Read Online Hard Light by Elizabeth Hand - Free Book Online

almost proto-CGI. And he was vilified for it. Ansel Adams called him the Antichrist, but Mortensen’s like the patron saint of Photoshop and Instagram.”
    â€œVery impressive. How much did you say this was worth?”
    â€œIf it’s a monoprint, it could go for five, ten grand.”
    Mallo’s mobile phone pinged. He glanced at it and made a face. “Well, thank you for the photography lesson. Morven will be pleased to know that picture’s worth something—she’s always hated it.”
    With a nod, he turned and walked back toward the living room.
    I continued to peruse the druid photo. Mortensen’s work had always made me slightly queasy: as though all the elements that comprised one of his images, ink and charcoal pencil, acetate and toner and silver salts, mutated into some kind of virus that attacked my optic nerve. After a few minutes, I shouldered my bag and hurried on, turning a corner into an empty hallway.
    I rapidly opened doors—storage closets; a compact washer/dryer unit; a wall of circuitry that appeared to be a security system. I thought of the omnipresent CCTV signs in the streets, looked around for a camera. I didn’t see one, but I bet Mallo could afford technology that would fit on the head of a pin. If anyone questioned me, I’d say I was looking for a bathroom. Which, of course, I was.
    At the end of the corridor a door was cracked open. Inside was a large bedroom. More windows; polished floor covered by white Flokati rugs; king bed heaped with nubby silk pillows. A glass vase of red tulips on a nightstand, with a framed color photo on the wall above it: Morven Dunfries, maybe fourteen. Long blond hair veiled her face and blinding sunlight streamed through an open window behind her, so that her breasts could be clearly seen through a sheer white slipdress.
    I leaned over the nightstand to examine the picture more closely. It had been taken in hard light, with a Big Shot camera—Andy Warhol’s favorite, the one he used for all those close-up photos you used to see on the cover of Interview Magazine. Manufactured for only two years in the early seventies, the Big Shot was designed for indoor flash portraits, with a fixed-focus viewfinder set for thirty-nine inches from the subject. The photographer had to move around her subject until she got it in range, a bizarre little dance known as the Big Shot Shuffle. This photo had been shot indoors, but even with all that sun flooding though the window, the photographer had used a flash. Morven’s pupils glowed eerily red, and I’d bet that the Big Shot’s flash diffuser had been removed.
    Hard light was a strange choice for a photo of a beautiful young girl. It gives a sharp edge to everything, throws it all into harsh relief, with no subtlety as it transitions from dark to light. It’s what you get with a flash or other single light source, like the sun on a cloudless day. Ugly light.
    And even if there was no sign of the ocean, I recognized the reflected glitter of sea and mica in the sun flooding that open window as Atlantic light. You get a more compressed light if you shoot by the Atlantic Ocean, in the Northern Hemisphere, anyway. The water’s darker, and the composition of the sand’s different—if you have sand, rather than rocky crags and gravel beach.
    Pacific light is like you tossed handfuls of pearl dust into the air, milliseconds before you pressed the shutter release. The sand there is formed by eons of shells being ground into the shoreline and ocean floor, shells you don’t find in the western Atlantic—abalone, tritons, Pandora clams. If you’re a great photographer, or just a lucky one, you can catch a flicker of that lost iridescence in the light reflected from Pacific waves crashing on a beach.
    Atlantic light is less forgiving. But whoever had taken this photo had captured it, to a degree that made it almost painful to look at, like squinting