The Iowa Review
Volume 33
Issue 1 Spring
2003
The Window Girls Move past Continually:
Thoughts on Photography
Lyall Bush
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Bush, Lyall. "The Window Girls Move past Continually: Thoughts on Photography." The Iowa Review 33.1 (2003): 75-88. Web.
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Article 24
lyall
bush
TheWindow Girls Move Past Continually:
Thoughts On Photography
In 1934 at a public meeting
organized
Andre Breton delivered a lecture called
he summed
up the mission
by the Belgian Surrealists,
In it,
"What is Surrealism?"
of Surrealism with this sentence:
"Our
wish,
growing more and more
at all costs to avoid considering
unceasing
has been
refuge,
outside
to pursue
these
investigations
our
consequences
urgent from day to day,
a system of thought as a
eyes wide open to their
with
investigations
and to assure ourselves
would
be capable
of facing
that the results
the breath
of
of the
street."
The breath of the street. Such a curious phrase: though it acknowl
to any "system of
is opposite
edges that the goal of Surrealism
it doesn't
which
the
Surrealists
thought,"
clearly spurned,
exactly
line up with what we have come to think of as the central Surrealist
to unconscious
in
attraction
impulses, either. Breton's formulation,
an excla
fact, has little to do with how we now use the word?as
as a synonym for the unexpected,
a jet plane crash into a
the unheimlich. So watching
the strange,
it doesn't follow system,
is "surreal," in our terms, because
building
that works with
and drops us, for a time, into an experience
the
mation
we
lob into conversation
the "breath of the street," on the other
illogic of dreams. Capturing
a
sort
of desire, in which you work to lay a net over
hand, is woolier
the foul blague of the real out there, to map its accidents,
fold crap
and transitoriness
Surrealism
and the uncut
is the ultimate
corners
Modernism:
into art. By this definition
the realism of an atomized
and random world.
Photography?the
photography
these terms Surrealism. Consider
of the street, at any rate?is
an old snapshot
from fifteen
by
or
twenty years ago, the one you still look at sometimes with increasing
to the person you were then, to the
wonder
about your connection
and shake-scene
the hair, the skin, the
you inhabited,
body-shape
on
look in the eye, the bones
the back of your hand. I am holding, for
of my younger brother that I took in June
example, a photograph
1974. Iwas
thirteen
and he was
eleven,
and he is at the bottom
of a
75
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on
chin-up
the
back
steps,
??
using the pipe that supported
our awning. He is straining a
little, and smiling, and the soft
grain
of
the picture and the
the slight
day mirror
bright
strain in his smile.
h
?y
In the inter
stices that knit clothing next to
and in the little
clapboard,
of body
accidents
language
I feel a small shiver
between,
of anagnorisis, Aristotle's
word
for the insight tragic characters
encounter
in themselves when
they realize how their actions
have converged with their fate.
My history is no more tragic than most
middle-class
lives after, say,
But among other things it reminds me that the frame
of the story about me and my brother?my
family: the
same
mists
into
the
that
and
it. Once
holds
clarifies
photograph
grain
a
we
were
time
Now
both
there.
we're
not.
The silt of the move
upon
Clytemnestra's.
holds a version
ment
between
is mesmerizing.
then something
else: My mother's
face appears in the little
window
behind my brother. She has shut her eyes against the bright
day, and my brother, hanging from the pipe and believing he is the
And
has also squeezed
his eyes shut. The
subject of the photograph,
visual rhyme is a strange accident, which
I like because
it leaves
a little spellbound.
them both in the same moment,
camera
to take the pictures was a Christmas
present,
and when I carried it around with me I knew Iwas close to an adult
form of magic-making.
In our not-so-personal
Presbyterian world,
The
that was
I used
even more
than my new hockey gloves. By June,
personal
I
and
could
devote my energy to making
art. I
hockey
snapped photos of my other brother sleeping, our Schnauzer
pup
a
in
father
chair
in
afternoon
socks,
my
chewing
nodding
light, the
the
into
leaf.
brother
big maple by
highway just coming
My
mowing
the lawn, in a corduroy coat. I still have these photos, and some of
was
over
them have a certain eye for detail or mood. But none has the strange
feeling of a "moment" that the chin-up picture has.
