Picture Post #30 The Great Debate

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

The first televised U.S. Presidential debate, 1960

      

This cozy scene is, in fact, a screenshot of the first ever U.S. Presidential debate which was televised, attracting a great audience. (Even at this time, 90% of households in the U.S. had  televisions. Black and white ones, of course.)

Presidential debates are often more about how candidates 'look' on the screen, than on what they say. Even more than newspaper photographs, the television screen distinguishes firmly - and often cruelly - between the telegenic and the rest. And one of the novelties of the 1960 Presidential campaign was the introduction to a newly televised public  of polite, staged exchanges between the nominees.

On the left is John F. Kennedy, 'JFK' and on the right is Richard M. Nixon, 'Tricky Dickie', as he was unkindly later known. The scene is the CBS studios in Chicago and the date is September 26, 1960.

The first thing that is striking about this image is how homely it all is - truly the CBS studio could be, if not someone's front room, certainly the seminar at the local college - and the whole effect is refreshingly amateurish, with the debate moderator's feet poking out from underneath the flap of his desk. Indeed 'Tricky Dicky' looks awkward and uncomfortable, squirming in his seat, while JFK seems much more at home.

It's a homely feature too that everyone is sitting - rather than standing behind lecterns - as this immediately changes the tone of a debate, rendering the human animal less aggressive and more consensual.

The election was very close but likely the TV appearance favored Kennedy who became the nation's youngest President and first Catholic ever elected to the office.


Today's TV studio’s are all about technological sophistication and electronic screens are likely the background. The more spectacular, the better. A lot of distraction. At least here, in this sepia image, the human being is shown as such, no fancy tricks in that regard. But of course, the real tricks are weaved psychologically, then and now. Did, in those days, to see the future president in this setting, make them seem closer to ‘normal’ people in a certain way - or even more exceptional?

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Picture Post #29 Stripping Down the Tailor's Dummy

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'


Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

A Shop Window in Florence, Italy, September 2017. Picture credit: Antonio Borrani

      

We can all wonder what we will do next. What to invent to keep on going while deadlines mark pressure on time schedules. And even when we have no idea what to talk about or to show, surely with something we have to come up. This is a crazy world, more bound to production than quality, and even when we have nothing to tell, we will fill the page, when we have nothing to sell, we fill the shop window. With (non)sense?

The image above shows a ‘flying’ woman in a, perhaps, rather dubious position. Her legs are revealed, which assuredly does exalt her shoes that anew lead up to her legs and higher up to her bottom without underpants. Of-course the woman is a tailor’s dummy, not a real woman. Still, the shoes and her dress are made for real, living woman. In short: what does this puppet represent?

The female figure seems to shape a larger social imagery than we are used to seeing explored for the male. Erotically the female body seems much more consumed for commercial purposes. Imagery is a driving force in many plays, to start with the daily role-play we dress up when we wake.

Something must attract the consumer.

One purse and one shoe exposed for sale, two glass frames containing sand that can be turned around. Like the image of a woman? Or is this a representation of sand dunes? The time? A woman suspended or, perhaps better to say,  a woman pending, in the air.

This, is the fashion to follow.

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Picture Post #28 Messages Concealed in Jarring Details

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'



Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

        Kung, Bamenda area, republic of Cameroon. 

    Picture credit 2015, Pierpaolo di Carlo

Looking back to the picture, nothing appears strange indeed. Perhaps, more often, we have seen pictures of people carrying loads of fruit, bread or books on their heads. A wallet seems so light and small that maybe this lightness is somehow surprising.

“No! The woman does not pose for the camera. Nothing extraordinary,” a linguist and anthropologist replies. “Common practice. Here, everybody carries things on their head. And, by the way, that is not a booklet - but a wallet.”

As with everything, we can pause and take some time for something. Imagine we would walk around with our wallet on our head. Could that happen?

Observing the picture, we might perceive a contrast between the modern, urban icon of the portfolio, and the rural, timeless idea of an African woman standing in front of her habitat. Why? When did we stop carrying things on our head? This picture seems to shape questions of comparison.

