Posts Tagged ‘Margo Davis’

I wrote about Women Writers of the West: Speaking of Their Lives and Careers shortly after I arrived in Palo Alto in the early 1980s. I would later get to know the editor of that slim volume, Marilyn Yalom, one of the founders of women’s studies at Stanford – she’s featured on the cover of the book, looking out from the picture window in her beautiful home office, as she writes. Decades later, after I learned she was René Girard‘s first graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, I would include her in my own book, the first-ever biography of the French theorist, Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard.

I also interviewed one of the writers featured in that volume: the poet and novelist Janet Lewis, about the same time this book was published – by then her husband, the eminent Stanford poet-critic Yvor Winters, was dead. I visited her Los Altos home with the legendary loquat tree. “Being a writer has meant nearly everything to me beyond my marriage and children,” said the author who is best known for here book The Wife of Martin Guerre, which was featured at a 2013 Stanford Another Look book event. “It has concerned the way I have thought and the friends that I have made. I’ve noticed that whenever I’m writing, I’m interested in everything, because I’m still waiting for the next page. I don’t pay as much attention, when I’m not writing, to living in general.”

Through Marilyn and her legendary women writer’s salon, co-founded with the late Diane Middlebrook, I got to know the photographer Margo Davis, who took the portraits in the volume, and her portrait above is the reason for this post: the poet, the photographer, the editor, and the magnificent photograph above that brought them all together. “It is no longer clear to me that the degree of familiarity with the subjects determines the strength of the portrait,” Margo wrote in a photographer’s note. “I used to believe, like the French photographer, Nadar, that the person I know best is the one I photograph best.” She already knew three of the women authors in the book – Kay Boyle, Joyce Carol Thomas and Janet Lewis. She had a few hours to photograph the others. She wrote: “However, in those brief meetings, I felt a common understanding that even though we knew very little about each other as individuals, we knew about each other as artists. And that even though we come from different disciplines, whether it be words or photographs, we are involved in a similar process of expression and interpretation.”

The photograph with persimmons is my favorite of the older Janet Lewis – hands down. Here are a few more excerpts from the chapter, which was taken from a Stanford public dialogue between the author and Brigitte Carnochan in 1980:

For Lewis, writing is “putting things in order in my head” so as to be able to perceive a situation as completely as possible. This was one of the motivating forces of her novel, Against a Darkening Sky, which describes the effect of the encroaching terror of World War II on an ordinary Northern California family.

***

“I began as a poet. Very small-sized, too. My first published poems, or practically the first, were about Indians, about Manibozho and the legendary Indians of the Ojibways.” More than half a century later, in 1979, with the publication of The Ancient Ones, Lewis returned to the Indian themes of her first poems. In “Awatobi,” for example, she brings together sites as distant from one another as the French court of Louis XIV and the battle at Awatobi, united only in the commonality of bloody violence.

***

When asked how she had found the time to write, while raising two children and caring for a husband and a household of airedales, Lewis’s reply was typically straightforward, without a trace of having suffered unduly in her responsibilities. “I put aside a few hours a day. Probably the` best hours. My working time has always been when everyone went to school.” In one instance she typed the manuscript for a novel with her small daughter sitting on her lap. “She was very small, so I could reach around to the typewriter. I was working on The Invasion then, and I was under contract to finish it at a certain time. I worked very regularly, getting up very early in the morning before anybody else, except the baby, who had to be taken care of. She was quiet for awhile, she had her naps, and I knew what I was doing because I had been working on the book for a long time. I knew where I was going and didn’t have to pace up and down the floor and say, ‘what do I do next?'”

Photographer Margo Davis and the late poet-activist Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who died on Monday, Feb 22, at 101, go back a long way. From about 1969 to 1970, she rented a downstairs apartment at the City Lights founder’s “classic red” house on Wisconsin Street, in the Potrero Hills district of San Francisco.

She was building her career as a photographer. The local celebrity was a natural subject. She wanted him to use the sombrero that was hanging in his house for a photo. Ferlinghetti told her he wanted the picture to include his dog Homer. “Get into the dumpster with the hat and the dog!” said the photographer. And so he did. This is the result.

