"Edgar James Banks, one of the first American scholars of Mesopotamia, was hired by the University of Chicago to dig at Adab [Iraq] in 1904-5.  He was caught trying to smuggle objects, banned from further digging and fired by Chicago.  He spent the rest of his life buying and selling antiquities." [McGuire Gibson in an article on the looting of the Iraq Museum and Iraqi antiquities during and since the American invasion, London Review of Books, 1 January 2009].



We went out last night to shoot the moon, which was supposed to be the best and the brightest, but we got sidetracked in Griffith Park (my idea, a very bad one), then went to Lucy's for enchiladas and then to Scoops on Heliotrope for ice cream where the mother of the boy whose hat we were taking pictures of (surrepticiously, we thought) approached us.  "My son is also a photographer," she explained, "but he never takes pictures of himself."  Then the young man came over and was shy and polite and told us technical things you can do with digital at which we nodded, pretending to understand.  He might have assumed, charitably, that we knew more because we were older.  In just such a fashion have I deceived youth in the past.

Lately I have decided I should try to compose in the camera and not resort to cropping afterward, but not reading directions and manuals and being self-taught, it is largely an intuitive process.  Bianca is more disciplined and knows considerably more.

There is, I am finding, something about being with a camera in public, at least in this town.  We are clearly not paparazzi so unlikely to leap on the hood of your car to get a shot, and we are old enough to look as though we know what we're doing.  People seem to respect that, or grow self-conscious and give us a wide berth.  Or maybe it is the full moon, because I feel curiously empowered, ignoring you and studying the world as though trying to decide how to frame it, what piece to take away -- her hands, his hat, that tableau in the tattoo parlor, that still-life of lawn ornaments.  Stealing is what it feels like.  No, not quite looting, or plundering, or pillaging, but close, since I generally think a war is going on (and there generally is, somewhere).  Shop-lifting  is more like it.  Lifting bits and pieces of you, the view into your kitchen window, the things you left on your porch.  I am not the man careening down the street with a large ornamental vase sticking out of his trunk, but there is nevertheless an exhilarating sensation involved that makes me feel like a renegade.

And yet, shy too.  We come out of the hills down to Hollywood Boulevard where a girl and boy are having a fight so bad that she (arms crossed against her chest as protection or defiance) shakes off his hold and walks out into traffic.  People slam on brakes and stop, luckily, to honk their disapproval.  The boyfriend flips them off, inserting himself between bumpers and girl to protect her as she continues against the light, still resisting him, to prove how mad she is.  I don't even think about taking a picture now.  I know it is the full moon.  "Full moon," I say to Bianca, to explain the crazy dangerous heartache that continues down the other side of the street.  We drive on.  I would be a terrible wartime photojournalist. 

Wikipedia calls Edgar James Banks an "entrepreneurial roving archaeologist" and a model for Indiana Jones and cites 1903 as the year he commenced his dig at the ancient city of Adab.   The discrepancy in date doesn't bother me, but the notion that a charming treasure hunter having adventures is essentially the modern day criminal trafficker in stolen goods is disconcerting. 

I come home and download over 80 images, most of them disappointing, but I am still proud of my booty, as though I have pulled off a heist.  "I got nothing," Bianca's e-mail reports this morning, but I write back and tell her to look again later.  Sometimes the images improve over time.  I think she is too critical of her own work.  I love what she sees out there. 

Meanwhile the moon hangs huge and luminous in the morning sky.