76
In an essay
called
"The Photographic
in
collected
Message,"
seems
to
Roland
Barthes
like
argue
Image?Music?Text,
something
this. He writes
that "the photograph
is not simply a product or a
but also an object endowed with a structural autonomy."
a pho
is obscure, but my sense is that he means
Barthes' meaning
or
a
of
crisscross
not,
tograph is, accidentally
funny
simple, dumb
as
"thereness"?a
"stencil" of reality,
Susan Sontag put it, "faithful
as Philip Larkin wrote?and
and disappointing"
random
something
and floating around it that Iwill call "design," which
iswhat I think
channel
Barthes means
by "structural autonomy."
This may be like saying that dust is a "version" of architecture,
but that is what Barthes
(and for that matter Jean-Luc Godard and
Claire Denis)
often asks his readers to consider
in general about
words,
representations,
life, social
reality, and so on.
a flash, an advantage
since flash cubes
cost extra and I had only a small allowance
I earned from mowing
the lawn in summer and shoveling snow inwinter.
I could keep film
Out
costs
of doors
I didn't
need
by using black and white film, which was fifty
cents or so less, and because
the guy behind the counter told me,
can
use
to
sense to me in an unde
it
learn
with."
That made
"you
tv
romantic
I
knew
from
and magazines
that black and
fined,
way.
down
further
meant
"art," and I thought about "burning through a few
rolls," as I read of enthusiasts
doing. But my parents would consid
er pictures with no people in them a waste of money,
so my picture
waste:
I
and
wanted urgently to snap away,
taking balanced frugality
white
but Iwanted
to spend wisely,
THE WORLD
IS AN ACCIDENT
Real
photographers,
too.
the generation
of the 1950s and
especially
of the snapshot from Helen Levitt toWilliam
beyond?the
geniuses
Klein and Robert Frank and up through Gary Winogrand?were
and
I've
since
are,
discovered,
profligate with film, snapping hundreds
of pictures
in a day to get two or three negatives
that have the cool,
aura of discovery and accident that I see in the picture
spell-binding
of my blindly smiling mother
and brother. (When he was taking pic
tures of New Yorkers
in the 1950s, Klein
told The New Yorker's
Lane in 2001, that he
Anthony
Iwas thirteen, squeezing
When
felt
like a "fake anthropologist.")
five times in an after
the shutter
77
a small death.
noon was
I'd think that I'd bitten off enough of the
were gluttons
real
of light
photographers
By comparison,
in con
and faces, of feet and shadows
and strangers, of monkeys
and bicycles
vertibles
cars,
resting, and barber shops, overcoats,
in
like sand, women
babes in arms, crime scenes, crowds shifting
world.
on fore
that somehow
commented
and backgrounds
a
moment
in
time.
grounds, by the chance of
me
about
weather
and
tells
My snapshot
family, and if I shut my
shoes,
hats,
own eyes
a picture.
I can imagine my brother was happy there, happy to be in
It's possible
that Iwas never closer to him than in that
that spring at the end of grade seven before the
pre-adult moment,
adult glamour, of grade eight,
the
turmoil,
very nearly complicated
was
I
around the budding girls.
and my vertigo when
she pushed aside the plas
And here's the point about my mother:
tic curtains
of the bathroom
ing the shutter.
and at the time
to look out just as Iwas press
is un-posed?
there?she
she'd spoiled the moment.
because
window
It's an accident
that she's
Iwas annoyed
it's clear that the accident
is the pic
of the moment
re-orient
ture's subject: her shut, dreaming eyes
the picture and re
in training
into a literally different
focus my image of an athlete
wicked
frame. I'm sure, given my mother's
temper that that's a dif
But afterwards
too. She is smiling, but in a different way
ferent frame of mind,
seems
my brother. She
caught inside a joy that was rare.
than
said that he took pictures of things "to
famously
Gary Winogrand
see what they looked like as photographs."
He meant
that, to some
women's
of
these
know
he
took
extent, he didn't
feet,
pictures
why
say, rather than some other pedestrians.