Does this picture tell more about us, than about her?

As with many otherwise trivial occurrences, something very ordinary conceals a door to a closet, and when we open that door we find a chaos of things that, before, we tended not to imagine. Nothing is strange, though there is no such strangeness as to believe that.

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A practical note on the picture:

Kung is a small village of about 600 people, perched on a steep hill in the Lower Fungom region, northwest Cameroon. Like any other village in the area, Kung has its own chief and its own language - a true language that should not be confused with a dialect. The language has no written form, and is endangered, although one of the community's central motivations is to safeguard its speech, so that the population can continue to communicate with their ancestors who have passed away.

Picture Post #27 An Icon on the ‘Verge’ of American History

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen 

A native American family taking a ride in a car. The picture was 

apparently taken in 1916 in the American Pacific Northwest

There's a piquant quality about the image. For the photographer and the publisher of the time, were the passengers meant to be ridiculous? A mocking look at native peoples in the White Man's world? Yet even if so they surely do not know that. For the passengers of that day, they are very modern, very grand.

The picture shows that realities fuse together in ramifications of accidental experiences. Notably, the image contains the awareness that symbols deeply embedded in societies take on different senses given different motivations and perspectives.

We now know how Native Americans, in general, fared with modernity: the car is a symbol of their fate and oppression. An image such as this accumulates meaning by virtue of some of its intrinsic symbolic values, which are nonetheless unusual in the face of deep-rooted events – events that allow a symbol to become an icon. 

There cannot be anything strange to see a Native American family driving around in an automobile. Yet this occasion, strange indeed might be the Indians pictured in the limousine. The first possibility shades into a reality where everything becomes like a dream and realisation is always immediate, no matter how many complex things are combined. The second bears the idea that realisation will always be something postponed to the future, and that in this process elements reappear as odd, as clashing symbols.  

The difference in the language is subtle. This is the delicacy on which an icon can be raised.

Picture Post #26. Life-Matters

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

Guatamala, 1968. Picture credit: Jill Gibson

A woman with a newborn passes by the word ‘Muerte’ written on the wall. Nothing could be more natural; birth and death simply belong to each other.

Which raises two questions: what happens when death becomes a symbol to reclaim something belonging to the past? What happens when a distinction is made about who, and who should not, live? Because then the right to live is not the same concept for all of us. 

Suppose that birth is a concept about being, and death a concept about non-being, then whatever touches upon these concepts, touches upon a principle. The problem is not birth, nor yet death itself. The problem is in the claims being made. To respect life means to respect death. Herein lies something universal.

A note by the photographer, Jill Gibson:

During the years 1966–1968, I was photo-documenting the work and progress of doctors who were examining the medical problems of children living in the pure Mayan village of Santa Maria Cauqué, located in the hills 30 minutes outside of Guatemala City. There were some days I travelled in a 4-wheel drive vehicle, up riverbed roads for five to six hours just to reach remote villages, along with a doctor. The doctor educated me about the United Fruit Company and it’s influence over the Guatemalan government, and the ramifications of U.S. involvement in the country. So, I believe the word Muerte, being a graffiti on the wall, has something to do with the resistance at the time.

There was in fact a lot of death going on then, as the country was immersed in military violence from 1965 through 1995. We saw it again first hand in 1984. During these years, the Mayans were being annihilated.

Picture Post #25 The Machine Age

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

1950s advertising image for a new-fangled vending machine

You can just imagine the conversation...  ‘Hi Betty, can I ask you a dumb question? Better than anyone I know Bill!’

Okay, maybe that's not what the image brought to your mind, but it is what the  copywriters for the original magazine adverstisement came up with - under a heading ‘Sweet ’n’ Snarky’. Don’t ask what ‘snarky’ means exactly, as no one seems to agree, but here the image gives a particular sense to the term: ‘smart, stylish, a little bit rogueish’.

Nearly 70 years on, the machine no longer looks snarky, indeed it looks pretty unstylish and dumb. The green fascia and the plain helvetica font shouting out in red the word ‘COFFEE’ scarcely impress, as surely at the time they would have done. That’s not even to start on the drab characters in this little play, Bill, the office flirt and Betty, the attractive secretary.

