Before-and-after photography: histories and contexts 9781474253116, 9781474253130, 9781474253147, 1474253113

Citation preview

BEFORE-AND-AFTER PHOTOGRAPHY

BEFORE-AND-AFTER PHOTOGRAPHY Histories and Contexts

Edited by Jordan Bear and Kate Palmer Albers

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Selection and Editorial Material: Jordan Bear and Kate Palmer Albers, 2017 © Individual Chapters: Their Authors, 2017 Jordan Bear and Kate Palmer Albers have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-5311-6 ePDF: 978-1-4742-5313-0 ePub: 978-1-4742-5314-7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Cover design by Clareturner.co.uk Cover image ©House Removals LAX, E, 1976 © John Divola Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations  vii List of Contributors  xii

1 Photography’s Time Zones  1 Kate Palmer Albers and Jordan Bear

PART ONE  MEDICAL RESTORATIONS AND ENHANCEMENTS 2 Before and After: The Aesthetic as Evidence in Nineteenth-Century Medical Photography  15 Susan Sidlauskas

3 Imaging the Criminal Body: “Faces of Meth” and Galton’s Composite Photographs  43 Kristen M. Thomas-McGill

PART TWO  LANDSCAPE AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT 4 “Noise Abatement Zone”: John Divola’s Photographic Fulcrum  59 Jason E. Hill

5 The Elusive Event: Frank Gohlke in Conversation with Rebecca Senf  79 Rebecca Senf

PART THREE  NATURAL AND UNNATURAL DISASTERS­ 6 Beyond Images of Melting Ice: Hidden Histories of People, Place, and Time in Repeat Photography of Glaciers   101 Rodney Garrard and Mark Carey

7 Natural Cycles: Naoya Hatakeyama’s Photographs of the 2011 Tohoku Tsunami   123 Lisa Sutcliffe

PART FOUR  SOCIAL “IMPROVEMENTS”: ASSIMILATION AND REFORM 8 Staging Emancipation: Race and Reconstruction in American Photographic Humor  139 Tanya Sheehan

9 Facing the Binary: Native American Students in the Camera’s Lens  153 Jacqueline Fear-Segal

PART FIVE  FROM TWO TO THREE: BEFOREAND-AFTER TIME, COMPLICATED 10 Beyond “This-Caused-That”: The Temporal Complexities of Before-and-After Photographs  177 Kris Belden-Adams

Afterword  193

James Elkins Index  198

vi

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures 2.1 Henry Van der Weyde, Patient 6, a and b, 1882  22 2.2 Henry Van der Weyde, Patient 5, a and b, 1882  23 2.3 Henry Van der Weyde, Patient 4, a and b, 1882  24 2.4 Henry Van der Weyde, Mary Anderson (Mrs de Navarro) as Galatea in “Pygmalion and Galatea.”  26 2.5 Henry Van der Weyde, Patient 1, a and b, 1882  27 2.6 Henry Van der Weyde, Patient 3, a, and W. Hudson, Patient 3, b, 1882  28 2.7 Henry Van der Weyde, Patient 2, a and b, 1882  28 2.8 Illustration from William Withey Gull, “Anorexia Nervosa (Apepsia Hysterica, Anorexia Hysterica),” 1874  31 2.9 Illustration from William Withey Gull, “Anorexia Nervosa,” 1888  34 3.1 Francis Galton, Prevalent Types of Features among Men Convicted of Larceny (Without Violence), 1879  50 4.1 John Divola, House Removals LAX, E, 1976  60 4.2 George R. Fry for the Los Angeles Times, November 3, 1970  63

4.3

John Divola, LAX NAZ, Exterior Views/LAX6018F06, 1975–76  67

4.4

Maynard L. Parker, Kaiser Community Homes, Exterior, c. 1947  68

4.5

John Divola, LAX NAZ, Exteriors and Interiors, LAX1003F07, 1975–76  69

4.6

Robert Adams, Newly Completed Tract House, Colorado Springs, Colorado, 1968­  70

4.7

John Divola, LAX NAZ, Forced Entries/Site 47 (LAX2039A), 1975–76  71

4.8

John Divola, LAX NAZ, Forced Entries/Site 47 (LAX1025F03), 1975–76  72

4.9

John Divola, Forced Entry, Site 13, Interior View A, 1975  73

4.10 John Divola, Forced Entry, Site 13, Interior View B, 1975  74 5.1–5.2 Frank Gohlke, Aftermath: The Wichita Falls Tornado, 4503 McNeil, Looking North, April 14, 1979/June 1980  81 5.3–5.6 Frank Gohlke, Confluence of Pine Creek and Lewis River, 13 Miles Southeast of Mount St. Helens, Washington, 1981, 1982, 1984, 1990  89 5.7

Frank Gohlke, Visitors on the Rim of Mount St. Helens, 1990  90

5.8

Frank Gohlke, Ten Minutes Later, 1990  91

5.9

Frank Gohlke, Ten Minutes in North Texas, #2—Clay County, Texas, 1995  93

5.10

Frank Gohlke, Ten Minutes in North Texas, #6—Clay County, Texas, 1995  94

6.1

Repeat Photography of Grinnell Glacier, Glacier National Park, USA  107

viii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

6.2–6.3 Left: Lake Palcacocha, Peru, 1939. Right: Lake Palcacocha, Peru, 2013  110 6.4

Taboche and Khumbu Valley in the 1950s  112

8.1

Unknown artist, “King Abraham before and after Issuing the Proclamation,” 1862  143

8.2

A. S. Morse and William A. Peaslee, Photograph of Private Hubbard Pryor before Enlistment in 44th US Colored Troops, October 10, 1864  146

8.3

A. S. Morse and William A. Peaslee, Photograph of Private Hubbard Pryor after Enlistment in 44th US Colored Troops, October 10, 1864  147

8.4

“The Escaped Slave” and “The Escaped Slave in the Union Army,” 1864  150

9.1 Sioux Boys as They Appeared on Arrival at Carlisle Indian School, October 6, 1879  160 9.2 Sioux Girls as They Appeared on Arrival at Carlisle Indian School, October 6, 1879  161 9.3

Sioux boys at Carlisle Indian School, 1880  163

9.4

Sioux girls at Carlisle Indian School, 1880  163

9.5

Before: Navajo, Tom Torlino, 1882; After: Navajo, Tom Torlino, 1884  164

9.6 Navajo Students at the Carlisle Indian School, Before: October 1882  165 9.7

After: Some Months Later  165

9.8

Carlisle Indian School Catalog, 1895, with Before and After Inserts of Chauncey Yellow Robe  167

9.9

Class on Hiawatha at the Carlisle Indian School, Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1901  168

9.10

N. Scott Momaday, Carlisle, 2012  170

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

ix

10.1 Alexander Gardner, Portrait of Lewis Payne, 1865  181 10.2 Eadweard Muybridge, The Horse in Motion: “Sallie Gardner,” June 19, 1878  186 10.3 Detail of the Eleventh and Twelfth Photos of Figure 10.2  187 10.4 Harold Edgerton, Death of a Light Bulb, 1936  188  A.1 Unknown photographer, Unknown title, c. 1920s–1930s  194  A.2 Unknown photographer, Unknown title, c. 1920s–1930s  195

Plates 1 “Theresa,” Faces of Meth. 2 John Divola, House Removals LAX, A, 1976. 3 The Grosse Aletschgletscher in 1856 and 2011. 4 Taboche and Khumbu Valley in 2012. 5 Naoya Hatakeyama, Imaizumi, July 2004. 6 Naoya Hatakeyama, Imaizumi, April 2011. 7 Naoya Hatakeyama, Kesen-cho, Imaizumi Sanbonmatsu, October 27, 2002. 8 Naoya Hatakeyama, Takata, Matsubara plage/beach, August 4, 2002. 9 Naoya Hatakeyama, Kesencho, Imaizumi, Nakamachi, March 19, 2011. 10 Naoya Hatakeyama, Kesencho, Imaizumi, Nakai, sanctuaire/shrine, Kitanojinja Imaizumi Tenmangu, August 7, 2002.

x

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

11 Naoya Hatakeyama, Kesencho, Imaizumi, Nakai, sanctuaire/shrine, Kitanojinja Imaizumi Tenmangu, June 14, 2011. 12 Installation shot of the Venice Architecture Biennale with Naoya Hatakeyama. 13 A. S. Morse and William A. Peaslee, Before the Proclamation, c. 1863. 14 A. S. Morse and William A. Peaslee, After the Proclamation, c. 1863. 15 Lalage Snow, Private Chris MacGregor. We Are The Not Dead series, 2010. 16 Lalage Snow, Lance Corporal David McLean. We Are The Not Dead series, 2010.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

xi

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Kate Palmer Albers is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Arizona. She is the author of Uncertain Histories: Accumulation, Inaccessibility, and Doubt in Contemporary Photography (University of California Press, 2015). Her recent articles address photography and digital abundance, multi-gigapixel photography, Gerhard Richter’s Atlas, and contemporary artists’ archival projects. Her current online writing project, Circulation/Exchange: Moving Images in Contemporary Art, is devoted to contemporary art practices that engage with photographic images as they move through physical and immaterial space, and is supported by a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Jordan Bear is Associate Professor of History of Art at the University of Toronto. His recent book is entitled Disillusioned: Victorian Photography and the Discerning Viewer (Penn State University Press, 2015). His work focuses on the relationship between visual representation and the production of knowledge, and has appeared in Grey Room, History of Photography, Visual Studies, and numerous other publications. He is currently writing about the improbable interaction between history painting’s decline and photography’s rise in the nineteenth century. Kris Belden-Adams is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Mississippi, and specializes in the history of photography. She received her doctorate from the City University of New York—Graduate Center in 2010. In addition to researching the temporal dimensions of the medium, Dr. BeldenAdams’s recent scholarship examines the selfie, and the intersections of sewage and photography in the decades following the medium’s birth. Her work has been published by the Metropolitan Museum or Art, and in Photographies, Afterimage, Southern Studies, The International Journal of Technology, Knowledge and Society, and Cabinet. Mark Carey is Associate Professor of History and Environmental Studies in the Robert D. Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon. His research links environmental history and the history of science through studies of climate change,

glacier–society interactions, water resource management, natural disasters, mountaineering, and public health—particularly in the Peruvian Andes. He has a coedited book The High-Mountain Cryosphere: Environmental Changes and Human Risks (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and his book In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers: Climate Change and Andean Society (Oxford University Press, 2010) won the Elinor Melville Award for the best book on Latin American environmental history from the American Historical Association’s Conference on Latin American History. He has also won the Leopold-Hidy Prize for the best article in the journal Environmental History in 2007. His current work on the history of glaciology is funded by a National Science Foundation CAREER grant (#1253779). James Elkins is E.C. Chadbourne Chair of art history, theory, and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He grew up in Ithaca, New York. For the last twenty-five years he has lived in Chicago; he got a graduate degree in painting, and then switched to Art History, got another graduate degree, and went on to do the PhD in Art History, which he finished in 1989. (All from the University of Chicago.) Since then he has been teaching in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Jim’s interests include microscopy (with a Zeiss Nomarski differential interference microscope and Anoptral phase contrast), stereo photography (with a Realist camera), playing piano (contemporary “classical” music), and (whenever possible) winter ocean diving. His writing focuses on the history and theory of images in art, science, and nature. Some of his books are exclusively on fine art (What Painting Is, Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?). Others include scientific and nonart images, writing systems, and archeology (The Domain of Images, On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them), and some are about natural history (How to Use Your Eyes). His most recent books are What Photography Is, written against Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, and Art Critiques: A Guide. Jacqueline Fear-Segal is a professor of American history and culture at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. Her research interests and writing are wide ranging and interdisciplinary with a focus on Native North America. Author of White Man’s Club: Schools, Race, and the Struggle of Indian Acculturation (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), which won the American Studies Network Best Book in 2008, she also edited Indigenous Bodies: Reviewing, Relocation, Reclaiming (SUNY Press, 2013) and Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Indigenous Histories, Memories, and Reclamations (University of Nebraska Press, 2016). Currently, she is completing a monograph on the Carlisle Indian School photographs: Re-viewing and Re-framing the Colonial Bequest of Indian School Photographs. Her next project will seek to build a national picture of Native North American presence in Britain up to the present day by exploring the legacies left by Native travelers. In 2006, she cofounded and continues to corun the Native Studies Research Network UK.

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

xiii

Rodney Garrard is a doctoral candidate at the Centre for Development and Environment (CDE), University of Bern, Switzerland. His dissertation is exploring landscape dynamics in Sagarmatha National Park, Nepal. Rodney used repeat photography to examine the ongoing landscape transformation in the Everest region and assess the impacts of such change on selected environmental services, and provide insight into the underlying drivers of land use and cover change and what this means for the sustainability of the region. Rodney has also carried out research in the Peruvian Andes, the Swiss Alps, and New Zealand’s Southern Alps. Jason E. Hill is Assistant Professor in Art History at the University of Delaware. He is the coeditor, with Vanessa R. Schwartz, of Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News (Bloomsbury, 2015). His book on Ad Reinhardt, Weegee, and the PM news picture is forthcoming with University of California Press. His essays on photography and adjacent media have appeared in American Art, Oxford Art Journal, and Études Photographiques, and in a number of edited volumes. Rebecca Senf is the Chief Curator at the Center for Creative Photography and the Norton Family Curator of Photography, a joint appointment between the Center for Creative Photography and the Phoenix Art Museum. Throughout her educational career, Senf focused on the history of photography. Her undergraduate degree in Art History is from the University of Arizona; her MA and PhD, also in Art History, were awarded by Boston University. While in Boston she worked on the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s major exhibition Ansel Adams from The Lane Collection, for which she coauthored the exhibition catalogue. In 2012, her book Reconstructing the View: The Grand Canyon Photographs of Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe was released by University of California Press. Her curatorial interests range from contemporary work about family to Modernist American photography, and have been presented in large and small exhibitions, both in physical space and online. Tanya Sheehan is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Art at Colby College. The author of Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in NineteenthCentury America (Penn State University Press, 2011), she has edited and coedited several collections of essays, including Photography, History, Difference (Dartmouth College Press, 2014), Photography and Its Origins (Routledge, 2015), and the forthcoming Grove Art Guide to Photography (2016). Tanya Sheehan is currently a research associate at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University as well as the editor of the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art Journal. Susan Sidlauskas is Professor in the Art History Department of Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, where she teaches the history and theory of modern art. She is affiliated with the Center for Cultural Analysis there, where she cofounded a

xiv

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

working group on the medical humanities. She has written on the work of Degas, Ingres, Sargent, Vuillard, Sickert, Cindy Sherman, and Manet, and is currently working on two books: John Singer Sargent and the Physics of Touch and The Medical Portrait, a study of Anglo-American patients’ photographic portraits, c. 1885–1945. She is the author of Body, Place and Self in Nineteenth-Century Painting (Cambridge University Press, 2000), a study of the representation of interiority; author of Cézanne’s Other: The Portraits of Hortense (University of California Press, 2009), winner of the Robert Motherwell Book Prize from the Dedalus Foundation; and coauthor, with Donna Gustafson, of the exhibition catalogue Striking Resemblance: The Changing Art of Portraiture (Prestel, 2014). She was a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow. Lisa Sutcliffe is Curator of Photography and Media Arts at the Milwaukee Art Museum. In Milwaukee, she organized Postcards from America: Milwaukee (2014), Light Borne in Darkness: Highlights from the Photography Collection (2015), Penelope Umbrico: Future Perfect (2016), and has coordinated Question Bridge (2014), and Larry Sultan: Here and Home organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2015). She is currently working on Rineke Dijkstra: Rehearsals (2016) and Marco Breuer: Work (2017). From 2007 to 2012 she served as Assistant Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where she organized Naoya Hatakeyama: Natural Stories in association with the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography (2012), and The Provoke Era: Postwar Japanese Photography (2009). She has organized film screenings, lectures, and panels with internationally acclaimed artists, and has written about contemporary art and photography for diverse publications. Kristen M. Thomas-McGill is a graduate of Wittenberg University (Springfield, Ohio) and Birkbeck, University of London. She resides in Kentucky with her husband.

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

xv

1 PHOTOGRAPHY’S TIME ZONES KATE PALMER ALBERS AND JORDAN BEAR

Among the most significant orthodoxies in the recent historiography of photography  is a shared conviction that a single, authoritative account of the medium is both impossible and undesirable. A tenet of much of the most innovative  scholarship since the 1970s, this commitment to a plurality of histories  is summed up in the scholar John Tagg’s haunting disavowal: “Photography as such has no identity…its history has no unity. It is a flickering across a field of institutional spaces. It is this field we must study, not photography itself.”1 Tagg’s renunciation may be most poignant to the artists, scholars, and curators who have operated from within the institutions of art, laboring to build a respectable institutional home for the medium, often by elevating the aesthetic accomplishments of individuals. The abandonment of a master narrative is, as Geoffrey Batchen argues, “a particular conception of photography that is now central to Anglo-American postmodern thinking in general.”2 One of the chief effects of this rejection of facile unity, at least in scholarship, has been an expansion beyond the predominantly art historical framework that preoccupied at least the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, toward a discourse that includes a plurality of disciplinary perspectives on “the photographic.” The multiplicity of photography’s histories is no longer a mere aspiration; it is now a premise that underwrites scholarly examination of an extraordinary range of photographic “flickering.” Bibliometric studies attest to the diversity of fields in which the study of photography has been enlisted.3 But even as the impact of this diversity is demonstrated, it is impeded by the continued disciplinary insularity of the academic landscape, which is still dotted by specialized and idiosyncratic silos. And precisely because of photography’s lack of identity outside of specific discursive and institutional contexts, the art historian, the climatologist, and the sociologist appear to have no common idiom for discussing their photographic

researches. We do not attempt to create such a universal language with this volume. Our aim is neither to homogenize photography’s role in distinct contexts nor to point to some “immanent” features of the photographic medium through which unities may be drawn. We do, however, propose that there are some bases from which comparative histories of photography can be initiated. As such, we focus on before-and-after photographs as a strategy so commonplace that virtually every disparate photographic discourse has enlisted it. We identify before-and-after photography as a device that both inscribes and interrogates the conventions of cause and effect, development and degeneration, and referent and representation. It has a rich history beginning in the nineteenth century, but also begs philosophical and conceptual questions that are now at the heart of contemporary debate. The particular areas where before-and-after photos are most central are notably timely ones: the visual impact of climate change, medical therapies, war, and the politics of race and assimilation. Yet, the early instances of before-and-after photography are not simply naïve foils to more overtly critical recent interventions. The promiscuity of the mechanism is not readily mapped onto a linear narrative, as the knowingly critical carte de visite pairs from the 1860s and the oblivious realism of contemporary “makeovers” jointly attest. At the same time, focusing on this endemic practice preserves the fundamental variety of these histories. The particular deployments of this device in any given history reveal some of its users’ most critical assumptions about photography, or, conversely, their queries about its limits. The omnipresence of before-and-after photographs in a wide range of disciplines allows for a unique approach: to use a specific photographic device to place into dialogue the diversity of research on photography that is taking place in relatively isolated ways in so many areas of scholarship. Doing so, however, demands that we first explain our terms: What distinguishes before-and-after photography from its apparently close relatives, particularly the “then-and-now” pair, and the series? Establishing what is unique brings into focus two broader conceptual dimensions key to the history of photography at large. Before-and-after photographs, we propose, often obtain their special identity from the ways in which the photographs relate both to one another, and, most intriguingly, to a third, generally unseen, event. This missing pivot is the implicit source of the development whose outer markers are imaged in the before-and-after pair. The perceived gap between these images employs—and troubles—two kinds of photographic conventions, both of whose continual interrogation have been central features of the historiography of the medium. First, these pairs underline the widely held temporal expectations for photographs and their capacity to render duration visible and legible, to serve as an empirically reliable representation of the ordering force of causation in the natural world. Second, the pairs, while fundamentally photographic, derive their power from a necessary reliance on the viewer’s imagination of what happens outside of the photographic frame. As such,

2

Before-and-After Photography

before-and-after pairs carry an implicit critique of common assumptions about photographic indexicality, for the referent that can be said to have caused the photograph to exist leaves no direct trace in the representation itself. Before-andafter photographs foreground and interrogate with special acuity the temporal and referential dimensions by which other modes of photography are silently governed. No major philosophical account of time was more indebted to the temporal relations among multiple photographic images than the one advanced by Henri Bergson just after the turn of the twentieth century. Bergson’s conception of time was in part a recoil from the serial photographs of movement pioneered by ÉtienneJules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge. In these chronophotographs, Bergson located a broader symptom of modernity’s inability to conceive of duration. As the historian Anson Rabinbach has put it, “Marey thus confirmed Bergson’s diagnosis of the crisis of all perceptual systems: objective time was infinitely divisible; moments of experience were organized spatially, that is, the reduction of quality to quantity.”4 The arrogance of the supposed “objectivity” of these snapshots had, for Bergson, deleterious effects upon human perception, for isolating these moments changes their nature. Although never mentioned by name, Bergson must have Marey in mind when he claims that along the whole of this movement we can imagine possible stoppages: these are what we call positions of the moving body, or the points by which it passes. But with these positions, even with an infinite number of them, we shall never make movement. They are not parts of movement, they are so many stoppages of it, they are, one might say, only supposed stopping places. The moving body is never really in any of the points; the most we can say is that it passes through them.5 Accordingly, one recent account has gone so far as to assert that “photography is the perfect anti-Bergsonian technology because it records through segmentation.”6 Before-and-after pairs, however, dispense with the pretence of representing intervals altogether. Indeed, it is precisely these “stoppages” or “positions” that they eschew. They literalize what Bergson claims is the ultimate shortcoming of photographic representation in particular and materialistic science generally: “As to what happens in the interval between the moments, science is no more concerned with that than are our common intelligence, our senses and our language: it does not bear on the interval, but only on the extremities.”7 Beforeand-after pairs refuse to represent these intervals, except as absent events that have escaped representation, thus pointing to the limitations of their own medium. They invoke those dimensions of the world which escape both the camera and the mind. Rejecting the possibility of depicting a comprehensive, step-by-step unfolding of an event in time was at the center of Bergson’s intellectual project. In his Creative

PHOTOGRAPHY’S TIME ZONES

3

Evolution (1907), Bergson sought to dispel mechanistic versions of evolution, like Herbert Spencer’s notion of “survival of the fittest,” that produced dubious social and ethical outcomes. As Jimena Canales has noted, Bergson “questioned Spencer’s mechanistic evolution by first questioning the basic techniques of representation used in the sciences by everyone ranging from evolutionary scientists to astronomers.”8 Evolutionary models came, over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, to inform, if not dominate, virtually all areas of Western thought. And so Bergson’s unraveling of its representational—and conceptual—conventions guides us to some of the other most compelling dimensions of before-and-after photographs. Photographic representations are very often arguments about progress and decay, similarity and difference. These arguments, which can be submerged into the “neutrality” of the medium in single photographs, are made palpable by the before-and-after pair. Such pairs are explicitly concerned with the idea of change, but from their earliest uses these photographs can evince skepticism. In pairs whose constituent photos are ostensibly separated by a long duration, we see telltale evidence of a much shorter period, such that the interval between the two images is not months or years, but just long enough for a costume change to take place. In the infamous case of the social reformer Dr. Thomas Barnardo, before-and-after cartes de visite were produced to show the transformation of a street urchin into a proper little bourgeois gentleman.9 When the photographs were revealed to have been staged in the studio—and almost certainly made during the same sitting—the public was predictably indignant. Barnardo’s charity suffered a collapse in donations, a plunge generally attributed to outrage over his offense against photographic “authenticity.” But Barnardo had violated a very particular set of expectations about paired photographs: that they were well suited to measure progress attest to an affirmative of middle-class altruism. It was the temporal deception, as much as the clumsy studio props and tattered garments, that was at issue. The legibility of a presumed relationship in time was the backbone of a system of visual representation underwriting some of society’s most fundamental beliefs about itself. These beliefs are registered not only in the temporal realm but also in the photographic image’s fraught referential relationship to the “real” object or event it depicts. This linkage has always been a cornerstone of photographic theory, oscillating across an evidentiary spectrum, from a positivist view of a transparent connection between the two to a thorough skepticism of the medium’s ability to tell any kind of truth. Before-and-after pairs disrupt each end of this belief spectrum, paradoxically, by embracing both of them. They depend as much upon the evidentiary aspects of visible temporal bookends as they do upon acknowledging that the more powerful way of articulating the central event is to leave it unseen. The before-and-after pair relies on the imaginative participation

