Every photographic print invites identification with the photographer, forces re-creation of the values implied in preserving the vanished image. Viewing becomes a memento mori, a reminder of the death of the subject matter, landscape or portrait, long since passed away but remade in our owning and involving ourselves with the print. For the viewer, contemplating the lost scene of a photograph lies well outside the aesthetic or the political. Hannah Arendt explains this in her treatise on violence:
Death, whether faced in actual dying or in the inner awareness of one’s own mortality, is perhaps the most antipolitical experience there is. It signifies that we shall disappear from the world of appearances and shall leave the company of our fellow men, which are the conditions of all politics.
Every full appreciation of a photo, every alignment of ourselves with the lens creates in us the profound awareness of such a departure. For we have left, we have died away from the conditions of the photograph’s moment. Every mechanical landscape, interior, or portrait comes to the viewer over time, a memory posted forward from the instant of the shutter waiting to come into conjunction with the instant of viewing. Noticing the image, observing it at once implicates the viewer as a partner in that memory. Looking at a photo, we act out and replay, to a copied phantom, parallels of the very decisions and criticisms of the photographer. We ask: “Who would I have to be, what would I have to believe in to have wanted to preserve this instant?”
And just as our daily autobiographical revisions resemble collective history and allow it to write itself, so the act of seeing and loving a photographic image calls us to action, but action circumscribed by the image’s historical context. Interpretation asks us to involve ourselves in complicity, to open a path between feeling and meaning, between ephemeral subject matter and the obstinate decision to preserve it, between the author of the photograph and ourselves.
The idea that we look at the sitter or subject matter begins to lose its credibility. We look over it, attempting to locate something else. When a movie editor cuts from a woman turning her head to a midrange shot of the shops across the street, we follow her gaze, having of our own volition turned our attention to look with her. To make sense of a montage means to reassemble the cut, in reverse, using the editor’s criteria. We remake the montage dynamically, as an act of looking.
The same applies to still photos: the lens slices a cross-section through time, presenting an unchanging porthole on a changed event. The frame invites us to feel a synchroneity with the photographer the way museum-case glass, slicing through a beehive, invites us to live in the colony. We cannot worry too much over what lies to the right or left of the restricting frame. If the path between sense and significance opens, it will open in those moments when, momentarily delighted by some overlooked detail or construed resemblance, we become aware of what lies in front of the plane of the photo.
We scour over a photo, asking not “What world is preserved here?” but “How do I differ from the fellow who preserved this, the fellows here preserved?” Understanding another is indistinguishable from revising our own self-image. The two processes swallow one another. Photos interest us mostly because they look back.
Time and again in Sander’s unfinished portrait gallery, Man of the Twentieth Century, painfully aware of the serious business of the lens, his subjects abandon hope of portraying their individual peculiarities and instead take up the heavier obligation of representing their upbringing, social role, and class. They focus their gaze distantly, well past the photographer, on a farther, more important concern. When we come behind the photographer’s shoulders into conjunction with that gaze, we have the macabre feeling of being its object, the sense that the sitters mean to communicate something to us, to all posterity.
Yet this sitters’ arrangement is the very opposite of what is commonly called posing. Sander deprives his subjects of the studio pose, the refined posture meant to convey character. With the cataloging urge of a natural scientist, he treats them as specimens, and they can at best buck up and make themselves presentable. Normally, the subject, desiring immortality, makes an appointment and appears at the studio. Sander reversed all that, bicycling to and pinning down his unsuspecting species where they grew. Depriving them of their active desire to be photographed, Sander enforces his subjects’ accountability to the camera. They are caught in the act of revising their own biographies under the examining eye of history, which is the lens.
A fish and child on either side of aquarium glass react to and modify the behavior of the other: a finger jab causes fluking causes a delighted squeal causes a surprised flushing of gills. We, on the far side of the glass, adjust ourselves similarly. The subject of Man of the Twentieth Century is this constant interplay between the small self and the larger portrait gallery. The subject of Man of the Twentieth Century is us.
Sander, in depriving his subjects of the ability to pose heroically, deprives the viewer of the same evasion and gives even the casual museumgoer the sense of being summoned. When just before the turn of the century, the police photographer Jacob A. Riis brought out his volume of images called How the Other Half Lives, he removed the subjects one degree more. His sitters were both unwilling and unwitting, not even aware they were being photographed. Riis and two assistants skulked about at night, clandestinely taking flashpan photos of criminals and the extreme poor. Following the blinding discharge, the photographers would have to disappear just as suddenly, often pursued by startled and angry crowds.
Riis meant to expose the squalid conditions of New York’s Lower East Side, to show the poverty and degradation of the human flotsam there. He could do so only surreptitiously, without his subjects’ consent. In one startling image, robbers, some bearing cudgels, peer threateningly down their narrow alley hideout at the dazzling phosphorus explosion. Decades slide past the ground glass, and they look out on the scholar, museumgoer, or nostalgist, who has taken the part of the original intruder.
Perhaps Riis intuited that a comfortable, propertied class would believe the debilitating conditions he documented only if they saw, as collaborative evidence, their own unwillingness to look reflected in the poor’s unwillingness to be looked at. Riis, in showing the local decrepitude of one city, succeeds in showing the true face of humanity when unable to prepare itself for the record.
The removal of the sitter’s pose from the finished portrait becomes complete in the work of Eugène Atget, who photographed Paris early in this century. Tens of thousands of plates show deserted streets, shop windows filled with bric-a-brac or headless mannequins, empty doorways and arcades, and barren cafés waiting for a clientele conspicuous in its absence. The scenes catch the hushed, paralyzed aftermath of tragedy. Atget’s empty streets are portraits without sitters, calling attention to a foreground surprisingly vacant. They are the clichéd snapshots of relatives in front of public buildings, only this time the viewers must supply their own relations.
The aperture of a camera forms a two-way portal through which both subject and viewer peer into another time. The subject, conscious of the permanence of the document, posts forward a memory. The viewer, aligning with the memory at some later date, works to preserve the sight from disintegration. Both are present at both moments; both experience the revelation of being adrift in time, sampling it laterally.
The moment of recording and the moment of interpretation lose their basic distinction. Somewhere in time, observer and observed reverse roles. Conscious of being watched through the asynchronous screen, both modify their behaviors, presenting their best profiles: interpenetration of looker and participant, audience and authority, aesthetic escape and polemical display, welded together and mechanically propagated through time.
To look at a thing is already to change it. Conversely, acting must begin with the most reverent looking. The sitter’s eyes look beyond the photographer’s shoulders, beyond the frame, and change, forever, any future looker who catches that gaze. The viewer, the new subject of that gaze, begins the
long obligation of rewriting biography to conform to the inverted lens. Every jump cut or soft focus becomes a call to edit. Every cropping, pan, down-stopping receives ratification, becomes one’s own.
Consider a print of you and a lover standing by the side of a house. You can shrink or enlarge it to any size. You can print it on matte, glossy, or color stock. You can mask the negative, tint it, print it up as Christmas cards. You can crop it and edit out your mate or yourself as appropriate. Finally, you can take a twelve-dollar camera and repeat the scene with a new lover, as many times as it takes to get it right.
And a new technology, already on us, extends this ability well beyond still photography. Every home is about to be transformed into an editing studio, with books, prints, films, and tapes serving the new-age viewer as little more than rough cuts to be reassembled and expanded into customized narratives. Reproduction will make the creation and appreciation of works truly interactive. These exotic technologies, like the camera before them, will enlarge the viewer’s understanding of the maker’s act.
We feel the process of looking most powerfully when not distracted by the object of attention. On a busy street, a normally perfunctory businessman stops on his way to the office and cranes his neck to relieve a crick acquired by sleeping with the window open. The woman behind him stops too, looking up with a voyeur’s curiosity. Soon a whole crowd gathers, refusing to miss the excitement, looking up into absolutely vacant sky. Some demand, “What is it? What’s happening?” Others imagine: “There; I saw it, just behind that building.” Still others feel an oceanic gratitude come over them: “So this is me, on a July morning, stopped a moment, looking into the blue.” Then they shrug shoulders, straighten shirtsleeves, and remark to themselves, “A curious thing, consciousness,” before heading off to their appointments.
Here at last is an explanation of why we can be moved by a scene clearly filmed in Griffith Park. We respond not so much to the events on film as to the thousand reels we concurrently edit in our mind—movies of our own hopes and terrors. Griffith Park, Verdun, the empty streets of Paris, or three men on a muddy road matter less than the mechanical decision to involve ourselves, to retake the composition and extend the story.
ON A WEDNESDAY afternoon, just after one, the drizzle of a false January spring began slowly, imperceptibly to crystallize into a flurry of snow. I had skipped work, calling in a lie about my returning to the Midwest for a family emergency. The couple in the apartment directly above mine were also home and fighting, as was their natural idiom. The woman alternately screamed and laughed in pleasure. The man begged, pleaded, threatened, and destroyed furniture. I could not hear the issue.
Across the courtyard, a baritone sax rehearsed chromatic scales—the music cartoons use to portray seasickness—missing the same notes it had missed daily since I took the apartment. In the street, a man wearing two bulky, oily coats stood stock-still, repeating, “The hell you did; the hell you did” to no one in particular. I had, in my neck and forearms, the warm distress that marks the onset of the flu. I decided to take a walk, not to get outside before it began snowing in earnest, but to get a good, solid, raging flu if I had to get one.
I prefer walking to any other means of getting from A to B. It’s a perversity on my part, pure and simple, but I enjoy the feeling of even the smallest, ten-cent errand taking up twenty dollars of my prorated time. The availability of the private car makes it absolutely unaffordable to use any cheaper transportation. But on this day I had not been able to walk fifty dollars worth before the snow became so heavy I could no longer keep my eyes open. In a fraction of an hour, the day had gone from delicious spring—the stink of earthworms and returning vees of geese—to a winter storm, knocking out power lines, blocking streets, and blanketing everything under whites and halftones.
For some minutes I was unable to move. I shielded my eyes as the neighborhood disappeared into gray outline. A car jackknifed nearby and thudded softly into the curb. Snow obliterated the scene, but the air, strangely, did not feel especially cold. It had that odd cusp quality that occurs at 68 degrees, again at 50, once more at 32, and finally, say the adventure stories, at –40, where the temperature osmotically matches the body, cradles it without being felt.
I stood motionless, seeing nothing, distracted by nothing, feeling nothing but the leading edge of my illness. Suddenly, I felt an overwhelming urge to quit my job: the most trivial, self-evident decision in my life. I had no idea why I wanted to be rid of it, or what I would do to survive. I felt like traveling. I bent down and scooped together the first accumulation of snow, pressed it into my cheeks and eyes, and let some drop into my collar and down my shirt.
A memory stirred just out of reach of my thoughts, some name, place, or event pressing in from the outside that demanded speaking. As the snow lifted slightly, I half expected to confront some tableau—a Model T, perhaps, sliding on the new layer of white, or a vision of antique petticoats, high-laced boots, and strawberry hair requesting a photograph while the snow obscured the outline and era of the city.
What I saw was nothing so remarkable. I had sprung a slight nosebleed from jamming the snow in my face. With a little imagination, I found I was in Mrs. Schreck’s neighborhood. It was still early afternoon; she could not have left yet for her evening cleaning stint at the office. At the staff Christmas party she had urged me several times to drop in if I was ever nearby. Well, I was nearby. Perhaps she would not mind my dropping by for something to stanch the bleeding.
For months I had gone after the source of the photo—names, dates, places—hoping, by pinning down the biographical fact, to alleviate the hurt and mystery of the thing. Yet in the time I’d spent trying to dispose of the memory, I’d become something of a martyr, thinking of it as “my photo” and “my farmers.” But it was not mine; I had done nothing with it except try to explain it away. Mrs. Schreck had far better claim on the image, not because she had met the photographer, shook his hand, or bought the image directly from him. That was incidental chance.
Mrs. Schreck’s claim on the image rivaled even Sander’s. She had made it her own; at the instant of seeing it, she had construed a relation between one figure and a friend of hers whom she had loved more than life. For half a century, she had honed that resemblance, elaborated on it, edited it, despite not one of the fellow’s other acquaintances ever being able to see a likeness.
Perhaps she would not mind my stopping by for a lesson in how to see.
Chapter Twenty
Out-of-Town News
He thought that by distilling the sludge he could trap the Weltgeist, or Universal Spirit. By chance he observed that the residue left in the retort when heated glowed in the dark even when cool, and he named it phosphorous (“bringer of light”).
—Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography
After sweating out the first few checkpoints, Peter settled down and stopped worrying about how little he resembled the picture of Theo Langerson on his official papers. Aside from superficial similarity of hair color, skin tone, and bone structure, the two men could not have been less alike. Theo was a good fifteen years older than Peter, had high cheekbones and narrow forehead, and looked saturnine where the other looked impish. Although only two inches wide, the photos on passport and press papers could never pass for Peter without the most generous assistance of the inspector.
When his group of neutral physicians, diplomats, and reporters from Maastricht reached the border of occupied Belgium, Peter, seeing how meticulously the German officials and Belgian collaborators went over the travelers’ printed documents, gave up hope of pulling off the switch of identities. But at the precise moment when he prepared to turn back and reboard the train for Holland and probable conscription, an examining line opened up and a boy his age, in the uniform he should have been wearing, asked him to step forward. Peter advanced and offered his papers. He hoped the amusement of the boy’s confusion would help compensate for the penalties. If the fellow asked him any questio
ns, he would answer with the echo game so beloved of the tobacconist’s widow.
The Kaiser’s foreign arm fussed a great deal with the written material. Peter suspected that he, like Hubert, was more polemical than literate. But coming on the photos, the fellow at once looked up and nodded in approval. He did the same with the second, identical print, then waved Peter/Theo into the occupied country. On the far side of the checkpoint, Peter, amazed, inspected the images to see if they had changed.
Now inside Belgium, trying to recross the Meuse was just as dangerous as pushing on to Paris. So he kept to the original plan, sticking with the band of neutral pilgrims for extra credibility, traveling to the front to escape the front. After repeat performances at various checkpoints, he began to think, incredulously, that he might make it. Number Four stopped his heart by holding the photo out at arm’s length next to Peter’s face and squinting. After an unbearable length of time, the ersatz Mr. Langerson suggested:
—Haircut.
The official gave a knowing “aha” and passed him on. Number Seven, a stubby, good-natured Hanoverian, who all during the inspection professed a love for the Dutch, stopped short at the photo.
Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance Page 29