The Fall of the House of Cooper

Photo courtesy 2008.

Today is my birthday. Every year in late May I have a freakin life crisis. This started because of public school: At first, this wasn’t so bad, because my birthday usually fell on one of the easy half-days at the end of the year, when all you do is play with Lincoln Logs and eat crayons. But the older I got, the more likely it was that I’d have to celebrate between bubbles on a standardized test while Mrs. Whatserfacerson stalked the rows like a scarecrow loose from its post.

The year I graduated college was especially bad, as you can imagine, but at least it was the last year I’d ever be in school, and for the rest of my life, I could have an easy birthday. In fact, the longer I lived, the easier it would get, until I ended up in the nursing home and my entire yearly thought process was: “Creamed corn, creamed corn, it’s my birthday, creamed corn.”

At least that’s what I told myself. I told myself a lot of things around that time. Two of the biggest lies were “Now you won’t have to fight to enjoy your birthday” and “Sure you’ll have a darkroom after college.”

Let me assert, readers, that the lies we tell ourselves are by far the most effective ones we’ll ever hear.

Clearly, the blog has been super quiet. I know I’m losing readers. I know those of you who are still checking to see if I’m alive are getting impatient. I know, I know. In fact, a large reason I’m writing this is that the stress of not blogging is becoming equal to the other stresses in my life. I’m sorry, that’s a complete falsehood, let me rephrase: The stress of not blogging has now surpassed the stress of blogging. Ergo, this post.

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We bought a house. I never thought it would happen. In fact, I was literally surprised as I shook the seller’s hand at the closing table.

I cannot begin to tell you what the process was like, though I know people do it every day, and we were both amazed at the amount of people who said, “A house! How exciting!” Exciting? Try terrifying. Nerve wracking. The sleeplessest of sleepless nights. Bloodshot eyes at dawn meetings. Midnight rides through the ghetto (Thanks, Bard) and hasty decisions that will impact everything. Jes says it better.

I would never complain about great fortune. I am happy to say that I have never worked this hard in my life. The great darkroom marathon of 2005 has finally been surpassed.

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On the day after we signed the contract, someone very close to me was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The cursor has been blinking at the end of that sentence for a good five minutes. What follows? What can you write after that? It says nothing. It says everything.

Uncharted waters and cloudy skies. How can the future be so uncertain, when the future is so certain? Susan Sontag wrote that “every photograph necessarily hides more than it discloses.” That’s a misquote, because my copy of On Photography is in a box, in a closet. Or at the used bookstore, I can’t remember.

But think about it. You take a photograph, and there is a record, some piece of evidence. A certainty. But everything around it in time and space is no more certain for it. Use a 28mm--the angle of view is about 72 degrees. That’s 288 degrees that you don’t see. Use a shutter speed of 1/125th. There are 124 more equal moments in that second.

It is a hard thing not to be caught up in the one moment that is certain.



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I received two interesting emails. The first was from a lady who found my site and wrote to tell me how inspired she was, and that she was considering taking up the camera again, but fear held her back. I told her she should proceed fiercely, that there is nothing to fear.

Upon further consideration, there is plenty to fear. Photographs make you look at things as they are, rather than as you’d like them to be. That’s a scary turn of events.

The second email was from a representative of a mental health clinic who wanted to use one of my photos to promote their crisis line. You can imagine how proud this makes me. Congratulations, Erin Brandy, your silhouette makes people want to call for help:



Consider a house. I’ve considered lots of them in the last few months. But the very idea of it is something fearful, standing there on the threshold. Like a new photographer fearful of displaying her photos, the new homeowner fears what he has worked so hard to achieve. Living in a house is putting a frame around your life.















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Our old house was small, and we lived there seven years. You can imagine the amount of stuff crammed into every corner. The worst part was our one and only closet, which I attacked three weeks before the move. At the back of the closet, shrouded in plastic like the hag from the Fall of the House of Usher, was my Leitz Focomat.



I was so excited to get that enlarger, and there it stayed, entombed in the closet for half a decade. That house saw me through seven years, from a time when the most riveting concern I had was whether or not my enlarger was up to the task, to . . . well, now. Too much of a gulf, and too littered with artifacts, to consider soberly when there’s so much to do.

Larry White used to say that the printing process was like zen. I scoffed. But looking back at it, why did I choose such an awkward, ungainly machine to print the most important negatives in my binder, if not because I wanted to be closer to the light, and know with certainty that my prints could not be any better? And here it was, hidden away, the deepest relic in the closet. The first layer of sediment, and the hardest thing to reach.





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Creative excuses for why I haven’t been shooting.

1. Lead poisoning from sanding paint in the bathroom.
2. The foundation of the house cracked spontaneously while I was reading Twilight.
3. Someone keeps rattling chains in the attic, but it’s too dark up there for anything but on-camera flash.
4. My smoking hot and incredibly patient wife finally snapped and entombed me in the coal chute while I was rolling film.
5. I’ve been too busy trying to trap the raven that keeps getting into the house. What do you bait raven traps with, anyway? Your last hope?




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To fight insomnia, I went to the used bookstore and bought a stack of books I knew would be engrossing enough to distract me. I was browsing the CDs, and found a copy of the Smashing Pumpkins’ Tonight, Tonight single. It’s pretty obscure, at least for those of us who didn’t have the cash to buy the boxed set back in the ‘90s, and it had songs on it I’d never heard before. I came back home and started painting my office with the disc on repeat. It was released in 1995. I was 14.

It was like someone threw a rock from the day I bought the double-disc Mellon Collie album and hit me in the head fifteen years later. If memory serves me correctly, I bought that album with birthday money. It was agony handing over more than $20 for a CD, but I'm still listening to it now.

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I'm going to tell you a secret, DarkTopo fans, and you can make of it what you will: This house has a detached garage. In it are two long work tables. The windows are very small, the outlets are already in place, and the plumbing won't be hard.

I have checked the price of paper, and it's staggering, especially for the kind of work I want to do. Likewise for chemistry. The Focomat will handle 35mm, but not 6x6, and I'd need an archival washer. And big trays. And a drying rack. And filters. Timers, lenses, grain focusers.

But the most intimidating aspect is that I'm a much better photographer than I was when I wrapped the Focomat in plastic and shoved it into the dark. And digital is orders of magnitude easier. Moving into a new house has surpassed the darkroom binge of my documentary photography course, but if I try to make actual wet prints that meet my current aesthetics, the record won't stand for long.

So I'm not saying it'll happen. But what else am I going to do with all this time and money?



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It’s not really my birthday anymore, because I’ve taken like three freakin days to write this post. Today is Memorial Day, another chance to consider what has come and gone.

The past is a rock--both a steady foundation, and a weighty burden. Moving from one house to another, it feels like the past is a mountain of furniture and boxes, piled on your front yard. Sometimes it drags you down, and sometimes you have to climb on top of the mountain and call yourself king of whatever you can claim.

Every photograph is such a mountain. Every day you start at the bottom.