Photographs aren’t real that way, yet the experience of watching (nostalgia) was sad, even devastating at times, because Frampton was burning his history.
I trained myself to spot the empty areas, or what I call “putatively erasable experience,” by watching for so-and-so’s father disappearing; wife after a divorce, and then I’d gently query the album owner. I hear and register: they divorced then or someone died. No one gets rid of their pets’ pictures.
Never pictured, formal failures—no formal announcement for these events, or “undone-events,” those characterizing the “un-bonding family,” because those require a spoken narrative, which I designate as “necessary but unreliable voice-overs.” With my posse, this necessity hit me hard. Talking over the pictures, because pictures don’t talk, they beg for narration. I did that in my first book. But I’m into something different now.
In most albums until recently close-ups are few, mostly medium to long shots: a few portraits in the traditional sense, once done by professional photogs, even until the 1960s, and there are always generic school photos, they continue; but usually in an album, people hang in groups, clustering from short to tall. So, it’s hard to see details, features of faces.
Generally, on sidewalks, in restaurants, for group pictures, people stand way back and shoot from far away. I watch tourists getting their pix taken by a stranger who stands too far back. What’s up with this? Don’t people know where to stand when they shoot? Really, what the hell are they seeing, are they even looking?
“Rational distancing,” my term for this peculiar form of inadequacy, is the distance humans believe necessary in order to include everyone fairly. Fairness is a matter of perspective, like the vanishing point in a social setting. But who’s in the foreground and in the background, you don’t want that, unequal heights, right. Imagine society solely as an image, then imagine its vanishing point. It’s abstract but I’m working on theorizing it. People don’t recognize that to image a specific event requires a specific kind of eye, a visual inclusion that must entail exclusion, a slice, not the whole pie. It’s called framing, and it’s not only a photographic or cinematic term but a cultural one too. (See Erving Goffman, Frames.) It’s how I can move between the disciplines, by keeping the frame in mind.
“Shifting Frames”: to shift them requires mental superimpositions. Like, when people say I’m out of my mind, or You’re out of my mind, or You’re out of your mind, I think, I’m out of my frame of reference. Not kidding.
Interdisciplinarity is a goal, but few do it, actually can do it. Just like any form of integration—the matter is: what gets absorbed into what, or whom. What’s foreground, background, and does the flattening of contrast between the two, or their fusion, prophesy other kinds of blindnesses, say, to differences, or total confusion? (Rhetorical question.) The discovery of perspective, in the Renaissance, brought the vanishing point, backgrounds and foregrounds. The vanishing point may be vanishing, which will have consequences.
When I was about ten, in the family trove I found a loose photo, glued onto cardboard, of four people, three women, one man, all wearing hats. A weird picture: the four are perched at, or in, a long, narrow rectangular opening in the side of a wooden building. All have squeezed into a space small for four adults. The lumber runs vertically, which also seemed strange. The picture was shot at an angle, the rooftop sloping down to the right; above it, framing the top right corner, a triangle of sky. With no bottom or foundation to the building shown, the four might be low to the ground or up high. Impossible to tell. One woman’s face is in sunlight, and visible; she’s smiling, her arm resting on the sill of the opening. The other three—their faces are shadowed, but the man looks happy. Actually, they appear to be having fun.
Mother and Clarissa didn’t know who took it or who was in it. What hit me later about our old family photographs: hardly anyone ever looks like they’re having fun. (Fun came later, with Kodak moments.) These characters, they’re gleeful as they pose for the camera. Unusual. Maybe they’re at a carnival or fair.
close-ups
Faces don’t open up, can’t read them like a proverbial book, faces aren’t prose. We face others with apprehension, in both senses of the word—fearfully and with some idea of comprehension. The mystery of facial expression can’t be completely decoded, even the book for Neapolitan gestures, colorful and fun, demarcates social communication, not what people are thinking when they do it.
The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it? —Jeremiah 17:9
Captions can’t capture it, they may contain meanings or restrain them. Also, they rely on wily words.
what are we human for?
With bigger brains, humans are equipped to ask complex questions. Unfortunately, they ask big, sad questions, such as, Is life futile? The wrong questions beget the wrong or no answers; basically, these are unanswerable, because existential, except as matters of faith and belief. I follow Wittgenstein up to a point—that is, when I want more than a discussion about language usage.
If Darwin was right, there are reasons, supposedly beneficial, our species has evolved and developed and keeps going in the way it has, and will. (Even that we are destroying the planet?) Other creatures live integrated lives with other insects and animals, parasitic or symbiotic. They kill each other, mostly for food. They also fight for territory. They steal each other’s babies, males kill other males’ females’ newborns. This is what self-described humans call “Nature.” What we call civilized behavior shares some of these facets.
OK, patriarchy had its time and its raison d’être—to track progeny for free labor. New men know that’s over, on hold, in suspension, and they are disoriented. They are all men in transition.
family values: domestic disinclinations
To a kid like me, everything promised freedom, later.
BUT Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner: deluded white people.
