Figure 1 – Autochrome of Madame Curie from the Curie Archives and in the public domain in the US because of its age.

While writing yesterday’s blog about Marie Curie, it occurred to me that she lived during the autochrome era and that it was likely that somewhere there was a color image of her. Well, sure enough, and Figure 1 is such an autochrome from the Marie Curie archives. It is a bit antithetical since she is wearing a very feminine pink dress. She is pretty in pink.The straw hat is charming and humanizing as well. It is always curious when the color is revealed when we know someone basically in black and white. In a black and white the pink dress would have passed simply and somberly as white. Our surprise is revealing. We all live colored lives and every black and white captures, indeed transforms, a color moment. So here in the dramatic beauty of the process Marie is transformed. We are a bit closer to the real breathing person.

We’ve spoken often about the magic of photography, and one of the magical aspects of it lies in its ability to bring us the unexpected, allowing us to see what we never expected to see like: Mozart’s wife and a two-hundred and fifty year old pretzel. Seeing such things is an unexpected bonus of the magical ability of the camera to record and preserve.

So speaking of the unexpected and the, well, preserved, I’m offering up today an image of a one hundred and six year old fruitcake. This particular fruitcake belonged to the Cape Adare-based Northern Party of Scott’s Terra Nova expedition (1910-13), and was found by the Antarctic Heritage Trust in Antarctica’s oldest building. It was constructed by a Norwegian explorer’s team in 1899 and subsequently used by Scott’s team in 1911 And therein lay the frozen fruitcake..

There is the immediate question whether it is still edible and the related question whether it ever was. I am reminded of a story that a friend of mine told me about his father. Around 1998 they were cleaning out the family barn and found some chopped beef labeled “1948.” My friend’s wife grimaced and said, “Can you imagine what that tastes like?” to which my friend’s father replied, “It was pretty good actually!”

One of Arthur Eddington’s photographs of the great solar eclipse of May 29, 1919, which “proved” Einsteins General Theory of Relativity. From the Wikipedia and in the public domain in the United States because of its age.

There’s a lot of discussion in scientific circles about the upcoming solar eclipse. And the world is dividing between those going and those not going. If you have a chance, I highly recommend it. The three-dimensionality of the corona, the shadow bands, and the wildlife driven to insanity are awe inspiring. We understand for the first time how primitive people must have felt from such a sight, and in our own way are just as filled with wonder.

My thoughts drift to what is perhaps the most important solar eclipse of modern times. The great eclipse of  May 29,1919. Figure 1 is one of the photographs take of that eclipse by British Astronomer Arthur Eddington (1882-1944). Figure 1 is one of the photographs that Eddington took of that eclipse. What is significant are the little star trails. Look closely you can see them. Just four years earlier, Albert Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity . which predicted that a massive object like the sum would bend like as it passed the star. This would be seen as a deflection in position. Eddington’s photographs and measurements offered the first proof of the General Theory.

Black holes, worm holes, warp drives. It all fuels the inguisitive imagination. It all began with these photographs.

Figure 1 – Daguerreotype of Emily Dickinson 1846/7. Original in the collection of Yale University. Public domain.

“Beauty is not caused. It is.” Such were the words of American poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886). And if you consider the words for a moment, you come to realize that they define our artistic endeavors as photographers. Seek beauty in all its forms and in all its places – realizing that it is everywhere.

I came to the subject of Emily Dickinson as a follow-up to my blog about her English contemporary, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), in the American Age of Crinolines. People say that they don’t understand or don’t like poetry. But really poetry is always there, like the wind in the forest, whispering greater meaning to us and to our lives. I’d like to think that photography does the same.

Emily Dickinson is local to us in New England, having been born in Amherst, Massachusetts. And we pride ourselves in a common spirit of resilience.  She attended the Amherst Academy for seven years as a youth, and also briefly attended the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. However, she soon returned to her family home in Amherst, where she became a famous recluse, noted for wearing white and her reluctance to greet guests at her home. Indeed, most of her close friendships were carried out by letter – epistolary intimacy.

