My mother filled in the gaps: Between clients, she came to all my high school softball games, rewarded me with admiration when I brought home A’s from school, and counseled me on my first love. My mother was infinitely resilient—a trait she learned from her own mother, Nonnie, who’d raised five children on her own—and she tried to stay strong and positive about my father. She kept repeating the mantra they had always told us—“Do what makes you happy, and you will be successful in life”—as if to discourage any negative feelings about him, as if nothing had changed. Perhaps it was the way my mother portrayed their separation, or perhaps it was because I’d grown up my whole life witnessing the sorrow of outcasts, but I accepted that my father had found the happiness he’d longed for. I even found solace in the idea that my dad left my mother for a man rather than a woman.
The weekend parties came to an end. My father stayed in business with my mother for moral and financial support for years after he left to be with Bruce, but the strain of remaining in business together was difficult for everyone. Six years after my father left, he and Bruce opened a new salon; most of my mother’s stylists and clients followed them. She struggled to keep the shop going. Managing money was never my mother’s strength, and without my father she could no longer maintain our expensive lifestyle. The first casualty was the two-seater Mercedes. She was unable to pay the bills on our house and our cars. Almost every month either the electricity or the water was cut off, or the repo man came in the middle of the night to take our car away. In middle school I often looked out the window at daybreak to see if our car was still in the driveway.
We moved out of the house with so many memories on North Ridge Road and moved into a smaller house a few miles away. There was no swimming pool and no big backyard. My three sisters had all moved on to start their lives, and my mom and I were alone.
It was around that time, when I was thirteen, on one of my rare weekend visits to his house, that my father gave me my first camera. It was a Nikon FG, which had been given to him by a client. The gift happened by chance: I saw it, I asked about it, and he casually handed it over. I was fascinated by the science of the camera, the way light and the shutter could freeze a moment in time. I taught myself the basics from an old “how to photograph in black-and-white” manual with an Ansel Adams picture of Yosemite National Park on the cover. With rolls of black-and-white film, long exposures, and no tripod, I sat on the roof and tried to shoot the moon. I was too shy to turn my camera on people, so I photographed flowers, cemeteries, peopleless landscapes. One day a friend of my mother’s, a professional photographer, invited me to her darkroom and taught me how to develop and print film. I watched with wonder as the still lifes of tulips and tombstones twinkled onto the page. It was like magic.
Bruce and Phillip.
I photographed obsessively, continuing when I went off to the University of Wisconsin?Madison, where I majored in international relations. Still, I never dreamed of making photography a career. I thought photographers were flaky, trust-fund kids without ambition, and I didn’t want to be one of those people.
Then I spent a year abroad, studying economics and political science at the University of Bologna. Free from the academic and social demands of Wisconsin, I embraced street photography. Between lectures I photographed Bologna’s arches and ancient nooks with my Nikon. During holiday breaks, I teamed up with new, instantly intimate friends, the kind who typified a college year abroad, and went backpacking around Europe, photographing the ruddy cheeks of Prague and the nude thermal baths of Budapest, the coast of Spain and the crowded streets of Sicily. I soaked up the architecture and the art I had read about my entire life, went to museums and photo exhibitions. I saw a Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective, from when he first began photographing until his death, and for hours I sat and studied his composition and use of light. I was inspired to photograph more.
The more I traveled, the more I craved a life of travel. I could wake up on any given morning and go to almost any destination; the countries of Europe were accessible by train and inaccessible only because of my own inhibitions or fear. This was such an unfamiliar luxury to me, an American who grew up on an isolated continent. I imagined a life overseas—as a diplomat, maybe, or a translator.
But one day as I was leaving the darkroom with a stack of prints, an Italian man approached and asked to see them. After flipping through them for a few minutes, he offered to turn them into a line of postcards. I was so excited that I happily handed them over without signing a thing. They were sold in Rimini, an Italian resort near Bologna, but I never saw a dime. It was the first time I realized photos could be published and seen by hundreds of people, maybe more.