Father roved freely at night, and fully invaded on weekends. Mother was inner sanctum, the domain, to which Little Sister carried a genetic free pass, always, in every way. When she had something to say, even without knocking, she could walk right into Mother’s office. I was pissed off then, I’m still a little pissed off, about her getting special treatment. Little Sister’s “selective mutism” had a critical place, established a critical wall, in our house; if she felt moved to open up—total license. She had super-added privileges. Then a child grows up envying the sick and admiring illnesses’ dispensations, benefits, not their disadvantages.
selective mutism
The Parents researched the syndrome. It’s an anxiety disorder. Later, I researched it, and Hart, because he copies me. Selectively talking, a selective talker, otherwise mute at school, in groups. Websites promote a concept: “Ridding the silence.”
For a person with selective mutism, it’s anguishing, and I get it. But I learned to love her the way she was. I love silence, I mean it.
Little Sister’s being, or image of being, and being there, pleased me, and so did her discretionary silence, which was evidence of a pathology; but I didn’t care then, and I’m not sure I care now, my lack of worry doesn’t hurt her or anyone, except me, maybe.
One, I need quiet time, space.
Two, lust for a self-possessed, long-distance-running woman.
Three, lean toward peculiar love-troubles.
And, because there’s no strict separation between “us” and “them,” that’s how I came naturally—haha—to observing my posse and me, guys late twenties to forty, and our attitudes toward women, ourselves “as men,” etc.
the contemporary is temporary
Ethnography isn’t predictive, but explanatory (theoretical).
Storytelling IS an ethnographer’s delight. We/they are greedy listeners collecting narratives. Ethnography and fiction both employ narratives, ethnographers hang their hats on lived lives.
Fiction lets imagination happen. We who are not the story-tellers but li
steners/readers are taught to restrain our fantasies, and hear what’s said, but part of the attack on cultural anthropology derives from the impossibility of turning off psychic processes. Since what’s before you isn’t stable, an observer can’t be, either, in his/her interpretations. Life is a relationship with other life. Humans are entirely dependent upon other humans, right? But you, I, must account for, and expect, disruptions, too. The observer is a temporary entity in relation to other temporary and ultimately inconsistent objects. One object might achieve balance with another, but generally that relationship won’t last.
Is inconsistency a symptom or result? It doesn’t explain anything, even though it persists. Obviously, it’s a paradox, and there’s no para-doctor. Just kidding.
Can life feel more temporary? On the verge of disappearing. Still, there are more and more ways to record it.
Nothing stays the same, right. Change isn’t good or bad, mostly indifferent, because “life” doesn’t care about you living.
A fact on the ground—an observable event, like a battle—is one agreed to have happened, though many interpretations of it follow, say, the massive fire-bombing of Dresden. (See Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.)
A photograph is similar. Cameras don’t create pictures. They don’t assemble anything; a person places or manipulates objects for it. No wonder an image can’t reveal anything: there’s no under-image, no substratum, no palimpsest to be erased, no “buried stuff.”
I’m digging in the forest for treasure. Feel me?
Now, why shoot what’s already there, when a scene can be created, equally true and false, one that’s never existed. The mind can decide it’s there. In my mind-lab, here’s the motto: make what you want to believe.
It’s my consciousness, even if it’s in the public culture.
Because of the camera and photographs, consciousness changed. Or, put it this way: there could be a consciousness industry, because of photography. There could be pop culture. I am imaged, I can image, and I do not need to be literate about what a photograph is, or about the camera. Everyone can take pictures. Big deal. And, everyone can be made to believe we all see the same way, which we do not.
What does a photograph do for human consciousness? What has photography done? With photography, is one more conscious of the world? Or, only, more self-conscious? We can be shown to others, shown others, other places; but can anyone avoid the projecting of self onto other images? Not mapping, but projecting.
How does subjectivity distort viewing?
The “self” changed with photography, or a new self emerged. That’s what some say. Yes, no, I don’t totally buy it, but it can’t have retarded its growth.
family values a body beautiful
My parents were enlightened, relatively.
But the world happened in me, not them. KEEP OUT OF MY ROOM. I shared it with transformers. Bedazzling realities.
We three kids were dragged to museums in Boston, New York, and other “significant cultural institutions.” Our pompous-art father deployed that vocabulary. They didn’t really have to drag me, more Bro Hart, who skulked around the vast rooms, not disguising his disdain, welling in his puny secrets. Little Sister drank in art like a wino at a bar, the perfect museum-goer—silent. In front of a Degas dancer, she resembled one; a pre-Raphaelite near a Rossetti, or an innocent child in a Julia Margaret Cameron photograph.
In museums, noisy streets, Little Sister’s muteness added depth—her silence amended the need for speech, so I discerned vulgarity in talking just to talk, mouths mouthing sounds, because near this unique creature with her fount of quiet solitude, my mind expanded, and I heard what wasn’t being said, since Little Sister communicated beyond language’s capacity, and she could always reach something in me. I believed that. The portraits of beatific passivity wounded Mother; she’d stamp one foot, usually her right, and vanish, gone to another picture, unnoticed by me or Little Sister. Little Sister loved them, though, maybe because of their demanding femininity. I can’t know. I tried to look at them the way she or Mother might, because I sometimes wanted to be her, a strange envy that caused more family concern.
