I did was hang a Ted Kennedy 1980 campaign sign on my wall.
My stomache is vacant, sucked clean by this blank roll of film. Somewhere in there was my shot, the one true shot of the afternoon of the fountian splashing Jr. Anarchists.
So,
somebody's got to go talk to the anarchists who've staked out a corner of
the park all to themselves where they're stitting cross legged, masked, wearing
only black and looking very very unfriendly, in front of a large banner that
says "We're Pro Choice And We Riot". Which I think is extraordinarily clever.
Their feelers of fear extend about 15 feet around them in a circle like a
drop of alcohol in a petri dish of bacteria -- nobody wants to get too close
to them. I walk over to two grrls sitting near the end of their compound
and introduce myself and ask if I can take their picture. "Thank you for
asking one of them says. People have been very rude about that all
day." The second adds, "You have a Leica." I'm not sure if this means I can
take their photo because I asked or because I have a Leica, but in any event,
the ground is broken. I sit down with them and we talk about cameras (one
of them is building a darkroom in her basement, she pulls a black (of course)
Nikon EM out of her backpack), we talk about Paris, we talk about politics.
I take some photographs, they introduce me to some of the other Anarchists,
I take some more photographs.
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After about twenty minutes I feel a tap on my left shoulder, turn to see
a woman, about 28 years old, with a Fuji disposable, "could you move over
a bit so I can get a picture?" she asks. It's then that I notice a crowd
of about 15 people with cameras has assembled behind me and is boging my
pose. I've 90% of a mind to say "Get bent, go chat up your own Anarchists,"
but in the end, I'm not that confrontational, so I step aside and let her
get her shot. What annoys me is that I'm now toting a line of people like
ducklings who are waiting for me to break some ground, get to know some people
and then they'll all swoop down like vultures to get their own shot. It's
like "Hey, who's doing all the work here so you can run home with some freak
souvineers?"
So are they wearing masks because they're afraid they'll get spotted by the cops? Because they're going to start a riot? or Because they want everybody to be afraid of them? Possibly a little from colum C. After much hanging back and pittering around, a woman in a beige suit comes up to the grrls I'm sitting with and asks, "Why are you here?"
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"We're supporting NOW," is the answer.
"What's NOW?"
"You're holding a NOW sign in your hand."
And indeed, the woman is. Though she seems incapable of believing that these two dozen little Darth Vaders could be here for any reason other than something involving mayhem and possibly pyromania.
"We're here to show our support for women's rights," someone else chimes in and this answer seems to be satisfactory. The beige suit hurries off to her friends who are hanging back about twenty feet feeling all the braver now. The march starts, the marchers start, Linda and I hang with the anarchists figuring that if something's going to happen, this is going to be the place where it happens. In fact, one of the anarchists tells me that a police officer had said to them earlier "If anything happens, anywhere, we're coming after you."
So we march. We march, I run backwards taking pictures feeling like I've been here before. Later I discover that I hadn't loaded the film improperly in the M3, the rapidloader's screwed, nothing comes out from these rolls either. 80% of my shots this day are gone. Out of a dozen exposed rolls of film, all I have are the three I shot in the M6.
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Somewhere in the confusion I've lost Steve from Anapolis and Dan Honemann, Bill and Steve Simons are already gone. We make an attempt to reconnect via the miracle of cellular technology but somebody gets lost and we give up. The anarchists change out of their superhero costumes and turn into ordinary people and slip away into the crowd. Linda and I head to the National Gallery and look for the Vermeers and the Bosch.
All I can think of are my lost shots. But when I get back Indymedia picks up two of my images so the day's not a total wash, though we're fiercely tired and hideously sunburnt. The next day, in a discussion about politics, some acquaintences I was castigating for political apathy -- after demonstrating that they had all read the Cliff's Notes for We the Living -- insisted that they were indeed political, but in a private way. (A way that, I gathered from the ensuing conversation, mostly seemed to involve sitting around, talking about all the guns they own or would like to own and complaining about how Welfare Mothers are sucking our economy dry with their layabout antics.) But there is no private politic. You move, you shake, you do your thing. You make your voice heard, whatever it has to say -- you fight for what you believe in; go do it.
Linda outside the National Gallery
Some places you might have got here from:
