other people's photographs
I have spread these photographs on my desk after rediscovering them amidst my own. I bought them four years ago at the Brooklyn Flea in Dumbo, selecting from a great bin of them, a few cents apiece. Banal snapshots, devoid of metadata, bereft from their context. Only one is identifiable, from a sign on the building: GREEN TRAILS FORK SHOP. A man is adjusting a sconce by the door.
At the time, one of my friends said that buying these photos was a morbid thing to do, as if I was plundering someone else’s memories. Perhaps there is something larcenous or voyeuristic about it, or something perilous in the lack of context. Maybe if I knew more, I wouldn’t have taken them. What if someone was looking for these? What if someone meant to destroy them? And how would one begin to know? Reverse image searches? Posts to social media?
A quick Google search reveals that Green Trails Inn was a bed & breakfast in Brookfield, VT, that permanently closed about a year after I bought that photograph. On Facebook, the owner posted that “My wonderful talented mother, inn keeper of Greentrails for the past 10 years, cookbook author, and extraordinary human being, unexpectedly died this summer.” The most recent post is of four framed Vermont Life magazine covers, one for each season: “I'm getting ready to put the Green Trails Inn up for sale and made these cool mixtiles out of vintage VT magazines I found in her house to put up for the open house. I kind of love them.” Not love but kind of love: rearranging banalities left by the dead, we collage our way toward a kind of mourning, stewardship, peace.
Whatever interest I have in these snapshots on my desk, however, is shorn of such comforts of provenance. All memories have fled these frames; I am some stranger. With the loss of their particulars, they all depict a larger, vaguer notion: the past as a strange supposition, the photograph as proof of some anonymous encounter. I think of Barthes’ line: “that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead.”
Laying them out again, I am less interested in the photos themselves than in why I chose them. What in that enormous box of oblivion did I put back? And why did I place these into the smaller, more intimate oblivion of my coat pocket? Was it mere amusement: that the cat appears to be hiding from the man sweeping the floor, that the school play looks so cultish, the wax figurines so bizarre? Or was it the odd detail: the text, T. E. DAMES, over the garage door? The lamppost’s impossible reflection?
In the snapshot of an old couple: was it that the man is holding up one of the roses with his hand? The oddly placed stack of bowls and used tissues? Or that his reflection creates a surprising third, a kind of stand-in for whoever took the photo?
There is something futile about these lesser archives; this unremarkable, useless stuff just meaningful enough not to be trash. As a documentarian, I am always rummaging through archives to elaborate or expand my notions of the past. But in these piles of offhanded and accidental shots, whose details time has dimmed to murk, history fades into historicity. What could I ever hope to find here?
I’m still not entirely sure, but I can’t help thinking that I’ve kept these snapshots because they articulate a process that I am constantly doing elsewhere: in arranging nameless artifacts, I arrange and name myself. In Camera Lucida, Barthes writes:
In this glum desert, suddenly a specific photograph reaches me: it animates me, and I animate it. So that is how I must name the attraction which makes it exist: an animation. The photograph is in no way animated […] but it animates me: this is what creates every adventure.
These photos no longer animate me, but assembling them on my desk does. Thumbing our way through the stuff of the world, we look for something that, in catching our eye, might reveal some hitherto hidden preference. Even on the Internet, in content’s torrent, this holds true: we save, like, and screenshot our way toward sensibilities.
At the flea market, my friend Norma bought a mannequin torso she would later paint green. It was gray like a prop, the fabricated ruins of some bygone stranger. As she held it on the subway station escalator, I took a snapshot. An adventure. Who knows where it will end up.
ben tapeworm