In a class to himself lay Moseley, who had put in a thankless ten years in engineering before being farmed out to the trades as an anachronism. Moseley’s father had told him that the survivors of the century would be the electronic technicians, but had failed to predict their rapid obsolescence. Moseley was what the press called “an analog guy”—he’d learned all his electronics before 1965 and could be of no possible help on a magazine dealing with contemporary digital technology. Delaney, who had to bring his flashlight batteries to the store to ensure his buying the right-size replacements, enjoyed torturing Moseley with lectures on the simplicity of digital—“A mere matter of On or Off”—using obscene finger gestures as visual aids. Doug Delaney had gotten on the magazine as a fluke—“I borrowed a résumé”—and remained there through the magic of inertia. Mays had survived in the vortex of positions at Powell Magazines by using Delaney’s simple advice: “When in doubt, interface.”
While Delaney hung out the window, Brink gathered her breath for a return to micro-normalcy, and Moseley shuffled paragraphs. Mays, trying to recall from grade school the background of Veterans’ Day, conjured up a hybrid image in his mind of Lord Kitchener and Marshal Foch, the two meaning nothing to him apart from the moustaches.
—Peter, get over here. You’ve got to see this. God. A magazine cover. A bacchante.
Until then, the highest tribute Delaney had ever paid a woman in public had been “amazon.” Mays, the compensatorily diffident superior, joined him at the sill. Without even a finger-point from Delaney, Mays locked onto the figure at once: a woman at once implausible, standing violently apart from the river of jugglers, scouts, vendors, and soldiers that threatened to take her in the undertow. She forced her way upstream, west, while the world all about her insisted on another direction altogether. Even aside from this salmon-perversity, she would have stood out at once from the busy scene as the figure that did not apply: she wore a full-sleeved, gathered, embroidered, bias-cut, hobble-skirt dress from out of the last century. She carried a clarinet. Her hair—a brilliant strawberry red—fell all around her in ringleted profusion. From eight stories up, she seemed to be listening to something, in pain, petrified, in parade-gladness, or simply lost, out of joint in time.
Late in October, the Berkshires having collapsed the week before, the vets began piling back on the subway to make it home before more leaves fell. As Acting Editor, it sat with Brink to order the Electronics Sector back to work. But Caro’d gotten caught up in a story in one of the competing trade journals about a mainframe chip that replaced rooms of computers and sat comfortably on two fingertips. Moseley continued to collate and excise, Delaney to resuscitate vaudeville. Peter Mays alone remained fixed by the temporary and remarkable frame that had opened up in front of him, a shock of red hair—the view from his window.
Chapter Four
Face of Our Time
The wrinkles and creases on our faces are the registration of the great passions, vices, insights that called on us; but we, the masters, were not at home.
—Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
At the time of my shock in the Detroit museum, I knew just enough about photography to hold up my end of a conversation, providing I had only to nod in agreement. I managed discussions of photography the same way I got by in all matters outside my own too-specialized technical vocation. I use a time-honored formula: for each discipline I’ve memorized a half-dozen personalities and an equal number of broad technical terms. From there, I simply string together judgments, always pleading subjective bias: “To me, Weston’s compositional sense is so much more interesting than Strand’s depth of field.” I’d played the same game as a child, using those decks of feature cards in which the ears, eyes, nose, and mouth of any face fit equally well on any other.
The bluffing game works because we think of history as the work of individuals. Politics produces Jeffersonian Democracy, the Monroe Doctrine, or Seward’s Folly. A history of music invariably becomes Bach and the High Baroque or Debussy contra Wagner. Even a field as objective as Mathematics marshals under proper names: Venn diagrams, Fourier transforms. The discoverer becomes the discovery.
