First Sale . . .
By
John Terence Turner
Stock Asylum Columnist
Sept. 4, 2007
©
2007 John Terence Turner
Photographers acquire clients in an infinite variety of ways. The clients
themselves are equally varied. Here’s one that was different beyond
expectation.
It was 1968 and the Peace Corps moved me from the Haitian border, where I had lived for a year and a half , to Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic.
The move was the result of a brochure I photographed and wrote. It had been well received at Peace Corps headquarters Washington D.C. They wanted me to shoot photo-essays for more recruiting brochures and the small town of Elías Piña in the far west of the country was too remote and isolated for this kind of work.
 This image was created while Turner was in the Peace Corps. It and the images below were part of the author's first photo sale. ( © John Terence Turner) |
I was living temporarily in Hotel Colón in the old colonial zone of Santo Domingo. It was a seedy old four-story building with high ceilings, tall windows and balconies that overlooked the narrow, winding streets where Diego Colón, Christopher Columbus' son, had ruled as viceroy of the West Indies in 1517. (Colon is Spanish for Columbus),
This was where Peace Corps Volunteers stayed while in the capitol on official business.
I was preparing prints of photographs I had made in the Haitian border area for an exhibition at the Dominican-American Cultural Center in Santo Domingo.
During the Trujillo era, the Haitian border area had been off-limits, so there was considerable interest in pictures from the frontier, as it was called. (Dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujilo was assassinated on the highway to San Cristobal in 1961 — some say with the aid of the CIA.)
One day I had a stack of 16-by-20-inch black and white prints with me during lunch with some other volunteers in the dining room on the third floor of the hotel.
A large, friendly fellow wearing thick glasses with heavy black plastic frames approached our table. His hair was a shiny black pompadour swept back from his face.
“May I join you?” he asked.
“Sure,” we said and he sat and awaited his lunch. He saw the stack of prints and asked if he could look at them. “Can I buy some of these?” he asked.
I was surprised. I had never sold a print before.
“What do you want, per print?” he asked.
I picked a price out of thin air. “Twenty pesos.” I said.
“Done!” he replied and paid me $100 for five (the dollar and peso were on par). I had just made almost my entire Peace Corps salary of $110.00 per month in just five minutes. The photography gig was showing some real possibilities.
His favorite, and mine, was the picture of the sleeping children. The children’s mother was a tuberculosis patient of mine (I was assigned to a TB control/community development program). Part of my job was to give her a streptomycin shot once a week.
 The skepticism on the face of this poor man was a typical reaction to Peace Corps volunteers. ( © John Terence Turner) |
I rode my motorcycle north of Elías Piña to the tiny hut where they lived.
There was no road. I used goat/human trails and a dried streambed to get there.
There was no assurance that they actually lived in the Dominican Republic. It easily could have been in Haiti. In Elías Piña there was an official border-crossing building, but once you were a hundred yards away, the border disappeared.
On this visit, I was out early and the morning sun was just coming through the cracks in the mud-wattle walls of their hut. Her husband met me at the door and over his shoulder, I saw the four children in the bed they shared.
I whispered that I wanted to take a picture, squatted, used my arms on my knees as a bipod and shot half a roll with a 35mm f2 Nikkor lens.
The children's health problems can be seen in this picture. The distended bellies and the lightened hair are signs of parasites and malnutrition.
Soon, the family moved to the capitol to put the mother in a hospital. We had arranged for a space where she could get more intensive care, but it was too late, she died later that year.
Then my new friend selected a couple of portraits. The one of the campesino (peasant) with his chin in his hand is memorable to me because his look of skepticism summed up the attitude of many Dominicans toward the youthful, earnest Peace Corps Volunteers they encountered.
It is a good example of the use of putting the subject in shade on harshly sunny day. He was outside sitting in the shade of a tamarind tree.
The items on the worn table contribute information about his life.
The photograph of the little girl in the dirty dress has locked itself into my memory because of the steady, trusting gaze of her limpid eyes.
Once again, having her in the shade allows her face to be photographed without hard shadows.
Her dress, her dusty hair and the unpainted wood of the wall against which she’s sitting provide details about her difficult life.
My first customer gave me his card. “Herr Doktor Dolkmann,” it improbably read.
There was nothing Teutonic about this guy, he was obviously a Latino.
 Turner used a shaded area to shoot a picture of this child without the harsh shadows that would have been created by direct sunlight. ( © John Terence Turner) |
He was also an itinerant fortuneteller. He had just arrived in Santo Domingo and was going to run his business out of Hotel Colón. He didn’t live there; his temporary residence was at one of the new, expensive, high–rise hotels on the bay.
