The musician is dressed in a coat with frayed, patched sleeves. Under the sleeves, at his wrists, there is nothing to be seen but bare flesh and bone: no jacket, perhaps no shirt. His scalp is scarred. His hat doesn’t cover the scars because he has to hold it out in his right hand. His left hand is raised in a dance figure. It has nothing to do with the musician; it is only a part of the music he transmits to his city. He and the music box hanging on him by a strap are equal parts of an art apparatus. Imagine a Piranesi prison seen from outside. The stone would still be there, but it would no longer enclose its universe. Now it would be shutting out.

Through that hard plein air dances Orpheus in his aspect of beggar. Let me dance you into my dance, he begs us. At a subordinate distance from his image you can see the shadow of an ancillary apparatus: the camera that stopped it for a fraction of a second along its route to Hades. Ever after, that fraction of a second has been recorded by the camera’s art in the historical present tense.

And into the image frame there did, once, come dancing another man with his finger up like the musician’s. It too has been stopped in motion. Shadow tarantella following the floral-decorated machine, it will outlive the economy of stone and iron through which it passes.

Source: “A little music in New York,” about 1900. Detroit Publishing Company Collection, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016800315/. Image restored in Photoshop.