Figure 1 – Portrait before 1867 of Lemuel Cook the last official veteran of the American Revolution. From the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

Yesterday’s post about Alonzo Cushing was fresh in my mind, when I went this morning to the “Concord Museum” to see a special exhibit tracing the events of April 18 to 19, 1775 hour by hour. These were the events that sparked the American Revolution.  And I was not expecting photographs because of age.  But as it turns out there was another exhibit called “The Last Muster” and this was only photographs, photographs of the few veterans of the American Revolution who managed to live to see the invention of photography and to be themselves photographed.

Oh,and before I move on, allow me one major peeve.  I object to the current trend in museums not to show original objects.  We don’t see the original photographs; but more often than not barely disguised copies of the originals.  I saw this in Charleston as well. Boo!!!!

This exhibit relates to “The Last Muster Project” and book by a similar name, by photodetective Maureen Taylor.  Taylor has done an amazing job of searching out photographs of “the survivors.”  Still, who actually was the last man out is a matter of some controversy.  It all depends on what you mean. Last proven veteran? Last pensioner? Are drummer boys acceptable?  You know what, it really doesn’t matter; the effect of all of the images on our psyches is the same. So I am not going to enter the fray here and I have sided with the United States Governement and included as Figure 1 a portrait taken before 1867 of Lemuel Cook (1759-1866). Cook was  the last official veteran of the American Revolutionary War, who enlisted in the 2nd Continental Light Dragoons, Continental Army.  To me this is really amazing.

And the reason that it is so amazing is, as always, that it connects us across time and as a nation.  Indeed, as a generation dies out unless we record their stories, or in this case photograph them, we loose their first hand experience.  The momentous event becomes by degrees just a bit more abstract and impersonal.  We see that now as we rapidly lose the “Greatest Generation,” the World War II warriors.

Indeed, in 1864 the Rev. Elias Brewster Hillard a congregationalist minister from Connecticut set out desperately to document these “Last Men” before they died out.  He published his photographs and stories in “The Last Men of the Revolution (1864).”  The date is important, because at the time the nation was embroiled in a civil war that put at jeopardy what these men set out to accomplishe.  Indeed, I would argue that the American Civil War as a fight for liberty was the American Revolution, part II. This book was reprinted by Barre Publishers in 1968.  Hillard recognized the importance of this task of preservation.  Ms. Taylor, using modern techniques set out with her Last Muster Project to discover more of these memorable men and women.  Her book documents the lives of seventy of these individuals.

Regular readers of this blog will recognize how often I am drawn back to the Old North Bridge in Concord, MA as a place of beauty and history.  When my son was younger he used to march in a band that crossed that bridge on Patriots Day commemorating what happened there.  I would stand with the other parents and revelers on the other side of the bridge, where the British Regulars came to cross, and it struck me on many a cold and windy April morning how insanely brave these framers and tradesmen were to stand and defend that spot against the mightiest army in the world.

Figure 1 – First Lt. Alonzo H. Cushing, from the Wisconsin Historical Society and the Wikimedia Commons. Uploaded by DIREKTOR and in the public domain.

We have spoken before about the nineteenth century faces that stare back at us from antique photographs. They seem to possess a haunting element of awareness. None are more haunting than the faces of soldiers from the American Civil War. You wonder just what was in store for these people. And while you might not know, what you do know is how terrible the statistically odds were and the inevitable fact that at the very least the person in the photograph would experience hell.  The tense is confusing.  Would experience? Did experience? It is the photograph itself that creates the ambiguity.

This morning I came upon the photograph of Figure 1 in the New York Times.  If the face is anonymous what do I experience in the seeing? I am are taken by the soft, handsome, youthfulness of the subject. Notice the eyes. They probably were blue. They look slightly way from us in distractedness and the catch-light is there to give the portrait life.  And the catch-light is a connecting point, because any of us would light the eyes in just this way if we were taking the image today. There is a certain jauntiness to the tie. Yes it all makes you wonder and it all brings the subject back to life.

But in this case there is no need to wonder. The image is of First Lt. Alonzo H. Cushing. Cushing was a West Point graduate and he was there at the battle, at the spot, and at the most pivotal and momentous of moments. Cushing stood his ground on Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg against Pickett’s Charge 151 years ago last month. Despite mortal wounds he kept firing his canon. Cushing is credited with playing a major role in turning the tide that day, an event which arguably led to preservation of the Union.which shows West Point graduate and Lt. Alonzo H. Cushing.  It seems just a bit incomprehensible.  These were the battles of a century and a half ago and a lot has happened since, the world and America have moved on.  Yet it was important and for this bravery, Cushing was just posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor by President Obama.

When he went off to fight, Cushing told a cousin that “I may never return…I will make a name for myself.” Now a hundred years later the promise seems both prophetic and ironic. It makes us realize all the more that everyone of these soldier images, Union and Confederate, is a silent witness to something both monumental, something beyond themselves, and at the same time something intensely personal.