Figure 1, a daguerreotype, is the only known (authenticated) portrait of Emily other than as a child. It was taken at Mount Holyoke in either 1846 or 47, when she was 17 years old. The original is held by the Todd-Bingham Picture Collection and Family Papers at Yale University. The photographer, as is so often the case, is unknown.

We are taken by so many delicacies. A pretty, young girl, a modest, yet flattering, dress, a delicate ribbon around her neck. Is that a flower in her elegant hands? Her lips are slightly awry. You must wonder about her future reclusive lifestyle. Like Barrett Browning, we know Emily’s heart through her verse.

But what do we really know? Does notoriety really animate the image any more than the hundreds of anonymous faces we look at in daguerreotypes of the day? These people, famous and anonymous alike, are ultimately remote from us. And the question of the meaning of their lives slips away from us, like so many grains of sand through our fingers. We may become desperate for an answer, because ultimately their meaning is our meaning. Always these photographs torment us with the ultimate existential question. In Emily Dickinson’s own words:

“I am nobody. Who are you?”

Figure 1 – The first newspaper photograph of future president Richard M. Nixon (second from right), Los Angeles Herald, 1916, public domain.

I have entitled today’s blog “The fall from innocence.” The phrase has a kind of religious ring to it, as if to connote The Fallen Angels or Man’s Fall from Grace and the Garden of Eden. Today marks the 45th anniversary of the Watergate Break-in, when several burglars, ultimately linked to the President of the United States, were arrested for breaking-in to the offices of the Democratic National Committee, located in the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. – the President of the United States connected with criminal activities, cover-up, and obstruction of justice. It precipitated a constitutional crisis and, arguably, our democracy proved stronger for it.

For those of us who witnessed the events of the scandal evolve, moment by moment, on our television sets, who read it, day by day, in our newspapers and weekly magazines the very word “Watergate” fills or minds with so many memetic images. I pondered long and hard as to which photograph of the day would be best to illustrate and commemorate the event. I settled in the end with the unfamiliar, but poignant image of Figure 1, which I think truly shows the tragedy of Watergate, because ultimately tragedies are personal. It is a picture taken by a staff photographer for the Los Angeles Herald in 1916, showing a uwoman with three children each contributing a nickel to aid orphans of the First World War – three angelic innocent faces, performing an act of charity and kindness. The child in the middle is then three-year old Richard M. Nixon, who credited it as the first time that his face appeared in the papers.

It would appear many more times. But what is of interest to me is how someone falls from innocence and grace to infamy. It is one of the great mysteries of how time treats us. We may truly wonder about this, and to me that is what the photograph connotes. In the words of American Congregationalist Theologist Lyman Abbott (1835-1922):

Figure 1 – Napoleon Sarony, portrait of a lady in a crinoline dress, c. 1870.

I can never resist a Napoleon Sarony photograph from when women wore crinolines. I especially like the portraits of everyday people, not some contemporary celebrity. It seems just so absurd. And here in Figure 1, Sarony has made the distinction between the drape overhanging the chair and the lady’s dress almost indistinguishable. She must have loved the image in all its opulence of fabric. I hope that I have restored the image to the way it captured the lady’s eyes, which judging from the photograph were almost certainly a lovely shade of blue.

Fundamentally, crinoline dresses were dangerous. In 1858 The New York Times reported the first crinoline-related death. A young Boston woman was standing by the mantel in her parlor, when she caught fire. Within minutes she was entirely consumed by flames. At the same time there were nineteen such deaths in England over a two-month period. Saddest of all, witnesses were impeded by their own crinolines and could only watch the hapless victims die in agony.

Parody by George Crtuikshank, 1848. Public domain.

Today we can forget about all these terribly things and laugh instead at contemporary cartoons and accounts. Figure 2 is a famous parody by George Cruikshank from 1848. If nothing else, crinolines enabled young ladies to maintain their social distance. And this much to a young man’s dismay. 

 In 1863, Blackwood’s Magazine published a poem entitled , “Crinoliniana,” which ended,

“I long to clasp thee to my heart
     But all my longings are in vain;
I sit and sigh two yards apart,
     And curse the barriers of thy train.
My fondest hopes I must resign,
I can’t get past that Crinoline!”