The Quality of His Attention

de Young Museum 1970s

“The subject of your picture shouldn’t slide out of the frame like that,” said David Fukuyama, our teacher.

The subject of the photograph wasn’t really the leather sandals, I told myself stubbornly. An edge was indeed out of the frame. “I was trying to feature the texture of the Navajo rug,” I said lamely.

“The sandals are almost all there,” said David. “You can’t just cut them off like that.”

I was silent, and thought about this for quite a while, though of course he was right. David had shown us techniques to develop our own negatives and then print them on various papers. He didn’t say much, letting us trust our instincts and learn by doing. He was more apt to sit down and tell us stories, and he had a few!

David was a few years older than I and was teaching both photography and pottery at the de Young Museum school in San Francisco. My sister Solveig was in his pottery class. He had taken up photography in the army so as to stay out of combat in the 1960’s. He seemed especially to make photographs of people working. One of his was simply a man with a hose washing down the steps of city hall. He was a realist. What was in front of him was enough.

From his stories, I have a clear image of David driving a big motorcycle along the coast highway down to Carmel with his girlfriend, both of them with long hair flowing down their backs. She was a blonde Norwegian and worked at the Tuck Shop. I was sure they made a beautiful, romantic pair.

By the time I met David, the two were married and perhaps even had a child. “We wanted something more,” he told us. But it drove him to take a job in sales for Sony. After the class I took was over, I went to the Sony shop sometimes, just to talk to him.

It wasn’t easy. Customers milled about, wanting to talk about equipment. A high-pitched tone permeated the air. David was the calm, knowledgeable presence in the eye of the storm. I wasn’t a customer, but I waited, and occasionally he felt he could take a break and we nipped out for lunch or an ice cream. I remember going to Le Central, the great French bistro on Bush Street, and watching him eat his lunch late in the afternoon. It was the quality of his attention I was after. He was so open to the person in front of him, so equal to any possibility, so capable of life in all its vicissitudes.

What did we talk about? He was curious and interested in everything. I would say of him, as John Steinbeck did of his great friend Ed Ricketts, that his mind had no horizons. I was married too by then, and things were tough. My husband had been in a car accident and couldn’t find work he could handle. David, on meeting him, sensed the intelligence in my husband and tried to help. 

One evening several years later, I asked David to dinner out in Walnut Creek. He agreed, but kept calling to say he had been delayed. I was sure this was how his life went. He gave himself completely and everything took more time than he thought. Late in the evening he did arrive. My husband was by this time asleep in front of the television while David and I ate and talked. He even stayed the night. My last memory of David is of shaking out clean flowered sheets together to put on the bed where he was to sleep. In the morning he was gone.

He died in the mid 1980’s of a blood infection. Suddenly, shockingly, irrevocably. He would have been about 45 years old. We found out through mutual friends. We didn’t know his family, so I didn’t learn anything more. 

And now, when the web records all of our details, I can find scant reference to David Fukuyama. In the summer of 2008, his Truck Drivers Series of photographs was shown at the Buehler Center, a museum at the University of California, Davis. Kurt Fishback mentions him in a memoir. And that is about it. “Don’t let it be forgot,” I say to myself. The quality of attention of that great soul.

What is it in us that calls out to those we occasionally meet? How do we pick each other out of the crowds of people in our lives? A certain vibration, a harmonic. Sparks arc across the space between us, visible in our lively eyes, in faces shining and open. We anticipate feelings of closeness, new knowledge of each other. And then remember later the thoughts and images we shared upon meeting.

Science tells us hormones are involved. Dopamine, which runs the reward pathways in our brains, plays a part in attraction. Oxytocin and vasopressin help in bonding us together. But long term associations depend on shared values.

I watched friendship arc between people a few weeks ago when Don and I attended the afternoon concert of an old friend of Don’s. I had long heard of Cole Panther, of the music videos and movies he and Don made together, of their mutual friends and of Cole’s brother. I had never met him and he and Don hadn’t seen each other in years. Don saw a notice of a Sunday afternoon concert and suggested we go, as we happened to be in the area.

Benicia, at the edge of the Bay, was warm in the sun and cool in the shadows. At the outdoor bar, groups of people were talking, drinking, eating; not a great venue for the songs with important lyrics Cole Panther played and sang with his group, a bassist and a steel guitar. But Don listened raptly. In the middle of a song, Cole said into the microphone, “Don Starnes?” Don nodded. They might have been the only ones in the place! At the break they embraced each other, Cole referring briefly to all of their past adventures and explaining what he hoped for his future.

Friendship has a long tail. We may be closer to a friend at some times and lose that closeness later when purposes and ideas change, or distance separates us. But we do not forget associations, measuring our lives by them. Often a phone conversation, in which we hear the loved, remembered voice is enough to call them up. Any number of other associations might call a friend to mind, sending one down long-forgotten rabbit holes. Times and places may be marked indelibly with the image of a friend and what you did together.

I don’t really like to use the term “artist” because of its romantic and pretentious associations, but it does seem to me that many of those I pick out from the crowd have artistic proclivities. It may be because they are makers, paying close attention to the elements of the world which go into things: earth, air, fire, water and metal. Certainly they are attuned to the world’s beauty, with a corresponding sense of pattern and taste.

A circuitous route of associations with artistic friends has brought me back to David Fukuyama. So many years later he leaves a powerful impression, a few photographs, plus a few pieces of pottery made under his influence.