by Susan Sontag
“We think we are wearing a pleasant expression,” said Bogdan. “But you are the photographer.”
“More pleasant would be better. A little bit of dreaminess, if you catch my meaning. An expression I’d not ordinarily suggest to a farming family but you don’t appear to me like the other people I have observed in this community.” Leaving her station behind the camera, she approached Danuta—“May I?”—and straightened her bonnet. Then she returned to the camera to examine them once again. “Or if not, perhaps there are too many of you, then more natural. I mean, not too relaxed, but almost a little distracted—as if you were having a good time. Sometimes one can look too dignified, I always say. What country did you say you were from?”
“Poland,” said Bogdan.
“Oh my! And you’re all from Poland?”
“All,” said Jakub.
“Well, isn’t it wonderful, all the different people who want to come to America. I mean, I would never think of going to Poland, which is very near Russia, isn’t it?”
“Very near,” said Cyprian.
“And Russia is vast, isn’t it, like America. But I’m sure your country is awfully interesting, too. All those small countries must be wonderful to see and to photograph. Maybe I will get to Europe one day, I’ve still got time. I’d go about in my wagon just as I do here, and stop whenever I felt the urge, and take all the pictures I wanted. Do you think people would laugh at me? Who’s that old bird from California, they’d say. No matter, I’ll just stare them down. Oh”—she laughed, pointing at Maryna—“I saw you smile.”
* * *
THE PORTRAIT of their community had been Maryna’s idea, when she saw the advertisement in Anaheim’s weekly Gazette:
Mrs. Eliza Withington
Photographic Artist
Excelsior Ambrotypes and Daguerreotypes!
Mrs. Withington, having perfected herself in the art,
cannot fail to please.
Will remain in Anaheim for one week in the
Planters Hotel, room no. 9.
Call and see. Prices reasonable.
Likeness guaranteed.
“Secure the shadow ’ere the substance fade.”
Maryna dispatched Ryszard to the village to call on Mrs. Withington and ask her if she could come out to take a photograph of fourteen people, including three children. Ryszard took the occasion to spend an intimate hour with his schoolteacher and then strolled over to the hotel. In a wagon near the entrance, the one bearing a sign depicting a camera on its tripod, sat a stout elderly woman in a Stetson and black alpaca ulster.
“It can only be the illustrious Mrs. Withington,” he said, tipping his new sombrero. “I did not expect to find you outside taking the sun.”
He explained his commission. She explained to him that it was tedious for her to wait for prospective clients indoors. “I live by the light and for the light,” she said. She agreed to bring her traveling studio to the farm the next morning.
The Polish settlers were enthralled by this specimen of independent American womanhood. But they could only watch while she unloaded box after box holding the fragile glass plates and the packets and bottles of chemicals, the tripod with its legs doubled up and tied, and “the pet,” as she called her Philadelphia box camera; set up her dark-tent in which she laid out her salts and emulsions and arranged the tanks for sensitizing and developing the plates; untied and unfolded the tripod and mounted the camera. Except for asking for water to fill the tank in which she cleaned the five-by-eight-inch glass plates, she refused all offers of assistance from the men. But she brightened when Julian told her that he had been a chemistry teacher back in Poland before becoming a farmer in America. “Ah yes,” said Mrs. Withington, “photography is chemistry. Nothing else, is it not?” She invited him to peer inside the cramped dark-tent while she applied the photosensitive salts to a sheet of glass and then coated it with the wet collodion, her reward being some knowledgeable questions from Julian about the superiority of collodion to the albumen-on-glass process, along with a respectful concern about the explosive properties of collodion’s principal ingredient, nitrated cellulose (“Yes, we call it guncotton,” she said cheerfully). Jakub was permitted to join them when he divulged that he was a painter as well as a farmer. “Of course, photography is painting, too,” she remarked. “Painting with light.” Her pair of new Morrison lenses, she told Jakub, would produce a likeness far superior to what could be achieved by any painter.