In those days, the set-up might have seemed attractive; offering new technological developments combined with social engagement. Just like the characters in a popular TV soap series, the image created by others seeks to tell you who you are. Advertising media in particular have long been keen to exploit this role-play and their success offers a fascinating additional question. Which is; just why do people like to be reduced to their function, to a stereotype?

  

Of course, the advertisers were not really interested in what an actual Bill might have to talk about to an actual Betty. Real characters are multifaceted. Why, this Bill and Betty might even have both been academics chatting during a break between lectures!

‘Hi Betty, do you think these coffee machines will increase our happiness in life?’

‘Hmmm. Good question, Bill. And my answer would be ‘Yes and No’.  Soon we’ll find ourselves oppressed with new technologies but first let us celebrate the reflection of change this one represents.’

Welcome to the deep world of everyday expression, not the frothy one of advertisers’ expresso.

Picture Post # 24 The Privilege of Being Near and Far

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

Image credit: from an original photographic plate created by Thomas Scarborough

The pictured child is not far, but too far to be near; or too close to be far, but not that near.  Instead, they are halfway, as the background, or foreground" seem to be as well. In-between is where we make distinctions; the difference is always in-between. But rather than representing elements between which a difference is made, this picture seems to represent the in-between itself.

Humidity and temperature change have touched the chemicals of this slide, and ‘X-rayed by life’ in this way, existence reaffirms itself as an ever-changing movement. Within the invisible that becomes visible, we might think to collect memories, freeze moments into pictures, and hence even to think of something as permanent...  yet, little by little, these perceptions are all erased by the visible that withdraws into the unknown.

Stability does not exist. The in-between hands to us that what we think, but do not truly know, and maybe if life would see us, it would say ‘we do not know much’. Thoughts alone make a thread that by stiff perseverance does not break, however often we may have to observe that the tissue is of dubious nature...

Picture Post #23: Politicians Seeking to Picture the Historic Moment

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

The UK Prime Minster, Mrs May, signing the Article 50 notification

March 29th 2017 was the date that the United Kingdom, in the form of its Prime Minister, Teresa May, formally notified the European Union, by letter, of its intention to leave.

The UK is split down the middle by the plan, with a fraction over half voting 'for' and just under half voting 'against'. But within the ruling Conservatives, a resurgent nationalism and indeed triumphalism dominates.

And this is what first stands out about this carefully prepared and balanced image. The very dominant ‘Union Jack’. Now British politicians do not usually cloak themselves in the national flag—it used to be considered inappropriate, a usurpation. The flag has also been for too long associated with 'unacceptable' political parties, like the National Front, who stood for Parliament (and fought in the streets) on an openly racist platform about expelling 'other races' from the country.

But now a Prime Minster with a very similar platform, expelling European ‘migrants’ from the country, involving a backward-looking and divisive notion of Britishness, is actually in power.

So the Union Jack is there, on Mrs May's left, carefully arranged to display the red English cross to good effect. And on her right is … an empty chair, conveying a sense of isolation. Above the Prime Minster is not Big Ben, but a small, wind-up, carriage clock. Such things are anachronisms in an age of digital timepieces. They need winding regularly and are much less accurate. Here, the clock looks sad, and conveys only the impression of monotonous, dusty waiting rooms …

Mrs May sits exactly in front of a marble fireplace. Marble sends subliminal messages about wealth and importance. But it is also the stone of cemeteries and mausoleums.

The British Prime Minster wears a black outfit, which despite the white speckles does not quite manage to dispel the funeral feel. Mrs May used to be a banker, working at the Bank of England and the Association for Clearing Payment Services. But here she looks less like a banker and more like a lawyer, signing a Very Important Document, such as a death certificate.

And so in a sense it may actually turn out to be—for her Brexit programme could be the death of the United Kingdom.

Picture Post #22 From Snapshots to Selfies

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

USA, early 1900’s, photographer unknown. (Pvt. Collection).

