Since 1982 I have taken many hundreds of pictures of the sites in which these three novels have been placed–Cardiff, Maine, a fictional version of Bangor, Maine, Commercial Street and Race Point in Provincetown, and Christopher Street in the West Village in New York. But when it came time to find a photograph we could use for the cover of each of these novels, I realized that all of my pictures were taken in the daylight, and the significant actions that made those places memorable all took place after dark. Charles Howard was drowned in the night, the crowds at the Stonewall rioted at night, and at the end of his long life, Fair Shaw walked with his friends in the surf at night.
So I went to New York September 20, 2010, getting there in the late afternoon, leaving my bag with my son and going back over to Christopher Street about 8:30 in the evening, with a tripod and a camera. I took pictures principally in three places—the “corner,” where Christopher Street begins on Greenwich Avenue, the intersection of Christopher Street and Gay Street, and the stretch of Christopher from #55 Christopher to the Stonewall Inn and a few buildings beyond on the north side of the street, across from Sheridan Square (which is what the inhabitants called it in 1969). Many of the pictures showed the edgy confusion of New York that I like. I chose the cover of Adam in the Morning to be one of the pictures of Christopher at Gay Street.
The Bangor pictures differed in the way Bangor differs from New York. New York streets never really get dark. Bangor streets, even one as close to the center of town as the State Street bridge, are badly lit, and do get dark, and make taking pictures without a flash difficult. I started just at dusk, October 13, 2010, at six o’clock. The sky was still light. There is a small bridge, slightly lower than the State Street bridge, a little downstream. I aimed my camera upstream to get the State Street bridge. Then I took pictures in the other direction, downstream, looking out to the Penobscot River—less light, fewer people. The cover of Ceremonies is of the State Street bridge, where Charles Howard died. All of my pictures of Bangor were of the Kenduskeag Stream, where Charlie drowned, except a few, which were taken in the daytime, of the granite monument to Charlie. I have been told that people in Bangor keep the monument and its plantings in good shape, and it was a shame these pictures of it had to be taken just at the end of the growing season.
I got to Provincetown in the late afternoon, October 26, 2010, checked into a B&B, and went out on Commercial Street at dusk. I started at the intersection of Commercial and Johnson Street and walked west or southwest through the center of town down to Carver, then I turned around and walked back toward Johnson. The sun had set in the southwest, making the sky over that part of the landscape lighter. These pictures indicate the kind of place Commercial Street is and the way it may have looked when Fair Shaw and his partner Chris and Julio and David walked down Commercial toward the west that night in 2004.
I would like to have chosen the days for my photography by the number of people on the street, but it was the beginning of autumn, and the weather was controlling. During September and October, I watched the calendar and visited these places when it didn’t seem like it would be raining.
These are not photographs of places in my novels, but they are photographs of places I was thinking about when I was writing my novels. So, enjoy.