The great physicist Max Planck claimed that the advancement of knowledge actually follows quite a different path than the one this cult of personality indicates. The climate of the times, according to Planck, rather than some timeless quality of individual genius, fosters the invention. Thus Newton and Leibnitz developed the calculus simultaneously and independently. This idea, which has been called Planckian, gains authority in having been proposed by one of the century’s great physicists. But it would insist of itself that the time was merely ripe for its own proposing.
Bluffing works because listeners impose sense on fragments. When I mention Nijinsky, you know exactly who I mean, smoothing out the snags between the dexterous faun and the aging, confined lunatic. In cementing a familiar name to an adjective phrase, I am simply the amiable volunteer from the audience, pouring one colorless liquid into another. My conversant is the magician, causing the resultant fluid to shine with the colors of the rainbow.
But at the Detroit Institute, seeing the black-and-white print of three young men from early in the century, I felt my dilettantism become urgency. I knew that the old bluffing game would not get me through this one, that my passing knowledge of photography was no longer enough. “Compositional technique” and “depth of field” were no longer the issue. Who made this? Under what circumstances? What did it signify?
Stung by three casual glances, I felt that the photographer had stumbled across a great discovery, caught, by talent and chance, an image of great importance, and that no one would have rescued that moment from obscurity if he had not arrested it on film. My first response, triggered by my passing resemblance to one of the figures, was to find out the photographer’s name. And later, if possible, to find out and hide away the names and identities of those three young men.
I snuck a sideways look at the identifying tag, crib sheet for an important test. I half-expected to recognize what was written there, but the tag meant nothing to me. It identified the photographer as August Zander, an Austrian. The room contained no other work by the man. The photograph’s identification tag turned out to be in error on three counts: in the spelling of the surname, in the nationality, and in the tacit proclamation of its correctness. A variation on an old puzzle goes: This sentence have three things rong with it. The first is the agreement, the second, the spelling of the word “wrong.” The third thing wrong is that there are only two things wrong. That third thing set me back several months in pursuing the hoax.
Where I had been in a hurry to kill time so that I could catch the connecting Technoliner back to Boston, I was now in a hurry to linger in the room a long time, longer than I had, fixing the image in my mind. The odd notion occurred to me that if I had a camera I could take a snapshot of the photo and thereby possess it the same way the photographer had captured the three figures. But I had no camera, so I had to document my alarm with the less reliable instrument of memory. And my memory has never been close to photographic.
Detroit had laid the groundwork for my agitation, with its cult of mass production. Rivera’s mural played on that agitation, surprising me with a thousand square yards of paint, a chapel to the greatest and most awful of human constructs—the machine. I had left the assembly-line altar with my whole sense of balance destroyed. Out of nothing, three farmers offered a foothold. The three men on a muddy road seemed to me an entrée of immense importance, but to what, I was still unsure.
The mechanics of my profession called on me to do a little research—modest stuff, periodicals indices—from time to time. I had lived in Boston before and knew those places where I could answer questions quickly. I found a cheap room in The Fens—the university ghetto, a short walk to the public library and a bridge away from Cambridge. The room was clean and the bugs did not keep me awake at night. Finding work was tougher, as I refused to sign any forms releasing pe
rsonal information for inclusion in my file. I finally landed a position downtown. I sprang for a subway pass as soon as it got cold, and set about my new life.
Aside from having once spent a month and a half asking everyone I met if they knew a song with the words “a lingering lass in her party dress,” a line I knew from somewhere but could not place, I had never been obsessed. And even after the first few weeks of researching the photograph, I did not yet admit to obsession: a glance at the Xerxes to Zygote volume of a multivolume encyclopedia in passing. Slight facial resemblance was not enough motive for irrational interest. I laughed off my curiosity. Dismissing is one of the great pastimes of those setting off into the dark. In a short while I accumulated enough absence of data to convince myself that there had never been a photographer named Zander. Austria in 1914 could produce no artist capable of creating the work I remembered seeing in Detroit just weeks before. The man simply did not exist.
