Remembering David Barry
I was introduced to David in the summer of 1991 by Dana Gallagher. He had cobbled together some grilling device which could be folded into a shoe or the cuff of his trousers, and was cooking soft shell crabs on the illegal roof above his apartment on Leroy Street. I’d never heard of a soft shell crab. Rachel was there, Dana, Dan Winters, maybe a few others from the Jerry’s crowd. I didn’t know what to make of this febrile, preppy guy who gravitated towards me with conspiratorial enthusiasm but spoke in a mumbling hybrid of whisper and snigger, like Muttley from Wacky Races, requiring me to lean in and keep saying ‘what?’. On the subway back to Brooklyn, I came to understand that I had agreed to go to Guatemala with him in a couple of days. Just the two of us. He had tickets, or if he hadn’t, he would by tomorrow. All I had to do was say yes. Which I’d apparently already done.
I knew nothing of Guatemala. I thought it was in Africa. Turns out David didn’t either. So it was a surprise, forty minutes after touchdown, to find ourselves standing by a roundabout, doing a deal with some guy to rent his brother’s 1987 Nissan Cherry for 10 days, no questions asked. Strangers in a strange land seemingly devoid of tourism, infrastructure, and in the grip of a civil war. The roads beyond the capitol were essentially non-existent, studded with military checkpoints manned by teenagers with pinprick pupils and suspicious Rolex’s. Thinking we could navigate them in Auntie Barbara’s shopping-mall runaround was abject insanity. But David, as always, said everything would be fine, ladies from DesMoines do this, and a few minutes later we were barreling through the night, white-knuckled, tires smoking, on the broken road to Antigua. ‘You have to drive like this down here’ he whispered, despite the fact nobody else was. We arrived in a blackout, the whole town lit only by candles in windows. We giddily ate potato chips for dinner in a bodega which turned out to be a family’s bedroom when the lights came on.
Guatemala was my baptism by fire in the crucible of David’s psyche. One part lust for life, three parts death wish, never the time or space to work out which. We ate pizza with burned-out hippies in Panajachel who told us not to go to Hueheutenango, where we immediately went, navigating the track to Coban at two miles an hour through villages whose entire populations came out and stared as we rattled past, hissing coolant. We never got out of the car. If anybody looked dyed-in-the-wool CIA it was David in his ubiquitous khaki Boer War cap, pressed shirt and shorts, socks slipped into Birkenstocks. And these people had blood behind their eyes. Frustrated by slow progress, he would suddenly snap and gun the Nissan round blind, unguarded bends with thousand foot drops, swinging a tire out over the edge before sniggering and mumbling ‘sorry’. Despite paring his luggage down to a single origami parcel, David insisted on lugging a huge 4/5 camera everywhere, along with focussing cloths, boxes of film, a loading tent and a plastic bucket full of purple slime for soaking polaroid negatives. He was going to repeat his iconic picture of Chichen Itza, he said, but at Tikal. And sure enough, when I gazed down, spent, from the top of Temple IV a few days later – just me, a German dude on mushrooms and a passing flock of toucans – there was David, 200 feet below, shouldering his medium-format bundle through the jungle like a Sisyphean dung beetle.
‘Some guys like girls. Others like cameras.’ said the German. If only he knew.
Photography really mattered to David back then. He knew he was good, that he saw things other people didn’t see. He had an archer’s eye, understood instinctively when the shot was there, as well as how to dodge the laser beams of drivel and distraction, slip in and grab it like a thief grabs a diamond. Watching him zero in, constantly tearing off his glasses to wipe the deluge of sweat from his eyes, was like watching a heron stalk a carp. And when he struck, it was sudden, surgical and over in a flash. He’d set the shot up, walk the subject in, mutter a single instruction – ‘hold your arms slightly away from your sides’ – then walk them out. Done. I remember a shoot with a whiny, condescending Martin Scorsese that was completed in four frames. Ten seconds, start to finish. Everyone had just started munching M&M’s and David was packing up his equipment. Scorsese stood staring at his handlers in amazement, his hands still slightly away from his sides, surely the victim of some secret joke. It was pretty great. David succinctly folding his tripod, the coolest person in the room, everyone else looking like chumps. And of course the shot became an instant classic. Scorsese’s people called later for a print. David said no. You can’t have it both ways.