Something
in moving
hands
light and the incidental matter
mouths
and the fidgets
of details?the
about angle and
and corners of
tricycle behind the child, the
about exactly. There's something
you never know
barking dog?that
no
about an individual moment
you can never fully understand,
are.
matter how conscious
inner
Your
and
eye, sharp
eye,
your
you
as they may be, can't see what a study of the frozen artifact gives
you
the
And
century's
nonsense
chance
onto
we
can now
artists
turned
see was
the twentieth
to the random
and to
flakes of quo
I, and began to moonland
their writing paper, their layers of
their canvases,
after World War
tidian matter
78
to.
is accident, which
supreme art vehicle:
there
in language,
and silver oxide. Not myth, not "experiments"
not even consciousness
have had the enduring life that accident has.
nitrate
No
form
William
the random
invites
Marker
Klein/Chris
Minneapolis
American-born,
In 1996, a
than photography.
at the Walker Art Center
in
better
exhibit
a melancholy
of Klein, the great
and
of
wide
photographer
angles
a
out
Klein's
metaphor.
thinking
gravelly,
featured
audio-loop
Paris-exiled
frame-filling
subjects,
New
French-inflected
to emerge from a re m
York voice seemed
a
two or
if
he's
life
has,
photographer
lucky, maybe
sleep:
meant
amount
at
I
of
first he
the
three seconds." Listening,
thought
"In his
has to factor the light, to focus and fire
time a street photographer
on a subject who will move or change in another second. But then
he clarified: shooting at i/30th of a second, i/6oth, i/250th, even the
may be able to capture in his lifetime only a
greatest photographer
of seconds
couple
using
answer
a motor
of existential
drive or on video?
human
Klein
time. And what
didn't
consider
or less plain: a photographer
could
the place of randomly pointed decision,
ismore
film, but
scious and unconscious
image. Accumulating
when
if he shoots
this, but the
capture more on
the play of con
to the still
choice, is part of the attraction
images doesn't count as much as the kinked
lines up: light, look, distance, mystery,
and
eyes stilling?accident.
arrangement,
people,
Klein's idea is full of an awe that, in philosophical
terms, is Greek,
I feel the strangeness
of accident
and in looking at my photograph
part-seconds
time
he describes,
that it can improve a plan and add the fifth element.
can that be said? Architecture
Of what other form of representation
to go over the place
requires bales of money,
blueprints, meetings
ment
of stairwells. Writing
drafts before
rarely escapes multiple
reveal figures re-drawn, delet
publication.
X-rays of great paintings
If there is a place for accident
inserted.
ed, re-situated,
painted over,
a thing in the
in other arts it is the happy accident of discovering
a
act
of
the
better
of
still
life, the anec
arrangement
long
making,
dote
from the radio show
that feeds
the short
(Frank O'Hara
inspired a friend to
story.
has a great poem on the look of sardines that
begin to paint them. Later, the sardines were painted
friend still titled his work, "Sardines.")
over but
the
It's not hard to add new
"elements" to photographs
now, and in so
moment.
with
the
With
software
like
doing tamper
pho
Photoshop,
and parachute bodies or
tographers can sit down at their Macintoshes
79
backgrounds
from their existential
into new ones. With
homes
some
I could be petting a weasel
rather
imaginative
cutting and pasting
so fulfill a terrifying dream I once had. But anyone
than my dog?and
the acci
looking at the photo could also note the difference between
dental
and the deliberate
juxtaposition.
ACCIDENT
Throughout
photography
Susan Sontag
a book that almost
On Photography,
singularly made
a legitimate
museums
for
and
intellectuals,
subject
a terror of her own: that since 1839 "just
contemplates
has
been
the overall
Pursuing
everything
photographed."
accrues
to
of
that
the
from
the
world?
images
"meaning"
taking
to
Diane
is
from Matthew
lies
truth,
Arbus?Sontag's
Brady
subject
about
and the riddling matter between
"Humankind
kick-off voiceover:
them, beginning
lingers
with
unregenerately
her ominous
in Plato's
to the philosopher's
is referring
trope of narrowed
our
senses
that
the
vision,
carry us as near to the
argument
to sunlight. Her tone, however,
Real world as shadows
echoes the
in The Crucible.
that Arthur Miller
Puritans
described
petulant
cave."
She
human
shows a moral perturbation
about
Sontag, normally
tough-minded,
It
without
the average photographer's
goes
aggression.
saying that
more
a
in
it does
than
public requires
aggression
taking
photograph
for a writer
to make
a silent
But Sontag's worrying
the
drive to get faces and
prose implies?more
implies?that
bodies with the net of a good lens is the tool of the devil.
observation.
than
Her
arose
about the "problems,
from thinking,
she writes,
of photographed
and moral,
posed by the omnipresence
and
she
concludes
that
has
images,"
gradually abduct
photography
as Pluto did Persephone.
ed us to the Underworld,
Pursuing
images,
she is saying, we turn from direct sunlight back ("unregenerately")
book
aesthetic
to the cave. So she issues Chandlerized
policier epigrams?"photo
alarming
ideograms about the tes
has become
almost as widely
prac
Zeitgeist: "photography
.... It is
as sex and dancing
a
social
ticed an amusement
rite,
mainly
a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power."
graphs
ticular
furnish
evidence"?and
Sex and dancing? A "tool of power"?
A couple of decades
later it is true
Merritt
can mix
voyeurism
first on the Internet and then
80
that an artist
like Natacha
a photo diary about her sex life,
in a book published
by Taschen. But a
with
graphie mix
photographs
event what
of body parts and arm's-length
angles (Merritt usually
not
was
is
what
herself)
Sontag
imagining, and in any
two hundred pages
for
On Photography circumnavigates
is the core content
of the photograph
and why it can be so satisfy
so
so
to
look
and
and
delicious. The best photo
at,
ing
absorbing,
are
our
extreme states. A pho
of
forms
of
archives
dream,
graphs
tograph that gets skin right, under this or that light, can prompt a
a recognition
of belonging.
When
response,
a
crowd
of
travelers,
boiling
immigrants,
Salgado brings
into his frame it can be extraordinary: Hieronymous
Bosch
migrants
meets Dorothea
Lange.
kind
of
ecstatic
Sabastiao
An
like Sally Mann uses the large
and brave photographer
produced by her view camera to capture the skin of her
intuitive
negatives
children?to
say that this is the way my family
slightly wild-looking
looks now, and this is the way we look, now, two years later; this is
state where her
in a Platonic black-and-white
my beautiful daughter
beauty is forever young, but not really, because I know the difference
between
this picture and my actual daughter. She works to see "fam
and desire, and the figures in the
ily" as a product of imagination
are
are
kin
while
her
also, momentarily,
pictures,
they
mythic. They
are naked but still not known, not least to their mother.
it is posed, family
The picture is a grabbed fragment, even when
in front of house. So Breton's
"breath of the street": the element
that renders a thing both more startlingly present and plucked
(or
so it could
from the psychic Underworld.
The American
engi
a
in
the
Hare,
grant
neer-turned-photographer,
Chauncey
accepted
to
late 1960s to knock on doors and walk into Midwestern
homes
seem)
how people lived, with an unannounced
agenda of also
owners.
He froze the unsuspecting
the
faces of these
photographing
lens and a strobe light, and they end up
people with a wide-angle
photograph
in their own homes?we
could say "inhabi
looking like exhibits
of
notion
Klein's
fake
tants," following
rocking
anthropology?in
chairs and lounging on couches.
of the people
(Somehow, most
believed
photographed
they were out of the camera's range.) There
an image in Interior America that doesn't
look like it was
staged by Bunuel. For those of us on a lower rung of achievement,
are ways to gather in what job promotions
and house
photographs
we
cannot?the
shards
of
prop up on
purchases
bright
Fuji graffiti
on
to the refrigerator, set on the
the piano, hang
the wall, magnetize
is hardly
81
tape to the inside cover of a favorite book are totems and,
Pictures of gatherings,
advertisements.
maybe,
birthdays, weddings,
to
vacations
exotic
Toronto; for some of us who have been
picnics,
to school, the photograph
ismaybe also a way of writing a song: this
is my trip to Nice,
is my wife,
nice. My life, in
this
gardening;
desktop,
res.
medias
At
sense
their best, pictures are memory
rods,
in ourselves
of our past, of believing
routes
as real,
to assemble
inside
our
the tide
life. In family photo albums, pictures combine
in group Bildungsromans.
On the shelf, they say, Here is the sover
I grow. Why
I've
self
been
eign
telling you about. They say, Viewer,
and wind
of regular
in
"The camera is the ideal arm of consciousness
else take pictures?
its acquisitive mood,"
the idea that taking
Sontag writes,
floating
a
is
For the many
the
world
toward
barbarism.
from
images
listing
feel real and to some extent
of us, however,
those Pluto moments
to explain us, maybe even idealize us.
promise
On the other hand the pictures we go back to look at again?the
ones I do?are
the ones that make a different sense than the one we
like good poems:
there is a
making.
