Recently I’ve been watching Mark Cousins’ documentary The Story of Film: An Odyssey. Most people don’t know about me that I’ve made a half dozen feature films, and about twice that many shorts and documentaries, all of them what is popularly denigrated as “experimental.” My kind of film is virtually unrepresented in Mr. Cousins’ documentary of course: he is, after all, British. That, however, simply allows me to clarify my thoughts about his work without me getting ideological or sentimental. Since he comes from a completely different world, in a sense, I learn a lot more about myself and about his point-of-view as distinct from mine.
Mr. Cousins’ panegyric to Alfred Hitchcock (“the greatest image maker of the 20th Century”) expresses a sentiment I most certainly do not share but listening to his rationalization put me in touch with my own thoughts about the function and purpose of moving images. He is correct, I think, that Hitchcock has a gift for using the camera subjectively as though it is attached to the psychology of the protagonist. I generally detest this exact quality in Hitchcock’s work because it is maddeningly inconsistent and he tends to use it with a heavy hand for a mechanical purpose. If an author of fiction switched as frequently between limited and general omniscient point-of-view in literature as Hitchcock does in cinema, one would raise the same point as Sartre reviewing Mauriac’s work: “The time has come to say that the author is not God… God is not an artist. Neither is M. Mauriac.”
I bring this up regarding still photography because there is a great myth of objectivity/subjectivity to be dispelled there too, with the additional complication no one ever mentions in cinema, which is “use value.” Without getting too Marxist about it, people rarely attach use value to cinema the way they do with still photographs. No one will ever say that even the most cinéma vérité work of Frederick Wiseman or John Grierson is “evidence” for anything, despite the use of the term “documentary.” The documents of cinema are nowhere near the sort of documents an immigrant is supposed to have, or the kind that bourgeoisie use to acquire property. They are, as Grierson himself once wrote, creative treatments of actuality.
Photographs are, too, of course. But their lingering reputation even in the age of digital manipulation says otherwise. They are “truth” and “evidence” and “proof” and so on and so on. Motion seems to be the divisor. Motion implies narrative, thus fiction; motionlessness implies permanence, thus truth. Anything that moves (apparently) is creative and anything stationary (apparently) is evidence. Because they are true and have no story of their own, still photographs can be used for any story a user wants.
It’s the beauty and the danger of photography.
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There are plenty of stories in which one can use this photograph. But what is it by itself?
Allow me the liberty of some minor color correction for clarity’s sake.
This is an odd shape: a 3″ x 5.375″ rectangle.It’s not the typical 2:3 ratio of 35mm film, the 1:1 of most medium format, or the 4:5 of large format cameras, but actually much closer to the 9:16 that Kerns Powers proposed for monitors in 1984 and has become the default for contemporary TVs and screens. The verso holds another interesting piece of information.
This is a photo-postcard, quite common in the late 1890s and early 1900s. But the standard size of postcards then would have been 3.5″ x 5.5″ in Europe, the Americas, Japan, India, and Iran. The most common cameras of the time would have been from Kodak, particularly the Brownie. The only Brownies I can think of that have a reasonably close aspect ratio to this would have been varieties of the Folding Pocket Brownie using 116 (1.70:1) or 122 (1.69:1) roll film. That makes this picture 1899 at the earliest. But the size makes it almost certainly 122 roll film which is normally 3.5″ x 5.5″ compared to the 116’s 2.5″ x 4.25″. That would put the photo at 1903 at the earliest with the appearance of the first “postcard camera”, the 3A Folding Pocket Brownie. The VELOX logo in the upper right of the verso is another clue, as this paper did not debut until 1902.
Within the frame, one can see that the print is monochrome and slightly sepia toned. The spots at upper right of the recto are actually not stains on the paper itself. They seem to be from either the negative itself or the printing process, then transferred to the positive print. The tonal range of the print is quite broad. There are definite shadows, just left of center and beneath the man’s hat off center right, and highlights abound. The composition rests on two horizontal lines. It is no different from a row of trees with a row of bushes below, with one odd variation in the center of the frame. The highest point of contrast is a shadow between two bright white shapes, one trapezoidal, one rectangular. The final 1/4th of the picture’s right side is almost completely empty of shape. Its only feature is a gradually lightening contrast, then a horizon line, then a blown-out Zone 10 area. I wonder why the photographer didn’t simply center the subject rather than leave this blank. The figures on the left of the frame are slightly cropped. The photographer could have moved the camera an inch to the left to avoid this. The focus, too, is on the soft side. This is strange because the massive negative size of the 122 film usually makes pictures incredibly sharp, even with a softer lens. These are hallmarks of a non-professional photographer. A pro would have cropped the photo properly, and made it much sharper.
The nominal subject matter seems to be a formal outing with nine adults and seven youths. The men/boys all have hats and ties. Three of the women wear day dresses that are bright white, as do two of the young ladies in front. The two older women wear shirtwaist blouses with dark skirts. The dresses have unadorned shoulders and ruffs. Everything is hand-tailored, which puts this photograph well before the 1920s when machines started to come into use and prefabricated clothes became the norm. The women still wear corsets but this is not high fashion and none of them show the exaggerated S-curve or the wasp-waists of urbane Edwardian women. (Note the absence of women’s hats.) This is post-1903 but it is also pre-1914, when the wartime fashion would strip away even more adornment.
Almost everyone in the frame squints. Judging from the angle and depth of the shadows, the sun would be on the right of the frame, fairly high in the sky. I deduce the picture was probably taken around 10-11:00 am or from around 1-2:00 pm. The arrangement of human figures seems to be done by generation: grandparents in the rear, parents in the middle ground, children in the foreground.
I can’t determine much from the deciduous vegetation in the background. The very tops of two trees are bare or nearly so, but the others are lush. The object just right of the figures is unclear to me. Cactus? Tree stump? Hat rack? I can’t tell for sure. It is, however, definitely not winter, and it is unlikely to be early spring or late autumn.
Also, what are the three oblique lines at the very bottom of the frame? They appear to be some sort of pole. Are they paddles? Rods? Nets? Rifles? I have no way to guess. I also cannot tell what the vertical line between the two female figures in the upper middle of the frame is. Perhaps it is a naked tree. It’s awfully straight and branchless.
And why is the one male figure in the front behind the children not standing with the adults? His jacket is formal, as is his tie, and large enough to cover his whole upper body. His arms and legs are not visible. Is he kneeling? Does he even have legs?
Interpretation: This is likely a photograph of a family reunion or family outing, taken in the summer around lunchtime, sometime between 1903 and 1914. The two men in the middle ground are probably brothers, and the older man left of center in the rear likely to be their father. The two women in the middle I surmise are their wives, while the one at the far right of the frame, slightly apart from the rest, resembles the older woman at the rear far left of the frame. I imagine she is the older woman’s daughter. Being printed as a RPPC, this is not likely to be a “memento”. It is much more likely to be a note to absent friends and family, for them to see the extended family is doing fine.
Oddly there is no writing on the postcard, which means it was never sent. But that doesn’t change its function.
At least not until it reaches someone else’s hands. Then all bets are off. The photograph has no narrative of its own, yet somehow can absorb myriad narrative uses. This picture can wind up in some book promoting connoiseurship of amateur photography as high art (cf. any of Robert Flynn Johnson’s books), or as “evidence” in a paternity lawsuit, or as scrapbook project by one who has no idea who these people are, or as a picture in a family album, or as a writing prompt (cf. the work of Hart Day Leavitt). Or as the subject of someone’s essay about use value in still photography.
