photography

Before history: plein-air composition with women and ship

Parasol, veil, widow’s weeds. The man in the derby may be speaking to the women, but the social group doesn’t include the second man, the one in the sombrero. Hat and all, that man is only a visual element which is adventitious to the composition. The legs are right but the face is in the wrong. At best, the juxtaposition of this figure with the other three or four is feebly ironic, with irony’s requisite little does he know minimally fulfilled by the man’s mere unawareness of the women behind him.

After all, the composition has failed to provide a reason why he should be aware. There’s no drama in this grouping. It’s mere real life.

But an artist once happened to bring the grouping into relation with a massive orthogonal structure forced into the image frame on the diagonal, and immediately a trigonometry took form along lines of sight and began instructing vision in trigonometry’s useful truths. Following one of those truths, a ship’s humble mooring line, white against black, powered itself up and began calling itself to notice. It had become entitled to visibility because it had composed itself and become part of a composition.

 

Forever after, then, the composition will reach out from the frame toward us, forcing vision on a triangulated course upward and away from the inconspicuous caption printed along the bottom of the picture. Even if we happen to notice the words down there, they will keep evading reading by directing the reading function back toward the image for a translation of what they don’t say. “Sept. 13, ’07,” read the caption’s abridged words, and if we look back upward from their pinched little apostrophe to the richness of the image we’ll be rewarded with an exuberance of millinery history. Here they’ll come, the parasol and the weeds and the hemlines: bursting from their closet after their term in the dark and confiding to us with happy giggles, “We are so [19]07.”

It would take a pedant to keep reading after that. For that matter, the original image in the Library of Congress at http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/ggb2004000082/ is now so faded that the words can barely be seen, let alone read.

But yes: even in the unphotoshopped original, the first word remains visible to pedantry. It reads Lusitania.

And the moment we surrender and read, the widow’s weeds will have acquired a pragmatic force in the future tense. Precisely eight years from now, on schedule, they will become the most heavy-handed of ironies.


Fred Spear, 1915. From 60 Great Patriotic Posters DVD and Book, ed. Mary Carolyn Waldrep
(Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010)

Translated into a word in the imperative mood, the weeds will become moral. In 1907, until their picture was taken, they were a conventional index of membership in a social grouping. After they had been photographed, they became visible to viewers outside the social grouping and so took on formal meaning in the abstract calculus of visual composition. Within a few more years, Marcel Duchamp would be pushing his geometry of the female body toward Platonic invisibility with a glass model of a bride stripped bare. But in 1915 another significance pushed its way into the picture, capturing it in the name of morality with no more warrant than mere association with the not yet fully meaningful first word of its caption. To live on in the mode of that significance, as a historical memory with an associated morality, is to have become a fact: something known and believed to be real. But it’s a fact that lives only by having replaced with an idea what was once the image of a body.

To symbolize, insert signifier

The little boy’s cap and coat are brand new. His shoes, however, are scuffed. He has been a little boy in them for some time and taken little-boy dominion. On scuffed floorboards his feet aren’t arrayed in proper new-clothes symmetry, but the cap and the coat are constraining his upper body to their form. Made in a factory, they still incorporate some of the factory’s architecture.

No wonder the little boy is unsmiling. The transaction that has covered him with new cloth may have been love, but he can’t yet feel it on his skin. During the instant when his photograph was taken, he was still in the factory, not yet home.

However, Costică Acsinte, photographer of humanity in the guises of its clothing, understood the problem and devised a fix. Into his image of a body restrained by buttons and buckles he inserted a second image, this one not of one body isolated but of two bodies touching. Merged into single fur, a lithe enclosing integument unites the two bodies in one.  Placed then under Acsinte’s control behind the little boy, the undoubled image takes on the intelligible function of an index of love. It mirrors the giver of the clothing to him- or herself as a body wearing that which has grown out from itself to make contact with another body.

And we are now admitted to the room where a body in a picture grew toward another body and a giver of covering for the body was helped to see.