4

Before-and-After Photography

of the viewer, thereby diverting attention from the “proof ” of the photographs toward the viewers’ own—necessarily subjective—interpretation. It is the philosopher and semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce whose propositions  about indexicality are most often invoked in photographic theory. Peirce’s expression of the relationship between a photographic image or object, and the real world referent to which it points, is often only narrowly interpreted, but its capacious view of indexicality is particularly worth detailing in the context of the limits and possibilities of the before-and-after pair. Certainly the most common mode of conceptualizing this relationship is what Peirce describes as a responsive physical relationship. This is an attribute that makes photographs powerfully seductive in the first place: as objects made real, literally come into being, by direct physical response to an existing yet external body. In our most common photographic experience, there is a visible and conceptual alignment between what we see in the photograph and what we can imagine more or less having been “seen” by the photographer. Peirce also established the idea of an index as a type of pointing: both photographs and spoken language can demonstratively say, look at “this” or “that.” In this mode, an index could be anything that focuses attention, including, for example, a loud noise or a startling event. Yet, a viewer’s attention is directed, and focused, by more than just a pointing index finger. And, often, the more interesting photographs document or suggest a stranger relationship than the most straightforward configuration of indexicality suggests. Most intriguingly for the present discussion, Peirce writes that an index “marks the junction between two portions of experience.”10 He elaborates, “Some indices are more or less detailed directions from what the hearer is to do in order to place himself in direct experiential or other connection with the thing meant.” The curious disruption of the visibly seen event that marks the heart of the before-and-after pair seems quite suited to this last configuration. If, in these pairs, “the thing meant” is an imaginative understanding of an event we cannot witness, the before-and-after pair marks with special insights that “junction between two portions of experience.” Further, we could observe that the two portions of experience that interest Peirce might be defined in different ways: (1) the more literal visual portions—the experience before and the experience after—or (2) the seen and the imagined. More recently, David Green and Joanna Lowry have suggested that the very process of making a photograph is “a kind of performative gesture which points to an event in the world.”11 While the authors’ interest is in a kind of captured invisibility within a single frame, the notion of using photography to point at something that can’t be seen is a central function of the before-and-after pair. These pairs, then, function in multiply indexical ways and themselves point to a more expansive framework of interpreting how we understand our perceptions as they emerge from various photographic cues.

PHOTOGRAPHY’S TIME ZONES

5

Perhaps not surprisingly, many of the more conceptually charged interventions into the before-and-after device turn precisely on these common expectations. And, as the following essays attest, any disruption of the viewer’s assumptions regarding before-and-after pairs is reason for pause. In the late twentieth century, amid broader shifts in thinking about the relationship between photography and a truthful record, we see a burgeoning of artistic interest in deploying this device in order to subvert an expected temporal or visible change. This volume is not a complete survey of before-and-after photography, and omissions are perhaps inevitable. But some exclusions are also the result of taking seriously the particular criteria of temporality and indexicality that we have already adduced. For instance, one very significant body of material that might seem to be a close cousin to the before-and-after pair is what has come to be known and widely practiced as rephotography, which also generally consists of pairs of images. The late-1970s contributions of the Rephotographic Survey (a team that included Mark Klett, Ellen Manchester, JoAnn Verburg, and others) pioneered a method of revisiting landscape, which has been both influential to later practitioners and well documented by critics and historians.12 Historically oriented by nature, rephotography often tracks a timeline of human development through the landscape. Importantly, though, rephotography operates in the zone of “thenand-now,” a more temporally ambiguous and longer-lasting view of the passage of time that is not dependent on the presence of a single transformative event demarcated by the temporal bookends of before-and-after images. Rephotography is typically not an intention from the outset, but rather becomes one in looking back to examine a subject that has, for one reason or another, gained historical or cultural interest. Beyond rephotography, we have left a number of stones unturned for future explorers of this terrain. Not least of these are some of the most common iterations of the before-and-after trope today: dieting and beauty. The hashtag #beforeandafter on the photo-sharing app Instagram yields, as of this writing, over three million posts, most commonly depicting weight loss, hairstyling, and makeup application. Beyond typical portrait views of predominantly female bodies and heads, particular body parts are often highlighted: eyebrows, lips, bare bellies, and bikini-clad bottoms join the relentless parade of physical display and underscore the powerful effect of the beauty industry on the self-perceptions, aspirations, and publicly shared personal documentations of millions. The visual narrative of personal transformation is unquestionably one of progress and improvement; it goes without saying that the end result is believed to be preferable to the starting point. Whatever process or length of time it took the subject to attain more voluminous tresses, red-carpet-worthy makeup, or a tighter, leaner body is collapsed into the side-by-side pair of magical transformation: the ugly duckling is transformed into a swan and viewers are spared the dirty process of becoming. In these cases, the before-and-after trope works to hide the intervening

6

Before-and-After Photography

series of events: the less the viewer thinks about the visually absent period of time, confirmed by its absence as a private matter, the better it is. The images have to exist as a pair: the “before” can only be tolerated as a public post in the presence of the triumphant “after,” which both confirms and eradicates the personal shame of the “before.” Beyond these generic exclusions, though, all of our contributors have been at liberty to define the parameters of before-and-after photography for themselves, and these boundaries have been drawn in irregular, often incommensurable ways. As a practice in collaborative scholarship, we find these irregularities vital and relish the indisputably rough edges around the definition of what constitutes a before-and-after pair and, more importantly, how they come to make meaning in varied ways. Our contributors have pushed our thinking, and this collection, together, reflects a vibrant intellectual spectrum of approaches to a photographic device so ubiquitous and long lasting, and so intertwined with the fundamental complexities of photography, that it has been, until now, hidden in plain view. The essays are divided into themed sections, with each theme approached by two essays. The first section, Medical Restorations and Enhancements, begins with Susan Sidlauskas’s consideration of the before-and-after pair as it appeared in nineteenth-century medical photography of women diagnosed with neurasthenia. The utter transformation of their bodies from gauntly malnourished to full cheeked and coiffed, demonstrated not only the healing effects of Dr. William Playfair’s “rest cure” but also a performative act between subject and photographer to mark a triumphant restoration to health. Sidlauskas notes that the “before” depictions are “virtually annulled” by the graciously posed “after.” For the maximum effectiveness of the before-and-after pair, the sick woman, who began as the only version of herself that either the doctor or the photographer would recognize, must come to “mis-resemble” herself as much as possible, without becoming wholly unrecognizable. In the case of recovery from a potentially recurring illness, the “after” photograph “discourages us from anticipating the future” and offers, instead, a perpetual present of newly achieved health. Far from the relatively private spaces of nineteenth-century white, uppermiddle-class psychiatric treatments is the very recent and public display of faces ravaged by the stereotypically lower-class vice of methamphetamine use. Kristen M. Thomas-McGill examines these visibly deteriorating bodies, and considers the ethical dimensions of their public visibility as part of a “Faces of Meth” drug awareness campaign in the US Pacific Northwest. The Multnomah County, Oregon, sherriff ’s office distributes online and in-school programs the public record mug shots of known meth users, always arranged in a pair and, significantly, noting the elapsed time between the two photographs. Thomas-McGill suggests that the revelation of a specific elapsed time—always understood as too short a time for the visible decline to have occurred naturally—produces a reading not just of beforeand-after but also of an unnatural cause and effect resulting in an abject bodily

