"Burning Chrome" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gibson Walter)

dozen shots of Frank Lloyd Wright's Johnson's Wax
Building, juxtaposed with the covers of old Amazing
Stories pulps, by an artist named Frank R. Paul; the
employees of Johnson's Wax must have felt as though
they were walking into one of Paul's spray-paint pulp
utopias. Wright's building looked as though it had been
designed for people who wore white togas and Lucite
sandals. I hesitated over one sketch of a particularly
grandiose prop-driven airliner, all wing, like a fat sym-
metrical boomerang with windows in unlikely places.
Labeled arrows indicated the locations of the grand
ballroom and two squash courts. It was dated 1936.
"This thing couldn't have flown. . . ?" I looked at
Dialta Downes.

"Oh, no, quite impossible, even with those twelve
giant props; but they loved the look, don't you see?
New York to London in less than two days, first-class
dining rooms, private cabins, sun decks, dancing to jazz
in the evening... The designers were populists, you see;
they were trying to give the public what it wanted. What
the public wanted was the future."

I'd been in Burbank for three days, trying to suffuse a
really dull-looking rocker with charisma, when I got the
package from Cohen. It is possible to photograph what
isn't there; it's damned hard to do, and consequently a
very marketable talent. While I'm not bad at it, I'm not
exactly the best, either, and this poor guy strained my
Nikon's credibility. I got out, depressed because I do
like to do a good job, but not totally depressed, because
I did make sure I'd gotten the check for the job, and I
decided to restore myself with the sublime artiness of
the Barris-Watford assignment. Cohen had sent me
some books on Thirties design, more photos of stream-
lined buildings, and a list of Dialta Downes's fifty
favorite examples of the style in California.
Architectural photography can involve a lot of wait-
ing; the building becomes a kind of sundial, while you
wait for a shadow to crawl away from a detail you want,
or for the mass and balance of the structure to reveal
itself in a certain way. While I was waiting, I thought
myself in Dialta Downes's America. When I isolated a
few of the factory buildings on the ground glass of the
Hasselblad, they came across with a kind of sinister
totalitarian dignity, like the stadiums Albert Speer built
for Hitler. But the rest of it was relentlessly tacky:
ephemeral stuff extruded by the collective American
subconscious of the Thirties, tending mostly to survive
along depressing strips lined with dusty motels, mattress