Though there was a place up north she called home—Ione City, a tiny village in the Sierras—where she had a portrait studio, for several months each year she was out and about in her wagon looking for picture-worthy escarpments and gorges, bizarre rock formations and looming cacti. She subsidized her itinerant life by stopping in villages to offer her services. “Weddings and funerals are best,” she observed. Since Anaheim had been a disappointment in both respects, she would be on her way after taking their photograph.
She had traveled up and down the state, she told them, many many times.
“Alone?” Barbara exclaimed.
“Are you not afraid, Mrs. Withington?” said Danuta. “I would be so afraid.”
“Never!”
“But surely you would be safer,” said Ryszard, “if you took an assistant with you.”
“I have my Colt and I know how to use it,” she replied, patting her hip.
After the picture-taking they invited her to stay for the noon meal. She said that she never felt so happy as when she climbed back into her wagon and moved on. “I have a restless soul,” she said, “and all the patience I am mistress of is used up in mixing my salts and collodion, preparing my plates, and concentrating my mind on my subject before I fix its image. The glory of it is that every day I have something new to look at through my lens.” But she accepted their invitation to come indoors for a glass of tea (“You wouldn’t have some whiskey, would you? Of course not, you drink vodka, like the Russians”; “Say, rather, the Russians drink vodka like us,” said Cyprian) and, once installed with glass and whiskey bottle on the parlor sofa, seemed inclined to linger and chat. “I address myself particularly to the lady who shifted into such a graceful position just as I was about to expose the first plate”—Maryna smiled again—“and smiles so winningly when she wants. Of course, few people would want to have a portrait of themselves smiling. In the paintings by the Old Masters only clowns and fools smile. A photograph should show us in our essence, as we try to be, as we wish to be remembered, which implies tranquillity.”
“Dogs smile, Mrs. Withington. Mr. Darwin himself makes something out of that.”
“True enough. But what does the dog mean by it? Is the critter happy? Or only trying to entertain its master? It may be pretending.”
“What do people mean when they smile?” Ryszard said. “Maybe we are all pretending.”
“I think,” said Wanda, “that we—”
“Wanda, just listen,” said Julian. “Please.”
“And then to lock the muscles of the face, to hold a smile, since the camera can hardly take a picture like that!”—she snapped her fingers—“is bound to produce an expression that looks counterfeit, or worse. When the negative is developed, the photographer may find that instead of smiling the subject looks about to cry.”
“Or both,” Maryna said.
“You have posed for the photographer many times, have you not?”
Maryna nodded.
“I thought so. The moment before I uncapped my lens, you arched your eyebrows ever so slightly, which elongated the oval of your cheeks. I like it when people know what they’re doing. Were you ever on the stage?”
“I was, Mrs. Withington.”
“But I’ll warrant you didn’t do comic turns, Mrs. Zawa—Mrs. Zawen— Sorry, your Polish names are too hard for me to pronounce. I’m sure you were very grand and serious and when you smiled, people felt it was a gift, a special gift for them. I feel that, when you smile at me.”
“You are very
perceptive, Mrs. Withington. Do you go much to the theatre?”
“Oh my, there’s no theatre in Ione City! Even when it was a mining camp—it wasn’t Ione City yet, the miners called it Bed-bug and Freeze-Out—it was never rich enough. But I came only twenty-five years ago, from New York, where I went to all the plays and had my favorite actors and scrapbooks full of clippings about them. I was sure I’d miss all that when my husband heeded the siren call of gold and I followed him to California. But when I was left on my own after he died in an accident, fell from a cliff, poor man, and I set myself to master the heliographic art, the demand then was mostly for pictures of men showing off handfuls of nuggets or staking their claims, and everyone thought it very original for a woman to hang out a photographer’s shingle, still more peculiar to become a roving photographer, with all these heavy boxes to lug about, but I knew I was strong—what I really wanted to be was a surveyor, but they don’t let women do that yet—well, then I didn’t miss going to plays at all. I appreciate when people are just themselves, because they don’t know any other way to be. Let me tell you about someone I photographed recently on my travels whose uncommon destiny has made her almost as natural as a landscape.” She looked about the room. “How long did you say you’ve all been in California?”
