Photography and family have been in dialogue for Geoffrey Biddle most of his life. He uniquely mediates and meditates on circles of relation, love and care through the camera’s eye. In this long-awaited memoir, Biddle narrates his photographs with a frank and moving account of surviving his wife's illness and death as a single father. Rock In A Landslide begins with the romance between Biddle and noted sculptor Mary Ann Unger, two artists who first met as picture researchers at Magnum Photos in mid 1970s New York City. He recounts their charged partnership, their parallel creative practice, and the East Village factory space they reclaimed as both home and shared studio. Their “Great Collaboration” was daughter Eve whose joyous birth was soon tempered by Unger’s breast cancer diagnosis and thirteen-year journey of treatment and recurrence. Biddle now edits and frames his images with the clarifying distance of time — making sense of the immediacy and tidal emotions enshrined in the photographs, revelatory of what so many families experience with both fear and determination.

Excerpt from Chapter 1

Her Name Was Mary Ann Unger

1975–1980

I wasn’t looking for love, I was looking for a job. I was twenty-five and planned to spend my life taking pictures. I applied to be a researcher at a photo library, and at my interview the director put me to work sorting through photos from a magazine assignment about Los Angeles to see what I would choose to put in the library’s collection. As I spread the slides out on a wide light box, a woman emerged from a back room carrying a book of contact sheets. She had short brown hair, dark eyes in a round intelligent face, and full breasts, braless under a thin jersey. It was impossible for me not to be distracted by her. She was full of energy and purpose, and as I took all this in, she gave me a jolt of pleasure when she aimed her smile straight at me. I got the job, and I got to see this woman every day. Her name was Mary Ann.

There were no rules about workplace romance, and within a few months we were lovers. For twenty-three years our passions intertwined: for art, for each other, for life itself, until the day Mary Ann’s dead body was zipped into a bag and wheeled away. My loves developed side by side, love for Mary Ann and love for photography.

It was the summer of 1975. I was tall and thin, with wire-rimmed glasses and an already ebbing hairline, and I had just moved from Boston to New York, primed for change and possibility. I caught the photography bug when I was seventeen and took pictures constantly. I’d been working seven days a week at three assistant-level photo jobs and was ready to take my chosen career someplace new. I was eager for a new love relationship too—my first real girlfriend had broken up with me, and I sorely missed intimate companionship.

I arrived at Magnum Photos that day full of admiration. It was a cooperative photo agency and stock house representing a quasi-club of documentary photographers whose loftiest goal was to expose injustice and inequality. I planned to study the photographs in the library to see if I could make that kind of work in my own style, put together a portfolio, and then quit to make a living taking pictures for magazines and newspapers.

Mary Ann liked the Magnum photography but she was a sculptor devoted to self-expression, looking inward instead of outward, and she would slowly and deeply influence my own choices and direction. I started my picture-making with my parents and sister as subjects, recording the telltale gestures and small interactions of private life. Then I went to college and took pictures for the paper, where I got excited by the events of the late sixties and my access to them as a member of the media. Outwardlooking photojournalism eclipsed inward-looking photos of home. In New York and immersed in the Magnum library, location photography was what I wanted to devote my energy to, and though I continued to photograph my family, it became secondary.

At the library, Mary Ann and I were two among a crew of researchers who pulled prints and slides to meet requests. The clients recognized the quality of the pictures, but their priority was finding something to serve a specific purpose. I was surprised to see great photographs used in ways that reduced them to commodities. There were many requests for politics and news and historical and cultural content. Do you have any documentation of the Watergate hearings; the run on the banks when Mao was taking over China; Elvis smoking a cigarette? The staff joke was that one day we’d be asked for a picture of an interracial couple making love on the back of a whale. I also got to see that for all the good pictures photographers made on assignment, they made lots of mediocre and even bad ones. I accumulated clues about what it might be like to do assignments myself.

All the researchers had areas of expertise. Mary Ann’s was anthropology— she enjoyed vicariously experiencing world cultures as she filled requests for pictures of tribal life or indigenous dance or coming-of-age rituals. My specialty was the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, first among equals at Magnum, whose work was renowned for its lyricism and storytelling power. I’d studied and re-studied his books since high school, so it was easy for me to remember where his pictures were, in the countless topic folders stuffed with black-and-white prints filling drawers and drawers of silver file cabinets. I went straight to them whenever his photos met a new query.

The researchers were companionable photographers and artists supporting their own pursuits, attracted by a job that, although low paying, exposed us to the world as described by preeminent photojournalists. Some days we brought bag lunches and ate on the roof or in a park, other days we went to a restaurant or deli. Mary Ann boasted that a can of Coca-Cola and a Hershey bar with almonds was a cheap lunch that gave a rush, satisfied her taste buds, and sustained her for the afternoon.

Flirtations crossed over into intimacy, like when she said that photographers and sculptors shared the challenge of confronting three-dimensionality. I found myself pursuing one-on-one conversations with her.

A month after I started at the library, I asked Mary Ann to my apartment for dinner. She came supplied with a big bottle of wine and brought along Larry Calcagno, an older artist friend. The two of them talked about art and the art world, how recognition appears and disappears, and Larry’s late-career concerns about what would happen to his paintings after he died. Although their conversation surpassed my reference points, Mary Ann could tell I was listening and being pulled closer into her orbit. They turned to other subjects and my attention wandered, but I remember suddenly sitting up when she said something about blow jobs. Larry picked up on the cue and left, and Mary Ann stayed over. That night was followed by another, then more, and it wasn’t long before we were spending all our time together.

Our affair turned serious for me before it did for her. I remember leaning across the table at a deli and telling her a story about my mother. She let me know where I stood by saying, “I’ll never meet your mother.” These two women were already linked in my mind, starting with sharing a name. My mother, Anne, also had a keen and sophisticated appreciation of the arts. I knew what I wanted, but I made do at the deli booth with a mild, “You never know.”