A century later, the image in the Library of Congress’s George Grantham Bain Collection has gone humorous, the way items remembered after oblivion sometimes do. This item stimulates us neither to nostalgia nor to tragedy nor, thanks to the costume’s baggy knees, to the thought of eheu fugaces labuntur anni. The name “Hydroaeromaid” is comical too, with its philological odor of a tavern by a school during the Georgian era (“Ho, maid! Bring me a tankard of nut-brown ale whilst I construe me lines!”). * And so, looking at the image brought back to light, we laugh.

And because the light has been merciful and faded out some of the details, we photoshop. We wield the controls in the spirit of the post-Georgian nymph Dorothy Parker, who wouldn’t have been caught dead with baggy knees.

But long after the era of Dorothy Parker has passed, the girl in the image is still standing on her chair. What would she be now? What was she then, out of the uniform that was once fitted onto her by comedy in one of its sergeant-major moods? If we looked at her in a different way through Photoshop, would we be able to think of her now not as a what but as a who?

I look.

 

And then the image comes to me of an airplane seen at morning in a novel written just after the Georgian era, when the sight of an airplane was still something new:  Mrs. Dalloway.  By the end of Mrs. Dalloway it is nighttime, and in 1923, the year Mrs. Dalloway was published, airplanes generally weren’t flown after dark. But Mrs. Dalloway has returned home and changed her clothes, and the book’s last sentence ascends from the light of its page like an image newly revealed after a long darkness:

“For there she was.”

Source: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/ggb2005022645/

* Or, since the flag in the picture is American, of Owen Johnson’s Stover at Yale (serial publication 1911, publication as a novel 1912), whose hero fills his days quantum sufficit playing football, doing Latin, and adjourning to Morey’s for a toby of musty.

—

Update: from a pair of notes by Art Siegel at https://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/14440864879/ we learn that the model is named Pearl Palmer and she is posing for a trophy. Mr. Siegel also links to a not very clear contemporary photograph of the trophy, and the New York Tribune published this note about it on August 20, 1916, p. 13.