“It’s already six months,” said Bogdan.
“And in that time has anyone mentioned to you a remarkable woman, Eulalia Pérez de Guillén? Everyone knows about her. No? She once owned the land that’s now Pasadena, but that’s not why she’s famous. It’s because this December past she celebrated her hundred and forty-first birthday. Yes. She’s back out in the San Gabriel Valley living with one of her great-grandchildren, her children and grandchildren being long dead, but what can someone expect who saw the light in 1735? That’s where she was born and she’s returned to assisting at the Mission church as she did a hundred and twenty-five years ago when she was a girl. Last month I made a beautiful ambrotype of her in the Mission garden. Can you picture her? Tiny and bent, the head toothless and furrowed and nearly bald—you would have thought at her age she’d be like a bush in that old garden. But she was fidgety as a calf, she didn’t even know how to become solemn as people do when they pose for the camera, and I could not resist photographing her good-natured smile.”
“Quelle horreur,” said Bogdan.
“She just doesn’t know how to die,” said Ryszard.
“An inspiration to us all,” said Mrs. Withington. She finished the glass. “Well, I must be off. I hope to be in Palm Springs in a few days, and from there go out into the desert to photograph some boulders, and after I’m expected in Los Angeles. There a colleague of mine has a studio where I will make my prints and mount them. I should be passing through Anaheim again in three weeks, and if you don’t like the picture, you need not pay me. But I know you will like it. You all have such interesting faces.”
* * *
“DID YOU EVER SEE such a creature?” said Ryszard. “Only in America could you find a woman like that, who thinks women are no different from men, who spends her life giving orders to other people. She is a man! That ginger hair and the man’s hat and the Colt in its holster and the morning whiskey and all those boisterous opinions. Wonderful, wonderful!”
“I liked her,” said Maryna. “She’s courageous.”
“I liked the story about the woman who was born in 1735,” said Barbara.
“I’d like to see the birth certificate,” said Julian. “I don’t believe a word of it. Nobody lives that long.”
“Mama, do you think—”
Maryna reached out for Piotr and pulled him to her lap.
“Of course, she may well be a good photographer,” Ryszard conceded.
“She’s certainly a good subject,” said Jakub. “I’d love to do her portrait, but she seems the last person who could stay in one position long enough for a painter.”
“Oh no, oh my,” said Cyprian, mimicking the old woman’s nasal drawl, “I don’t like to pose. I’m a very restless person.”
Maryna laughed.
“It will be sweet,” said Danuta, “to have a likeness of the girls when they were still little.”
Picture-taking transported everyone into the future, when their more youthful selves would be only a memory. The photograph was evidence—Maryna would send one of the prints she’d ordered back to her mother, another to Henryk, another to Bogdan’s sister—evidence that they were really here, pursuing their valiant new life; to themselves, one day, it would be a relic of that life at its hard, rude beginning or, should their venture not succeed (after six months on the new Brook Farm, the colony counted $15,000 spent and almost nothing returned), of what they had attempted.
“I wonder if I’m going to be shocked when I see myself in the photograph,” said Maryna to Bogdan when they were alone. “I never think anymore about how I look, now that I’m not obliged to care about looking my best.”
Bogdan reassured her that she looked no different (not true), that she was as beautiful as ever, as beautiful to him (also not true). But Maryna was not to be soothed. Posing, posing now, left a queer aftertaste. “It felt natural to be photographed as an actress, in the costume of one of my roles. I knew what I was supposed to do for the camera, and how I wanted to look. Today I was posing in a void. Pretending to offer something. Playing at being photographed.”
* * *
IMPOSSIBLE TO FEEL SINCERE while having one’s photograph taken. And impossible to feel like the same person after changing one’s name.
Maryna’s little son was the first to rename himself. One day in February he announced that he was Peter, as he was called in school. Maryna, startled by the firmness of his childish treble, had replied that this was quite impossible since he’d been christened Piotr and, besides, what patriotic Polish child would wish to have a German name?