PHOTOGRAPHY’S TIME ZONES

7

transformation. The makers of the photographs explored in the two essays in this section relied upon the temporal conventions of rehabilitation and degeneration, as well as the legibility of traces that the passage of time inscribes upon the bodies of subjects, in order to offer divergent claims about human health. In the second section, Landscape and the Built Environment, before-and-after pairs cannot be readily understood within the conventional temporalities of visual evidence. In these instances, the “after” serves to puzzle or confound the “before”; the pair together begins to undermine its own structure. Specifically, both Jason E. Hill and Rebecca Senf consider artists’ use of the before-and-after pair in the realm of landscape. Hill investigates John Divola’s LAX Noise Abatement Zone series (1975–76), in which, from one image to the next, a house simply disappears. Hill points to the viewer’s “hunt for some generative event” to explain such a dramatic erasure, which in this case is the burgeoning Los Angeles aviation industry. Of one home’s unsettling expurgation he writes: “That it would have proceeded so neatly, so deliberately—threatens the whole edifice: if a house will be our ‘proof ’ of stability, then its deliberate erasure will be ‘proof ’ of that same stability’s terrifying contingency.” Contrasting Divola’s missing subjects with the dramatic photojournalistic images that ostensibly captured the same subject, Hill points not just to the “convulsive built environment” but to a consideration of “noise” as a photographic metaphor. Akin to Divola’s interest in subverting the expected positive progression of the before-and-after-pair, Frank Gohlke’s work reveals a spirit of pleasure in disrupting a viewer’s visual habits. Rebecca Senf, in her interview with Gohlke, homes in on three projects: the aftermath of a tornado in Texas (and the aftermath of the aftermath), the natural consequences of the eruption of Mount Saint Helens, and the subtle shifts over a ten-minute span of time in the prairie. Each of these bodies of work considers the conceptually charged relationship between the photographic medium and a viewer’s sense of the passage of time. The selected projects, and the conversation around them, elucidate Gohlke’s determined indeterminacy about the relationship of his medium to time. As the artist himself puts it, “The photograph has this way of supposedly stapling the moment in which it’s made to the continuum of time…but not necessarily.” The next section, Unnatural and Natural Disasters, addresses a different variety of photographic and interpretive challenges to the culturally conditioned expectations of the before-and-after pair. Writing at a time of urgent and widespread concern about climate change, Mark Carey and Rodney Garrard seek to expand the goals and parameters of glacial before-and-after photography beyond the familiar illustrations of global warming through visible ice loss. As they demonstrate, overemphasis on seemingly simple sequential before-andafter narratives that focus solely on the ice itself can obscure the more complex scientific, cultural, and human realities of those losses. Such misleading accounts only serve to widen the chasm between the public’s views of nature and of

8

Before-and-After Photography

culture in those areas most directly affected. Garrard and Carey’s essay acts as a corrective to our understanding of this currently very visible variety of­ before-and-after pairs, locating them within a more critical discourse. Much of the anticipatory framework of before-and-after photography relies upon imagining a future “after” at the moment the “before” half is conceived. However, Lisa Sutcliffe’s essay demonstrates how many individual photographs only become paired retrospectively, in the wake of an unexpected and, in her case study, traumatic event. The photographic documentation of the aftermath of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami on Japan’s eastern coast was extraordinary in scope. Sutcliffe focuses on the deeply personal photographic gestures of the artist Naoya Hatakeyama as he came to terms with the impossibility of adequate representation of the aftermath in his own hometown. New meanings came to be embedded in his formerly private photographs, now reconfigured as documents of an irretrievable, distant “before.” In Hatakeyama’s 2012 publication Kesengawa, Sutcliffe argues, we see that a “shocking transformation in style as the book progresses illuminates the altered state of the photographer himself,” extending the notion of before-and-after not just to encompass stylistic choice but also to reflect the aesthetic shifts necessary to account for such deeply internal loss. The fourth section of essays, Social “Improvements,” locates complexity in even the most fundamental of before-and-after tropes: those that promise or document personal advances or triumphs. Tanya Sheehan reinscribes the complex emotional responses of a range of viewers onto a before-and-after pair of photographs of a young African-American boy who evidently reacts to the news of the Emancipation Proclamation with a broad, toothy grin. The apparently instant transformation, Sheehan argues, reveals a culturally and historically specific humor at work. Though these images speak to audiences sympathetic to emancipation differently from those hostile to it, they capitalize in both cases on effacing “the difficult work, messiness, and uncertainty associated with transitioning from bondage to freedom.” The pair “makes invisible” the real, lived challenges of an individual’s social, economic, familial, and emotional experience. In her essay on the Carlisle Indian School, Jacqueline Fear-Segal further addresses the effects on both subjects and viewers of the promise of photography to affect cultural transformation. The School sought to be a template for the national improvement of “savage” Native Americans into more easily recognized models of mainstream American citizenship. While the de-exoticized “after” photographs served as indexical evidence of the School’s effective training, the “before” images more readily found a place in a popular imagination governed by stereotypes. The successful assimilation of the Indian sitters vied for priority with the elegiac “vanishing” on which so much deleterious policy was based, a tension that registers with particular force in these haunting photographs. The final two contributions, from Kris Belden-Adams and James Elkins, go farthest in questioning the before-and-after parameters we have set forth, and

PHOTOGRAPHY’S TIME ZONES

9

thus offer questions and opportunities for further study. Belden-Adams departs from the visual duality that defines the other contributions with her attention to photographer Lalage Snow’s work depicting the temporal experience of Scottish soldiers during combat deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan. Snow photographs her subjects three times: before, during, and after deployment. Moving through the trio of images, viewers easily see how youthful features are visually reconfigured: jaws and cheekbones become defined, and their new lean muscularity symbolically aligned, Belden-Adams notes, with the hardening of war experience. A soldier “cannot return to this temporal ‘otherness’ of his past naivety,” she suggests, and a viewer’s relationship to his or her ordeal is shaped as well by knowledge of Snow’s interest in post-traumatic stress syndrome. The narrative expectation of the classic before-and-after device is spelled out through the addition of the third (middle) photograph and, importantly, this third photograph also reconfigures a viewer’s expectation of an ongoing future for this soldier: here, time does not stop, and viewers are invited to imagine the subject forward through time. Finally, James Elkins reflects on the relationship of the before-and-after pair to the general condition of photography, ultimately proposing that these pairs offer an extreme version of a more common form of photographic looking. Photography’s temporality is always multiple, encompassing the moment of its execution and also the moment of its subsequent contemplation. The strenuousness of comparison that before-and-after pairs demand of their beholders affects a peculiar selfawareness on the part of the viewer. The temporal vectors that encircle the viewer of these pairs are especially marked, but what they indicate is a central—if often submerged—facet of photography in general. The visible and the unseen, the certainties of proof and the imagined processes of transformation: these contrasts are the heart of the before-and-after device. If there is any universal feature of the before-and-after pair, it is their reliance on a viewer’s imaginative investment in the temporal dimension offered in the visual exchange. Collectively, the essays in this volume shed light on the manifold means this perpetual photographic device has been developed, deployed, upended, and subverted, in ways that, by turns, may confirm or unravel a viewer’s sense of the photographic. The omnipresence of before-and-after photography across the widely dispersed discursive realms investigated in this collection is not meant to fashion a new (or rehabilitate an old) dominant history. Indeed, the most obvious result of bringing these studies together is to highlight the impossibility of such a unity. Yet, the regularity with which before-and-after photographs appear shows how these varying discourses have responded disparately to the availability of a shared structure. These responses shed light on the particular temporal and indexical attributes that have been variously imputed to photography by its users. In these responses we find not the rudiments of a more expansive master narrative, but

10

Before-and-After Photography

rather the potential for expanding histories of photography that are comparative in orientation. If photography is to escape the stranglehold of essentialism, it will be by locating its relative positions within a rapidly expanding discursive universe.

Notes 1 John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 118.

2 Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 11.

3 Anne L. Buchanan and Jean-Pierre V. M. Hérubel, “Clio’s Other Photographic

Literature: Searching the Historical Journal Literature Using America: History and Life to Explore the History of Photography,” Clio 31, no. 2 (2012): 199–209.

4 Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 113.

5 Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T. E. Hulme (1912; Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1949), 42.

6 Michael S. Roth, “Photographic Ambivalence and Historical Consciousness,” History and Theory 48, no. 4 (2009): 85.

7 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (London: Macmillan, 1911), 348.

8 Jimena Canales, The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 285.

9 Seth Koven, “Dr. Barnardo’s ‘Artistic Fictions’: Photography, Sexuality, and the Ragged Child in Victorian London,” Radical History Review 1997, no. 69 (1997): 7–45.

10 C. S. Peirce, “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs,” in Justus Buchler, ed.,

Philosophical Writings of Peirce (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), 108–109.

11 David Green and Joanna Lowry, “From Presence to the Performative: Rethinking

Photographic Indexicality,” in David Green, ed., Where Is the Photograph? (Brighton: University of Brighton and Kent Institute of Art and Design, 2003), 48.

