photography

Blink remembered

At first, all we know of these five people is 24 words set off by brackets from the rest of the universe of language:

[Two unidentified women seated on a sofa, two unidentified men standing behind the sofa, with a woman peering over the back of the sofa.]

The words represent the finest detail visible at the end of a zoom in on the five people’s location in archived history:

Library of Congress, USA;

Prints and Photographs Division;

Daguerreotype Collection;

https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2004664588/

That is all the zoom is intended to do, and all that words such as “two unidentified women” can do. At the end of the zoom rests a detailed collective body, clothed in modes and tinted, but unable to communicate itself as a body. The tinted body can’t name itself. Between its modes and yours and mine lies no word’s land, the emptied space between the lines where comprehension bleeds away and dies. The five people all had expressive faces, but we’ll never know now what they were expressing.

But if we venture to think that they may still communicate by means of their silence, we might try the experiment of examining the silence as if it were a body. We might, for instance, lay it down on a table, turn up the lights,

and then lean over it.

Leaning, we see a man’s hand and a woman’s hand. Isolated for inspection, they are seen to be speaking complementary dialects of body language. The woman’s hand clings; the man’s hand holds down.

Above and between the hands is a woman’s face. Like the other women’s faces and unlike the men’s, it isn’t set apart from eye contact by a pair of glasses. But even without glasses, of course, we can never see how the woman saw from within her bonnet. Whether she wore the spectacles or we do, there lies between her and us an ever-thickening deposit of optical glass. Lens after lens has been interposed: first by a daguerreotypist during the woman’s floruit (“1840-1860,” says loc.gov), then by us. Seriatim, the lenses deflect the rays that once were direct.

But for the length of a blink, at a location in space and time, this woman became the source of her own light. She was its beginning and end – that is, its history. The history had been latent before its time and it is occulted now, but within its time it was extant. From its blinking open to its close, it endured only long enough to resolve itself to completion like a cadence. But during the resolution – that is, during the only instant when a cadence can be a cadence – it was.

And now we all – once upon their time, for those three women and two men; forever after, for the rest of us – can see that it was. Light had lensed a woman into an image.

Terms of art, 1847

Footnotes in advance:

1. “Now exhibiting” means “now being exhibited.” It’s a progressive passive construction that now survives only in a few expressions such as “Now showing” (= “Now being shown”) and “What’s cooking?” (= “What’s being cooked?”).

2. The epigraph from Hamlet’s “Speak the speech, I pray you” had extra force in 1847, when its readers would have known that a daguerreotype’s surface is reflective, like a mirror.

3. “Fleeting and happy expressions” means “fleeting and lucky expressions.”

4. “Saloon” means “studio,” “likely” means “capable,” and “sold for no fault” means “money-back guarantee.”

On the other hand, “Seamstresses for sale” has kept on meaning “Seamstresses for sale,” not only as of 1847 but at present as well. The Civil War dismantled the text machines that had fabricated the phrase, and so “Seamstresses for sale” is no longer a tissue of truths. But its bared minimum, “We have for sale GIRLS,” remains on the loom. It still means what it says.

Richmond [Virginia] Times-Dispatch, Tuesday, March 23, 1847, page 3

History in an era before irony. Art in an era before color.

After the World Series of 1913, the New York Giants and the Chicago White Sox boarded the first of many trains and headed west for a series of exhibition games. After they arrived in California, they kept right on rounding bases through Asia, Australia, and then Europe. In England they played a game before King George V, then boarded one last steamer for their return to the United States. It arrived in New York on the morning of March 6, 1914.

It docked two hours late, and the weather over the harbor was rainy and snowy. Nevertheless, a riverboat brought hundreds of people alongside, cheering. A photographer from the Bain News Service recorded their approach, and after that somebody scratched three words of explanation into the silent negative that survived the event. Using a photo-editing program, I’ve erased them from this print. Trying to read them on their own single term is pointless now, because “now” is the period of time extending almost all the way back to the instant of shutter release. To read the word “now” requires a supplementary history archived far from the site of anything instant.

The words that no longer mean are “Ship with fans.” Other attempts at inscribing meaning might have been made, of course: words such as “prow,” “angular,” and perhaps “geometric” or “abstract.” Two more would have to have been “white” and “black.” Think of a Mondrian shape without color. As of March 6, 1914, however, the time for such a thing hadn’t yet arrived.

But one more incision scratched into the negative cut all the way through to the time beyond 1914. Referring across a few more inches of silver halide emulsion to the word “ship,” it gave it a name bearing the colors of a future. In 1914 “ship” in plain black and white was all it needed to be. For the purposes of a news service’s lexicon in 1914, the ship was only a mode of baseball delivery. The second scratching gave “Ship” a proper name, but as of 1914 that amounted only to journalism’s who-what-where practice at its automated busywork. The name itself remained insignificant.

But in 1915 it suddenly began signifying on its own. Suddenly the ship sank below the visible surface of things; suddenly the letters on its bow and stern became unreadable; suddenly, then, they were transformed from a string of morphemes painted on metal to a meaning capable of existing anywhere. Now that they are gone into history, the metal letters are history.  Their historiography took only a few minutes to accomplish, and in its final form it is only one synecdochic word long.

Say the synecdoche. In memory, as memory, say Lusitania. Like Guernica, it will be one of the words in which some artists of the twentieth century defined a mortal passage out of time.

Sources:

Tom Clavin, “The Inside Story of Baseball’s Grand World Tour of 1914.” Smithsonian Magazine, March 21, 2014. 

“Giants Get Rousing Welcome Home.” New York Times, March 7, 1914, page 12.

[“LUSITANIA, 1907-1914 . . .”] George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2002721377/