Source: the Costică Acsinte archive, https://www.flickr.com/photos/costicaacsinte/13785204545/in/photostream/

Lights out

Jack Delano, “New Bedford, Massachusetts. Foggy Night.” Fall 1940. Farm Security Administration / Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives, Library of Congress. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/fsa2000024815/PP/

From the bedrooms all the light has disappeared. The citizens of this night have dropped into the dark behind the image plane.  Now that they are there, they have gone permanent. They can never be seen again.

Outside their windows, the surface of the picture is a box of light-soaked fog, seemingly open. We can look at it, and we think that looking at implies looking into. Diffusing out of the picture’s permanent unchange into time, the light illuminates the sign on the wall and tempts us to think that come November we’ll be able to take it at its words, surrender our light source in exchange for the source within the picture, take a stroll down the picture’s cracked sidewalk, and cast a vote for or against John Francis Morrow, citizen of the night.

But at the end of the avenue of fog, perspective merges the street lamps into a backdrop. From there, illumination shines back at us, overmatching our every attempt to see more of the fog than its display on the surface of the photograph’s silver halide replica. Behind the silver halide is the fog we can’t see into, within the fog are the fog’s own sources of light , and what they illuminate is what the fog illuminates, under fog terms. Because it is not our light that shows us the name on the wall in the box of fog, it is one of the names of the dead.

Mid Air

The spring wind was stripping the blossoms. Little was left of this one except its reproductive apparatus. I opened my lens wide and cut back the exposure time to 1/2500 second. That minimized my instrument’s exposure to the quivering thing before it, and the change it was undergoing where it had been touched by light in midair.

 —

“Flirting with Death in Mid Air,” reads the curving headline. Like the curve, the choreography of flirtation with death had to be planned to its conclusion, even when (as here) the flirtation was called off in advance. It’s the having been planned that remains in evidence, going brown under the touch of light and air but still serving as the record of an intent.

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“This act will not be done,” said the scrupulous newspaper. Yet the artwork that promises a doing still clings to language’s living  stem. Its trace remains as a print on paper. It was always on its way into the homes. In the homes where it went to be read, the idea of flirtation with death became an act promising to be done. Ninety years later, the flirtation has been consummated.

Sources:

Carter Buton album loan, image 00055. San Diego Air and Space Museum Archive, http://www.flickr.com/photos/sdasmarchives/9971158295/in/photostream/

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” trans. Harry Zohn:

“A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them.” (Illuminations [New York: Schocken, 1968] 257-58)

Nude for Norway: on the culturally limited expressiveness of the human body

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Sources and translations

The Oldsmobile advertisement, from 1942, is at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jon_williamson/11982067064/

The image of women on the battlefield can be found in many locations online. It was taken by Dmitri Baltermants in Kerch, 1942.

The painting of the girl writing to the soldier wearing Norwegian mittens in Germany’s SS Wiking division, like the two other propaganda images in color, is by the Norwegian Nazi artist Harald Damsleth. All three of the Damsleth images are at http://gasskammer.blogspot.com/2013/02/en-nasjonal-samling-bilder-av-harald.html

Austrvegr, literally  “eastern road,” is an Old Norse word referring to Russia. I have also written about this image at http://jonathan-morse.blogspot.com/2010/01/home-front-art-familiarizing-defamiliar.html

Enten eller translates as “Either / or.” The red-and-yellow sun disk was the emblem of the Nasjonal Samling (National Gathering), Vidkun Quisling’s Norwegian Nazi party. In the image titled Kultur-Terror, the dialogue at the bottom translates as, “The U.S.A. will save Europe’s culture from destruction. . . .  with what right?” I thank Domhnall Mitchell for correcting the translations.

Two grammars of seeing

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At the top and bottom of this photograph, clumsy slashings have separated the image from its background in the reading matter.

The wavy lines are history’s way of showing us that the negative was scissored from a roll of film exposed in one of the cameras that were generically known then in the United States as kodaks. From the clothing fashions within the image frame, we can establish that “then,” the era when kodak was spelled with a small k, would have been approximately the turn of the twentieth century. The orthochromatic film that rendered the red in the image’s American flag as black was also responsible for whiting out most of the real from the sky, but if we desire sky we can partially reconstruct it by turning away from the image and reading its textual metadata.