12 Mark Klett, Ellen Manchester, and JoAnn Verburg, Second View: The Rephotographic Survey Project (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990).

PHOTOGRAPHY’S TIME ZONES

11

PART ONE

MEDICAL RESTORATIONS AND ENHANCEMENTS

2 BEFORE AND AFTER The Aesthetic as Evidence in Nineteenth-Century Medical Photography SUSAN SIDLAUSKAS

“The worn and wasted, often bedridden woman who has broken down, either from some sudden shock, such as grief, or money losses, or excessive mental or bodily strain.” This is how one British physician described a typical patient of his in 1882. She was suffering from what he called “neurasthenic disease,” an affliction that he considered “multiform, strange, and misleading.” That same year, the doctor commissioned photographs of six of those “worn and wasted” women, whom he had treated with a method gleaned from a Philadelphia doctor he much admired. The photographs would later be displayed by the British physician at a medical conference in London, presumably to affirm the efficacy of his American colleague’s cure.1 Despite their documented function as medical evidence, the photographs were produced by a man who identified himself unequivocally as an artist, in contradistinction to the typical photographer of the day, who was, in his view a “modest, unimaginative, patient and expert manipulator,” one who, moreover, tended to favor “an obtrusive sharpness and technical perfection.” To the great detriment of the field, these technical preoccupations had derailed what could have been the “art-progress” of photography.2

Two people deserve a special thanks: Alison Chang, for finding these photographs in the first place, and insisting that I look at them; and Andrés Zervigon, who lent indispensable support to a novice in the history of photography.

Two of the requisites for scientific objectivity in the late nineteenth century seem especially pertinent here: the investigator should not theorize about his subject; nor should he succumb to the “siren call of art.”3 How might we categorize, then, a body of images commissioned by a doctor as scientific evidence and produced by a photographer who, as a matter of principle, chose not to resist the seduction of “true artistic feeling” but instead exploited its capacity to rivet the viewer with a more “refined” truth?4 Chris Amirault has analyzed the confusion that could result when photographers of the period self-consciously aspired to combine art with science. In an image made around 1866, the Civil War veteran Sargent William Shakespeare poses jauntily in imitation of his namesake’s memorial sculpture in Westminster Abbey. But the latter-day Shakespeare leans against the decorative balustrade without trousers, lifting his long nightshirt to display the effects of the gunshot wounds he had suffered: a broken left femur and permanent damage to his quadriceps. The eye moves between the subject’s arm akimbo and thinker’s pose to the scarred skin and collapsed thigh, struggling to identify the function of a picture that could possibly contain both.5 Such photographic “curiosities” were popular during the nineteenth century; they allowed an audience to gaze upon those from whom they wished to distinguish themselves: the diseased, the wounded, and the insane. Around 1854, Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond of the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum produced what are considered to be the earliest psychiatric photographs.6 These portraits of his female patients were displayed in the asylum itself, but also in venues more commonly associated with art photography. In fact, Jennifer Green-Lewis has argued that Diamond’s pictures constitute “points at which the distinctions between art and science literally collapse.”7 The photographs that are at the core of this essay were never shown in public. Nor is there any evidence that either their photographer or the physician who commissioned them intended that their circulation should extend beyond the medical context for which they were originally produced. But rather than dissolving the differences between art and science, the images I will introduce here draw liberally upon strategies identified with both domains, integrating them with such subtlety and calculation that it is impossible to disentangle them. This admixture of the artful and the scientific produced a new kind of photograph: not a hybrid, exactly—as in Sargent Shakespeare’s picture, in which it is not difficult to isolate the theatrical pose from the medical disability. Instead, the visual form that emerged was an unpredictable, sometimes disturbing, amalgam forged through a conspicuous disregard for the boundaries that conventionally distinguished the artistic from the clinical. The photographs that were generated render visible something rarely seen: the private medical histories of six female patients, as a doctor and a photographer together decided to represent them. An understanding of the conditions that made this particular conflation of specimen

16

Before-and-After Photography

and subject possible offers an opportunity to consider a question that Sabine Kriebel has recently posed about the medium of photography: “How does matter mean?”8

Complementarity Writing about the persisting division between the aesthetic and the institutional in the writing on photography, Richard Shiff has suggested that rather than reinforce the art/document divide, we should “recognize the complementarity of these two interpretative gestures.”9 In the spirit of Shiff ’s complementarity, I offer here a case study from the visual culture of medicine: a series of photographs whose structure, function, and history enact the very interdependence that he and others have emphasized. My intention is to supply a close analysis of individual images that is fully integrated with an account of their production and circulation—as far as we know it. In so doing, I am not “choosing” history over theory. Rather, I share the view that has been recently articulated so well by Patrick Maynard: “By putting aside notions of theory and trusting our own resources, new conceptual tools will arise inductively, through attention to particular cases.”10 My particular case is a rare series of “before-and-after” medical portraits of the female patients mentioned earlier: six pairs of 4 ¼ × 6 ½ in (10.79 × 16.51 centimeter) silver albumen cabinet cards that are labeled simply “1a” and “1b,” and on through to “6a” and “6b,” which reside now in the Library of the College of Physicians in Philadelphia (Figures 2.1–2.3 and 2.5–2.7). All but one of the twelve pictures were produced in London in 1882 through a collaboration between a Calcutta-born, Scottish-trained physician, William Playfair (1836–1903), and a Dutch-American, painter/photographer—a veteran of the Civil War’s Union Army—named Henry Van der Weyde (1839–1924).11 The six “before” photographs of Playfair’s patients (those labeled “a”) display emaciated women who wear a variety of bodily coverings—most are too provisional to be labeled “garments”—that expose bony shoulders and protruding clavicles. In their “afterlives,” the same women—in some cases, barely recognizable without the numbering system—possess markedly rounder and more attractively decorated bodies, softer faces, and more conventionally feminine embellishments. The photographs themselves can be found today in the papers of the doctor who invented the controversial “rest cure,” Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell of Philadelphia. Mitchell’s treatment consisted of the hyper-consumption of food—especially milk and meat (Fat and Blood and How to Make Them was the title of Mitchell’s first book in 1877), enforced bed rest, a complete absence of intellectual activity, isolation from family and friends, and muscle stimulation—either by massage or through the application of a mild electrical current. Originally devised for the battle-weary Union soldiers of the Civil War, Mitchell later adapted the treatment

BEFORE AND AFTER

17

for the women who were “fighting the battle on the home front.”12 By the early 1880s, the perception was that the majority of rest cure patients in both America and Europe were well-off, highly intelligent women suffering from some variant of the “multiform” ailment of neurasthenia. There is a slip of paper included with the photographs in Philadelphia with an explanation in Mitchell’s handwriting of how they came into his possession: “188911-6. Portraits of Cases of Rest Treatment given to me by Mr. W. Playfair—as they were shown to the British Medical Association, 1889.”13 Playfair had become a prominent obstetrician/gynecologist and England’s most vocal proponent of what he called the “Weir-Mitchell method.” In all likelihood, the photographs were given in gratitude to the treatment’s originator shortly after the images were presented at that 1889 meeting in London. We know that Playfair kept his patients’ photographs in an album, now lost, in which he took such pride that he boasted about it competitively in public. The six pairs of photographs he gave to Mitchell are, as far as we know, the only images that survive.14

Food and light If an abundance of food was a key agent for Playfair’s transformation of his patients, for Van der Weyde, his collaborator, it was light—if not exactly the “free substance given to man by God” so prized by early photographers. He produced the pictures Playfair bestowed upon Mitchell in a studio on Regent Street that was advertised as the very first photographic establishment in London to use only artificial light. Although the photographer was not a scientific investigator in the traditional sense of the word, he was a prolific inventor and would hold eighty-one patents during his lifetime, including one for the system he designed to light Playfair’s patients.15 Van der Weyde initially disdained artificial illumination, which in his view left behind “a metallic or varnished surface, with glittering high lights, dense shadows and ghastly reflections.” He first tried concentrating the pallid light of his adopted city with a “plano-convex water lens” over 6 feet in diameter, which he filled with 987 pounds of filtered water. Having neglected to factor in the water’s weight, the photographer suffered a serious gash to his arm when both water and broken glass crashed down upon him.16 Resigned to the need for electrical power in some form, Van der Weyde attached a Grove battery to a colossal dioptic lens—the same curved rectangle of ribbed glass used for lighthouses. But he saw that while such a lens certainly gave a sufficient amount of light, its effects were harsh, generating “sharp darts of diverging rays.” He sought a light that would instead “embrace instead of strike the sitter.” The photographer finally decided upon an arc light that glowed “with the brilliancy of 6000 candles,” which he redirected and diffused with an elaborate