Today the talk is all about ‘Selfies’ and the rise of ‘look at me’ photography, but the early Twentieth Century snapshot also raised many questions about how we like to think of ourselves, how we see our place in the world and, hence too, the universe. The arrival of box cameras and chemically coated film in the roaring American century, provided a cheap medium in which not only to share beautiful scenes, but also to depict ‘the ugly’, the immediate, the unimportant, in playful, short, spontaneous resemblances.

Nonetheless, in a world of Selfies, we all too easily overlook how things only really become banal when the acceptance of a message is taken from within a specific context and is not granted further thought.

Goethe's gentle observation that beauty can never obtain clarity about itself, and that things remain true in their nature when veiled, seems to be briskly wiped away by the deceptive promises of modern photography to depict spontaneous resemblance. Instead, when we view pictures like the one above, we have to imagine ourselves a bit back in time, when being portrayed was as unusual for the ‘common man’ as eating caviar.

If, within a visible document, we can do this, then the urge to express a voyage towards self-interpretation simply explodes. How do we like to think of ourselves? How do we see our place in the world, and hence too, the universe? The ‘snapshot’ provided the possibility to create a culture of your own, and one might even come to think, for the American citizen, a way to break away from older, European traditions, escaping through the eye of a lens.

One of the main distinctions the snapshot has made, although it may have slipped into our consciousness without being noticed, is the difference between resemblance and semblance: to be like, and to seem like. If there is one thing about the snapshot we cannot ignore, it is this insubordination concerning the fragile commitment to semblance.

Nor is it only our perception about beauty that is transformed. The truth about what we see becomes more real than ever in the represented moment, and this taste of realness, of revealing immediacy, helps create a social conformity built from identification. Today’s ‘Selfies’ are the outcome of something that is now mainstream yet started from a movement more than a century ago, that ever since has not only been shaping us, but changing us, too.

Picture Post #21 Where Do Ideas Come From?

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t that what they seemed to be, neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

Le lac El Mansour Eddahbi, Morocco Photo credit: Tessa den Uyl

An horizon, form, movement and colours softly scale to inspire the poet, incidentally but gently. Or is it the composer, the scientist, the choreographer, the sculptor - or the philosopher? The muse carries along inspiration naturally between the old and the new world.

To be inspired is of such subtlety, like a breath indeed, that we can hardly understand how it happens. In its place, we simply recognise the sensation when it comes to us, like a thin thread, solidly spun, that triggers a powerful, yet uncontrolled sensation and offers the mind an opportunity to float on the ribs of the river, to muse thereupon.

Innocent and timeless is that moment in which the muse breaks down the schism between the real and unreal and in this ‘lawless’ state of being she unfolds something unnoticed that is suddenly seen, felt, appreciated, related. The muse chains creativity like toppling dominoes, yet touches the one ahead, in the space of time.

To receive a vision is an experience of great excitement.

Originally, nine Greek goddesses protected the arts and the sciences and were called upon by their name to draw forth different pieces for the poets' verses. The name of Mnemosyne (the mother of the muses), like the word muse, both derive from the verb mnaomai, meaning to be mindful.

Seen through more modern eyes, the muse seems connected with something sensual, passive - perhaps like a model posing for the visual artist. The meaning of memory, in its juxtaposition to remembering (the verse) and becoming future reminiscence, it has been transformed. Within this certainty, it is this uncertainty, to not be certain:

How will the memory source for an artist’s inspiration, the muse, survive in a cybernetic world?

Picture Post #20 Olber's Paradox raising insoluble questions

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Martin Cohen and Tessa den Uyl

A NASA  image from the Hubble Telescope looking into the 'Deep Field'

This is a patch of BLACK sky - empty when initially seen - even through the largest earthbound telescopes. Yet, with the  Hubble space telescope and a long-enough exposure time, even the darkness of space soon comes to glowing life. The point is, every bit of sky is actually packed with light - not merely with stars but with uncountable distant galaxies.

