There was this too: they were both deeply ambivalent about photography. George Eliot set Middlemarch almost four decades into the past when she began writing it in 1869. It was set, in fact, in the two years before British inventor and nature-sketching hobbyist Henry Fox Talbot dreamed up the still camera during an 1833 trip to Lake Como.
Italy’s beauty had struck again, this time as Fox Talbot pondered a camera obscura’s projection of the Mediterranean landscape he was sketching. The “inimitable beauty” of the projected image gripped him, along with the idea that the same image might somehow be permanently imprinted on the paper where it hovered. Though he referred to the still camera he eventually invented as “nature’s pencil”—a fortuitous but organic combination of glass and light—Fox Talbot’s idea had something of science to it, not just a trick of chemical solution, but a way of seeing reformed by objectivity. Here was reality, recorded with a fidelity that matched and perhaps succeeded that of the human eye.
Reform and realism were much on Eliot’s mind as she wrote Middlemarch, which sets the overhaul of England’s political system and a shift toward science-based medicine into an intimate social relief. Some of photography’s early critics vowed that it would spell the end of not just painting but writing: Why labor over intensive description when a photograph can tell us all we need to know about the world?
As if to refute the previous forty years of fretting over the future of the fine arts and nullify the competition for the most truthful rendering of reality, Eliot devoted herself to describing human experience with scalpel-like acuity. The author’s partner, a philosopher and biologist (in a time when the two disciplines were often and intuitively bound together) named George Henry Lewes, noted that no response to Middlemarch pleased her more than that of surgeon Sir James Paget, who marveled that reading the novel was like “assisting at the creation—a universe formed out of nothing!”
As a young woman, the author was beguiled by phrenology—a “science” that connected character to the topography of the skull—going so far as to have a cast of her own head made. That interest seems reflected in her writing, where Eliot sketches faces, outfits, postures, and attitudes so closely they seem to yield a moral essence. Eliot has been included in a school of close description dubbed literary pictorialism, and indeed, portraits hang on many of her characters’ walls, often serving as false reflections or otherwise improbable ideals. Though we are encouraged to universalize her characters (Eliot’s suggestion that the picture of young Mary Garth is available in any crowd comes to mind), her descriptive scrutiny distinguishes the weight and consequence of every soul. (It’s a technique, curiously, that now marks the work of no one more than nonfiction paragon and sometime photography critic Janet Malcolm.) Like Whitman, Eliot insists on the greater connections between us, on the least of our goodnesses as the highest human achievement—that is the progressive cause that most interests her.
In Middlemarch, the odious Naumann’s proposed portrait of Dorothea drives Will Ladislaw, who doesn’t believe her beauty can adequately be represented, to protective distraction. In Daniel Deronda, Eliot’s final novel, set after the dawn of photography, the extraordinarily self-conscious, self-admiring Gwendolen exhausts the narrator, who considers the photographer’s comparative ease in representing such a girl: “Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change—only to give stability to one beautiful moment.”
* * *
A Google image search of many of Eliot’s generation of writers—Charles Dickens, Whitman, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne—returns a gallery that, arranged chronologically, documents a gestation that delivers the author from the smudgy womb of vignetted oil portraiture into the ass-spanking world of the photographic image. The transfiguration generally occurs in the 1850s, when instead of another tinted cameo—bam!—there they are.
Dickens was an uneasy subject, wary of compounding the problem of image fraud that followed photography’s inception. “I feel it will not be in my power to sit,” he replied to photographer John E. Mayall’s 1856 request for a session. “I have so much to do and such a disinclination to multiply my ‘counterfeit presentments.’” It took twenty years for Dickens’s earlier Mayall headshot to make it to George Eliot in 1871, and it pleased her both for correcting the “keepsakey, impossible face” given to him by painter Daniel Maclise in 1839, and for preserving the youth that had since been worn from his features.
When Mayall and his daguerreotype got to Eliot herself, in February of 1858, she was so disconcerted by the result that she vowed never to be photographed again. Mayall’s three-quarter profile is now the only existing photograph of the author, though as with many of her portraits, its translations have raised suspicions of fraud and defamation. Eliot was not considered a beauty, and though Eliot was not many of the things convention required of a Victorian woman, it is said that even she was not free from the agonies of self-image and felt little better about her painted portraits than she did the blasted photograph.
A pseudonymously male novelist who insisted on more realistic portrayals of women but didn’t believe in her own right to vote, of her many contradictions Eliot’s faith in the physical image as a tool of realism—subject to its own doubts—and her disappointment in every visual rendering of her own face are, to me, the most easily reconciled. Her attraction to physical detail is only one facet of a heightened quality of perception—the capacity to perceive the inescapable surface in worldly terms, then push beyond that surface for meaning.