The image before us, for instance, is archived in its primary form in the California Historical Society. There, the catalog will tell us that at this instant in its photographic history a flag was being paraded through San Francisco by volunteer infantrymen returning from service in the Philippines. Knowing that much, we have thereby been granted the full freedom of every library, with all its newspaper files and army records. Those have the power to restore some of the image’s missing metadata: a specific date, for instance, and possibly too a time of day and a weather report and a parade route showing the location of a school.  We might even learn the name of the soldier carrying the flag. All that is missing from this reading is power within the image. The woman in the tall hat can never turn and show her face. She is a display behind an image pane. The pane illustrates history in the act of passing her by.

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The phrasal verb to pass by operates across two loci of meaning. Within the image of woman and flag it refers to a transition seen within space. Outside the image, where it is not seen but read, it refers to a transition from one state of time to another.

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Now see this.

You find yourself seeing under two simultaneous but administratively distinct constraints. The constrained disappearance of content from the metadata (after the history of Romania in the twentieth century, it’s unlikely that we’ll ever relearn this twentieth-century Romanian baby’s name, let alone the name’s felt meaning) is an episode in the history of history. The constrained disappearance of form as the image squirms out of focus and breaks up is an episode in the passage across time to the vanishing into death.

Sources

“[Spanish-American War] Return of volunteers from Manila,” http://www.flickr.com/photos/chs_commons/9629205713/in/set-72157635287688523/. Photoshopped.

Costică Acsinte, “Bebeluṣ,”http://www.flickr.com/photos/costicaacsinte/11529170135/in/photostream/. Not photoshopped.

Hat: comparative immortality

1. Art

Early one April, Vaslav Nijinsky descended in New York. For his atterrisage he was costumed in a fuzzy coat and a furry hat.

A few days later, a New York Times reviewer wasn’t entirely pleased by Nijinsky’s appearance. However, he was prepared to make allowances for the deleterious influence of choreography.

2. On the other hand, real stuff

This judgment on Nijinsky’s suspect grace appeared in the newspaper just below another Russian item. That one began:

The list continued for several more inches. As it rolled down the page, it seemed to grow a voice and a music. The music was a song made of names, and it pulsed with their rhythm like a dancer.

3. Punchline

The year when Nijinsky danced one way and Princess Troubetzkoy danced another was 1916. Within a year from then, the choreography of the ballets russes was changed, onstage and off.

But this color picture from a century afterward depicts an exhibition of Nikolai Roerich’s costumes for a dance that Nijinsky choreographed in 1913: The Rite of Spring.

A girl in a leotard is looking. She is still young, as Nijinsky in his deteriorating photograph is still young. Some hats, it turns out, come from a boutique where moth and rust do not corrupt. Immortal fur, let’s name you the Nijinsky.

Sources

The photograph of Nijinsky is in the George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/ggb2005021382/. Photoshopped.

The New York Times articles are part of a single column published on April 16, 1916.

The photograph of the Roerich exhibit is at http://www.theritereturnsomaha.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/RoerichCostumes_Rite.jpg

From after to before: an image is returned to latency

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This gray visual field is an afterimage. Like its three subjects, it has undergone the process of vanishment from sight. Unlike the subjects, however, the imaged vision is reparable. But when I admit the image to my computer and begin the process of reparation, something startling happens: the area of change begins expanding from the image itself to the caption below it. As the words of its history begin losing their after significance, the image is returned to a state in which both words and images meant something we can no longer think we understand. 

In history, in the state of After where we think we do understand, this image has an archival place and a pair of archival names. In the Provincial Archives of Alberta, it is known alternatively as catalog number PR2009.0499/60 and as “Alan, Mary, and Robert Brebner, Spruce Grove, Alberta, ca. 1900.” But the effect of photoreparation is to break the collective name “Alan, Mary, and Robert” back into three names, attached to three faces as they were in the era when there lived three Brebner children. Now, says the optical illusion generated by Photoshop, the single name and collective idea of these children have been returned to latency in the image. Their collective history has not yet occurred. We have been vouchsafed a vision of the children one by one, as they stood in front of a tent one summer day circa 1900. It is the illusion of Before.

See:

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/alberta_archives/11358837083/in/photostream/