It is really kind of odd the importance we attach to historic photographs of people. Read a biography and you inevitably find yourself drawn to the portraits. Somehow the visage in the photograph gives genuineness and life to the story. In this case what a horrible yet courageous story it was.

Figure 1 – The Pedro Miguel Locks of the Panama Canal photographed by Earle Harrison in color using the Autochrome Process. From the Wikimedia Commons uploaded by Mschlindwein and in the public domain because its was photographed before 1923.

In addition to the centenary of the start of the First World War, this August, August 15th to be precise, marked the opening of the Panama Canal, that great dream of a “Path Between the Seas.” I have been looking at a lot of photographs of the construction of the canal, including, of course, many pictures of that larger than life and somewhat controversial figure, President Theodore Roosevelt.

Most interesting among them are the color autochromes of Earle Harrison.  Figure 1 is an example of these and you might also what to check out the link above for some more dramatic examples. The whole collection of these images was recently reissued.

I have spoken at length about the autochrome process and will, in fact, admit to be really intrigued by it. The Autochrome process works as follows.  An adhesive layer was coated onto a glass plate. Potato starch grains graded to 5 to 10 um where attached to this layer.  The starch grains were dyed with either red orange, green, or blue violet dye (an unusual color wheel). Gaps between the grains were filled with lamp black (essentially soot).  This fragile layer was coated with a shellac and then overlain with a conventional silver halide gelatin emulsion.  Because of the high sensitivity of these emulsion to UV light from the sun, a yellow orange filter needed to be placed in front of the camera lens when taking a photograph to block-out these rays.

When a photograph was taken the colored potato starch grains acted as minute filters.  The silver halide emulsion was developed by conventional means and then reversed to a positive by what is effectively a bleaching process.  Since the colored starch matrix remains intact, when the positive image (say illuminated from behind) will become colored as light passes back through the filter matrix.

Like our own time, the early twentieth century was a period of huge technological advancement, posing a series of complex moral an ethical issues.  Indeed, it is all really an accelerating continuum.   And again like our own time, it was a period of great ethical hypocrisy.  World War I represented the worst that technology had to offer, highly efficient mechanized killing.  The Panama Canal represented the middle ground. There was the dream, powered by visions of huge profit, that drove men to build the canal, which was the ultimate Herculean project.  It took over thirty years to complete, and was a triumph (?) over nature both in terms of the actual digging and reinforcement and in terms of overcoming yellow fever.  The autochrome, I would argue, ever subtle, was the best.

Humans see in color, and as long as photography was confined to black and white there was something important missing. Color represents a significant dimension of reality.  Actually, as we have seen it really adds three dimensions.  And thanks to the Lumiere brothers we can look back and marvel, as if we were there for the events.  Shackleton set sail for his destiny in the Antarctic.  The Panama Canal opened. And Europe leaped head first into disaster.  All caught on camera.

Mark Twain gave sage advice about the proper way to behave in the afterlife.

“Upon arrival do not speak to St. Peter until spoken to. It’s not your place to begin.
Don’t try to Kodak him. Hell is full of people who have made that mistake.
Don’t ask him what time the 4:30 train goes; there aren’t any trains in heaven, except through trains, and the less information you get about them the better for you.
Leave your dog outside. Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.“

Mr. Clemens was always one to embrace technology.  He would certainly love the vain and narcissistic pursuit of the selfie – the glorification of you.  And there is a subtle point in this reasonably famous quote, and that is the use of the word Kodak, otherwise a brand name, as a verb.  There may be a modernization of this, now that we store our images on “The Cloud.” It was the latter day equivalent of the word Xerox, that being only one brand of copy machine.  And now of course, much to the chagrin of Microsoft, who would rather we “Bing it,” we still “Google it,” even if as yahoos we are actually “Binging it.”  Life does get confusing.

In Twain’s case I believe that his usage belies the incredible rise of Kodak and the popularization of photography.  Of course, with popularization came its sister mediocritization, as we discussed in my recent blog about the pictorialists, who hated this sort of thing.

Figure 1 -Kodak Picture Spot from Disney’s MGM Hollywood Studios, from the Wikimedia Commons and uploaded by Tregowith under creative commons license.

Kodak’s dominance of photography through popularization got to the point where you couldn’t go to a scenic spot in the United States without encountering a sign referred to as a Kodak Picture Spot.  “This location recommended by top photographers to help you tell the story of your visit in pictures.” Stand here and you will get a beautiful picture, which by the way you could take to the nearby Kodak store and have it processed.  Oh, and please buy some film while you’re at it.  You wouldn’t want to run out. Figure 1 is an example from Disney’s MGM Hollywood Studios. Kodak ended this sponsorship relationship at Disneyland in 2012.  Which is pretty much when Kodak, the inventor of digital photography cried “uncle” and gave up the consumer photography market.

Of course, anyone who loves photography for the sake of art and beauty abhors this concept, which caters to the view that photographs are essentially trophies.  That’s the least of it.  The more paranoid among us might suggest a certain level of mind manipulation, an attempt to cookie cut as into the perfect customer – to Xerox us into similitude!.