Consider the rather brutal first strokes of an Eliot likeness Henry James offered his parents: “She is magnificently ugly, deliciously hideous,” he began, but “in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a very few minutes, steals forth and charms the mind.” She may not have thought much of James during their first meeting in 1870, but in this he at least shows the potential for the kind of acute but considered observation—representing the truth of change; something jeopardized in the image-first age of social profiles—Eliot favored on and off the page.
Toward the end of her life, Eliot expressed reservations about photography’s claims on realism. Writing in 1879 about a portrait of her recently deceased friend G. H. Lewes—also taken by the apparently unstoppable Mayall—Eliot questioned the dark alchemy of photographs: “My inward representation even of comparatively indifferent faces is so vivid as to make portraits of them unsatisfactory to me. And I am bitterly repenting now that I was led into buying Mayall’s enlarged copy of the photograph [of Lewes] you mention. It is smoothed down and altered, and each time I look at it I feel its unlikeness more. Himself as he was is what I see inwardly, and I am afraid of outward images lest they should corrupt the inward.”
For Eliot, photographs do the opposite of what they claim to: record a subject’s reality, which is to say preserve its memory. At best photography footnotes what the attentive mind already knows; at worst it bullies the imagination. Again and again, Eliot’s novels suggest the extent to which handwrought portraiture forged social identity and defined a way of seeing and not seeing in nineteenth-century Europe—most often in her native provincial England. More insinuating than traditional portraiture, photography offered its own reality, one that over the next century would proliferate beyond the question of whether its replications might rival those of the arts, and on to the point, as Eliot feared, of supplanting a subjective experience of memory and even reality itself.
* * *
This new reality resists distinction. Networks like Facebook, Flickr, DailyBooth, and Instagram have forged a new standard for social realism, and though they are designed to promote individuality, what jumps out immediately is the organized, ticky-tacky sameness of the profiles—personality portals that members groom and prune like geometric rows of royal shrubbery. Beginning with the vaguely photographic dimensions of every computer screen, in
any attempt to re-create a society within the physical confines of a 2-D square, aesthetically the jig is pretty much up. We’re all going to look like variations on a pretty banal theme, which I suppose is realistic enough. The variety is in the human detail—of gesture, of voice, of pheromonal profile—something sacrificed in the transmutation of social life into the flat-screened exchange of images and occasional, captionary bursts. The sameness and placelessness of that life is reflected in the unification of much of the world into an interdependent monolith.
For Eliot, again, any amalgamation has a moral sting. She believed in the comforts of the physical world with a touch of the nostalgist’s fever for the past. In Daniel Deronda, she describes the advantages of remaining on nodding terms with the place one first called home:
A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of the earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar, unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge: a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection, and kindly acquaintance with all neighbors, even to the dogs and donkeys, may spread not by sentimental effort and reflection, but as a sweet habit of the blood.
Eliot’s ideals might seem quaint, or worse, to us now. They might seem as silly and antiquated as the pointed conversation opener a friend once overheard in mixed (and presumably fancy) company: “Who are your people and where do they summer?” In the twenty-first century we invent ourselves however and wherever we please, and maintaining ties to a “native land”—assuming, God forbid, you don’t actually stay there—is a private, slightly embarrassing matter, when it isn’t slowly crushing your spirit or cluttering the better portion of your dreams.
Complicating notions of rootedness and sweet habits of the blood further is the extent to which citizens of town and country, province and locality, suburb and inner city, east and west, north and south, and all points in between can now effectively inhabit the same space, subdivided into home pages. The excitement of this possibility was hardly unfounded, and to a great extent the results were as magical as their promise. Uncanny and salubrious connections were made; information traveled through unimaginable corridors and at an unthinkable speed; lonelinesses were averted; billions of online Scrabble games with strangers passed as many hours; the entire planet was mapped for instant reference, and most of its knowledge too. The world began to reform as one nation, and though it was many things, it emerged, foremost, as a country of images.
Early on, Web historians like to remind us, the Internet was made up solely of language, or at least the alphabet of code. Making it “work” meant tapping out some kind of communiqué with the intention of reaching someone far away. In this, its inception had the same, miraculous quality of every communication system yet devised, from printing press to telephone. The lay public’s first experience of the Internet was as a kind of techno-social chimera, where the phone line and the postal service combined to create e-mail, and the next era of communication was lit with the butt end of the last one.
The first advantage claimed for any aspiring mass technology is its democratic nature, and the Internet was no different from photography in this regard. University campuses, libraries, and other learning institutions were among the first to wire up, and fifteen years later charity programs such as One Laptop per Child are founded on the ideal of access to technology as a basic right. Photography was first embraced as the class-immolating antithesis of formal portraiture. Where for centuries only the elite could afford or would presume to have their portraits painted, and possession of one’s own image was the rarest of status symbols, in good time picture-taking—an instant seized in an instant—would be available to anyone with some pocket change to spare.
In theory the camera was a great equalizer, depicting whatever stepped in front of it with a consistent and dispassionate gaze. By the end of the nineteenth century, some found the whole thing a little too democratic: the “pictorial” movement was mobilized to rescue photography from the mugging plebs and arrange it—via experiments in lighting, form, and exposure—into a more painterly art.
But the battle over photography’s cultural turf was ultimately too great to be fought in the provinces of Alfred Stieglitz and his photo-secessionists. It was, perhaps—like the other great twentieth-century cage match between high and low culture—no battle at all. Anyway it seems that way from here—just as a cultural economy run on the production and consumption of “realistic” images looks like a foregone conclusion, the argument over art versus documentation feels mostly irrelevant, and the question of whether, in generating the most prolific human records to be created with no real notion of posterity, we are making history or preening like Melville’s dayalized dunces appears somewhat self-evident. North American culture in particular—founded in a meritocratic spirit but nourished by a democratic one—now feels defined by a free-market, deeply individualist mentality. More is not only always better but always necessary; and if you’re not either taking it in or putting it out, what are you doing?
As we cultivated a boutique experience of the world—where cable channels and Web niches and food franchises became available to cater to particular interests, reinforce particular views, and make Afghan airfields feel more particularly like “home”—the digital camera offered one more way to consume our own lives. Given the right tools, we became masters at entertaining ourselves, an expression that has shed the suggestion of private diversion or introspection. Maintaining even the most basic Web presence can quickly start to feel like running a small celebrity empire. To leave the house unprepared to be photographed is to risk being captured and preserved that way forever and for all who’d care to see. (In a city like London, England, it has been estimated that the average commuter is photographed by surveillance cameras over three hundred times a day.) If anything, images have gained the advantage over “reality” first associated with people like Madonna, who became so used to the camera’s attention that she was accused of not wanting to live without it. Rather than freezing a moment, digital cameras effectively unfreeze reality; more and more we exist in a pre-represented state, and only what is photographed can be said to have actually taken place.
The creation of a parallel, virtual society in a fact-obsessed culture has put reality into something of a bind: in privileging the self and its expression we have reduced it to something flat and static and yet wholly unstable, infinitely changeable. Persona and subjectivity are now easily conflated, especially when it comes to the display and consumption of images—of ourselves and our lives, of others and their lives. The former is designed to be elastic—just ask Madonna. The latter is an innate sense of the world and one’s own experience that can be pursued to its own end. From the novelty of developing public identities to the telephone-pole flyers selling a thousand “likes” for Facebook photos to the pseuds we dream up to nudge the comment count on prized blog posts, the endgame of we waxen stars wandering through our empty mansions and performing the old hits for the end tables doesn’t seem that far off. Hegemony is already here, it seems safe to say, and it looks a lot like last night’s meal.
* * *
I don’t know. It’s not that I think that things were somehow better when a person could live his entire life without ever seeing a single photographic image of himself or anyone or anything else. No—how could I believe that? I was the child who, when lacking in any other suitable occupation, would spend evenings poring over old family albums, imprinting and installing them, in the case of my father’s early photos in particular, into the part of my mind still deliberating over what childhood looked like. I could tell you the color and texture of each of these albums, the sound they made when I opened my father’s closet and edged them off the top shelf—the sound I made when they finally tipped into my arms. The sound my father made when he found me bent over them for
the seven hundredth time. In this way and so many others I was raised on images, I was drawn to them from the start in the most intimate way, and now they are all mixed up inside me.
If my interest in family photographs was obsessive, as a pint-size subject anyway I had an easy coexistence with the camera. Now when I see a child open his face for the lens, serenely accepting the conceit, I marvel at how seamlessly the moment translates. Or I wince at her self-consciousness, the way she moves in a millisecond from regular life to junior catalog posing. Or I am startled by his lunge for the camera and eager self-appraisal the second after a photo is taken. Or, finally, I feel for those kids who reflexively balk from the one-eyed machine, dart a corner of their mouths in displeasure, or face-plant into the nearest lap. For although the copious photographs from my childhood suggest what Roland Barthes, in describing a picture of his own mother as a girl, described as “a sovereign innocence”—pure, unmediated personality—today when a flash is set off within thirty feet of me my instinct is to enumerate every available exit. I mean, there is very little, down to like Madagascan spiders and the speaking voice of Bashar al-Assad, that provokes in me a similar balance of fear and loathing.
This Is Running for Your Life Page 21