This guy had his market thoroughly figured out.
Middle and upper class people may have believed in fortune telling, but the volume was in the campesinos.
He advertised on the campesino radio stations, using mini-dramas about whether a woman’s husband was being faithful and whether a girl’s boyfriend would remain true or whether a man would regain his sexual potency.
He charged $3.00 or $5.00 for “la especiál.”
The next day we were amazed to see a line of poor people, mostly women, that started out on the street and extended up the two flights of stairs to the lobby/dining room, snaked across it and ended at the corner room where he performed.
We could hear him yelling, slamming his fists on the table, banging the furniture around and entertainingly bringing the future into the room for his credulous clients.
Based on a count of those in the line, we figured he was doing about 100-150 fortunes per day—all in cash!
From what we could hear, he delivered a bravura performance for every customer. He yelled, he moaned, he wept, he sweated-a lot. Most of his customers left looking stunned, but pleased.
He used our hotel because he knew his clients wouldn’t come to any upscale neighborhood. Hotel Colón was suitably poor and run-down for the campesinos to visit without hesitation.
My new customer then surprised me again, by saying he’d like to take me out to dinner later in the week. I was intrigued and up for a free meal. He said we would go to Lina’s, an exclusive, expensive restaurant favored by the diplomatic community.
I had never been there and never expected to go because I couldn’t afford it. On Saturday, after his daylong, sweaty exertions in the corner room, he went back to his hotel to change and said he’d pick me up at 7 p.m.
He arrived in a two-seat ’56 Ford Thunderbird. Appropriately for the tropics, it was sea-foam green and the top was down. It turned out that he had the car shipped to his various venues. He stayed in each Latin American capitol for 2-3 three months, or until his customer stream dwindled.
We entered the lobby at Lina’s and saw a line of eight or ten persons waiting to enter the main dining room. We sat on a sofa beneath a large mirror with a gilt frame.
The maitre d’ recognized Doktor Dolkmann, parted the line and asked for our drink order. “What are you eating, meat or fish?” he asked.
“Carne,” replied Dolkmann placing our order. Our drinks arrived, a scotch for him and a gin and tonic for me. We were led past the line of those waiting for their tables and taken to a prime table against the wall with a view of the entire, elegant room.
Dolkmann scanned the wine list and ordered a Bordeaux.
When it arrived he tasted it and the scene began. “No!” he said loudly. “This wine has been watered.” The sommelier was shocked and torn between keeping Dolkmann’s objections at low volume — adjacent tables were turning their attention to us — and trying to convince Dolkmann that such a thing as watered wine was impossible at Lina’s.
“Hold the corner of this napkin,” he commanded me as he took the other. We were each holding a corner of a napkin, letting it hang between us perpendicular to the edge of the table.
He grasped his wine glass with the suspect Bordeaux and threw the contents onto the napkin. Jaws dropped throughout the room, conversations ceased and my heart stopped.
At this point, I was picturing myself in the kitchen, the jacket of my Brooks Brothers summer-weight suit off, my sleeves rolled up. I was washing dishes in a cloud of steam to pay for dinner.
I also imagined myself in the “la carcel” (jail) behind bars at La Victoria, the dreaded Trujillo era prison from which many never emerged, for being an accomplice in a scheme to defraud the best restaurant in the country.
I had no idea what was going on, but Dolkmann said his contention would be proved if the stain separated. If the wine had not been tampered with, the stain would be a consistent color. If it had been watered, he said, we would see a stain distinctively lighter at the top and darker below.
It sounded improbable to me and again, I imagined myself scrubbing filthy pots in the kitchen or being forgotten in some subterranean cell.
Miraculously, before our eyes, the stain on the napkin separated.
Dolkmann brandished it like a battle flag before the embarrassed sommelier, who began barking orders to his minions and snapping his fingers.
Instantly, an entire wooden case of Bordeaux was carried to our table.
The sommelier pointed out that it had never been opened and that it even had cobwebs (telarañas) on it. A hammer was produced and, as nails squeaked and boards fractured, the case was opened. A bottle was extracted from it and the cork removed. After Dolkmann had inspected it a sample was poured.
Dolkmann took his glass, he sniffed, he twirled, and he examined the wine’s legs. He extended the moment for all it was worth. Finally, he sipped; he tasted and swished and sat silent and impassive.
The room held its collective breath. By this time, we were the only show in town, and everyone in the restaurant was watching every move in our little drama.
Finally, he nodded and said, “está bueno.” The quiet hum of dinner table conversation of Lina’s returned to normal and I was able to draw a deep breath.
Who would have the sheer guts to pull this at the best restaurant in the country?
