The Flaming Corsage

Katrina Sits for her Portrait, with a Flower

IN THE MACDONALD photographic studio on Broadway and Maiden Lane, the studio favored by eminent Albanians, Katrina confirmed with the secretary her appointment for a portrait sitting. She sat down to wait and the secretary stared at her exposed ankles, one stockinged leg visible up to the shinbone.

“Is something wrong?” Katrina asked the secretary. “You seem to be staring at my dress.”

“Oh, nothing wrong at all, Madam. It’s a lovely dress. I’ve just never seen one like it.”

“Do you like it?”

“I wouldn’t have the courage to wear it.”

“That’s a very silly thing to say. One may wear whatever one chooses to wear.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

Pirie MacDonald, the photographer who had established the studio, came out of an inner office in his tailcoat and greeted Katrina who shook his hand without standing up.

“Your secretary finds my dress unusual,” she said.

“Does she?” MacDonald stared at her legs, nodded. “Shall we go into the studio?”

He entered behind her and motioned her to a seat in front of a pastoral backdrop with a sky full of clouds. She shook her head.

“That will not do,” she said. “I do not want to be photographed with clouds.”

“Whatever you say, Madam.”

He moved the backdrop to one side, revealing a black backdrop behind it.

“Nor do I want blackness,” Katrina said.

“White, then?” And he moved the black backdrop aside, revealing the white wall.

“Do you have any yellow?”

“Color doesn’t show in the photograph, Madam.”

“But color is there, whether it shows or not.”

“It’s white or that’s it, I’m afraid.”

“Then let it be white.”

She sat in the chair he placed in front of the empty whiteness while he organized the placement of lights, creating the fall of shadow on her face. “When will the photo be ready?”

“Beginning of the week.”

“You’ll deliver, of course.”

“Of course.” He was under his focusing cloth, adjusting the camera lens. “You’ll want a torso portrait, I assume. From the waist up?”

“Not at all. I want the entire body.”

She moved her legs to give greatest visibility to her ankles. MacDonald came out from under his cloth.

“Is this how you want to be seen in the photo?” he asked, indicating her ankles.

“It’s for my husband.”

“Very lucky man, your husband.”

“No, he’s not a lucky man. His life is a disaster, and much of it is my doing.”

“I’m sure you’re too cruel to yourself, Madam.”

“I’m not cruel at all. This is just how it happened to be. One is what one is, one does what one does. Isn’t that how you find it?”

“I’m not much on philosophy, Madam.”

“But in taking pictures you must see in people’s faces how they are.”

“Sometimes I think I do, but other times I know what I see is only an illusion. From what I see here, I’m sure this photo will cheer up your husband.”

“I hope you are right.”

“Then relax, Madam,” he said as he hid himself beneath the cloth, “relax.”

“I have no intention of relaxing,” Katrina said. “You’ll have to photograph me as I am.”

“Don’t move. And look into the camera.”

“Wait!” she said, for she suddenly remembered Femmitie Staats, defined forever in her painting by her flirtatious smile; and Katrina wondered which feature of hers people would fix upon as definitive. She loathed the idea of its being her avant-garde ankles. Then she saw the dried sunflower in a vase on a corner table in the studio, and she spoke up, told the photographer she wished to redesign herself, and would he leave her for a few moments?

The billowy V-neck of her dress was adjustable by hidden burtons, two of which she undid, allowing the neck to open to the edges of her shoulders. The separation of her breasts then became visible, but she concealed most of that with the sunflower, whose stem she snapped to shorten it, then tucked the stem inside her bodice. In her mirror image she had become different, new yet again. And, for the first time, the top of her white, oval scar from the Delavan was visible to the world, above the edge of her dress.

Could one call this appearance brazen?

She thought not. Some might suggest that a flaw such as a scar should be hidden forever, but she disagreed.

She called to the photographer to return, and he raised an eyebrow at what he saw, then proceeded to take what would be unarguably the most important photograph of his later life. In it Katrina’s hair is symmetrically divided in an inverted V that falls with slight convex curves from the center of her forehead to the edges of her eyebrows, not one hair straying. Her sharply patrician nose is half in soft shadow, her mouth a small smile that says “I understand,” and there are deep oval shadowings that enhance her eyes, render them patient with the melancholy she so covets. She is looking directly at us and into us, her torso slightly rightward, her yellow sunflower an oblique presence, her left shoulder in a gently aggressive forward thrust, for she is yielding, but with a will that only very reluctantly recognizes the inevitable; yet it does recognize it. Her ankles, a statement of rebellion, do not dominate the photograph as MacDonald thought they might; but they color it, as Katrina’s radical exploration of love colored her entire life, and the lives of those around her.

With the making of this picture MacDonald would elevate himself, for a time, to the status of master photographer of eastern American beauty. Women of privilege, having once seen this photo, would come to Albany from as far as Boston and Manhattan to be photographed by him. But no other photo he took in these years would approach in vividness the image of Katrina and her sunflower with the pale yellow petals: two kindred blossoms of nature’s intelligence, caught at the peak of their elegant desiccation.