A few weeks after escaping Guatemala, David asked me to be his agent. I didn’t know what this meant. I knew nothing about photography, possessed no contacts, experience or resources, and had only recently moved from London where I’d been diligently collecting Unemployment Benefit. I was supporting myself in New York by cleaning toilets. David was a rising star, shooting features for all the classic publications of the 90’s; Vanity Fair, Bazaar, Esquire, Rolling Stone, Interview. My friends were assisting him, jumping into taxis to go hang with Johnny Cash, Andrea Bocelli, Seamus Heaney, Jay-Z. He was being courted by several agents with sparkling orthodontics, despite his portfolio being merely an insouciant box of black and white prints. Why would he want some floppy-haired mongrel in plus-fours and jelly sandals to be his standard-bearer? Turns out life for David, at least back then, was a kind of practiced, day-to-day exercise in fully occupying the present. He valued co-conspirators more than any promise of a glittering future, dangled in front of him like a golden carrot. He knew from childhood that the future is often an imposter: it might turn up: it might not. And even if it did, he had few good reasons to trust he’d be around to welcome it. And so he invested everything in the lifeboat he was occupying, along with the motley crew recruited to occupy it with him. Absurdly generous, the rent and credit cards went unpaid for months in favour of new adventures, all spun out entirely on his dime. There was never a taxi fare or restaurant check he didn’t get to first: he wanted it behind him, there was no time to waste. The past was barren country and David the ultimate Jumbly; forever spinning round and round, sailing away in a sieve.
Not having an office was no obstacle to being David’s agent. He simply put a second, identical 1980’s telephone on the door-and-sawhorses that served as his desk, and we sat on stools, shoulder-to-shoulder, day in, day out, smoking up his tiny living room with endless packs of Drum. Not that we did much work. He hated me talking on the telephone to clients even more than I did. It was noisy, fake and vulgar; it interrupted the improvised shoots we’d do between multi-day games of Risk, long lunches at Kenny Shopsin’s and evenings with Matty, Andrea, Dana, Marty, Rachel and Rich, owning the giant cotton-reels outside the Ear Inn. In retrospect these were halcyon days. Bathed in the blood orange soup of colossal sunsets on the Hudson River, we frolicked and barked like naughty stuffed toys come to life in some scurrilous, slightly pornographic rendition of Winnie the Pooh; with David as a slurring Christopher Robin, barely mounting his postman’s bike before tottering slippery down Spring Street in search of tonight’s bed, tomorrow’s hangover.
But if it’s true that David stayed committed to sailing the sieve, it is also the case that the rest of us, emerging from behind the wedge he had driven into the photography industry on our behalf, were becoming more interested in the taste of golden carrot. His assistants were getting jobs as photographers: his agent took on a second photographer, then a third – people who actually wanted to work, have careers, get paid. We still gathered at the Ear, but no longer as gawking acolytes watching a genius shoot bottle rockets out of his ass. The conversations thickened, clotted with observations on clients, competitors, day rates. We still swam, fished and shot each other with BB guns in the Catskills, but the tapestry that was so rich a year or two earlier was beginning to fray at the edges. We were taking the stuff David had championed; photography, beauty, food, the outdoors, fishing, vintage folding kayaks, curated toothpaste – lifestyle before it was lifestyle – and monetizing it. There was talk of lofts, mortgages, children. Of building lives and not missing opportunities. Christopher Robin was looking less like a hero, more like a nutter. There was a chill in the Hundred Acre Wood and the creatures were lighting fires, staying home, counting shekels.
David Barry was the Pied Piper who emerged from nowhere – a hatch in a tar roof in the West Village – at a critical fulcrum in my life. Salvaged from London and freshly minted, I was utterly without direction until he handed me one he had lurking in his drawer, already cleaned up, polished and ready to go. Saying yes to his offer was the defining moment of my twenties and I ran, walked, hopped and finally trudged with the gift he gave me for more than two decades. It birthed a marriage, children, homes. Certainly all these things would have happened anyway; but they would have been different. Different people, different children, different homes. And though I would surely have loved them as much, how can I not thrill to the profundity of the actual narrative life has afforded me, as catalyzed by David? He saw me with my thumb out by the side of the road and he stopped. Then he put his foot to the floor, did some donuts and jumped the rental car over the levee.
More recently, David’s capacity to purge the past, along with my own propensity toward self-absorption, led to a decade-long period of estrangement. Nothing in particular happened other than the collective nothings that always happen. The right reason to reach across the humdrum divide of routine, circumstance, embarrassment, never presented itself. We acquiesced into a silence which I lazily supposed would one day end. And now it has. Just not in a way I would ever have anticipated.
In a single telephone call the ragged halves of a thousand memories owned by just the two of us have vanished. The albums of a distant decade are full of torn photographs.
It’s sad. He’s been gone more than two weeks and I hadn’t a clue. Really, it’s a terrible shame.
•••
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.
Philip Larkin