photography
Burnish
Interior with two expressionists
A steamroller, a cat, five judgments, and Miss Moore
1.

2, as posted yesterday.
3. About (2),
— Yong Ju writes, “Cute!”
— Jane writes, “Amazing eyes!”
— Cora writes, “Darling!”
— Susan writes, “Hooray for kittens!!!”
— Fran writes, “Scary . .”
4. Within duly qualifying quotation marks, Miss Moore tentatively concludes in her “To a Steam Roller” that
Therefore (5),
Yeats with Blake, remade
At
https://blog.blakearchive.org/2017/10/17/yeats/
Hell’s Printing Press, the blog of the Blake Archive and Blake Quarterly, carries a portrait of William Butler Yeats holding a copy of his edition of Blake, the book that established Blake’s prophetic works in the canon of English poetry. Following the link will take you to views of the portrait in two states: the original photograph, taken in a New York hotel room in 1920 for the Bain News Service, and a reconstruction processed by me in 2017.
But Photoshop is more powerful now than it was in 2017, and Yeats was the poet who sang, “It is myself that I remake.” So here is a second attempt at seeing him in the same image with Blake.
(vicinity). The white apron, September 1943
On September 23, 1943, Henry Moore revisited an air raid shelter in the London Underground and reenacted the death-defying role he had played there three years earlier, during the battle of Britain. This time, however, he stood without a pencil in his hand, and a movie crew was on the scene to establish its own ever-changing record. For that sculpture without stone, the sculptor and his models had changed into spectators of one another, living on in time after the timeless art was finished.

Somewhere aboveground, simultaneously, a white apron had draped itself over a woman’s round body. We don’t know who the woman was, or just where. The same history that confidently told Henry Moore “Alight here” places her only in a parenthesis named “(vicinity).” But next to her in (vicinity) there once did stand the flattened forms of another woman and a dog. Coursing and smiling but unbreathing, those are works of dead art.
We see the woman in white in a different way. She whom the drape conceals from our sight was capable of the adventitious. Only she could have violated art by dropping a burning cigarette into weedy space.

It has remained. Wherever (vicinity) is, a chair still awaits its white-aproned woman, rocking a little in the air pushed ahead of her arrival.
Photo-assisted: the autumnal fantasy that history is orderly and beautiful

Slant: Rodchenko, Caligari, manifestation

Times 2: the weird abstraction
Twenty-two words say: “His mere presence in the pulpit was majestic and fascinating, in the weird abstraction, concentration, solemnity of face, voice, mien, and manner.”
Wordlessly, this says:
Sources:
“Tribute by Dr. Richard Salter Storrs.” Memorial Collection of Sermons by Edwards A. Park, D.D., LL.D, Professor in Andover Theological Seminary for Sixty-Four Years, ed. Agnes Park (Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1902), p. 12. https://archive.org/details/memorialcollecti00park/mode/2up
Daguerreotype by Mathew B. Brady, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2004664036/. Cropped and post-processed.
Letter 142, The Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward. Harvard University Press, 1958.
Alfred Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson (Random House, 2001), pp. 310-313, “A Theology of the Feelings.”
Update: recovered detail in the 1847 daguerreotype of Emily Dickinson
On August 29, 2019, at
Recovered detail in the 1847 daguerreotype of Emily Dickinson
I posted a copy of the original image along with a post-processed version which brings out more detail, notably in the hands and eyes. Today, for Dickinson’s 190th birthday, I ran my restoration through Photoshop one more time, this time using Nik Color Efex’s Brilliance/Warmth and Dark Contrasts controls.
And: