In my college, it was a requirement that each photography student do an internship during
senior year. Someone recommended a photographer to me that I hadn’t heard of before. He had
worked in New York and photographed the Statue of Liberty, I was told. I would be his second
assistant for the duration of the semester.
It was winter, and the photographer lived on the top of a hill. Had I not been staring at
the icy patches of concrete beneath my feet and going over an introduction in my head, I might
have seen the gathering dark clouds above his home which also housed his business. I might
have heard the foreboding thunderclap which, no doubt, sounded at my arrival.
The photographer was a large man and his first assistant was rather small. She moved
around like a Jack whose giant had made it down the bean stalk alive. “Tear sheets,” she said on
my first day and motioned for me to follow her. It would always be that way. A curt exchange
with her boss and we’d be climbing and descending stairs–finding new rooms and tedious jobs
at every turn.
It didn’t take long before the giant stress the first assistant was under became apparent.
Her job included room and board. There was no escaping the rants when the photographer’s
needs weren’t anticipated. Profanity stunk up the air like photo developer and you never knew
where it had come from: the boss, his African Grey parrot, or the toddler son.
I’d go home and write about it in the journal I was required to keep for class–like it
might, one day, become a Broadway play kin to that of Neil Simon. It became a dog-eared
paperback, and my professor began to look forward to new installments with the giddiness of
someone who had met that type of giant before.
The first assistant and I painted and hung cabinet doors, put up shelves, and installed
padded flooring for a future darkroom. One morning, we sat for an eternity removing adhesive
labels from file cabinets.
“This acetone isn’t working,” I complained. “Hand me that WD-40.” Number one’s face
filled with horror.
“The right tool for the right job,” the first assistant warned me. Her voice was fearful and
hushed. There was no magic harp to sooth the man upstairs. She’d been told to use acetone.
He’d called her lazy, stupid, and unhelpful in language as glaring as the Chrysler building. A
misstep in adhesive removal wouldn’t be her undoing.
Nevertheless, I wanted her to rebel, to stand up for herself. “What could the photographer
do?” I wanted to know. This I said as she stood sobbing in the cold garage after busting her finger
with a hammer.
“If, I go, I won’t get to ride in his blimp,” she finally said. “He promised we’d take the
blimp out one day, and I don’t want to miss it.” And there it was, the invisible carrot that had
been dangling before the first assistant all these weeks. She wanted to see the top of the bean
stalk.
A blimp hidden somewhere wasn’t out of the question, I guessed. The home housed
souvenirs from New York skyscrapers, and I regularly walked by a giant nose from before the
Statue of Liberty’s restoration.
The next day, on the first assistant’s day off, I worked with the photographer alone. While
out in his garage moving wood around for shelves he pointed to a small trailer.
“Maybe we can take the blimp out today,” he said.
“The blimp is in there?” I asked.
I don’t remember the words I chose when I told the first assistant, a day later, that the
blimp carried a camera up in the air, not people. I can tell you she was gone soon after, and my
internship, while a good read, didn’t amount to a hill of beans.