“It’s not German, Mama. It’s American!”
“They can call you whatever they want, but your name is Piotr.”
“Mama, you’re wrong! Peter’s an American name!”
“Piotr, this discussion has ended.”
“I’m not going to answer or obey when you call me Piotr,” he wailed, and ran into the kitchen to fling himself into Aniela’s arms.
And he meant it, having received the command to change his name from the people who lived in a drainpipe he passed every day going to and from school; they were very tiny, no bigger than his hand, a whole family of them, with many children, and he used to stop and chat with them and they would tell him stories, and what he ought to do. One day Miguel came riding by—Miguel was the strongest boy in the class, Miguel came to school on his own pony—and, seeing him squatting at the side of the drainpipe and talking into it, dismounted and stooped beside him; and his Polish schoolmate had told Miguel about the tiny family in there, and also that his name was really Peter. And that was a bond, Miguel and he were really friends now. So he would have to go through with it, much as he was afraid of angering his mother, especially since she wasn’t as pretty anymore.
He won the essential part of his struggle immediately: Maryna stopped using his name to address him. She could say “darling” or “little one”—he would answer docilely to endearments—but the inhibition galled her, and she suspected that behind her back Aniela had already yielded to Piotr’s strike on behalf of his new name. This went on for two months. Then one morning, as he was leaving for school, Maryna said, “Come back for a minute.”
“I can’t, I’ll be late!”
“Do as you’re told.”
She motioned for him to sit at the dining table.
“What is it, Mama?” She sat across from him and began stacking the greasy breakfast dishes. “Mama, they’ll punish me if I’m late!”
She put her hands in her lap. She cleared her throat. “All right. I give up.”
No need to explain. After a minute of silence he pulled his slate out of his schoolbag and laid it on the table.
“You don’t want to go
to school now?” she said softly.
He extracted a piece of chalk and laid it on the top of the slate.
“And I’ll tell your stepfather and the others—what we’ve decided.”
He pushed the slate across the table at her. She wrote his new name on it in large letters and handed it back to him. He nodded solemnly, returned the slate to his bag, and went off to school.
Shortly after Piotr became Peter, he also inherited a bedroom of his own. With the two new dwellings put up by Indian laborers, there were now separate quarters for Cyprian and Danuta and their children, and for Barbara and Aleksander. Each couple had its own hearth, and Julian had built an outdoor oven with the leftover adobe bricks, but everyone continued to take meals together in the dining room of Maryna and Bogdan’s house or at a long table in the yard. Communitarians of the mildest stripe, the friends had quickly dismissed Fourier’s call for the abolition of marriage—the unseasoned dream of a lifelong bachelor, observed the contentedly married Aleksander—but agreed that the preserving of family feeling did not require the perpetuation of the lugubrious family meal. And they needed to unite after the day’s dispersions of interest and labor: accustomed to talking late into the night, as educated Poles had been doing for generations, they balked at keeping farmers’ hours, even if it meant having less energy for the next day’s work.
They were still far from attaining their ideal combination of mental and physical exertion. But at least the main house had a library now (the last of the books had been unpacked and arranged on newly built shelves) and a proper piano, with a lid and brass legs, which Maryna had ordered from San Francisco (it cost a fortune, seven hundred dollars). No vehicle of nostalgia is more potent than music: they’d not been aware how much they missed Poland until they started making music together after supper. They had longed for music, they had longed for the music of Polish composers, a song by Kurpiński, a waltz by Ogiński, above all for Chopin’s nakedly expressive art. But these resounded differently in their outpost at the far edge of the American vacancy, the American sublime. Chopin’s polonaises and the mazurkas, celebrated throughout the world as a musical symbol of the Polish struggle for independence from foreign rule, now seemed an involuntary disclosure of the pathos of patriotism. His nocturnes, with their enlivening flow of moods without boundaries, seemed weighed down by the sadness of exile and homesickness.