max s. gerber(the latest shot)

i just received an email from my old college saying that the dorm i lived in as a freshman is about to be demolished and rebuilt elsewhere. it’s kind of funny to me that this notice would come on this particular day, july 2nd, because i have very clear memories of that dorm, mostly of the first few weeks of my freshman year. of course, all the freshmen get to school a week or two before everyone else and undergo orientation to ease into being there so that maybe by the time class starts they won’t be so scared out of their minds and confused. those first couple weeks you end up with a lot of 18 year olds walking around nervous as can be, trying to act cool, and that was certainly us.

that first year of college i shared a wall with amy macwilliamson. our dorm rooms were right next to each other, and we hit it off right away. strangely, our room-mates ended up being good friends, too. sometimes i’d knock on the wall and amy would knock back. for some reason this pleased me very much, and i remember feeling that that simple act was an indication to me that i was somewhere else - both in place and in life - and even being as resistant to change as i was, i felt it was a good thing. i won’t embarrass amy and say publicly what i used to call her as a nickname. i will embarrass myself and say that i sometimes still call her that, even all these years later. that first year, after being fast friends for a few weeks, we had a falling out and took a couple years to come back around.

of course, this was all before either of us knew anything about photography, before either of us had ever considered taking a photo class, let alone taking pictures for our lives. in fact, i think we became friends again in the school’s small, poorly equipped darkroom. i was knee deep in trying to figure out how a rolleiflex worked and if i was crazy to be doing any of this, and amy was just starting to make quietly powerful and thoroughly humanistic pictures. while i was busy filling horse feeding troughs with fixer and bolting enlargers to tables trying to make giant prints, getting distracted by the toys and science of it all, amy was there, inadvertently teaching me important lessons: slow down. don’t be so flashy. look at people evenly and quietly. if you want someone to be real in your pictures, be real to them in person.

i always use the word quiet when talking about amy’s pictures. i’ve used it so much in talking to her that it probably annoys her now. but i keep repeating this because a sense of quiet (without being boring or mundane or plain) is such a difficult thing to achieve in a picture, and when it works i find it to be more impactful than almost anything. amy’s so good at this, and i’m jealous every time i see her photos. sometimes i think amy’s photos are like mountain goats songs, or raymond carver stories. that is, they all seem to me to be about that moment in someone’s life when everything has changed, but nothing has happened yet. there’s always a sense in her pictures that something really momentous is just about to happen to these people, and it’s a really beautiful thing.

anyway, today, july 2nd, i learned that the wall we used to knock on is being knocked down, and today, july 2nd, is amy macwilliamson’s birthday. i’m even prouder today to call her my friend than i was many years ago. happy birthday, amy. thanks for being so awesome for so long.