Margaret Bourke-White

Scientifically cool, with new cartoon

Observation on the basis of iconography: American cultural history and American literary history seem to be arguing for new study of the once famous, now forgotten Georgia novelist Erskine Caldwell (1903-1987). See below. The second icon depicts the office of House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi during the Republican insurrection of January 6, 2021, when the United States Capitol was occupied by a paramilitary force of Caldwell grotesques.

Grotesques were a Caldwell specialty; grotesques and lurid sex scenes. A cruel laughter pervades. But Caldwell was also a serious liberal who collaborated in 1937 with the photographer Margaret Bourke-White on a documentary book, You Have Seen Their Faces, which showed its readers some of the things that the South’s chain gangs and sharecropper economics had done to faces and bodies. Soon to become Caldwell’s wife, Bourke-White was one of the foremost photojournalists of the twentieth century, but when You Have Seen Their Faces is read in the twenty-first it’s read only for educational comparison with James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which was published in 1941 and went virtually unread at the time. In her history of that exchange of reputations, Janet Holtman suggests a reason why: Caldwell’s attitude toward humanity, which was naturalist tending toward eugenicist. In retrospect, where the literary judgments are made, Caldwell’s characters have turned out not to be fully human. We remember Agee’s three families for their souls, but we recognize Caldwell’s type species only for their pathognomonic signs. And the faces photographed by Bourke-White in the service of Caldwell’s vision were reduced by his captions to the function of medical illustration.

But oh, go ahead and notice the Bible in the pocket in Caldwell’s image 3. The Caldwell way of seeing is still available to you after all — if not photographically, at least verbally. After all, too, the initials N.A.L. stand for New American Library. So go ahead: read. Then, if you can, laugh. Laughing, close thy Agee. While thou art at it, close thy sentimental Steinbeck too. Instead, if only as an experiment, open Caldwell and see if he can be thine. Consider it possible that the maimed humor characters who swarm through his language actually are happy with what it has done with them: summoning up their bodies from the pathology text, making them live and move and hit and tweet and kill. Then, please, try to understand what your disbelieving laughter is teaching thee about our country.

 

(1958)

 

Janet Holtman, “‘White Trash’ in Literary History: The Social Interventions of Erskine Caldwell and James Agee.” American Studies, vol. 53, no. 2, 2014, pp. 31-48.

And it was Diogenes Teufelsdröckh in Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus who said, “Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe.“

Corrective lens

The provenance of this stereophotograph of the World War II Japanese battleship Musashi isn’t indicated online, but a lot of its art history is preloaded. The shell-deflecting curves of the ship’s armor, for instance, are prominent in its image for reasons having to to with the history of Art Deco, and the camera’s heroic angle, gazing raptly upward, was probably designed in the studio of Alexander Rodchenko, artist of the totalitarian. Then too there is the matter of the photograph’s dramatically dark tones, which were probably generated in-camera by a red filter.

In the eye, then, per design, the twinned Musashi artworks, one image for the left eye and one for the right, are massed and ungraspable and black. Blocking out the light, they push together into your senses, take control, and merge into a single black ingot. After that, the ingot is no longer something capable of being seen, in the light, from without. It has become the material for a stamping mill broaching darkness within.

Forty years earlier, a different ship in a different world looked as innocent as a maiden as it struck a happy pose and waved its flags with both hands. The ship was wearing white, too, and the camera was looking down at it as if it were little. I can imagine Musashi having been photographed by a professionally adoring, professionally upward-gazing modernist woman like Margaret Bourke-White or Leni Riefenstahl, but the idea of a happy little boat seems to have brought out something protectively chivalric in Messrs. Underwood and Underwood’s cameragentleman.

But the happy little boat happened to be another battleship, with a battleship’s single purpose. Guns got bigger and armor got thicker in the course of the battleship’s half-century of naval dominance, but from the beginning of the era to the end, the corpses floating in each successive wake followed only one model of naked form. If the older corpses seem somehow simpler than the more recent ones, that’s only because more of their historical detail has been eaten by the fish.

This believing in an illusion of simplicity is an ordinary error committed by beginners at living in time. Because we were once younger and more ignorant than we are now, we think the world was younger and more ignorant too. But in these two particular artworks, the error can be corrected by a simple trip to the eye doctor. The corrective process isn’t just good for us, either; it’s also educational.

Go ahead with it, then. To begin the process of correction, assemble each stereo pair into an anaglyph. Then bring the two anaglyphs into juxtaposition. This formal art-maneuver will reduce the historical distances between the two images — distances across time, distances between democracy and fascism — to almost nothing. After that, with history controlled for and minimized, there will be little for the eye to do except see.

So see.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once they’ve been brought together at a single moment, the two images from different times will simplify to a single timeless idea. It will be what the two otherwise different battleship images have in common: a battleship idea, the idea of that which is death-dealing. Having been subsumed into a general idea of the death-dealing, each separate death-dealing image can shed its distracting photographic artifacts of (on the one hand) black and (on the other) white. The polychrome stains of life and death will then become imaginable again, and after that we’ll need to do just one more eye exercise.

It will be this. To see the colors as they were before they became a part of history’s blacks and whites, we will only have to unlearn the way of seeing that we once learned from a block of black steel.

Sources:

Online, I’ve been able to find the image of Musashi only in an otherwise unidentified list of World War II photographs. The image of Wisconsin is at the U.S. Navy’s Naval History and Heritage Command, http://www.history.navy.mil/our-collections/photography/us-navy-ships/battleships/wisconsin-bb-9/NH-100334-A.html. I’ve photoshopped it for contrast. The anaglyphs require a red-and-blue stereo viewer.