Heinrich Olbers (1758–1840) was a Viennese doctor who only did astronomy in his spare time, but realised that there was a bit of a logical problem about the night sky. And ‘O’ is for ‘Olbers Paradox’*,  which can be summed up by saying that if the universe is really infinite in size, the the night sky should not only be bright – but should be infinitely bright. Put short, we should see stars everywhere we look. So why don't we and why isn't the night sky all lit up ?

The paradox touches upon profound issues in cosmology, or the study and theory of the origins of the universe. Simply saying that most of the stars are too far away to see is not enough. Certainly it is true that starlight, like any other kind of light, dims as a function of distance, but at the same time, the number of light sources in the ‘cone of vision’ increases – at exactly the same rate. In fact, on the mathematics of it, given an infinite universe, with galaxies and stars distributed uniformly, the whole night sky should appear to be not black, not speckled, but white!

Olbers’ paradox is a ‘thought experiment’ in the very good sense that most of the reasoning is done by hypotheticals. What if the universe is infinitely large? And infinitely old? If the stars and galaxies are (on average) spread out evenly?

Various possible explanations have been offered to explain the paradox. Such as that stars and galaxies are not distributed randomly, but rather clumped together leaving most of space completely empty. So, for example, there could be a lot of stars, but they hide behind one another. But in fact, observations reveal galaxies and stars to be quite evenly spread out.

What then, if perhaps the universe has only a finite number of stars and galaxies? Yet the number of stars, finite or not, is definitely still large enough to light up the entire sky…

Another idea is that there may be too much dust in space to see the distant stars? This seems tempting, but ignores known facts. Like that the dust would heat up too, and that space would have a much higher. The astronomers who took this image claim it shows some kind of spectral shift into the red specturm. Or is it only the dust? The questions are not really resolved, even yet.

So what is the best answer to Olbers’ riddle? The favoured explanation today is that although the universe may be infinitely large, it is not infinitely old, meaning that the galaxies beyond a certain distance will simply not have had enough time to send their light over to fill our night sky. If the universe is, say, 15 billion years old, then only stars and galaxies less than 15 billion light years away are going to be visible. Add to which, astronomers say that the phenomenon of red shift may mean some galaxies are receding from us so fast that their light has been ‘shifted’ beyond the visible spectrum.

After reading this, and then standing here on planet Earth and watching the night sky, one might feel a little trapped by the questions. Our sight is limited and it always will be but maybe this is our hope for we can continue to philosophise: afte rall, what are we thinking? The picture above might as well represent pieces of coloured glass, under water visions where fluorescent life flows in deep dark sees, a pattern for printed cloth. Our brain only represents what we think we see, not necessarily the reality in which we live? In the incredible immensity of space, mankind has always been aware of this, even if, once in a while, the tendency is to forget.

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* Although the paradox carries Olbers’ name,  it can really be traced back to Johannes Kepler in 1610.  In Wittgenstein's Beetle and Other Classic Thought Experiments, Martin’s book, which talks a little more about all this, 

Picture Post #18 A Somersault for the Suspension of Civilisation

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

Photo credit: students of  A Mundzuku Ka Hina, communications workshop. 

A life conditioned by the dictates of competition and consumption cannot but bring great social differences along in its train. When we ascribe symbolic values to a consumptive life, ideas will conform to ideals in which our moral duties are the rights of others on us.

The subtle way social disproportions are perceived as if a causa sui, something wherein the cause lies within itself creates a world of facts based upon competitive abstractions that endlessly rehearse on a Procrustean bed.

The salto (flying somersault) performed by the boy, who depends for his survival on a rubbish-dump, breaks with this gesture the conditioned life. What he breaks is to function, which means to think, alike a certain ‘life-design.’ His action shows the incompleteness of our relationships in an abstract world.

His jump is a jump into a space of non-facts.

In the suspension of the movement is the liberating being of lightness.

