time

Timestamp

A moment ago, the words readable in this New England vista of elms and steeples were saying only “McDaniels Drug Store.” Then, however, in a tumult of galloping hooves, the words “Keene N.H. Aug 12 1911” stamped themselves into place with a demand for understanding. From that instant, so long as it shall remain in the image, the word Keene is to be understood as the term here in the picture. As it takes dominion over that meaning, here imposes an unambiguity on the vista, forcibly unifying the multiple connotations of its two steeples with the single denotation of the sign that declares itself to be McDaniels’. Burned into the negative like a permanent scar, the white word Keene will continue being read even after the fire engine has completed its passage through the image frame and it is no longer August 12.

Passing through at a gallop, the men of the fire engine whip their steaming apparatus on toward an only slightly different here. Atop the apparatus, they race for the laureate idea that fires can be put out and (therefore) change can be forestalled. Also, because for them that idea is a smoking, sweating, horsedrawn thing, they can’t travel any significant way beyond the frame. On August 13, when the fire is out, the term Keene may still (therefore) mean here. But even as the fire engine rushes away on August 12 toward the new here, it is carrying away with it, beyond recovery, a Keene’s worth of fragmented images specifically timestamped August 12. On August 12, during the instant just before they became a part of the record, those things meant — those things were — life lived in Keene, life lived as Keene. Now, read as aftermaths of August 12, they are only components of a record. In that record, the outlines of the dead letters K, E, E, N, E remain what they always were: whitely unambiguous. All the other items that make up the image, however, have been changed. What they are now is only what we can see, and what we can see is only aberration and focus error.

Source: “Horse-drawn fire engine, Central Square.” Photograph by Bion Whitehouse. Keene Public Library and the Historical Society of Cheshire County, resource identifier hsykwh590 (15-37), https://www.flickr.com/photos/keenepubliclibrary/14556429244/in/photostream/. Photoshopped.

Elusive charm: uttering its spell, what is seen disappears, leaving behind only the counterfeit memory of an image

Sources:

http://blog.vintascope.com/image/87793090508

http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=63366

http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=56192

http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2004663944/

All images photoshopped. All names except Corinne Griffith’s erased from the historical record.

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.

9971158295_9d8beecdf1_bB

“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)

Perfect

From where we stand on our hillside, the train at a station in Michigan can’t be seen. It’s there, however, or perhaps it was there a moment ago. We know, because a cloud of smoke is drifting away from the station. In a zone just outside the visible portion of this image, a steam engine is, or is about to be, somewhere else in space and time.

“Michigan Central railroad station”
http://www.shorpy.com/node/10829
Click to enlarge.

The image comes to us now trailing a Shorpy comment stream, and from there we can learn that this building in Michigan is located at 401 Depot Street, Ann Arbor. Still standing and in good repair, it looks much as it did when this image of horses and derby hats was captured. Two more images in the stream, captured at approximately the present time, demonstrate. One of the two is a download from Google Street, and with its help we can take a virtual walk around the building, just as if we were alive on the spot.

Simultaneously, from a dig where the stream cuts through the past, a researcher reports that The Awakening of Helena Richie, one of the plays advertised on the billboards to the left of the street, ran on Broadway from September 1909 to January 1910, then went on tour in the spring. That locates a terminus in time for the mixed group of buggies and cars in front of the station. The year when somebody put his head under a photographer’s dark hood to see the group this way was 1910, two years after Henry Ford’s Model T, forty miles down the rail line in Detroit, had begun changing the mix. The camera could record the mix but not the change. Photography is the art of stillness in the momentary.

But then, blurred a little by his passage into and then out through the stillness, a man carrying a winter overcoat but wearing a summer suit began climbing the hill from the station. Because he wasn’t in the stillness then, he will never stop now. Trudging toward us along a borderline between the seasons of his year, he is headed past the camera toward a destination somewhere over the camera’s shoulder. His course is set toward a space created by the educational conventions of perspective between ourselves and the composition’s foreground. If the lesson is successful and we bring ourselves to think of him coming to rest there, he will have left the picture’s depicted fraction of a second and arrived in a future.

However, that future isn’t depicted in the picture itself, and it can’t be depicted anywhere else because both the man and the fraction of a second when he was have vanished from time. It’s true that while the camera’s shutter was open, the man’s left foot in its buttoned shoe seemed still, as if it could claim a place, no matter how tiny, in a finally fixed and stable history. But of course it couldn’t. Freeze-framed on the pavement by the camera’s virtual way of seeing, visible there only as an illusion of motion stopped and about to start again, that not really unmoving shoe is something like a visual equivalent of grammar’s future perfect tense: the representation of an action completed (Latin perfectus) with respect to a moment in the future.

In that grammatical sense, perhaps every instant when a shutter opens and closes and time seems to stop is a perfect instant. It may be that an image is only an a perfect instant confined within a frame. Of this moment in 1910, at any rate, nothing remains except what is interior to its frame. As unconfined creating light passed westward through the exterior and away along its track, the end came for everything: the horses on their dirt road, the railroad station which is now a restaurant with a railroad theme, the men in their derby hats. But when we put the frame around our tiny image of the man walking up a little hill toward us, we locked in the illusion it had created of a moment held still for us to see, forever. It was a moment in the interior, with the end locked out.

Then, at the end, we let the man escape into the end. Hold his image up to the light, let the light penetrate, and look. From its foreground in the past, this picture seems to extend toward the invisible place over our shoulder where the man with his suitcase will finally have gone.