An Arranged Marriage: My Life with the Computer
by A. D. Coleman

In a previous column, I acknowledged my sympathies with those photographers who are less than thrilled with the accomplishments to date of those who produce electronic imagery, and who remain skeptical about the impact of these new technologies on the craft of photography. Now I want to indicate my empathy with those photographers who have an actual fear and loathing of these suddenly omnipresent tools and processes that seem to be rapidly taking over the medium. I understand what you're going through; it's exactly parallel to what I've experienced as a working writer, and I want to address the situation from that standpoint.

As a professional wordsmith, I hated the whole idea of writing on a computer from the beginning. Not that I was a Luddite, devoted to the literal manuscript, by any means. During the early 1950s my family had spent a couple of years in France, where they still taught kids to write by the Palmer Method; so I had a fine cursive hand, of which I was quite proud, by the age of eight. But my parents founded a small publishing enterprise that was run from our home in my childhood, so I grew up around typewriters: not just manual ones, but even more serious writing machines -- those hulking, tank-like post-World War II IBM electrics. They were the first pieces of machinery I ever came to love; I used to turn them on when no one was around, to listen to them hum, or to run a blank piece of paper all the way through by keeping my finger on the automatic carriage return . . .

When asked how to become a writer, Sinclair Lewis habitually answered, "Learn to type." I never did acquire touch-typing skills, though I had plenty of opportunity; instead, I evolved an idiosyncratic, advanced hunt-and-peck technique that even today pretty much keeps pace with my thinking. Still, by my teens I understood what Lewis meant: Typing lets you see what your words would look like in print. While I made notes, and sometimes first drafts, by hand (and still do), by the time I got to college it had become second nature to sit down at the typewriter -- a lovely dull-green Olivetti manual portable, finely designed and compact, the writer's equivalent of a 1950s rangefinder Leica, was the first I had as my very own -- to work out an idea.

As an undergraduate at Hunter College in the Bronx, I wrote for the school's bi-campus paper (the largest in the City University system) and its literary magazine -- my first experience in seeing my own work published. Both of these publications were produced in the same print shop, down on Manhattan's Lower East Side. In my senior year I edited the school newspaper. Altogether I spent weeks, maybe months of my life in that cramped little shop. My favorite part of it was watching the Linotype operator set something I'd written myself. If I stood at the side of the machine, I could observe out of one eye as his hands flew over his keyboard, entering in my text from the typescript before him; with the other eye, I could see the slugs of hot lead drop down a slot, my words in metal, fixed, permanent, ineradicable.

When I graduated from college in 1964, with a B.A. in English, and headed off to do graduate work in literature and creative writing, my mother asked me what I wanted for a present. "An electric typewriter," I answered immediately, Smith-Corona having just produced its first electrified portable model. And that's what she gave me, over my father's strenuous objections: "No real writer writes on an electric typewriter," he sneered.(1) (It stung me. A sometime writer himself, he gave me a monogrammed leather briefcase, presumably a more essential tool of the trade. A few years later, in a profile of James Jones, I read that the celebrated author of From Here to Eternity always wrote standing up at the mantel, on an electric typewriter. I sent the clipping to my dad. So there. Not long thereafter I'd started earning my living as a working writer, and that no longer mattered.)

So I got accustomed to turning my instrument on and off, and to its humming quietly and vibrating slightly on my desk as I worked. For the next two decades I traded up every five years or so; like camera manufacturers, typewriter companies periodically added new bells and whistles. (There was the automatic carriage return, the typo correction cartridge, the changeable typeface ball . . . ) Basically, however, the instrument remained the same; the user never had to rethink his or her fundamental relationship to the tool. In this sense, photography and writing were in pretty much the same boat from World War II through the decade after Vietnam.

Then, in the early 1980s, "word processing" began to be discussed, and various crude instruments came on the market. I could tell this was the future of my profession, and I found it hateful. I'd never been much for television, and this promised to be like watching myself writing on TV. Even the term "word processor" was repellent; it sounded like something you'd use to make verbal sausage. I committed myself to holding out.

One day in 1981 there came a knock on my door. I opened it to find a postman named Aaron Farr, who lived on Staten Island also and was, it turned out, something akin to my average reader (according to the demographics of some of the publications I was then writing for): a college-educated, serious amateur photographer, in his mid-30s. He'd recognized my name on the mail he was delivering, and decided he wanted to meet me, since he'd been reading me in Camera 35 and elsewhere for years. A writer doesn't often get to meet his average reader, so I invited him in for coffee and we struck up a friendship.