Picture Post #17 The Mask

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

The headquarters of Mussolini's Italian Fascist Party, 1934 via the Rare Historical Photos website

The curious thing about this image is that it looks so much like an over-the-top film set. The dictator looks down on the hurrying-past public, from the facade of the Party HQ. Which in this case is imaginatively, yet also somehow absurdly, covered in graffiti - in the original sense of writing or drawings that have been scribbled, scratched, or painted. The 'Si, si, si' is of course Italian for 'Yes', which is actually not so sinister. The occasion was the the 1934 elections, in which Italians were called to vote either For or Against the Fascist representatives on the electoral list. Indeed, the facade was not always covered up like that.

In 1934, Mussolini had already ruled Italy for 12 years, and the election had certain fascistic features: there was only one party - the fascist one - and the ballot slip for 'Yes' was patriotically printed in the colours of the Italian flag (plus some fascist symbols), while 'No' was in fine philosophical sense a vote for nothing, and the ballot sheet was empty white.

The setting of the picture is the Palazzo Braschi in Rome, and the building was the headquarters of the Fascist Party Federation - which was the local one, not the national, Party headquarters.

According to the Fascist government that supervised the vote, anyway, the eventual vote was a massive endorsement of Il Duce with the Fascist list being approved not merely by 99% of voters but by 99.84% of voters!

But back to the building. Part of Mussolini’s and his philosopher guru, Giovanni Gentile's, grand scheme was to transform the cities into theatrical stages proclaiming Fascist values. Italian fascism is little understood, and was not identical to the later Nazi ideology - but one thing it did share was the belief in totalitarian power. As George Orwell would later portray in his dystopia, 1984, in this new world 2+2 really would equal five if the government said so. Si!

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Picture Post #16: Life Behind the Pile of Petrol Cans

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

Azad Nanakeli 2011, Arbil, Kurdistan-Iraq

A tailor shop that is situated behind a pile of petrol cans. An image that offers a certain brutality about human life – yet in this harshness, but also lightness, man survives. In such ‘idiosyncratic sympathies’ is hidden our intimacy – and hence, similarity. How violent is it to earn one's daily bread out of sight of the street, and behind a symbol of capitalism and war and power?

Virtue will always raise its flags of dependence upon what it believes. Reducing intimacy to something impersonal in cultural terms, yet personal in providing a subjective state within which is created a distinct worldview. The subtlety between intimacy and brutality can then pass by unnoticed, or be easily exchanged, one with the other.

Yet human beings are blessed with something called imagination. And without imagination, intimacy cannot exist. Strangely, the most common scenes reflect our trouble with imagination. As if the common has very little value in regard. We let comparisons decree our personal preferences – and in so doing, not only do we refuse to imagine ourselves, but we refuse to imagine others. We refuse intimacy with the world.

Imagination evokes thinking, even though most thinking occurs within the already imagined. Imagination reveals a problem as to how we make the world intelligible. In this way, daily life offers us a myriad stream of common, unanticipated images like this, scenes in which a host of uncommon things can be traced.

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Picture Post No. 15: Boulevard du Temple

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

Boulevard du Temple, by Daguerre

This is one of those 'first ever...' photos- so a little history story could be told. But more than that, and unlike most of the early images,  it has quite an aesthetic. And the two stick figures in the foreground add a certain something human too... Are they children playing?

The Frenchified nature of the town is given by those shop awnings and ordered lines of trees - as well as perhaps more obscurely, by the slope of the roofs.

On closer inspection, the figures turn out to be adults, and one is offering his boot via an extended leg to the other, who presumably is a shoe-shine boy. Thus, the image captures in a frozen moment of time, a slightly sourer taste of social inequality.

It is a daguerrotype, an image recorded on a sheet of copper coated with silver and developed by mercury fumes, taken by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (after whom the process was named). The exact date of the photo is not known, but it is thought to be either 1838 or 1839.

One contemporary photographer says too that the matchstick figures are the first human beings to be photographed*, adding:

‘Their simple, everyday transaction has made them immortal.’

Following on from the artistic era of Romanticism, photography fitted well the artist's needs to express the real and natural. But above all, this mechanical medium seemed to fit the industrial revolution and the need for man to fix himself into particular roles.

