From Reuters, January 11, 2015, Paris, France.

Figire 1 – Autochrome of Shackleton’s Endurance Under Full Sail, 1915, by Frank Hurley, from Shackleton’s “South.” In the public domain because of its age.

We have been talking a bit about fact that 2014 marked the centenary of the begining of World War I.  Lesser known, but perhaps more positively it marked the centennial of Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-antarctic Expedition – and the so called Worst Journey in the World. The BBC recently highlighted the return of photographer Mark Chilvers and journalist Jonathan Thompson from the Antarctic, where they went to mark the centenary and to follow, so to speak, in Shackleton’s footsteps.  The result is a set of  wonderful and stunning portraits and bio-interviews with some of today Antarctic explorers.  While we now have gps, cell/satellite phones, and the internet, as an environment the Antarctic remains unforgiving and its environment temporally leveling. It still takes a special breed of personality to attempt the Antarctic in more that a tourist mode.  Indeed, even as a tourist the experience can be transformational. Chilver’s beautiful photographs bring us eye-to-eye with these modern explorers, Shackleton’s heirs.

Figure 1 – Holmes’ first appearence in film in Sherlock Holmes Baffled 1903, American Mutograph and Biograph Company, from the Wikimediacommons and in the public domain because of its age.

I have to admit that last week, on New Years Eve, I snuggled up beneath the blankets and turned on PBS to watch Jeremy Brett(1933-1995) as Sherlock Holmes and got Live from Lincoln Center instead.  Hmm, far be it for me to question the knowing gnomes at PBS, who read my mind and think like me in kind – I feverishly await the return of Downton Abbey.  However, as I swung to the rhythm of George Gershwin, my mind kept going back to Holmes and I started searching for images.

Figure 2 – Theatre poster of H. A. Saintsbury as Sherlock Holmes.

There is a different Holmes for each generation and that is very much to the point. Despite the fact that if you return to the original stories you will find that there is a common thread of prejudice in each one. You’ve got your anti-Semitic story, your anti-Mormon story, your anti-Indian story, and your I don’t like much of anybody story. God bless the Victorians and Edwardians! Did I mention the recurrent theme of misogyny? “Quick, Watson, the needle.”  But I digress.  This is not the point.  Everybody (well maybe not my wife) loves Sherlock.  Indeed, when asked which fictional character she would want to date Margaret Atwood was very recently reported as saying: “I fancy Sherlock Holmes, but he doesn’t date much, and anyway the date would be interrupted because he would have to rush off in the middle of it to trap some criminal.”

Holmes, who first appeared in print in 1887 and ultimately was featured in four novels and 56 short stories.  The events in the stories take place from about 1880 to 1914. And so, Holmes is reinvented in each generation, which you know is really quite wonderful. And friends, this is the stuff that memes are made on. So I did some investigating about Holmes as a meme.  While my interest is the photographic it seems only right to point out that photgraphic and cinematographic image that we have of Holmes derives from Sidney Paget‘s (1860-1908) original illustrations of Holmes. The elements are all there in Paget’s drawings.

According to the Guinness Book of World Records Holmes is the most portrayed movie character with more than 70 actors having played the part in, get this, over 200 films. The story begins with his first screen appearance in the 1900 Mutoscope film, Sherlock Holmes Baffled. And curiously, it would require a modern day Holmes to figure out who exactly portrayed Homes in that brief film.  But that Holmes smoked a cigar and is, well baffled, by the perp.

William Gillette (1853-1937) in 1899 played Holmes in The Strange Case of Miss Faulkner, a synthesis of four of Conan Doyle’s stories. It was Gillette who introduced the well known phrase “Elementary, my dear Watson.”  Harry Arthur Saintsbury took over the lead and by 1916 had played Holmes on stage more than a thousand times.This play ultimately formed the basis for Gillette’s 1916 film, Sherlock Holmes. And it was there that  Gillette dramatically introduced Holmes’s signature curved pipe. Meme in the making!

For my generation Sherlock Holmes was the great british actor and film star Basil Rathbone with the equally great Nigel Bruce as Watson.  And there the meme is mature, deerstalker pipe and all.  This was the stuff that cold Saturday afternoon black and white television was made of.  This was my first introduction to the Hound of the Baskerville’s – very spooky stuff indeed.  I was only a bit skeptical when Holmes leaped forward thirty years from his own era to do battle with Nazis in “Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror.” But, of course, Holmes has gone and come and I can guarantee will continue to come in the future in a myriad of incarnations.  Such is his wonderful timelessness. And if there is a time machine to be found this forensic genius and skeptic, who in the Adventure of the Sussex Vampire assures us that he does not believe in vampires, will find it.

Figure – Basil Rathbone as Homes. Image from the Wikimediacommons, uploaded by SchroCat and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – Frank Eugene, “Minuet, 1900.” In the public domain because of its age.

In doing this past year’s Favorite and Noteworthy Photographs, I discovered and was quite taken by an image by Frank Eugene (1865 – 1936) entitled “Minuet, 1900.” It is shown in Figure 1. Frank Eugene was an American-born photographer, a founding member of the Photo-Secession, and one of the world’s first professors of photography. So marched photography ever so slowly from craft to fine art, which was, of course, a significant goal of the Photo-Secession.

What one sees in “Minuet” is typical of Eugene’s heavily worked negatives.  There is the very fine photographic detail of the dancer’s beautiful dress, the delicate precision of the lace and the setting of her hair, and at the same time scratches scribed with an etcher’s pen in the background to create the ambiguity: photograph or etching?  The faces of the audience are obscured in an impressionist fog and not seen at first.  To me, what is truly amazing about this image is that the subject’s back is turned to us.  We are barely thought of viewers. It is so antithetical to what we normally see as the “rules” of composition. And yet, the beauty of the woman is revealed to us by her slender, alluring neck with its alluring Ingresesque curve and by the mystery of her hair.  In these elements it is truly a genius work.