They work
us
a
A
in
of mine
drives
back.
friend
that
them,
puzzle,
something
in
his
visited
twenties
and
took a
who
teaches Wordsworth
Italy
a
narrow
street
that tapers crookedly. He hung it in a hall
picture of
thought
we were
it stayed into his forties, a framed haunt
of his house, where
was
he
but because he was behind the camera
that
said
there,
ing
of
he was also not there. It is a picture, hanging near his bathroom,
way
or so my fancy leads me to believe.
runs through chemistry
and glass and pret
that combine
the two to create images. Janet Malcolm
his own disappearance,
The camera's history
ty engines
in Diana and Nikon
writes
are basically paintings
in
that photographs
in their sense of mythically
ordered human space
their composition,
and time. That description
ital manipulation.
Leonardo
tends
to look even
da Vinci
invented
truer today with dig
the camera obscura?a
a pinhole on one side that captured and projected
light and
onto
A
back.
few
the
later,
Johann Kepler gave the box
years
images
its name, and in 1611 he laid down the laws by which
single and
the
lenses would
images, and explained why
project
compound
box with
not become
permanent
images would
image was reversed. These
a
chemist
with
named
until a French
Joseph Niepce,
working
an
fixed
mediocre
painter named Jacques Daguerre,
accidentally
82
iodized silver in contact with mercury
image on plates coated with
left open all night). The first fuzzy photo
fumes (a jar accidentally
was
in
1826?a
device for aiding artists, as the original
made
graph
camera
tions.
obscura
aided
An
like Vermeer
painters
named
William
with
Talbot
their composi
discovered
the
Englishman
images we call "negatives" also by accident: his cat upset
an extract of nutgalls on some half-exposed
papers coated with sil
ver chloride.
reversed
So accident
after Matthew
is also part of the interior history of photography. And
Brady, who carried his darkroom with him to the
Civil War, and George Eastman, who manufactured
pact roll-film and called it "Kodak," possibly because
the first com
the word was
a little
it sounded
odd and because
like the click of a shutter, the
take as a national birthright
grew. The
nerdy hobby we presently
machines made now are remarkable but they could just as easily be
("Iwas here") or at Black Angus
spray cans at the Roman Coliseum
as such they are unnatural manifesta
("I am a year older")?and
tions of the liberal glorification
of the subject, of me. If everyone
is
now entitled
or other, we are quick
to an oral history for something
at the absurdist point that is nevertheless
hard to deny,
ly arriving
given national rhetoric, that all lives are glorious and original.
to recognize and not very middle
That they are not is unpleasant
that are the most
class to allow. But running against
interesting
century which have been, with few excep
photos of the twentieth
of
of strangers, of failures and the soon-to
tions, photos
outsiders,
so easily connected
to
The Kennedy clan, so photogenic,
be-deleted.
a line of, say, Egyptian sun gods, of Praxitilean destiny, exists most
and some official White House
shots of a presi
ly as home movies
dent deep in thought. The more estimable work of photography
has
to
the soulful tradition of Dorothea
Lange and Walker
belonged
Evans, those Depression-era
gatherers of faces and clapboard, grit
and floorboard and misery who carried into the field an Aristotelian
conviction
is itself pleasing.
that the accurate representation
But
they worked with
large, heavy cameras, slow lenses and slow film.
If they somehow
The life they captured was still and sculptural.
froze the running dogs of capitalism on their glass plates there were
no actual dogs in their images,
A decade after the Depression
ic world
was
suddenly
at least none
ajar with
that moved.
and World War
motion?granular,
II the photograph
speed-happy,
83
time-driven.
convulsively
Robert
Frank's work?an
Australian
cine
told me recently that he found Frank "incomprehensi
matographer
the on-the-road
ble, like a miracle"?was
probably unlikely without
same time that
In
of
and
Walker.
around
the
1954-55,
Lange
example
on
was
Tri-X
New
William
Klein
Yorkers
black-and-white
shooting
film, and the same year the young Elvis Presley entered Sam Philips'
won
a
Union
Avenue
the Swiss-born
studio,
photographer
to drive across the US in search of lost America.