Because, indeed, another quality of the image is that there are only these two figures, locked forever in their unequal relationship. What should have been a bustling boulevard is strangely deserted. This appearance is, however, also illusory: the first daguerrotypes took some minutes (10 to 15) to fix on the plate, and so all that moves is removed... moving objects, like coaches or even pedestrians, would leave little or no trace. They are the ghosts of early photography.

*Others would argue the point, including earlier images by Daguerre himself such as Foyer au Pont-Neuf, but if there are literally other figures to be found, none are as striking and problematic as these two.

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Just fancy that! Hardly any daguerrotypes have survived, but this one was still being lovingly preserved as late as 1974 in a museum. At that point, however, someone decided to ‘clean’ the tatty old silver plated surface, wiping the delicate image away in a moment ...

Picture Post No. 14: On Otherness and Logic

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

Photo credit Max Perissi .  Florence, Italy 1994

How can a woman in a semitransparent dress, passing on the streets of Florence, pass by unnoticed? Or should we question why a woman in a semitransparent dress is challenging? The above picture - inspired by Ruth Orkin’s 1951 photograph,  ‘American girl in Italy’, reworks the underlying issues of female freedom and independency.

Being foremost independent and possibly attractive stresses female power over men and the ability to challenge patriarchal behavior. The woman ‘out objects’ herself in claiming her ‘subjective freedom’. She, like He, plays this game in the face of gender difference, molding both men and women into objects. 

Challenging the other gender, even as we are controlled by a vision of being sexual bodies, is hitchhiking on a road where ‘the obvious will always be the driver, in a country of good reasons’, even when the road might be deceptive.

Less obvious is the question of whether we have distorted intimacy into something we can rationally justify? 

Have we made a confused exchange between the inescapable faults ascribed to the virtues of the male and female body and the awareness that intimacy informs all the conceptual relationships of Life?

Intimacy unties borders in which the other is disqualified - in a moral way. That this disqualification is unfounded might perplex us, but it will not make us doubt.

When intimacy is appropriated into a web of the already related, the lurking suspicion is that once we have sexualised the body, will we also not  find that we have destroyed intimacy?

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Read on: More ways in which images  are not always quite what they seem are explored in the post immediately below, by Keith Tidman.

Picture Post No.12: Critical Eyes

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

Alice Seeley Harris, missionary, photographer and campaigner with a group of Congolese children, early 1900s.  Photo credit Anti-Slavery International

A group of Congolese children and Mrs. Seeley Harris all pose in a pyramid geometry and look towards us. In doing so, their bodies seem to animate a question and hand a voice to us. Perhaps this is why this photograph obviously from another age moves beyond being material evidence to become an inexorable happening. Our voices still try to formulate that question today.

These children embody the rich properties hidden into the soil they inhabit. The presence of the white woman accentuates this intuition being dressed in the middle of the children, as if ‘their clothes’ lay underneath the earth. What for these children is not essential, others might think of as indispensable.

The relation between these children and Mrs. Harris is critical. We might end up striving for the same cause but this is already a movement upon effects. When violence is related to law, justice cannot be achieved within a law preserved by violence. These children represent an entire population that got identified as a working force. Violently estranged from their culture, is it still possible to see out of one’s own eyes?

With more then a century in the middle between them and us, we are left with a riddle:

A century conceals more truth than a day, though every day carries with it a millennium of falsehoods.

Who are we then, today?

Picture Post No. 11 The Playground

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

'Playing'. Original photo, title and date unknown, by Alexsandr Malin

In this deceptively simple image a simple gesture accentuates not only a perception of an optical play about reality, but also leads on to a vision about a virtual world.

We enter the paradox of pick and choose.

The shift between figure and background position produces contradictory responses. The object - the car being used as a kind of toy - transforms and breaks the coherence between the object and ourselves. Evidently, one value must have another value.

We can be flexible: the playground is free to enter. Humour has the capacity to reveal ‘our will of absence’ - to guide things beyond their ascribed function. We laugh alongside our own rigidity.

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Picture Post No. 11 The Playground

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

'Playing'. Original photo, title and date unknown, by Alexsandr Malin

In this deceptively simple image a simple gesture accentuates not only a perception of an optical play about reality, but also leads on to a vision about a virtual world.