Mother wasn’t masculine in obvious ways—short hair, short nails, mannish suits, not her style; though in the eighties she wore long jackets with boxy shoulders, all the women did. She was pretty, and is, and affected men, heads turned fast, and I saw it as a kid, her potent effect on them. Then I watched her watching them watching her.
Way later, learning about the cinematic gaze in a film course that segued into cultural anthro courses, about “fixing” women with the camera’s male eye—Father’s, basically—I imagined butterflies pinned to a dorm bulletin board. Worse, pinned there, Mr. Petey, an endangered species.
Back then, my parents worried about my normality, because little Zeke felt drawn to age-inappropriate weirdos. And wanted to be a weirdo. But I watched TV. I was captive to the game world, also conforming to trends, D&D and other stuff; I still did my schoolwork, because I’m compulsive and it was easy.
Conforming is the operative concept—talking ’bout my gen-gen-generation; in the end my parents conceded “normal enough.”
I tested everyone’s limits, that’s what they told me; I saw myself as a race car, and they were my track. I don’t have tracks, I never did that. I tested them, and me. I still test people, and they always fail. OK, I have my laughs. Yeah. I do whatever, whenever. But also I’m not spontaneous. Highly overrated, anyway, usually just a case of impulsivity or drugging.
An adult or grown-up is an adaptation, a living set of learned behaviors for specific social settings, other contexts. I was coached, verbally, and shown displays of adulthood. I was verbally warned, harshly: Once you’re an adult, you will have to … If you don’t do this … It’s a natural process, developmental, maturation, the inevitable, natural unfolding of a species, but there’s a harshness, savagery, in its execution, its executives. What about the executive function, parenting?
They say: When you’re an adult, you’ll see. You’ll be sorry. Just wait until you’re a father or a mother.
I had to keep up appearances, so that when I outgrew my child-self or, colloquially, grew up, I acted like a grown-up.
Some young mammals get dumped in the jungle to fend for themselves. Our species isn’t meant to but it does that also.
Does the world happen in them, too?
picture people picture values
Photography developed the way photographs first developed—over time. Many characters influenced its attenuated birth; given its emphasis on reproducibility (see Walter Benjamin), that seems appropriate. Depending upon which historian you read, one innovator will get more play than another: Henry Fox Talbot (“the art of fixing a shadow,” he wrote), England; Hippolyte Bayard, France; and John Herschel, who invented the word “photography” as well as the terms “negative” and “positive” for the new medium.
Now, it’s a cool medium. Thus would have spake 1960s visionary Marshall McLuhan, if he weren’t dead.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, if you failed at drawing, wanted to produce art, which meant imitating Nature or “capturing” it, the camera machine could do it. Henry Fox Talbot’s book of his salt print photographs, his invention of the calotype (talbotype), The Pencil of Nature, had a run of seventy copies, but those copies got into the right hands, let’s say.
A camera was a bigger pencil, drawing Nature without a human hand. The machine displaced the hand, an art in and for the Industrial Revolution. The Pencil of Nature foresaw the coming of Walter Benjamin. Not a felix culpa, like Adam’s fall that necessitated Christ’s coming. Or maybe it was, if the development of the picture machine actually doomed us. But this we cannot know—Picture People can only surmise about the future, enmeshed in hope or despair about it.
Capturing a scene, face, with the photographic apparatus, frosted an already gooey narcissistic cake. Humanity’s birthday cake, say. Pursuit of that capture, the urgency with which s
cientists and artists sought to stop time, proverbially, or keep it, a snapshot of a moment or scene, is not unlike any adventure or journey, the seeking of spices in India or tea from China. Human beings often get what they want, as a species, even if not as individuals; they strive, invent it. Failures are many, and history records species’ successes; these are rewarded. People wanted to fly, they did; reach the Moon; have babies outside the uterus. To some extent, people construct their realities, but unlike other mammals they/individual members are regularly dissatisfied or, worse, miserable, and so humans invented abstract tools—religion, say—to persuade themselves that they might be, will be, or can be happy, if
not now, tomorrow. Later, in the invention of an after-life.
family devalues
Sad people become artists, mostly sad ones, Aunt Clarissa says, because they can’t forget, and they make up worlds to suit their sad memories, but they can’t get it right, so they keep creating. That’s her version of creativity.
Writers worry about losing what people said, and how it happened; photographers worry about losing how it looked, I tell her.
Clarissa knows it all (she’s Mother’s only sib, plus older): If you have a happy childhood, you don’t become an artist. But what if it’s too happy, I ask, so you always want to go back there; and that makes you unhappy, too, because it’s totally gone.
That’s when you start to write, she says, without a glance, but you start a little late and that creates depression.
In my humblie, artists’ explanations are often self-serving, displaying a “self-satisfying sadness” (my term).
Aunt Clarissa is a passivist, takes life lying down, never been on a march, would never go near one, not even a parade, couldn’t find the heart or the right shoes. “Public spectacles,” Clarissa says, “are hell to us sensitive people.”
Men and Apparitions Page 7