Aaron was also seriously interested in computers. I don't know if he'd qualify as a hacker, but he was fooling around with a Texas Instruments model (nowadays a real dinosaur) and doing some elementary programming. He invited me over to his house one day and gave me a tutorial. It was my first direct encounter with word processing. I didn't exactly take to it, but it seemed -- intriguing. In any case, I could no longer say I'd never tried it.

By mid-1987, editors were beginning to ask if I could make my texts available to them on floppy diskette or via modem. The inevitable moment had come. Through a strategy that's too bizarre to recount, I forced myself to address this new technology by ensuring that a large quantity of my work would be converted to text files on floppy diskettes for my own subsequent use, an act roughly equivalent to entering into an arranged marriage. I was handed a dozen such diskettes -- I'd literally never touched one before -- by a woman who wished me good luck, and who neglected to inform me that she'd entered all the texts in an early Apple word-processing program already so outdated that copies of it had become scarcer than hen's teeth.

There ensued perhaps the most stressful period of my working life as a professional: three agonizing, extremely frustrating months in which every free hour of my time -- often eight to twelve hours of a day -- was devoted to finding my way into this technology. I had to acquire a whole new vocabulary. There were system crashes. Sometimes an entire file would simply vanish into cyberspace (which, as I came to understand it, is the computer version of that parallel universe inhabited by all your missing socks). Occasionally, late at night in the computer lab at the university where I taught, I'd find myself weeping, or screaming, or pounding the desk in rage.

Then, quite suddenly, to my astonishment, I came out the other side, happily and confidently working away in WordPerfect, which continues to be my word processor of choice.(2) Somehow, I'd come to terms with the first radical transformation of my medium that had ever confronted me. Two months after that I had my first computer. Everything I've written since then (including everything you've read in these pages), even if it started out as a hand-written draft, has been put through the computer; I can hardly imagine working without it now, and cannot figure out why I waited so long to engage with it.

Mind you, I'm no computer maven, nor even a word-processing whiz. I haven't logged on to the Internet; the postman hasn't rung once yet insofar as email is concerned.(3) As a working professional writer, I haven't once experimented with desktop publishing or mail-merge; I use my computer mainly as a fancy electric typewriter with built-in scissors and paste, Wite-out, and vast memory. I don't say this proudly; I know I'm ignoring some of what this technology could contribute to my productivity, and plan to attack this self-limitation soon.

At the same time, I'm more than willing to acknowledge that, even at this stage, I can't imagine getting along without the computer; it's changed my life as a working writer, and has even, in some ways that I sense but can't specify, changed my writing. And yes, I still consider myself a writer, and call what I produce writing, even though my former blank page has been replaced by a screen, and my prose has become plastic, malleable and provisional in a way it never was when, by hand or by typewriter, I used to imbed words physically in the fibers of paper.(4) (Am I obligated to give it some other name -- "electronic wording," perhaps? Instead of telling people that I'm a professional writer, should I instead be saying something like "I'm in prose" or "I do words"?)

In any case, I can't really claim to have taste-tested the full range of the computer's potential improvement of my life. So when the beauteous and brilliant Brenda Laurel (who devised the home version of Pac-Man) announced to a packed house at the Eastman Theater in Rochester last July that "Computers are devices not just for computation but for representation -- they allow us to re-present all kinds of things and issues to ourselves," I had to take that assertion on faith. Almost. But not entirely.

You see, back when I was in graduate school, circa 1965, I wrote a peculiar, pre-"cyberpunk" experimental fiction titled "postscript" that was intended as a cross between a lunatic's ravings and an account of a post-apocalyptic world. I meant it to be heard in the reader's mind as coming from a flat, affectless, virtually robotic voice; I used certain punctuation mannerisms to indicate this. But no one I ever showed it to heard it as I'd intended. By and by, I realized that it was a sound piece, meant for the ear and not the eye. But I couldn't figure out any way of getting it onto audiotape that wasn't unbearably laborious. So I shelved it as a failed experiment.

Then, a few years ago, a friend of mine in Cleveland, the photographer Masumi Hayashi, was describing to me some electronic imaging work she was doing on an Amiga system. In passing, she mentioned that the Amiga "Talker" program would allow the computer to recite an electronically encoded text, in a variety of voices: male, female, and "robotic." My ears perked up; I remembered my failed experiment. I dug out the text and had it scanned onto diskette, in ASCII. A few months later, I bought a cheap round-trip ticket to Cleveland, spent a weekend in Masumi's studio, and produced a computer-spoken version of my fiction, on audiotape. As soon as I heard the first few words come out of the computer's speaker, I knew that this was the way the work was supposed to be experienced; this was what I'd heard in my own head when I was writing it twenty years before. It was a very young piece of writing, and far from perfect; but it had, at last, found its appropriate form.(5)