We enter the paradox of pick and choose.

The shift between figure and background position produces contradictory responses. The object - the car being used as a kind of toy - transforms and breaks the coherence between the object and ourselves. Evidently, one value must have another value.

We can be flexible: the playground is free to enter. Humour has the capacity to reveal ‘our will of absence’ - to guide things beyond their ascribed function. We laugh alongside our own rigidity.

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Picture Post No 10: Faceless Fighters of Vietnam, 1972

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t that what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

Somewhere in the Nam Can forest, Vietnam, in 1972 ( Image: Vo Anh Khanh)

In the pciture above, faceless activists meet in the Nam Can forest, wearing masks to hide their identities from one another in case of capture and interrogation.

For many Americans, the dominant image of the Vietnamese and their Viet Cong allies during the war was as a ghostly enemy sneaking down the Ho Chi Minh trail defying US bombs and apparently inured to suffering.

The visual history of the Vietnam War has been defined by such images. There is Eddie Adams’ photograph of a Viet Cong fighter being executed; Nick Ut’s picture of a naked child fleeing a napalm strike, and Malcolm Browne’s photo of a man setting himself alight in flames at a Saigon intersection.



These scenes were captured by Western photographers working alongside American or South Vietnamese troops. But the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong had photographers of their own. Almost all were self-taught, and worked anonymously, or under a nom de guerre, viewing their role as part of a larger struggle.

‘For us, one photo was like a bullet.’ 

As one of the revolutionary photographers, Nguyen Dinh Uu, put it much later:

‘Processing chemicals were mixed in tea saucers with stream water, and instead of darkrooms, film was developed at night.’

Another photographer, Lam Tan Tai recalls how they came up with a new form of flash photography in order to picture fighters and villagers who were living in bomb shelters and tunnels.

‘We emptied gunpowder from rifle cartridges onto a small handheld device and then lit the gunpowder with a match. The burning powder provided all the light we needed.’

For Mai Nam:

‘The vast dark forest was my giant darkroom. In the morning I’d rinse the prints in a stream and then hang them from trees to dry. In the afternoon I’d cut them to size and do the captions. I’d wrap the prints and negatives in paper and put them in a plastic bag, which I kept close to my body. That way the photos would stay dry and could be easily found if I got killed.’

These photographers worked in the shadow of death whether by bombing, gunfire or from the perils of the jungle on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Nine out of ten Vietnamese photographers perished whether by bullets, bombs, or disease. Many, such as Vo Anh Khanh, working clandestinely in the South, could never get their images to Hanoi and the media, but instead exhibited them to fighters and villagers in the mangrove swamps of the Mekong Delta - to raise morale.

Each image was precious. Today, with digital images essentially infinite, it is revealing to read that one photographer, Tram Am, had only a single roll of film which he had to use judiciously for the whole duration of the war.

In the early 1990s, two photojournalists, Tim Page and Doug Niven, decided to try to track down surviving Vietnamese photographers. One had a dusty bag of never-printed negatives, and another had his stashed under the bathroom sink. Vo Anh Khanh still kept his pristine negatives in a U.S. ammunition case, with a bed of rice as a desiccant.

One hundred eighty of these unseen photos and the stories of the courageous men who made them are collected in the book: Another Vietnam: Pictures of the War from the Other Side (National Geographic, 2002).

These pictures tell the story of a simple, rural people fighting the most technologically advanced and militarized nation on earth - and finally defeating it. They reveal a reality that nobody outside of the local experience could truly imagine. Looking back today, at Vietnam itself, in many ways their sacrifices seem to have been for nothing. Yet perhaps their struggle, and the images it spawned served a more profound purpose.

Life is not a neatly defined itinerary as these safeguarded masked women neatly standing in line might seem to imply. Rather, there are always several layers of meaning. Indeed, as one Vietnamese proverb puts it: ‘If you travel with Buddha, wear a saffron robe, but if you go with spirits, wear paper clothes.’

Read (and see) more at Mashable.com

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