In the early days, his work was awful.  That’s standard in any skilled work.  For some people it takes years, other people decades — but it always takes time.  Time to triumph over awful.  It works this way for painters, for farmers, for writers, and it’s no different for photographers.

Pablo started with an old film camera that was the size of a refrigerator.  He dragged it outside on only the best of the sunny days.  He ran around making photos.  When he got the photos back from the developer, there were flares and flames and smears of objects.  All of the photos looked like the camera had been pointed directly at the sun. Plenty of photos were dead, nothing to them but a frothy blackness.  There were photos of Pablo’s fingers and his coat sleeve, which were constantly falling in front of the lens.  There was one picture of a bird.  A bird in flight.  The image was warped in a way that the tail feathers seemed to stretch the length of the photo.  It was mostly blurry, but it was clear enough to invigorate him for the next batch of photos.

Back in his apartment, Pablo pinned that photograph of the elongated bird to his wall.  He pinned it up on a wall on the east side of his apartment.  All afternoon that photograph baked in the sun.  Sunlight was the only good thing about that apartment building.  The structure itself was tall and anemic.  A good breeze could sway it.  No two stairs or floorboards were perfectly level.  Round things collected in one corner.  The entire building hunched like a person suffering severe stomach cramps.  There were rats that chewed through the insulation.  When the insulation was gone, they chewed through one another.

Pablo lived on the fifth floor which allowed for a decent view over neighboring buildings.  The sixth floor was under renovation.  It was in a perpetual state of renovation, and had been since he moved in three years prior.  Sawdust and loose nails sprinkled down on the fifth floor.  Pablo was constantly brushing off the surfaces in his apartment.  The comforter on the bed needed to be shaken out the window three times a week.  Any cups or cutlery left out had to be rinsed of sediment.  Even when drinking a glass of water, Pablo would set a book, or an old ruined photograph over the glass to avoid contamination.  

In addition to the constant dust storm, heat and the aroma of spoiled food from the lower floors lofted upwards and became lodged on the fifth floor.  The only saving grace was the rent.  Rent on the fifth floor was the cheapest in the building.

Eventually, the sunshine that lit the apartment during the afternoons discolored the photograph of the bird so much so that it became unrecognizable.  It could have been a banner in the sky, or a dragon drawn with a crayon, a smudge from a dirty finger, a bug squashed and smeared.  One day, Pablo pulled the pen from the photograph and watched it flutter to the ground.  With a sense of nostalgia, he left it sitting there, face up, along the baseboard for several weeks before he finally picked it up and tossed it into the garbage.

The photos he took got worse, and then better, and then stayed the same.  Time seemed to pass and Pablo shot and developed boxes and boxes of film.  There were outliers in the photos.  Decent photos, accidentally shot from the hip, or purposefully shot with lucky timing.  He pinned these outlier photos up, now on the west side of his apartment.  He hung them high up, above the window so that direct sunlight couldn’t chew the color out of them.

It didn’t happen quickly, but Pablo was able to cover an entire wall with photographs he’d taken.  The spacing was uneven and there were no frames.  Everything hanging on his apartment walls was made by him.  He took pride in that.  Sometimes staring, going from one photograph to the next with a smile in the corner of his mouth.  There was no single photograph that his eyes fixed on.  In fact, it wasn’t clear whether Pablo noticed the details of the photographs at all.  He never stopped and pondered on a flower, a blurred nose, a car in the rain with the taillights glaring.  It was as if, instead of looking at the photos directly, he looked at the spaces in between the photos.  The misaligned lanes, vertically and horizontally, zigging and zagging up and down like avenues in the city.  His eyes would travel.  He’d absorb the essence of the photographs, the way one observes the landscape from a moving train.

It wasn’t until a couple years into his photography that Pablo shifted his focus.  No longer was he enamored with perusing the wall of photographs.  He knew them well enough.  Walking past that wall several times a day, he could easily locate any specific photo in a matter of milliseconds.  One morning, encouraged by nothing, inspired by no one, he took one photograph off the wall and laid it flat on his desk.  He didn’t sit right away.  He wandered.  Paced back and forth across the apartment knowing that he’d put the photograph there, but not dwelling on why or what he’d do with it.  When he had nearly forgotten about the photograph altogether, he came to an abrupt stop, pulled out the chair, sat with both elbows on the desk, face resting in his hands, and inspected it.  Again, he didn’t inspect the entire thing.  Looking at the photograph as a whole would have been like staring into the sun.  Something in Pablo knew that.  Instead, he broke it down, centimeter by centimeter.  Starting at the top left corner and crawling his way across and down until he’d dissected the entire thing.  

Never before had he noticed the narrow color spectrum of the photo.  He’d never realized the empty parts, where there seemed to be no photo at all.  It fascinated him to look at this photograph, one that he’d seen hundreds of times before, this time from a new perspective.  It was perfect in some segments and awful in others.  But for one reason or another, it required both.  Both the uneven angle and the symmetry.  If the camera had been shifted one millimeter in any direction, the photograph would have never made it to his wall.  There seemed to be precision in the photograph where none was intended.

Pablo went over that photograph until his eyes were red, the lids heavy.  Finally, he picked it up, walked over to the garbage bin, and set it in gently.  It didn’t hurt him to do so, nor was he pleased by it.  It was simply a discarding of something that had fulfilled its purpose.