New York

Wordless glare

In 1918 a caption written in American expository prose employed the word twixt. The caption’s author assumed that that word twixt would mean something to his readership, just like the two-word combination Hoffman House. If it has turned out that you don’t know what Hoffman House means, he was wrong. In 1918 his words were part of a lexicon dating from 1918, but that number turned out to be impossible for computers to handle in 1918, when the word computer referred to a person. In 1918, on May 19, James Joyce wrote to Harriet Shaw Weaver about Ulysses, “It is impossible to say how much of the book is really written.” But in 1918 Joyce was in the process of writing off 1918.

William Joseph Showalter, “New York — The Metropolis of Mankind.” National Geographic, vol. 3, no. 1, July 1918, pp. 1-49.

In the same magazine, another block of prose suggested ten years as a range of history during which terms like Hoffman House might remain stably conceivable. The thought must have seemed reasonable while its subject was still sharing a present tense with horse traffic.   
But now we know that it’s harder to say “It identifies” than we used to think. In 1918 a billboard atop the building at the left of the image of Madison Square identified a remedy for indiscretion, but the identification couldn’t be read in 1918’s Geographic text and in texts post-1918 it can’t be understood.

But now that it can’t be understood, it can be read.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flatiron_building_1918.jpg. Contrast and detail adjusted.

As people say, it goes without saying. Artificial intelligence has transported us up Fifth Avenue to a caption. The caption’s lexicon now comprehends the legible words laxative water on a rooftop and legible fashion on women approaching a door. In the fullness of time, the deposit of data saved on a large-format negative in 1918 has matured at last. Its worth is redeemable now. But what, now, can at last mean?

We have been enabled to read 1918, but all we can do now that 1918 is over is to see it: depictionless, without seeing that its label bears a signature. Unsigned, however, is the glare that comes forward behind the Flatiron and reverberates from the wet paving. That you can still experience as people experienced in 1918: communication in a present not bound to a knowable future. The wordless glare in the gutter isn’t a part of the caption because it isn’t captionable. All along, faithfully paralleling the caption from 1918, has been something just above it on the page: something long pre-1918. There in the unchronicled is image uncaptioned, without words to slow the light that comes flowing down the gutters of Fifth Avenue to us.

Dark, windowed

Interborough Rapid Transit, New York, 1930s. Image undated; photographer unnamed. Farm Security Administration / Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsa/item/2017736285/. Post-processed for contrast and detail. About the hole in the negative which marked an image for exclusion from the FSA collection, see Alex Q. Arbuckle, “1930s ‘Killed’ Photographs,” https://mashable.com/2016/03/26/great-depression-killed-photos/.

A dance to time

From left to right the words dance past. As words, they claim to mime a song of pain. “Badly handled,” they say they are crying. But the words “badly handled” are visible, only: particles of gray prime-coat, mutely darkening a surface.

But an image isn’t a surface. If it is seen to be dancing from left to right, it is dancing all the way to the depths of itself. On their page the New-York Tribune’s gray paragraphs are separate from one another and static, but this horse en pointe and the three men with clubs work with one another in a single moving mass. In fact, they seem to belong to one another, as if they had been conceived in unity by someone raising his legs toward a barre as his body thought through an idea about space.

“Garbage wagon stoned — driver is inside.” George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2014689866/. Post-processed for contrast and detail.

Close to the image but still outside, one more paragraph frames the unity as an expression of a concept such as “pain.” Pain is kinetic in the transformation of the word stone from noun to verb, but it also distressingly latent in the fear-adverb inside. The image itself has attempted to make a break with uncertainty by perforating one of its own imaged windows, but of course that can’t let us in. Read from outside image, the term inside can only signify terra incognita. We will never see far enough inside. Never again will this horse descend from pointe.