Dolkmann.
Of course, that wasn’t his real name. It was Sanchez, but he had decided that his customers would be more impressed with the German name.
His wife, he told me, ran the other half of the family business. It was a wax museum.
“Like Madame Tussaud’s?” I asked.
“No, malas enfermedades,” Bad diseases, terrible injuries, executions—all in realistic wax.
The man knew his customers. Most peasants, he told me, wouldn’t know historical figures like Genghis Khan, Stalin, Hitler or Roosevelt. But they were interested in the depictions of the dangers and tragedies that haunt their lives.
Dolkmann and his wife took elaborate vacations together a couple of times a year, he said. For the rest of the year, they were on the road in different Latin American cities.
When the meat arrived, it turned out to be an excellent Chateaubriand.
We enjoyed the meal and Dolkmann said after dinner we should go to some places he liked on Avenida Maximo Gomez. This is an infamous strip on a busy thoroughfare that dominates the western part of the capitol and leads from the north of the city to the shore of the Caribbean.
The ride to Maximo Gomez was idyllic, tropical breezes wrapped around us as we slid silently along dark, palm-lined streets.
I still remember being ensconced in the T-bird’s luxurious leather seats because they were such a welcome contrast to the ripped, filthy seats I had grown accustomed to in my travels around the island of Hispaniola.
Riding in a publico (taxi) in the Dominican Republic frequently involved sharing a seat with a passenger who was carrying a chicken or a young goat.
Along a stretch of Maximo Gomez were a series of large three-story buildings that had nightclubs on the first floor and bordellos on the upper floors.
Some of the nightclubs featured full Caribbean bands with searing horn sections that backed a variety of vocalists.
Errol Flynn first made this area newsworthy in the thirties when the movie star visited Santo Domingo on his yacht. He is said to have partied and debauched famously on Maximo Gomez. He refers to it in his autobiography, My Wicked, Wicked, Ways.
Dolkmann took us to a smaller club where, not surprisingly, he was well known and welcomed heartily. He pushed his way through the throng to the bar and returned with a full bottle of scotch, glasses and a bucket of ice.
I begged off the scotch and had a beer, figuring that I’d need my wits about me — I didn’t know him and didn’t know what to expect
Dolkmann danced the merengue, he drank, and he sweated profusely.
He laughed and joked and seemed driven to keep the evening wild and crazy. His glasses, encased in thick black frames, matched the oily black pompadour of his long hair.
The women of the bar competed for his attention and the bills he casually peeled off a thick roll he kept in his front pants pocket.
Dolkmann’s eyes peered through the thick glasses unblinking and manically wide. His sweat-sheened face reflected the lights of the dive and dripped onto his sodden shirt.
As he urged me to drink scotch and dance with any of the eager women in the bar. He seemed to be pleading for me to join him in his booze-fueled high intensity revelry.
I had the feeling he had to have maximum stimulation until he could pass out without enduring even the shortest quiet moment in which his only companion would be himself.
He was paying $50 per bottle of scotch (in 1968!) and when the second bottle appeared at our table I decided to find my own way back to Hotel Colón.
Dolkmann was a consummate party animal, he was pounding down scotch after scotch and sweating rivers.
I could not imagine being a passenger in that Thunderbird with him at some early hour of the morning.
When I last saw Dolkmann, he was dancing in a frenzy with two women at once.
The horn section of the band was blaring, Dolkmann looked like a whirling dervish, sweat was cascading down his face and he jerked his head backward to flip the oily hair off his face, the sweat-stains growing in his armpits.
He looked like he could go all night.
I had an authentic excuse about some shooting I had to do the next day. I used it and went out into the now chilly morning where I selected a publico driver from among those huddled together at the curb where they were warming their hands by the flames from an oil drum.
The next week I found an apartment with a couple of other Volunteers in the Colonial Zone near the Ozama River and lost touch with Dolkmann.
I continued to hear his ads on the radio from time to time and I heard he was packing them in at the Colón. After a few more weeks, I realized that I wasn’t hearing his ads anymore, so I guessed that he had moved on.
He said he planned to frame the prints he bought and put them in his home in Bogotá and maybe he did.
When I was last in Bogotá, I didn’t try to look him up. Sanchez is a very common name and I never knew his real first name.
I’ve never forgotten him. He was, after all, my first customer.
(John Terence Turner has been shooting stock photography for 20 years. His work can be seen at Getty Images, Alamy and, of course, The Stock Asylum, where his column appears twice a month. He lives and works in Seattle, WA.)
Turner's web site can be found at: http://www.johnterenceturner.com.
For more of his images: click here.
For all of Turner's columns: click here.