The simple fact is that, for any creative person who engages with it seriously, the computer makes feasible things that couldn't have been done before -- either because they were impossible or because they were too labor-intensive to be worthwhile. Even a disgruntled creature of habit like myself, an old dog who's just crossed the half-century mark, can learn new tricks, can at least test this tool for its potential contribution to his or her working process. Some of my favorite older writers -- Frank Herbert, best known for his consciousness-expanding Dune novels; the venerable Hugh Kenner, whose brilliant literary criticism I was reading in graduate school -- have not only found value in this new tool as part of their own professional practice but have written at length about the significance of the computer as a new communications technology. I simply didn't feel I could afford to avoid the challenge they were embracing.

Changes in the tools, materials and processes of any medium are traumatic for some of its practitioners. The great British architectural photographer Frederick Evans stopped photographing when the commercial production of platinum paper was discontinued early in this century; he couldn't -- or didn't care to -- actualize his way of seeing in silver. The shift from manuscript to typescript, though rarely investigated or even discussed in terms of its impact on literature, was both a shocking and a shaping experience for several generations of writers a century ago; the transition from one-of-a-kind images to multiples, and from hand-drawn images to lens-derived ones, was equally transformative and has been much more widely analyzed. There's no question that the shift to word processors and electronic imaging systems will be such a watershed in our day, for writers and picture-makers alike.

Be there or be square, I say. Put your fear and loathing on hold; approach this set of options with an open mind. Take a look at the fascinating experiments that are being run by serious photographers like Pedro Meyer, Joan Fontcuberta and others (parallel investigations in creative writing are being undertaken by such writers as William Gibson). In particular, I'd advise you to reconsider, in the light of these new technologies, any photographic projects of your own that you've shelved as unfeasible; you may find, as I did, new options at your disposal. (For example, I'm convinced that there are extraordinary potentials here for new, inexpensive ways of structuring, encoding, transmitting and disseminating documentary and photojournalistic image-text works.)

There's no obligation to accept these new technologies into your own toolkit, and certainly one can and should adapt them to one's own process. (My father, who in his seventies resumed writing fiction and poetry full-time, still produces all of his first drafts by hand in an almost illegible scribble -- which he he then has transcribed and keyed in by a secretary, so he can make his revisions and corrections on a computer printout.) But it seems to me that those who reject this new way of working out of hand, untested, whether writers or picture-makers, are in the same league as the "moldy figs" of jazz criticism and performance in the 1940s, who refused to recognize the revolutionary importance of innovators such as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and insisted on listening to or playing nothing but Dixieland and swing. One can sympathize with their inability to shift paradigms while also realizing that, as a result, they ended up in the dustbin of history. Let's learn from their errors. The computer, in all its technical, conceptual and cultural complexity, seems to be here to stay. It's up to each of us to find out what we can make of it.

Notes

(1) In point of fact, this wasn't that much of a change in working method, roughly comparable to a photographer's first experience of using a built-in metering system rather than a hand-held one.

(2) Nowadays I use AppleWorks.

(3) My first experiences with the 'Net, and with email, came in the spring of 1995.

(4) Several years after I published this piece, I was struck to find a number of similar percepts regarding the relationship of writing on an electric typewriter to writing on a computer in an essay by Ron Rosenbaum, a colleague at the New York Observer. In his column, "The Edgy Enthusiast," for April 21, 1997 (Vol. 11, no. 16, p. 39), he offered an over-the-top paean to his wordsmithing instrument of choice (the Olympia Report deLuxe Electric), waxing delirious about how, with it, "you inscribe, carve -- virtually brand -- a thickly pigmented carbonized sign on the incarnate physicality of a tabula rasa." In addition to its value as a comparatively rare discussion by a writer of the physical tools of the trade, and its charms as a love song from a boy to his vehicle for flights of fancy, the piece speaks lucidly and provocatively to some of the changes for the worse Rosenbaum suspects computers to have generated in the work of at least some writers: a tendency to tinker rather than "rewriting from the top," a consequent erosion of internal coherence, the loss of the complex relationship one used to have to failed but preserved earlier drafts, which he speaks of in much the same way certain photographers talk about their negative files.

(5) The piece is titled "postscript," and I still haven't done anything with the results; but it provokes me, and I suspect it'll turn into something one of these days.

This essay first appeared, in shortened form, in Camera & Darkroom, Vol. 16, no. 8 (August 1994). This full version subsequently appeared in my book The Digital Evolution: Visual Communication in the Electronic Age, Essays, Lectures and Interviews 1967-1998 (Nazraeli Press, 1998; second edition, Villa Florentine Books, 2002).

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