But the custodian of the horse-image has noticed some other words within, and keyed those to a history preserved in words outside. With that key the Library of Congress’s online link teaches us the image’s coordinates in time: “Photo shows the garbage strike in New York City, Nov. 8-11, 1911.” It adds a coordinate in space, “The lamp post sign is for East 57th Street,” and with that we may seem to have escaped from ahistorical image and reentered the chronicle of time through which we pass. Year by year we have been stepping away from the image’s cobblestones and leaving behind the people inside, and now that they are interred where lies the year 1911, we seem to have broken free into a margin-free, illimitable field of vision. Far from sight or memory of the horse on his cobblestones, we may think that the East 57th Street we see now is a state of being that we actually know: the state we see on today’s TV, decisively erased from print’s black and white: a finally permanent history of a stage across which will now go dancing — forever, and forevermore unregulated! a corps de ballet of hedge funders and international criminals.

https://media.architecturaldigest.com/photos/5ca273a7409e482be3729d32/3:2/w_5996,h_3997,c_limit/111%20West%2057th%20Street,%20Rockefeller%20Hero,%20FINAL.jpg
https://media.architecturaldigest.com/photos/5ca273a7409e482be3729d32/3:2/w_5996,h_3997,c_limit/111%20West%2057th%20Street,%20Rockefeller%20Hero,%20FINAL.jpg

But the horse with the sore on his hip and the men with clubs haven’t finished dancing themselves into realized being. They have only begun their translation from life to image, but having begun, they have begun putting on immortality. For them who started dancing and for us who have seen the dance, East 57th Street will remain a 1911 coming again and again to mind. There, in the mind, 1911’s stony thoroughfare will remain under the control of men with imaged clubs who have been authorized to force us, when the time comes, back to the barre for the next position.

Nataraj with his corps

Having been produced for a news agency, this photograph had a verbal meaning in advance. Even before it was a latent image on a glass plate, it always and only signified what the words written on the plate afterward were intended all along to say. “Checking loads of snow,” the words said to themselves, and then to posterity they added, “N.Y. Jan. ’08.” From the beginning, from the moment the horses were seen with the intent of being experienced editorially, their image meant and meant only checking. Checking, said the verbal construction to itself and to posterity; checking, not treading; checking, not dancing. As we look at checking we are to experience by evocation a crunch of wheels through snow and a jingle of harness, not the pattering of Shiva’s finger drum.

See. All is shovel and plod, all is gray.

00031uA1As of the beginning of 1908, the gray horses in their gray snow were ordinary. They were to be taken in immediately, without registering on the senses, like the “understood” words “Every driver must” that aren’t written on a stop sign. Nobody within this image can be heard saying, “Dance” or “Breathe” or “Be” or “Cold” or “White.” As of January 1908, the horses and the man were not significant. They were only real.

And now they are only a history, and (depending on whether you count “N.Y.” as one term or two) that history is restricted to a vocabulary of only seven or eight words. Horses and man and snow seem to have passed from an uncomprehended past to a merely textual present. Along the way their historical existence vanished without ever having been vouchsafed a meaning as such. If that had existed, it would have been a meaning not delimited by words, contained solely within itself, forever. But on the evidence, it seems not to have existed.

But if the transit of twilight across the snow could be reversed, and then if the text of the history of checking could be covered over by a silent whiteness?

The image is in our hands, and we possess a technology for opening it to a not yet read chapter. Look in, then, and see: the dancer comes, as he always comes. His step toward us is that which communicates again and never not and forever.

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Eyes cast down in love toward his earth, he dances. Behind him come dancing the hooves of his corps de ballet. They are seen now as such, and as it turns out they always were. They are now to be seen forever in their snow. That is what they always have meant. Step by step, forever, they are going to teach us dance.

Source: George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2014680030/.

 

Art goes begging

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.

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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.

Lesson plan in another alphabet

As early as the 1940s, when the New Criticism was beginning to take hold, the caption under Berenice Abbott’s photograph of a bakery window must have begun to seem ludicrous. In 1939 it had been published in Abbott’s book Changing New York with a caption that noncommittally began, “BREAD STORE, 259 Bleecker Street, Manhattan; February 3, 1937.” Those modest factual words were in the same register as the simple rectilinear form in glazed brick with wicker embellishments that filled the image’s lower third: the bakery’s foundation, with a coal chute and some breadbaskets. None of those were anything but utilitarian. But then above the practical forms there abruptly appeared a vitrine window-dressed in the style of Abbott’s mentor Man Ray: a simultaneous reflection and refraction, displaying both a delivery truck’s curved roof and, through steamy glass, loafy shape, loafy shape, loafy shape, loafy shape, soft loafy hard-crusted shape, woman’s loafy face.