ONE NIGHT IN 1910, August Sander, a German then working in Austria, while doing menial chores, hit upon the idea of an epic photographic collection to be called Man of the Twentieth Century, a massive, comprehensive catalog of people written in the universal language—photography. The work would be a meticulous examination of human appearance, personality, and social standing, a cross-sampling of representative types, each fitted into a sweeping scheme of categories and subcategories.
Incredible as it seems to us now, Sander believed, without irony (that peculiarly twentieth-century defense), that hard work could complete such a document. It took a man of the nineteenth century to conceive of Man of the Twentieth Century. Sander was born in Herdorf, a mining and farming village east of Cologne, in 1876, six years after the Franco-Prussian War, during which the provisional governor escaped a besieged Paris in a hot-air balloon. He had only six years of schooling.
His memoirs describe the Siegerland of his boyhood as an idyllic and varied paradise. “There were impressions daily,” he wrote, “and every day brought new experiences.” A dreamy child, he loved more than anything to listen to the herdsmen tell their ghost stories in the twilight. He learned to draw and paint, sealing himself up in landscapes. The idyll came to an end when August went into the mines at the age of thirteen. Labor below ground left Sander a pragmatist for life and marked his documentary project with grim toughness. Sander’s early descent into the mines contributed to his being one of the first to train the camera on the uglier face of humanity. Before Sander, photographers used their machines solely to isolate beauty: upper-class portraits, vases of flowers. But Sander’s monumental document would include a section of portraits entitled “Ill, Insane, and Disabled”—no art that does not acknowledge the asphyxiating life underground. Yet despite this pioneering social realism, Sander remained a miner, suspicious of the avant-garde and of ideas, more comfortable with the Westerwald farmers—the ill, insane, and disabled—who were his real people.
After years in the mines, the young Sander was one day called on to assist a traveling photographer, one of the breed that springs up in the wake of a developing technology, surveying the mining district. Sander led the man to a hill overlooking the entire mining valley. He writes how, still a boy, he was suddenly struck by how a human invention could stop the fluctuations of nature and make permanent even those qualities as accidental as the shadows of moving clouds. Sander had a vocation.
Both financial and critical success came almost at once. His early work as a painter helped him master the gum arabic process. This technique let the photographer brush and scrape the developing print, touching up in the lab the mistakes of the studio and the subject’s face. Although Sander later gave up the gum process, declaring his hatred for “sugar-coated gimmicks, poses, and false effects,” his early mastery of the touch-up technique earned him his own studio and the financial prosperity to renounce the process.
In these early years, he supplemented his income by bicycling from his studio in Cologne into his familiar, rural Rhineland. He took impromptu portraits of the local population, becoming one of the first to spread photography outside the privileged and middle classes. Technical advances permitted short-exposure images out of doors. Several of his poorer rural subjects got their first taste of photography on Sander’s weekend trips into the Westerwald. In this way, Sander led the movement to bring serious and commercial photography out of the artist’s studio.
Sander always considered photography a trade, a livelihood earned by hard work. Art and income were bound together. In addition to documenting the working class, Sander specialized in commercially lucrative commemoratives. He photographed emigrants departing for America. He produced soldiers’ keepsakes. Those works that he could not sell went into shows, where they almost always took prizes. Then in 1910, at the age of thirty-four, he hit upon, overnight, the final shape of his life’s work: that comprehensive catalog of faces that would record, with German thoroughness, life in the new era.
From then on, Sander worked at his human encyclopedia, stopping only for the century’s two interruptions. The year of the three farmers photograph caught him at an early career peak. Two major honors had just come his way. The Berlin Museum of Arts and Crafts purchased six photographs for an exhibition honoring international photography pioneers. Additionally, the Deutscher Werkbund, a Cologne design association, recognizing in Sander and his medium that middle ground between the trades and arts, between forward-looking technology and reflective portraiture, commissioned photos for an exhibition linking progressive architecture with advancements in industry.
