Thirty-Six Times Nothing

Photographers all carry regrets, heavier or lighter. There is no reason we should escape our humanity. 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 book, one I may write someday. His own father had been disabled since a wound from the war of 14–18, his mother left with next to nothing, and every day meant finding some way to survive.

Dickens could have written a saga about the Veneto of those years, and I won't say any more about it. Know only this, reader: my father was the only one of the children to suffer from rickets, from accumulated deficiencies, because his priority was always turned toward the others. At fifteen, I had no idea that this attitude, this renunciation, would come to illuminate my entire life. I only understood it far too late.

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 burst out laughing. It remains one of our greatest shared memories.

That man of few words, denied the ability to write, gave me an immense lesson that day: not to do things for a result or an expectation, but to live the moment, and if possible, to laugh at it, again and again. He had just posed for an hour for nothing. An hour did not weigh much, he knew that better than anyone, and he laughed 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, 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.