In the presence of that onslaught by the syntax of the surreal, the caption’s prose reacted with a spasm and went dark. Squeezing its eyes shut, it sat down on its bottom, swelled itself from a title to a treatise, and gabbled:

Although food chemists believe that bread baked on its own bottom instead of in tins is the healthier food, one now finds only a few bakeshops such as A. Zito’s, where the old-fashioned methods are still in use.

In the dark of the not seen, a simulacrum of something not there had been talked into something that would have looked (if it could have been seen) like being. It wasn’t actually present in the image, but in well-meaning intention it was meant to be. Trying to intend, it made its speaker sick with desire. Laugh at that feebleness of imagination, instruct the New Critics Wimsatt and Beardsley. They would have diagnosed the failed desperate maternal effort to create a nutrient force as a case of the intentional fallacy. As of 2017, we might call it fake news.

But the unfake history of the diagnosis makes the laugh unfunny. From Bonnie Yochelson’s 1997 study, for instance, we’ll learn that to read Changing New York in accordance with the artist’s explicitly voiced intentions is actually to read it dimly, as a subfusc artifact of New Deal social engineering. With the smile withering on our lips, we’ll learn then that what Yochelson calls “the caption catastrophe” (n.p.; page containing figure 14) refers not to the captions’ grim didacticism but to something grimly didactic about Abbott herself. In this collection, Abbott — Abbott, the woman who singlehanded saved from oblivion Eugène Atget’s diffident archive of not quite readable fragments! — seemed to have considered herself first a social educator trying to convince people of what was good for them and only thereafter a formalist artist with a formalist’s concern for making sure not to see what isn’t there.

And so her words failed her when the time came to use her mouth for something in addition to eating.

Two days before Abbott set up her sixty pounds of photographic apparatus on Bleecker Street, she had gone through the same ritual on Hester Street. There was a shop there, too, with, likewise, a person behind the window. But on the window the language shapes were different. “Yiddish,” says the caption about that difference, and then it begins executing the task of explaining, at a final length of six lines: “A complex dietary logic underlies the Jewish insistence that chickens must be newly killed before they are eaten. . . .”

But that opening word “Yiddish” isn’t capacious enough to hold the thought. On its own in Berenice Abbott’s edition, separated from Hester Street, it lacks etymology, which means that it lacks history. Etymologically, for instance, the three lines in the Hebrew alphabet under the number 55 are neither Hebrew nor Yiddish but transliterated English. Letter for letter, in English, those three lines read “Strictly kosher chicken market,” with the Hebrew loan-word “kosher” isolated from the rest of the phrase within a Jewish star. “Chicken market,” repeats the English once more at the bottom of the sign, this time undisguised. As of February 1, 1937, R. Cohen and his Hester Street culture seemed well on their way to American assimilation. On Cohen’s window, the one remnant line of his or his parents’ primal Yiddish is buried in the middle, in fine print. It also happens to map exactly, phoneme for phoneme and trochee for trochee, onto another language of the majority culture, German. Frisch geschlachten jede Stunde, reads this transliteration: “Freshly slaughtered every hour.”

No irony attached to that line in that language in 1937, and it would be an anachronism to read irony in now. Still, if you try to think of this image in 2017 without irony — formally, undidactically, as if these words painted on a window were just, well, words, painted — the image will lose an unseen but not unsensed remnant of prior meaning. It will be like a Jacob Riis photograph no longer able to access Riis’s photographically mediated understanding of the word “tenement,” or a Lewis Hine photograph no longer able to access Hine’s photographically mediated understanding of the phrase “child labor.” Go ahead and delete the caption printed alongside the image; Bonnie Yochelson does, even though her edition of Changing New York is much longer than the original. But the words that remain despite that, the ones painted on glass in three languages, probably aren’t erasable. It may be that that window never will be transparent again.

Sources:

Berenice Abbott, Changing New York, with text by Elizabeth McCausland. E. P. Dutton, 1939. Reprint (Dover, 1973) published as New York in the Thirties.

Bonnie Yochelson, Berenice Abbott: Changing New York. New Press / The Museum of the City of New York, 1997.

The two Abbott images have been photoshopped for contrast from prints in the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library, http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47d9-4e64-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99 and http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47d9-4fb7-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99.