Jack
Guggenheim
to this seminal book, titled The
Kerouac wrote
the introduction
Americans, and he placed Frank "in a used car" not unlike the one
Kerouac
in. Frank took pearly images of forlorn and forgot
a
perfect focus, and rapidly, and with
lack of applied method.
described
his
Janet Malcolm
traveled
ten people,
scandalous
often without
this way in Diane and Nikon: "He scrupulously
shed all the
of
his
pictorial
predecessors?composition,
design, tonal bal
as if a kid had
that
look
ance, print quality?and
produced pictures
a
taken them while
eating
Popsicle and then had them developed
technique
values
and printed at the drugstore."
Frank used his camera as a fugitive tool, Sontag's
in its acquisitive mood,"
consciousness
but without
In
stony-eyed
judgment.
the most
remark
arguably
in The Americans
able picture
is also, above
accident of light?the
there
cast
pallor
fluorescent
by
all,
the
deadly
an overhead
of
language
light,
he could
predicted
or arranged.
not
body
have
Titled
New
Bar?Gallup,
it is an image of the
in a tilting frame.
haphazard
simply
Mexico,
The
holds
the eye
picture
because we can imagine that
the little cowboy
standing
there never knew, will possi
bly never know, that he has
been
captured,
remember being
84
not
may
in the bar or
"ideal arm of
her
sense
of
what
he was
thinking
when
he crossed
Robert
Frank's
path.
But
more
than the subject's disposition
is the look of the picture: the
at its edges gives the picture a funny look: turn the picture
on its side and it could be the light cracking into the opened
lid of
darkness
a coffin. Kerouac
said the book
gave Frank "rank among the tragic
Kerouac
is wrong about a lot of things, but he
he wrote that.
poets of the world."
was all money when
When
Frank photographs
an empty table near an overexposed
about the
on, he is saying something
window,
of light (like Vermeer)
and the awful facticity of
simple beneficence
too:
the human moment
God is in Frank's details,
(like Vermeer).
next
to a tv
there are numerous
signs
turned
shots
of
in The Americans
of the various American
tomb stones, massive
boxes,
gas pump
in Vermeer
could point to a Protestant
an unstained window
is the plain light of rev
salvation?juke
background
light. Details
world
view
in which
In Frank, light seeks no human figure but bursts hugely at
the window
and appears to say "life" against the frozen televised
man
on the television. Were
a
face of the
the figure on television
elation.
to say something
have managed
startling,
irrational
about
America,
deep, poignant
religion, tele
at once, in a rush. (The photograph
is
vision, and emptiness?all
i
titled Restaurant?US
leaving Columbia, South Carolina.)
preacher,
Frank would
and wholly
85
or Walker
to photo
Evans made
it their work
a
come
to
in
if
had
time.
Frank
brief
know,
graph people
they
not
of
of
bits
and
the
pieces
landscape,
personalities
grabbed
blight
ed by an economy
that had turned against them but by personality
Dorothea
Lange
So
obsession,
itself?by
by the turmoil of dreams not achieved.
will
look
into
camera's
where
the
lens, already
Lange's
people
and trusting,
who
the woman
stands behind
it, Frank
knowing,
act of
to haphazard
objects and to the improvisational
or
or
cars
a
car
from
them
from
trains,
passing
pulled over
swiping
to the side of the road.
gravitates
In On
little patience
for these ontological
pursuits.
we
can
like
Arbus?and
Photography, she argues that photographers
and Merritt here?are
include Frank, Klein, Mann, Hare, Winogrand,
of
"the
Surrealist
bluff," creating cheap imitations of dream
exponents
Sontag
has
life for the express purpose of upsetting middle class audiences.
But cheap imitation isn't Surrealism, which aimed at a better take
on life. In A History of Private Life, Paul Veyne remarks of the portrait
of a Pompeiian
couple from the second century a.D., "this portrait,
so like a snapshot,
their identity by depicting
establishes
them . . .
are not
flesh and blood people
caught at some arbitrary
to a soci
in their lives, but individualized
types belonging
as
both natural and ideal."
ety that conceived of itself
is
with
the
that one of the possible pur
writing
assumption
Veyne
these
moment
poses of higher art is to reveal the truth about individual lives, indi
I return to my snapshot
from so long ago I
vidual citizens. When
can see that my brother is no longer quite my brother, my mother
not really the woman
in the window.
has made
The photograph
but figures. Time has done
else, not individuals
something
it.
that too, separate from the photograph,
but in agreement with
Yet they are people I recognize:
they are not exactly "figures," not
are
not
in an ideal sense, and
but
individualized
yet,
certainly
they
them
sense. They are family but probably more so they are
to me as a way to think
interesting
design: over time they are more
is not
about time. My brother, alive today with wife and children,
not
in Veyne's
even a little
The
culture
like the shut-eyed
boy
in the plaid car coat.
of the century just finished,
is the century less of T.S. Eliot
Stein and Marcel Duchamp;
Gertrude
to see,
86
as many people have begun
than of
and Virginia Woolf
of Franz Kafka and Andy
Warhol.
begins
Time
Don DeLillo, a late- twentieth
century master of transience,
his slender novel, The Body Artist, with this paragraph:
seems
to pass.
