Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

by Richard Powers

  He continued reading:

  I said publicly on more than one occasion during my recent attempt to bring sanity to Europe that you were the only fellow I got any sense out of, and that I owed you one.

  Mays quit reading, for medical reasons. He checked the signature before replacing the letter, although such a check was superfluous. In remarkably less time than it had taken him to crawl in, he freed himself from both eaves. And going downstairs to where his mother sat over a game of patience, Mays felt solitude rushing back into the house—the smell of an old friend.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The Cheap and Accessible Print

  . . . Those who came into contact with the machine process found it increasingly difficult to swallow the presumptions of “natural law” and social differentiation which surrounded the leisure class. And so society divided; not poor against rich, but technician versus businessman, mechanic against war lord, scientist opposed to ritualist.

  —Robert L. Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers

  In one of those apocryphal stories that make up the official history of Hollywood, a strapped producer tells a director who wants to take a film crew on location to Africa: “A rock is a rock, a tree is a tree. Shoot it in Griffith Park.” The budget-conscious fellow knows that locale is created only partly by the on-screen jungle. The rest of the work is done by the million collaborators and African explorers inside the confines of the darkened theater. Reproduced on celluloid and given the lightest excuse for a narrative frame, Griffith Park can beat the deepest heart of darkness, even if the audience themselves have passed the same park on their way to see this same show.

  A sophisticated adult might spend ten hours a week in Griffith Park, know every slab of granite and each graffito. But frame the place with a camera, crop it, mask the boom mike and bordering expressway, put two boys in the mud with gray fatigues and shallow bowl helmets, and add the persuasion of an artillery barrage produced by firing pistols into a trashcan, and this same sophisticated viewer will think: “So that’s what Verdun looked like. It must have been horrible.”

  We explain such willingness to believe by pointing to the improving technology of reproduction, the growing accuracy of the mechanical facsimile. According to the theory, our machines have become so good at mimicking the sound, texture, and color of the original that it takes only the smallest suspension of disbelief to fall for the illusion. But this explanation is not enough. Boccaccio reports that Giotto’s contemporaries often mistook his frescoes, which don’t even employ rectilinear perspective, for the real thing; and viewers reportedly collapsed in dead faints at a scene in The Great Train Robbery—a film, in its best print, jerky, silent, black and white, and out of focus—where an actor takes a potshot at the lens.

  Early audiences did not fall for clumsy illusions out of mere technical naïveté. For even the hyperproduced photographs and films of the 1980s come no closer to actual verisimilitude than did Giotto. A camera cannot begin to approximate the way an eye sees the same image. It changes the scale, focus, field depth, dimensionality, perspective, field of view, resolution, surface modulation, and luminosity of the image. Film color is restricted to discrete, subtractive values of the three primaries, and only approximates the continuous spectra of human sight. Each color print is unique, its tones not reproducible at will. Technological reproduction of images has certainly improved beyond all expectation. But our most advanced images are closer to Giotto than to the image a three-dimensional object makes in the eye.

  Besides, if photographic technique were really powerful enough to make us confuse the image with its source, then we would at once say to ourselves, “Those are actors in Griffith Park,” not “Those are soldiers at Verdun.” For the park we pass daily would be so perfectly reproduced that it would force our recognition. The true power of photography and motion pictures, the trick that allows us to live imaginatively in the frame, is not the perfection of technique but the selective obscuring of it.

  The strange persuasion of photographs rests on selective accuracy wedded to selective distortion. The reproduction must be enough like the original to start a string of associations in the viewer, but enough unlike the original to leave the viewer room to flesh out and furnish the frame with belief. Photography seems particularly suited for this precarious hybrid. It produces a finger painting in light-sensitive salts, but one regulated mechanically—simultaneously the most free and determined of procedures. One’s shutter can only be open or closed, yet the resultant image can never be fully previsualized, corrected, or repeated.

  Because the lens works so much more quickly and permanently than the eye, the result surprises even the photographer in its particulars: “That sign to the left on the building—I hadn’t noticed that.” Because the process mixes mechanical control with the surprise of light, and because the product mixes technical exactitude with veiling and distortion, the viewer’s response is a cross between essayistic firmness—“This, then, the dossier, the facts”—and the invitation of fiction—“What can we make of it?”

  Early photography had to educate its audience to this mixture. Editors of old pictorial journals, attempting to introduce rotogravure prints into their copy, met enormous resistance from readers, who found the old line engravings more realistic and dramatic. But by 1939, the public could see not Queen Elizabeth nor the anemic Bette Davis nor even a silver-gray, flat, underexposed and oversized phantom, but a hybrid of all these, tailored by the individual ticket holder.

  Since inception, the medium implied that the only material difference between audience and artist was the possession of a camera. The technology first arose out of the desire of amateurs to record a scene independent of the unreliable hand. The camera obscura, an eighteenth-century tracing box, while reducing the need for special skill, still betrayed whether clever Hans or clumsy Franz did the tracing. One needed a device to place the Swiss Alps or the Grand Tour directly on the glass as it now stood. That need, and not the larger one of “seeing” better or improving on the Old Masters, precipitated the development of photography, although all the mechanisms had been known for some time.

  And when, as often happens, several people at once evolved a process whereby light left its own register on the receiving frame, there arose an art not of talent or wizardry but of pure composition, vision, and decision, not of technical execution—the machine managed that—but of conception. Yet composition, vision, and decision are precisely the skills any intelligent viewer uses when standing in front of and appraising a finished picture. The process of making the thing becomes qualitatively indistinguishable from that of appreciating it. As Walter Benjamin puts it in his seminal essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction:

  . . . the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character. The difference becomes merely functional.

  With the advent of the cheap, hand-held, self-focusing, automatic camera, even this functional difference became negligible. The burgeoning, moderately privileged classes carried at their hip a machine that made it possible to select, edit, and preserve moments of reality at their own choosing. They did so by the trunkload, until no home was complete without crateloads of photo albums on display or stashed in the attic. Every family became at once the subjects, the photographers, and the editors of these albums, making the small jump from author to authority.

  The enormous popularity of photography and movies comes from their having arrived at a gratifying hybrid of the expository and the participatory. The effect of a filmed image depends less on its content than on weighting, pacing, contrast, and other editing. Quick cuts between a man walking down the street and a woman, across town, anxiously looking at her watch affect us less in their content than their composition. We go to the matinee each Saturday less to see what perils the script inflicts this week on Pauline than to see how we and the director will get her out of them. As Benjamin states:

  The audience’s identification with the actor is r
eally an identification with the camera.

  A thinly disguised Griffith Park cannot, by technology alone, pass for Verdun. Our enjoyment of the film comes partly from our knowing it is Griffith but making it serve as the battlefield. It resembles the battlefield enough to trigger us to build a symbol table in the mind, a table indistinguishable from the photographer’s table of editorial and technical decisions. We are children, the photo, the germ of a story told us by a parent that we must elaborate, expand, repeat to ourselves to keep from falling asleep in the threatening dark. Listen to two people describe the same scene from a recent movie, complete with gesture, montage, directorial flair, but never one the same as another. Witnesses at a crime, they have forever sullied the facts with their own involvement.

  We build our own symbols into the image, encouraged by the autonomy of the machine-made image. Although photography offers the possibility of manipulation—tinting, retouching, solarizing or mis-exposing, collage, assemblage, painting on the negative—such tamperings rarely fool the eye, let alone the mind. But under the auspices of the limiting machine, viewers give credence to their own free editing.

  The nineteenth century adored the formal photographic sitting for three reasons. First, it could do, cheaply, the work of oils, which had been the reserve of the wealthy. Second, a print gave a good likeness without a painter’s mannerisms. Third, the customer enjoyed the multiple pleasure of being subject, audience, and—by commissioning, posing, and selecting the final work—auteur. The photo-buying and soon the photo-making public saw in the studio portrait the perfect accomplice for its lifelong autobiographical projects.

  With a shorter life-span and a heightened awareness of death, the nineteenth-century middle class also found in the daguerreotype and photograph more persuasive remembrances than the customary swatch of hair or inherited necklace. A newspaper ad for one portraitist’s studio urges, “Secure the shadow ere the substance fade,” and with this slogan hits upon the true selling point of the portrait: the shadow, infinitely more pliable, can mean more to the survivors than the substance ever did.

  The shadow lends itself better to the continual act of biography the viewers weave in understanding the subject. Oval portraits, religious icons, stand on dresser-altars, remembrances rounding out the interpretive biography. The nature of the image takes second place to the associations of those who took, or feel that they took, the photo: “We had this taken on Stephen’s tenth birthday, two months before he passed on. The photographer took a dozen, but I chose this one. His face clearly shows what he might have become. I made copies and sent them out to the aunts and uncles.”

  Running off copies—identical except to the trained eye—rather than decreasing the value, as with stamps and rare coins, multiplies it. There can be only one Ghent altarpiece, but there can be as many photos of Matthew on the back steps as one has the machine make. The monetary value of the Ghent altarpiece lies beyond calculating, while Matthew weighs in at twenty cents a print. But to the audience—the artistic consumer—the singularity of the altarpiece renders it unfit for anything but worship: five minutes at the museum rail until the folks behind begin “hemming”—a distancing proposition at best. On the other hand, one can possess, alter, love, own, and archive a print. When the Hindenburg explodes, it’s not enough to look over someone’s shoulder on the train and see that the thing has gone off. Buy a copy of the newspaper carrying the photo, and make the reality your own.

  While the commercial value of a thing varies inversely with its ownability, this century nevertheless has declared that the book price counts for little against the identification of ownership. The autobiographical impulse—the true measure of worth—must stamp the object with the viewer’s mark. One cannot interact with the “Mona Lisa” while standing behind the chain. But the machine has manufactured enough Betty Grables for everyone’s personal consumption.

  Certain reactionary photographers have tried to preserve the value of their prints at the expense of their consumability, creating limited editions and swearing on a stack of Stieglitzes that they destroyed the negative after fifty prints. But photos have always been the Model T of the arts. The man who wants to be buried with his five-hundred-dollar Ford because it has pulled him out of every hole so far also wants a five-dollar photo of his wife so that when she passes, he can pull her out of her hole and place her firmly on the dresser. A rock is a rock, a tree is a tree, and a profile does fine for the original.

  This ability to reproduce limitless, virtually identical images without manual intervention seems either the greatest debasement or the fullest promise of the machine age. Machines strip processes of any value aside from the result. Packing plants, cameras, and motorcars care nothing about the way from A to B; they only want to get there sitting down, in the easiest manner possible. But the most expedient path is never the most delightful: the two are by definition distinct. We must choose between the getting and the going, the journey itself or the material outcome, aesthetic transport or mechanical transportation.

  As a result, a large segment of population in each age attacks the machine as dehumanizing, moribund, ruthless, stultifying, uncontrollable, banal, ugly—in short, the worst sense of “mechanical” and “mass-produced.” To these people, an object’s value is the measure of humanity poured out and lavished on it. Reproducing destroys the unique quality and value of things. The cult of beauty judges by difficulty and effort: the clumsiest painting holds more value than the most striking photo, as the first came about through the more revealing, because more arduous, path.

  For these believers, replacing the simple and beautiful with the mechanical and expedient—tractor with plough, horse and carriage with Ford, saber with musket and then carbine—starts a process of self-replicating escalation that ends only when our tools, regardless of our own say, seek an outlet of power and mechanical efficiency in an act of violence. No one can deny that this century’s wars have been exercises of mechanical power, nor can one doubt—equivocal theories of deterrence notwithstanding—that the mere existence of fifty thousand nuclear warheads raises the possibility of annihilation above zero. But this camp takes an even stronger antitechnological stand: mass reproduction of photographic images represents and initiates those values that would destroy beauty, singularity, and all that is human and humane.

  To others squared off against this line, mass production and reproduction provide a welcome liberation from the tyranny of privileged aesthetics—an “art of five kopeks.” This camp, including Benjamin, believes that equating rareness with beauty, worshiping art in museums instead of using it in homes, keeping the market free of imitations to drive up the price of the original have for too long deprived too many people of the natural material necessary for contemplation and betterment.

  In this light, photography—mass reproduction and distribution—at last provides a means for popularizing and democratizing artistic value. For the first time in history, copying an image is no more difficult or expensive than enjoying the original. The previously hallowed barrier between maker and appreciater breaks down. The anti-mechanicals lament the debasing of author to the level of mass audience. The pro-mechanicals celebrate the elevating of mass audience to the level of authority.

  To the pro-mechanicals, rapid and unchecked proliferation of printed art, rather than negating or diluting value, promises untold practical and aesthetic worth for unchecked, proliferating mankind. As Benjamin suggests:

  . . . the newsreel offers everyone the opportunity to rise from passer-by to movie extra. In this way any man might even find himself part of a work of art . . .

  What of the anti-mechanicals’ accusation that the machine’s concentration on results over process, on ends over means leads to a state of violence, where domination grows naturally out of efficiency? That mechanical technology creates weapons of unthinkably violent potential lies beyond doubt. But pro-mechanicals counter that our spirit of using or denying machines, rather than mechanics itself, causes or avo
ids conflict. Just as proxy battles and corporate shakeouts mean to solidify—by conflict—antagonists’ holdings, so wars between national states, say the pro-mechanicals, mean to preserve and expand the material value—the uniqueness—of the state while asking the constituency to pay in doughboys.

  An art of the few rather than the many, equating beauty with commercial rareness, only perpetuates those material motives that underwrite wars. Says Benjamin:

  If the natural utilization of productive forces is impeded by the property system, the increase in technical devices . . . will press for an unnatural utilization, and this is found in war. The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ, that technology has not been sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society. . . . Imperialistic war is a rebellion of technology which collects, in the form of “human material,” the claims to which society has denied its natural material.

  The choice is clear: shoot snapshots or shoot rifles. Produce and distribute widely available images that answer the material needs of the world, run off universally available, obtainable stock certificates, or enforce the old system of aesthetic ownership with violence. We have the choice of politicizing aesthetics with the aid of cameras or falsely prettifying political reality, which, according to Benjamin, leads only to war. Treating current events as art or reading history as romantic fiction must result in revering conflict, too, as a formal beauty.

  Thus both extremes in the debate of mechanical reproduction accuse each other of stances that result in catastrophe. Between these two groups, the vast majority of us go about using cameras without realizing the consequences at stake. We make our albums, take our snapshots, at times out of a love of rare beauty, at times out of a documentary impulse, but mostly as a healing charm against death. We try, with the aid of the lens, understanding neither technical mechanism nor philosophical import, to beat the annihilation of time, shore up against loss, not just loss of the subject matter—our late aunt Sophie, or last summer’s vacation in the Balkans—but the death of the instant of vision, the death of the eye, which, without the permanent record made by the machine, gradually loses the quality revealed to it in the moment of seeing.