My name is Viola Chen. I am twenty-six. I live in a small apartment in Los Angeles with one window that faces west, and I work as a camera assistant, which means I spend my days beside the lens, never behind it. I load the magazines inside a black changing bag, by feel. I carry the cases. I write down every roll.

I am learning to see.

Six in the morning is blue and says nothing. It is honest light. It will not flatter anyone.

Noon is the enemy. Everyone squints. The grips raise a twelve-by-twelve silk over the actors like a sail, and we wait under it for the sun to move.

Four o'clock comes in sideways through the blinds and lays the room out in bars.

The last minutes before the sun goes down, we call magic hour, though it is never an hour. Everyone runs. I have watched grown men sprint across a parking lot with a camera on their shoulder to catch the last of it on a woman's face.

And after, the blue again. The evening kind. Softer than the morning's, as if it learned something during the day.

My grandmother kept a photo studio on Webster Street in Oakland's Chinatown for thirty-one years. Passport pictures. Wedding portraits. Babies in red at their full-month parties. Old men in their best suits who wanted one good picture of themselves before they died. She said that last part plainly, the way you would say the rent was due.

I spent my Saturdays there. The darkroom was the size of a closet, and the safelight turned everything the color of an apricot. I stood on a milk crate and rocked the trays. The stop bath smelled like vinegar. I watched faces rise up out of blank paper like someone surfacing in a pond, and I thought it was the most magic thing a person could do with her hands.

Po Po never told anyone to smile. She said, look here, and tapped the air just above the lens. She said a face is always already doing something. You only have to wait for it.

The shop closed in 1994. She lives with my aunt in San Leandro now, and every time I call she asks two things: whether I am eating, and whether the light is good.

The first film I ever shot was one cartridge of Super 8. Fifty feet. Three minutes and twenty seconds, at eighteen frames a second. I was fifteen.

I filmed Po Po closing the shop at dusk: the grate coming down, her hand on the light switch, her own reflection in the front window among the framed weddings of strangers. It came back from the lab two weeks later. Half of it is too dark to see anything at all. The other half is still the best thing I have made.

I keep it in a coffee can on the shelf above my bed. I did not know, then, that I was trying to keep something. I think now that every camera is for that.

Things I would like to see, and someday put on film:

   the inside of a lighthouse lamp while it turns
   Hong Kong harbor at night, the one Po Po left
   a room lit only by candles — I have watched Barry Lyndon four times, for the candles
   snow falling. I have never once seen it fall
   my own name in the dark at the end of a film, on the line that says
      director of photography, rising slowly, and then gone

This page is small because I do not know yet what belongs in it. There will be pictures when the scanner at work is free on a weekend.

If you have seen good light somewhere, write and tell me where it was. I would like to know.