18

Before-and-After Photography

arrangement of movable white screens and white-painted reflectors. An adjustable “parachute reflector” was suspended from the ceiling.17 No subject of Van der Weyde’s was ever touched directly by the sharp rays he abhorred, but was bathed in a concentrated white radiance. A visitor to the studio observed one client’s sitting: “With the pure electric light flooding face and shoulders, and brilliantly illuminating her features, we are reminded of the good fairy in the enchanted island of dazzling light.” This “pure” light was made even more incandescent by positioning a circle of white screens only 18 inches away from the subject’s body, the only interruption being “an opening in the latter screen permitting the camera to peep through.”18 At least some of Playfair’s patients likely sat alone within this tempietto of light, with the camera’s lens the only visible link to the world outside it. Once Van der Weyde perfected his method, light functioned as a near-material entity for him, one that could cause harm (“striking” with its sharp rays), or bring comfort (through its “embrace”). Inside the Regent Street studio, Van der Weyde manufactured and controlled a soft but potent illumination that was unavailable outside it; one observer described the manufactured light as possessing the effect of a “bright white cloud.”19 The “Van der Weyde Light,” as it became widely known, was a triumph: “I saw my hopes realized, for I produced at last an artistic portrait with tender crisp high lights, which did not need retouching, and was full of modeling and transparency in the shadows.”20 Indeed, the light was not simply the photographer’s solution to a technical problem: it came to represent his professional identity. The Van der Weyde Light, in eye-catching, flame-like script, was stamped on all of his cabinet cards; those of his most celebrated clients were embossed in gold—a palpable synthesis of his professional and artistic aspirations. A profile published in 1882 in the Photographic News made it clear that business was brisk at the “The Van Der Weyde Electric Studio.”21

Collaborating Playfair may have read that very profile, which appeared later in the Journal of the Society of Arts, as he and his wife traveled in a circle that included artists, actors, and musicians as well as heads of state and aristocrats.22 However, while Van der Weyde’s prominence in the early 1880s suggests why the doctor might have sought him out for a family portrait, it does not explain why Playfair would have chosen him to make clinical photographs that were not only “objective” enough to be displayed at a medical meeting, but sufficiently persuasive to serve as a gift to the originator of the cure they were intended to verify. (And the doctor clearly thought that Van der Weyde’s photographs were a success; if he hadn’t, he never would have given them to Mitchell in the first place.)

BEFORE AND AFTER

19

It is also not obvious why Van der Weyde would have accepted such a challenging commission, given the demands of a practice that had become robust enough to support two assistants and a studio configured as a pair of adjoining parlors, “thickly carpeted and warmly furnished.”23 Perhaps the Civil War veteran was interested in the Weir-Mitchell method, given the traumas that he had witnessed and suffered himself as a prisoner of war. Or perhaps a curiosity about medical matters had been instilled by his father, who trained in America as a physician after emigrating with his family from Holland around 1850.24 There is another explanation that likely trumps the others: tracking a subject’s journey from wasting illness to blooming health offered an exceptional opportunity for the doctor and the photographer to showcase their respective talents for a limited but exacting audience. The time was right for such a collaboration; both medicine and photography were undergoing an unsettling process of professional identity-formation as to the purpose and limits of their respective practices. To some degree, both Playfair and Van der Weyde defined themselves against the grain. Throughout his career, Van der Weyde seized every opportunity to distinguish himself from most contemporary photographers, whom he generally considered to be “intensely vulgar and inartistic.” He preferred that his work be judged by experts in aesthetics: by “leading painters and sculptors who know nothing of the details of photography.” His frustration with what he perceived as the field’s obsession with technique at the cost of “art-progress” would only deepen in the ensuing years, until he and a number of his “brother artists” seceded from the Photography Society to found the Linked Ring, a group committed to upholding the highest aesthetic standards in the field.25 By the time Van der Weyde’s studio was described so invitingly in print, Playfair had gained a reputation not only for his skill as an obstetrician and surgeon, but for his unusual ability to establish an easy rapport with his anxious patients—a reputation enhanced by his affiliation with the queen herself. Beginning in 1881, Her Royal Highness Queen Victoria periodically sent Playfair to the remote corners of Europe to tend to the difficult births and nervous temperaments of most of the younger childbearing women in her enormous and widely dispersed family. Stranded in Bohemia, Colburg, or Malta, he was captive to the newest royal waiting to be born— sometimes for weeks at a time. But there were compensations: every time one of the Queen’s descendants arrived, a bulletin signed by William S. Playfair, as accoucheur to the royal family, was published in all the major newspapers of Europe.26

The profession of medicine Despite his privileged clientele, Playfair, like most of his peers, competed fiercely for socially prominent patients, appointments to august medical societies, and

20

Before-and-After Photography

secure positions within the hierarchy of medicine. He was painfully aware that “ladies” doctors like himself were not as prominent as surgeons, such as his rival and senior colleague, Sir William Gull.27 Debate had quickened over the years as to which specialist offered the best hope for treating the nervous ailments of women: the neurologists, or the “nerve doctors” (like Mitchell); the alienists—forefathers of today’s psychiatrists; or obstetricians, such as Playfair. To those who wondered how an obstetrician became deeply engaged in treating women’s nerves in the first place, he explained, “This was chiefly because my attention was first directed to the subject … in consequence of the frequent association of these states with disease of the reproductive organs in the female.” And, as he warned his readers, “uterine mischief ” could become systemic with neglect.28 To the skeptics who believed that his patients were malingerers, the doctor retorted that they were instead “emotional, highly strung and clever women, who have no desire to be ill and who would give much to be strong and well if only they knew how.” Gull, on the other hand, believed that emaciation, listlessness, and loss of appetite (which he was one of the first to label “Anorexia Nervosa”) were the signs of an “unsound mind”—to be more precise, a “perversion of the ego.”29 But Playfair believed that those same symptoms constituted only one facet of “neurasthenia,” a word whose vagueness he regretted, even as he conceded there was currently no better term. His refusal to categorize his patients as possessing “genuine mental disturbance” is of a piece with Van der Weyde’s representations of them, for the images allow us to partake in the women’s restoration to the lives from which they had been only temporarily exiled.

The patients The women in Van der Weyde’s “before and after” photographs were almost certainly Playfair’s private patients, who were generally treated at “home hospitals”—distinguished houses whose desirable neighborhoods and architectural refinements belied their medical function.30 They were attended to by a nurse handpicked by the doctor, chosen for her agreeable manners as well as her competence. As Playfair put it rather indelicately: “To shut up a refined and intellectual woman for six weeks with a coarse-minded stupid nurse, can only lead to failure.”31 Playfair would be widely recognized for his 1883 book, The Systematic Treatment of Nerve Prostration and Hysteria, which included case studies of unnamed patients. The decision to gather his talks and pamphlets together as a book may have prompted the original commission to Van der Weyde. But Playfair ultimately chose not to use the photographs, which would have been published as engravings after the originals, a process necessary for mass reproduction until

BEFORE AND AFTER

21

photolithography became routine in the 1890s. But perhaps the doctor suspected that the photographs, even remade as engravings, would distract from, rather than simply illustrate, his narratives. Van der Weyde’s significant aesthetic interventions would have puzzled viewers, in part because they were impossible to ignore. To begin with one of the most affecting pairs, Patient 6 (Figure 2.1) is a birdlike young woman, her eyes immense in a frail, gaunt face. She appears to be dressed in strips of semi-sheer white fabric twisted and tied together, a multilayered ensemble that is difficult to parse. There is an inexplicable elaborateness about its ties and folds. Prolonged looking reveals that the woman’s gauzy dress has been drawn down from her shoulders; the corset beneath has been partially unbuttoned and the resulting triangles of fabric carefully folded back—its fasteners and empty buttonholes are clearly visible. The subject’s hollow chest is thus displayed for all to see, with the strips acting as an exteriorized rib cage: an elegant but restrictive geometry. The woman’s head is turned to her left and her gaze follows, yet her body faces squarely front; the strain of the twist is expressed by the protruding tendons of her neck. Her eyes are wreathed in shadow and the hair is smoothed back, without any curls or waves to soften the sharp cheekbones and protuberant ear. In Patient 6’s “after,” the deeply recessed eye sockets look attractively, subtly shadowed; her hair is crimped at the sides and curled at the crown to fall loosely on

FIGURE 2.1  Henry Van der Weyde, Patient 6, a and b, 1882. Silver albumen print on cardboard. 4 ¼ × 6 ½ in (10.795 × 16.51 cm). The image is used by kind permission of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia.