Unfortunately, the Kaiser did not attend this exhibition. Wilhelm had not yet been informed of any progress in any field since Frederick the Great. European balance of power—or a failure in the balancing act—preempted Sander’s career ascendancy. A reservist, he was called up to serve in the medical corps. He stayed with his unit in Belgium and France until defeat in 1918.
Sander retaliated with his own historical indifference in the years following the war. As the Weimar Republic brought Germany into its most economically depressed sixteen years in modern times, Sander commenced the most productive period in his life. Blessed with that unusual combination of architect’s vision and laborer’s obeisance, Sander continued his hopelessly anachronistic cataloging through the general disillusionment that followed the First War. He ignored the century’s first principle of positivism, which forbids us to talk about what we cannot know. Instead, he did the only thing that could save a work too naïvely ambitious to salvage: he made it larger. As his portfolio of faces grew, as his subject matter—Man of the Twentieth Century—doubled twice in his lifetime, Sander responded in a way possible only for one limited to six years’ formal education. He expanded his classifications of facial and human types to include the terrible new categories of the times.
Sander, the uncontroversial, comfortable, middle-class craftsman, crossed the public will in 1934 when the Reich Chamber of Visual Arts destroyed the printing blocks and burnt all available copies of a volume of Sander’s photographs called Face of Our Time, the first installment of Man of the Twentieth Century. Face of Our Time, a microcosm of the larger work, followed the same archform, beginning with Westerwald peasants, creeping up the economic and social scales, peaking with creators and inventors, then descending through urban compromise, squalor, and illness, concluding with an ominous image of an unemployed man on a Cologne corner.
The Nazi suppression of Face of Our Time ended Sander’s overt work on Man of the Twentieth Century. The ban seems at first an arbitrary exercise of police power. How could such harmless images, in the hands of a respected craftsman, be subversive? Sander was no more political than normal. His party, just left of center, was one of the most popular of the day. True, the man who wrote the foreword to the book was Jewish, but a converted Catholic. Sander’s son, Erich, was actively anti-Nazi, but the thin book could hardly be found guilty of complicity with Erich.
But Face of Our Time was found guilty. Sander’s gallery of anarchists, min
orities, and transients crossed the view of the German people the Nazis were trying to foster. And Sander compounded his sin by presenting these dregs alongside the industrious and the propertied without editing or commentary. Sander removed himself from the seat of photographic judgment, deferring artistically in favor of real life. The Ministry of Culture, intent on its own version of the face of our time, might have forgiven an aesthetic error more than the proclamation of objectivity. Con fronted, Sander gave up portraiture for harmless landscape and nature studies. The ban was the century’s way of confirming that the enormous cataloging project had been doomed from inception.
Sander’s camera crossed the authorities in another tragic way. His son Erich published anti-Nazi pamphlets on a private press until the police tracked down the machinery and destroyed it. The father offered to help his son by reproducing written tracts photographically. Thus Erich, who on any of several bicycle trips into France might have emigrated and ensured his safety, instead remained in Cologne and continued distributing subversive material. Father and son worked together on the project, an appendix to Man of the Twentieth Century, drying prints on clotheslines on their roof. An anticonspiratorial wind blew a loose page down to the courtyard below into the hands of a citizen eager to earn social credit by denouncing a stranger. Secret police came for Erich at four the next morning, and he received a ten-year jail sentence. A few months before the end of his term, Erich, unable to convince his guard that he was suffering from a sharp abdominal pain, died in prison of a burst appendix.
Sander survived a decade deprived of his calling, subject to periodic searches and seizures of negatives. But throughout it all, he never stopped archiving, scrutinizing faces, rating individuals for the lens, exposing and developing in the mind, a mind that left no evidence of aperture or silver nitrate. His house near Cologne was gutted by Allied bombers bringing their purifying and simplifying fire. His forty thousand negatives, hidden in the cellar, survived.
Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance Page 4