Once, in the age of steam, perspective moved through space like an engine and generated a postcard. In there, along a diagonal, it erected a high-sided chute and spilled into it some Italians whose arms and legs were movable in promenade gait. Per design, one of them also functioned to create an additional sense of motion in haste: his blazer buttoned backward, his flyaway hat just recaptured, his feet at trot, his pants rippling. Swinging and pivoting along minor axes, he serves the postcard in the capacity of a small extra part, jiggling. To be so close to this detail that you see what the machinery is doing to it is to receive the postcard’s communication that a man once lived a moment in the wonder of the present tense.

In the present tense, emitting sounds of small talk and chugging steam, the machine that is the mailship König Albert comes toward you, then moves past on your left. Where it was for a moment, the horizontals of the composition’s right side slide left and refill the postcard with vacancy. A moment after a shutter closed at some time between 1899 and 1914, the sentence in the present tense was over and König Albert passed into what is not yet and never again will be picture.

Source: Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2002720829/. Photoshopped. According to Wikipedia, König Albert was in service for North German Lloyd between 1899 and 1914, after 1902 primarily on routes between Italy and the United States.