The
world
happens,
unrolling
into moments,
and you stop to glance at a spider pressed to its web. There is a
quickness of light and a sense of things outlined precisely and
streaks of running luster on the bay. You know more surely who
you
are
on
a strong
bright
day
leaf is stabbed with
after
a storm
self-awareness.
when
the
smallest
The wind makes
falling
sound in the pines and the world comes into being,
and the spider rides the wind-swayed web.
a
irreversibly,
may be the most
lyrical observer of the "moment" we have
the Zen whirl of the plain world, holds
right now. He acknowledges
it up to his eye until the surface offers up its own shape to him?
DeLillo
and
its own voice.
spider web, his figure for "things outlined
the hinge for a world of sunlit blur: the "wind
The
is also
precisely,"
is the fatal chain
web"
swayed
link over
the world
that so appalled
design is slight,
the web's
Frost in "Design." But for DeLillo
a tidy corner of precision
in a day big enough to tear it away.
its tide-pull irony, the sentence
And: "Time seems to pass." With
same
to
in the
relation
flux as photography
does. A
stands
Robert
bluff? Henri Cartier-Bresson,
Surrealist
of streets and people
finest photographer
as
a
young man by the French
impressed
poets, and by Freud's work on dreams.
as the
widely
regarded
in the western world, was
Surrealists,
the Symbolist
in his most
Steiner observed
The twentieth
century, George
recent work,
the sign of Dada, Tristan Tzara's
occurred
under
as evidenced by
movement
of rage against the demise of rationalism
seem
lest the
the trench warfare of World War I. Lest that
extreme,
notion
that Marcel
Duchamp
years bring fear to your heart,
texts of the century?Ulysses,
is mental
remember
king of the last hundred
that the central high-water
The Waste Land, The Cantos, The
B.
The
Alice
Toklas,
Interpretation of Dreams, The Trial, To
Autobiography of
or
all built around forgotten,
the Lighthouse, Godard's Weekend?are
sense
in
hollow
fragments, Percy Bysshe Shelley's
nearly forgotten,
that the mighty
"Ozymandias"
and
fading.
negligible
and the grand
in the modern
age are
87
as I've been describing
it is not just the aggressively
"real"
that
shakes
her head at, and which
she
Sontag
strip-mined
as
too
to
sense.
the cynical work of fakers
make good
It
regards
lazy
owes something
to the irrational?to
the favor of chance and for
Photography
tune. As
accident
he writes
upset a rationalist with its weird
art.
It's what John Ashbery means,
improves
in Flow Chart about the frame:
such
itwill
intuition
that
I think, when
A hound-shaped fragment of cloud rises
abruptly to the impressive center of the heavens only to fold
itself
behind
itself and fade into the distance even as it advances
bearing news of the channel coast. That is the archetypal kind of
we're
development
interested in here at the window
must
continually. Something
be happening beyond the point where
and
become
mere
fragments.
But
to find
the girls move past
they turn
out what
that
is,
we should be forced to relinquish this vantage point, so
deeply fought for, hardly won.
to the photogra
about is comparable
Ashbery writes
as
where
it
the
world
well
be bursting
frame,
may
pher's
beyond
into "fragments,"
like the girls. Ashbery worries
about relinquish
ing the "vantage point, so / deeply fought for, hardly won" but his
has always
that that's where
the fun is. The
writing
suggested
The window
in electing
its multiple
promise photography makes
temporary por
tals of entry into the world
is the promise
of the discovery
of the
the window.
fragments outside
once more.
not cap
I have a strong memory,
My photograph,
out
tured on film, of my mother
of
the
house
coming
shortly after
the picture
is snapped and yelling hard at me as my brother was
about to snap my picture, mid-chin-up?something
about my thir
teen-year-old's
whole house.
88
weight
pulling
down
the awning
and fucking
up the