Eventually, he sold the house, but she remembered one more story about him from those long-ago days. Davis’s then-husband, Professor Gregson Davis, taught Latin and classics at Stanford. One day Ferlinghetti burst in with a magnifying glass and a dollar bill. “Can you translate this dollar?” he asked. What did he want translated? E Pluribus Unum. What else?

Postscript: Margo Davis reminds me that there is also Latin on the other side of the dollar bill, around the pyramid with the eye. If I had a dollar bill in the house I’d run and check.

And another postscript, this time from Gregson Davis, Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Humanities, Duke University: On the reverse of the dollar bill there are two Latin citations above and below the pyramid: annuit coeptis (top) and novus ordo seclorum (below).  The latter is an allusion (not an exact quote) to Vergil’s 4^th Eclogue: “A new order/cycle  of ages”.  I put Lawrence on to the Eclogues, which he had never read, and he immediately began composing a poem, originally called “The Nixon Eclogues,” but later published as “Tyrannus Nix.”  By the way, the top citation (which is loosely translated as “he favors our beginnings”) is inscribed in very large letters on the dome of the Capitol.  In one of the vivid mages that captured moments of the insurrection, an intruder can be seen hanging by one hand from the architrave directly under the large letters: ANNUIT COEPTIS. Ironies galore!

Loyal readers of these pages know the legendary self-effacement and humility of the Book Haven. You should. We keep telling you about it. But we are shedding our accustomed modesty and shyness for a brief holiday.

Humble Moi no more! Now it’s Glamorous Moi! Elegant Moi! For we have had our photograph taken by the esteemed Margo Davis, whose artistic focus is fine arts portraiture.

The notable photographer and I met in an elevator, some years ago. We were both on our way to visit Marilyn Yalom, who was hosting the Middlebrook Salon at her lovely Russian Hill home. Margo was memorable. She was wearing a black leather jacket, with her hair characteristically short, and she spoke in a rapid-fire Connecticut accent (not New York, as my imprecise ear thought).

We’ve seen each other since – usually at Marilyn’s home. So naturally Marilyn recommended her as the perfect photographer for my once-every-seven-years photograph. Marilyn was correct, as she so often is.

Humble Moi is not the easiest client to photograph. I panic and freeze before the camera and my eyes bug out and go glassy. But Margo just kept talking, and she kept snapping, too. She talks about getting to know her photographic subjects as “a waltz between two people trying to do something in the way of a portrait.”

“You have to spend time,” she said. “This is not a journalistic activity, an in-and-out thing.” The result of her efforts above.

Margo has spoken in the past about being drawn to the “landscape of the face.” As a young photographer, she recalled: “When I was going through my proof sheets I realized I was really gravitating toward portraiture. And from that point on, I think I started moving in closer towards peoples’ faces. It was a process, it wasn’t something that happened overnight.”

Margo always uses natural light, and is known primarily for her black-and-white portrait photography, because, she’s said, “you’re already in an abstraction process, because the real world is in color.” In black and white, she’s photograph such celebrities as Saul Bellow, Maxine Kingston and Ursula K. Le Guin as well as average people in Africa, the Caribbean, Asia and Latin America. But in my case she clearly made a colorful exception. In the quick tour she gave me of her home, I fell in love with her black-and-white portrait of an Angor Wat monk. He looks just as uncomfortable in front of the camera as I was, meditation notwithstanding.

An especial focus for her work has been Antigua in the Caribbean, as well as Africa: “I borrowed the methodology of an ethnographer: participant-observation, becoming part of the fabric of the culture,” she has said.

“Being married to an Antiguan [her former husband Gregson Davis] and returning there often, I was able to work with this axiom in mind; the importance of getting to really know people.”

She has taught photography at Stanford University forever, as well as the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, Santa Cruz.

By my count, she’s up to half a dozen photography books now. Her newest book this year is Antigua 1967-1973 from Nazraeli Press. Previous books include: Antigua Pride, Edition One Press, 2013; Under One Sky, Stanford University Press, 2004; The Stanford Album: A Photographic History, 1885 – 1945 (Stanford, 1989); Antigua Black: Portrait of an Island People (1973); and Women Writers of the West Coast (1983), with text by Marilyn Yalom.

Margo’s work is in major museums, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Cantor Art Center at Stanford, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.