The Scat, or An Experiment in Photo-Liguistic-Timetravel (Session 34: Carnival)

 
I hate cheap pictures. I hate pictures that make people look like they're not worth much, just to prove a photographer's point. 
                                                                                                                      ~   Jill Freedman

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The photographs I selected for this essay are among the snapshots I have piled beneath my bed.  I chose to present photographs documenting "the county fair." In some ways the project was ethnographic, as Grace suggests. Although I do not think that this project clearly sets out to study a specific people or culture.

The comments on Blogger reacting to these photos generally expressed a feeling of alienation between the viewer (and the photographer) and the subjects.  The carnival and the carnival-goers became the dingy, the Other. The photographer's compositional decisions offer this reading.  

But I also think the photos ask for a more generous viewing.  There is something endearing and sincere about this event.

Will's association of Pagliacci and the photographs stirred my interest.  He quotes Rorschach from The Watchmen:

I heard joke once: Man goes to doctor. Says he's depressed, life is harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world. Doctor says, "Treatment is simple. The great clown Pagliacci is in town. Go see him. That should pick you up." Man bursts into tears."  But doctor," he says, "I am Pagliacci."

Pagliacci has been to the other side. He understands the mechanics of machine that cheers people up.  He is the clown and can therefore not be prescribed what he offers.  I think this little fable resonates on a few levels within this photo essay and photography in general.

The workers are Pagliacci. They exist in these photos to bring amusement to their patrons.  They are alienated from the consumers by their status as machine managers.  They are they techies who keep the scene changes running smoothly, just as Pagliacci keeps the people sane by offering them a platform to pique and quell their subversive urges.

The photographer is also Pagliacci, but in a different way.  Photographs and the camera are the photographer's mask and image.  When we think of a famous photographer, how often do we know what they looked like?  It is much more common that we know them by their photos- not their spatial body, but their body of work.  Similarly, Pagliacci is known by the appearance he has created: the clown, a fictional character.  The doctor knows Pagliacci, but does not know the patient -- this man who is and is not Pagliacci.  Who or what was the photographer to the photographed people at the fair? 

The photo essay that follows is an exploration of a subjective experience looking at these photos, and riding their cascade of associations and buttress memories.

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The first carnival I went to was held in a strip-mall parking lot outside of a movie theatre and supermarket.  For three days the carnival bunkered down here.  The popular meeting spot for teenagers to sit in trucks and drink liquor out of plastic bottles would be occupied by The Zipper, The Scat, and a glorious, wheezing Ferris wheel.  I don't remember who I went with that first time.  I could thread my little red-headed best friend or my sister into the picture, but honestly, it is a warm, dim memory between me and The Scat, glowing in my cerebrum like the buttered pop-corn pumped with yellow 5 radiating out of its smudged glass capsule.  

Before I was allowed to go to the carnival, the word floated in my imagination, shapeshifting without referent.  At least once a year, while exiting the Superfresh with my mother carrying bulging plastic bags, I would spy the word among the local event posters.  Slipping through the layers of BINGO dates and aerobics classes, my eyes adhered to the yellow and red carnival poster with its gaping clown wearing a little top hat.  This image and the memory of walking with my mother through the parking lot with heavy bags became inseparable with that jingling word, carnival.

Propped in front of the TV on sore elbows, I strained my ears to eavesdrop while my older sister spoke of the carnival on the phone.  I listened to her raspy voice warp with excitement as she spoke to her invisible cohort.  Although I didn't know what carny or The Scat meant, it sounded dangerous and seductive and I knew that I would not be allow to join her on this adventure.

Eventually I was allowed to go to the carnival.  I finally came face to face with my tantalizing behemoth, The Scat.  The riders stood around the circular platform, holding on to sticky iron bars with a loose chain hanging waist level.  Clenching the metal, I gazed the faces of the other riders across from me.  The machine, waking up, accelerated its rotation letting out a harsh grinding sound like a monstrous cicada at the bottom of a well.  Then, warmed up and spinning smoothly The Scat began to tilt, further and further and we all held heavy smiles stretched across our taut faces.  With sweaty winces of delight and upheavaled innards, I shared a two ticket euphoria with blurred faces youthful in wet moth light.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yt3nDgnC7M8

There was another carnival I went to years later.  I was on a fishing trip in Virginia with my father and his gang of endearing and worrisome upper-middle class men who hadn't quite realized that the Victorian era had long since passed.  We spent the whole day since five in the morning out on the ocean trolling in endless circles, gradually losing more clothing and enjoying fried egg sandwiches with jelly, scrapple, butter, and tomato in the sea salt air.  
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YVRTcsMV_U 

After filleting the mahi-mahi back on shore, the men bathed and made drinks.  Looking even more sunburned and red-eyed in their clean shirts.  They postponed their poker game half-an-hour in order to catch the carnival down the street. We rallied together and walked a sandy block under street lights to where kids ate cotton candy and threw ping-pong balls at the mouths of jars.  There were a few dingy rides, but for the most part it was fairly quiet. A troupe of girls in tank tops and flip-flops passed by in the tawny light. I remember one of the men I was with wistfully exhaling "seventeen" and shaking his weakly grinning head.  

It wasn't simply a leering gaze - in some ways he wasn't even looking at her at all.  It was like he was watching the chartreuse rays flash below the hull and disappear into the abyss where fractals of light diffuse in spasms.  That look and slow shake of the head - He was looking into a oceanic mirror watching his younger years seizure on the lugubrious swells. He looked down into an endless blue where dark shapes glide, untouchable and vaguely familiar of shapes he knew. And above him, the boundless sky was empty save for a seagull's silhouette whose shadow crossed his skin then disappeard.  He looked at that girl like he was watching the shapes below or the fading gull above - a little spark of surprise then, oh yes: the hull, pinched between the sun and the ocean floor. 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8l4vU_-urZs 

A few years later, when my father and his friends went to the same carnival during another fishing trip, one of the men posed as a candidate for the upcoming county election.  He spoke so inspiringly that a news team interviewed him on the spot. Later that week, it aired on the local news channel.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEpCrcMF5Ps 

One night the summer after I graduated high school, while driving through flat dark farmland, I saw a church yard lit up with spinning lights. I parked my car and grabbed my camera.  As I walked over, I met a man standing beside his car taking long exposure pictures with a digital camera on a tripod. He was taking pictures of the Ferris Wheel.  We talked amiably about photography. How it's art and all.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwiDHDyrh18 

Carrying my Pentax, I poke around the carnival. I talk to some of the people who are at work tonight, collecting tickets, operating rides.  I take a picture of a girl buying something, just as she becomes aware of my presence.  Her eyes get huge and gasp why? and she laughs and swings at me.  The self-awareness of her age dilates as she scrutinizes the solitary older boy behind a lens pointed at her. Her friends standing aside whisper huddled in giggles. 

A woman working there stands by a shooting gallery lined with clown heads.  We talk about things I don't remember.  She didn't seem bothered with the idea of me taking her picture.  Unlike a lot times I have taken people's pictures, there wasn't the mutual feeling that the camera was stealing something.  I snapped a shot.  Looking at the photo later I am drawn by the gravity of her heavy keys and the looseness of everything about her.  We talked: strangers happy to pause as dew condenses on the grass and metal rails and listen to each other in the din of the ticket tearing and the rhythmic whine of gyrating light-strewn rides and the moans of lonesome cars lighting the pitch black road that leads to other worlds.