photography

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/

Cloud and rippling water nineteen six

That summer evening, women in white gowns went to a boat under a sky that didn’t seem to concern them. For the five years of my life since I first saw their image in that act, I haven’t understood. I’ve been trying to make the sky around them concern me, but I haven’t succeeded.

The women are present to us now only as a blemished, poorly processed image in an archive:

“Going to the night boat, Petoskey, Mich.,” 1906. Detroit Publishing Company Collection, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016800038/.

Petoskey, their place of being in the image, is a tourist town near the northern end of Lake Michigan, and there exist plenty of other archives that can easily define the women’s tour term “night boat” by placing it in historical context — for example, in detail that can be increased almost as much as you’d like,
(1)
St. Joseph (Michigan) Daily Press, Monday, August 27, 1906, page 1

(2)
Grand Haven (Michigan) Tribune, Wednesday, June 27, 1906, page 4

(3)
Detail from “R. R. Station and Park, Petoskey, Mich.,” 1908. Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016814610/

But somehow the gowned women were also all of a piece with a cloud and a sun and some rippling water, and that plenum isn’t present except as an image.
Left behind with me in the visible, the first traces of the image seem no longer to be apparent. They are no longer detectable in the present tense that once was written “going.” Perhaps they never were detectable, and perhaps that’s why the gowned women seem not to have noticed, there under the setting sun, what they were undergoing. At any rate, it seems apparent to you now that some time ago the women in white and their particular sun were erased to dark.

Civilization considered as a huge machine

A moral is this aria from Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus:

How vain is man, who boasts in fight
The valor of gigantic might,
And dreams not that a hand unseen
Directs and guides this huge machine!

But the libretto directs that the aria’s performer be a coloratura tenor, not a man in coveralls with a dented oilcan and lungs full of coal smoke. The unseen hand and its score are a musical machinery, but the mustached body once was warm and tangible.

—

From “Group of Lackawanna freight engines,” between 1890 and 1901, Detroit Publishing Company Collection, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016801376/. In 2020 I posted to this blog an earlier edit of the image (no longer shown) under the title “Man in City.” The city is Scranton, Pennsylvania, which between 1851 and 1960 was the headquarters of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad.