Kind of a denunciation, and it peeved me. TheyвЂ™re really saying: Forget it, stay home, frig around with your old prints, leave everything to us your career is ours now. вЂњSure, heвЂ™s all right, but what about you, sugar?вЂќ I said sharply, вЂњListen, I donвЂ™t think a seventy-year-old has much left to fear, do you?вЂќ They are supposedly flattering me by treating me like a fairyвЂ™s mother, one of those grasping disappointed women who like to be kissed and winked at and warned that they might be in for a little unwanted boom-boom. They want to keep us indoors, so they get flirtatious and start the canoodling routine. They said, вЂњWatch out, Maude - heвЂ™s got a reputation,вЂќ laying it on thick with that leering insincerity the younger set uses on old ladies. No one wanted me to go: afraid IвЂ™ll croak, barf on my shoes, faint on the plane, get lost, disgrace myself - that sort of elderly caper. IT WAS something of a struggle, getting away from Grand Island (which is not an island, but a вЂњneckвЂќ-a South Yarmouth sandbar in Nantucket Sound). It was not until I tried to do Graham Greene in London that I had doubts about the whole shooting-match. With so many loyal subjects it was easy for me to believe that I was a queen.ДЇrank had begun to forage in the windmill for the Maude Coffin Pratt Retrospective. It was my Third Eye, as close-fitting as a jewelerвЂ™s loupe, almost corporeal. A camera was, after all, a room.ДЄs a photographer I considered my camera indistinguishable from my eye. And gin and solitude - drawing the cork and decanting the clear liquid and tasting it to hear the ghosts wake in the walls. No photograph could do justice to these aromas. вЂњA credit to her sex,вЂќ the patronizing critic often said, calling attention to my tits, which they promptly put in the wringer of art criticism.Д«ut art should require no instrument but memory, the pleasurable fear of hunching in a dark room and feeling the dayвЂ™s hot beauty lingering in the house. вЂњIвЂ™m just a farmer.вЂќДЇor over fifty years I was a world-famous photographer, but being a woman was regarded as something of a freak. вЂњWhatвЂ™s all the fuss about?вЂќ says the American creative genius. This is not odd, but most heroes and doers I have known dreamed of being Walter Mittys - puzzled benumbed souls with sore teeth and eyeglasses, shuffling through the house in carpet slippers to take a leak. And what a posture! Your Walter Mitty dreams of heroism and great deeds. I was posturing I still believed in my pictures. вЂњHang them!вЂќ I threw open the windmill, my picture palace. вЂњI want to hang your pictures,вЂќ said Fusco. I said, вЂњJust because I happen to be a photographer, it doesnвЂ™t mean I have to make an exhibition of myself.вЂќ Where was I? A barnacle named Frank Fusco told me that laid end to end in a retrospective they would tell my complete story. вЂњIвЂ™ve never seen Marilyn like that before,вЂќ a critic once said to me. But I was still proud of Orthodox Jewish Boys, Cummings in Provincetown, Refugees, Danang, and Marilyn.

As for your favorite, Twenty-two White Horses- that received more attention than it deserved: it is seldom oneвЂ™s best work that brings one fame. Firebug, Fidel at Harvard, and my portrait of ChГ© Guevara were part of the folklore. No - and I did not invent the camera, though a fair number of admirers told me I was the first to make it work properly, not only with Boogie-Men, my early negative prints, Pigga, Negro Swimming to a Raft, and Blind Child with Dead Bat, but in the simpler Clamdiggers: Wellfleet and the very steamy sequence of the Lamar Carney Pig Dinner. Some people thought I began in the wet-plate days. The rest of the Cape was dark, yet I would not have been anywhere else. Beyond the windmill the moon on white fence-posts made tracks to the shore of the Sound. Now the light was failing, and the old house had that late-evening fatigue that followed a scorcher, a kind of thirst aggravated by crickets: groans from the woodwork and all the closets astir. Julia Margaret Cameron, вЂњAnnals of My Glass-houseвЂќДЄLL DAY LONG I had been thinking that I had grounds for believing I was an original. From the first moment I handled my lens with a tender ardor, and it has become to me as a living thing, with a voice and memory and creative vigor.

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