22

Before-and-After Photography

the forehead. The angle of her body is slightly softened; the torque of the subject’s still-frail figure seems less strained, her boniness less pronounced. The clavicle is covered now with what is undeniably plumper skin. It is as if the garment composed of fragments has been reassembled into a whole, although it still falls short of being an actual dress. The drapery wrapped around her shoulders would fall with the faintest pressure, yet it remains suspended just low enough to expose the hollows under her arms. “Cured,” this subject could be a model for a Rococo marble bust. In another pair (Figure 2.2), Patient 5’s face “before” is a thin leathery mask, as if continuous with the surface of her skull. Her hair is tightly pulled back, and the head is turned in a way that allows the Van der Weyde light to dramatize her jutting cheekbones. The unfashionable black dress imprisons rather than simply covers her body, with the buttons functioning like nails in a coffin. A modest brooch appears in both before and after photographs, a rare sartorial linkage between a patient’s ill and healthy states. “After” finds Patient 5’s hair curled and shining but shorn, a not-uncommon practice for bedridden women whose hair had become matted beyond repair. While the practice itself was not uncommon, displaying the result certainly was. Otherwise, the young woman after treatment appears quite radiant: an aureole of light softens her features and rounds out her face. Her body is now aligned with her head, with no twist to generate tension. A different, but

FIGURE 2.2  Henry Van der Weyde, Patient 5, a and b, 1882. Silver albumen print on cardboard. 4 ¼ × 6 ½ in (10.795 × 16.51 cm). The image is used by kind permission of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia.

BEFORE AND AFTER

23

still black, dress cushions her body rather than presses against it. Its satin surface gleams in the light and the smocking of the yoke curves around her once-angular shoulders. A more elegant lace collar rises to frame her face. While the dress of “before” was so unadorned as to appear harshly utilitarian, the garment worn “after” is not only more elaborate; it seems made for someone of a more elevated class. As the woman’s body has “gained flesh,” so has her dress acquired both luster and pedigree. In a third pair, Patient 4 (Figure 2.3) before treatment gazes sternly off to the right, the length of her neck exaggerated by the boniness and slope of her shoulders. A brooch is pinned unexpectedly on the semitransparent drape that clings to her concave chest. Her hair is sharply parted and smoothed back, its natural waves tucked behind her ears. In “after,” her hair is a mass of thick sausage curls that cap her oval face like a helmet. The ill and the recovered subjects face one another, as they were likely juxtaposed in Playfair’s album. With a neckline that lightly skims the shoulders and a filmy lace shawl, the white dress could be a wedding costume from twenty years earlier. The inference is that with health, the subject may become marriageable at last. The exaggerated roundedness of this young woman’s curls and the fussiness of her lacy shrug suggest the presence of a hand other than her own. The conviction is deepened by the recognition that she looks a decade younger than she did before treatment.

FIGURE 2.3 Henry Van der Weyde, Patient 4, a and b, 1882. Silver albumen print on cardboard. The image is used by kind permission of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia.

24

Before-and-After Photography

Honorific vs. repressive Van der Weyde’s pictures exhibit none of the rigidity or harshness that we associate with most institutional photography. As forms of portraiture, they appear more “honorific” than “repressive,” to cite Allan Sekula’s influential distinction.32 The photographer clearly ignored the convention that pictures intended to serve some ideal of scientific objectivity were to be “unmarked by prejudice or skill, fantasy or judgment, wishing or striving.”33 Van der Weyde’s handiwork is everywhere: he lit, posed, and likely even dressed his subjects with great care. Presumably they believed that they were posing for the sake of science; it is difficult to imagine how any middleclass woman of 1882 would permit herself to be exposed in such a state of partial undress unless she (and her family) had been persuaded that they were serving a larger good. For Playfair’s colleagues they acted as living evidence of the worthiness of his cure; for the families, the “after” photographs—virtually indistinguishable from other contemporary studio portraits of these years—offered the reassurance of a conventional aesthetic form that augured a return to both health and home. Intimations of the shock or strain that must have compelled these women to seek out Playfair in the first place are virtually annulled by their wholly appropriate, compliant, even gracious posing for the camera. There is none of the self-absorption or tragic isolation that we associate with Diamond’s patients’ portraits at the Surrey asylum, or indeed with most nineteenth-century photographs of psychiatric patients.34 In Diamond’s pictures, the women do not defer to the camera, although they clearly conformed to his request—or demand—that they sit motionless for the seconds it would have taken to secure the exposure. They are either oblivious to or wary of the camera. Playfair’s patients, on the other hand, are deeply attuned to Van der Weyde’s presence—in both their before and after states. In fact, it could be said that their poses, dress, and expressions were configured for the camera.

Performance Surely it is relevant that the bulk of Van der Weyde’s practice was devoted to subjects who performed for a living—whether in society or on the stage. He became particularly well known for his “vignettes” and “promenade portraits” of entertainers and prominent figures in society, including members of the royal family (Princess Alexandra of Denmark, whose regal containment is not unlike the patients’ graceful reserve), society figures (Lady Randolph Churchill), actors and entertainers (Lily Langtry), and even athletes (his cabinet card of the renowned German wrestler Sandow remains the most widely circulated image of the athlete).35 Van der Weyde’s staging of the American-born actress Mary Anderson (Figure 2.4) demonstrates that he was a shrewd adaptor of classical drapery when

BEFORE AND AFTER

25

FIGURE 2.4  Henry Van der Weyde, Mary Anderson (Mrs de Navarro) as Galatea in “Pygmalion and Galatea.” Silver albumen cabinet card, 1884. 5 1/2 in × 4 7/8 in (14.10 × 10.4 cm). Purchased 1983. National Portrait Gallery, London.

26

Before-and-After Photography

the situation warranted. In one of many photographs made during the same period as those of Playfair’s patients, Anderson poses on a plinth costumed as Galatea, her most celebrated role—the marble statue that comes to life through the desire of her sculptor, Pygmalion. Dressed like a wealthy Roman matron, Anderson is resplendent in a long tunic dress whose folds gather volume as they flow down her body. Set aglow by the Van der Weyde Light, Anderson is poised somewhere between the beautifully sculpted statue and the flesh and blood actress; her dress—a variation on the Roman chiton—is entirely appropriate for her role. But what of the provisional apparel worn by Playfair’s patients “before” treatment? How are we to justify the roughly textured blanket that binds Patient 1’s arms to her body (Figure 2.5), Patient 6’s origami-like unfolded corset (Figure 2.1), the misshapen ruffle that barely covers Patient 3’s chest (Figure 2.6), and Patient 4’s filmy shawl, pinned by a brooch that likely weighs more than the fabric itself (Figure 2.3)? These extraordinary costumes—for costumes they are—are arranged to display what Playfair would have called the women’s “wasting flesh,” while allowing them to preserve at least a modicum of the dignity their infirmity had cost them. Only Patient 5 (Figure 2.2) retains her severe black garment, but it is grafted to her skeletal body like a second skin, concealing nothing. Patient 2 (Figure 2.7) “wears” very little—if anything at all. A stiff lace ruffle flares up around

FIGURE 2.5  Henry Van der Weyde, Patient 1, a and b, 1882. Silver albumen print on cardboard. 4 ¼ × 6 ½ in (10.795 × 16.51 cm). The image is used by kind permission of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia

BEFORE AND AFTER

27

FIGURE 2.6  Henry Van der Weyde, Patient 3, a, and W. Hudson, Patient 3, b, 1882. Silver albumen print on cardboard. Both are 4 ¼ × 6 ½ in (10.79 × 16.51 cm). The image is used by kind permission of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia.

FIGURE 2.7  Henry Van der Weyde, Patient 2, a and b, 1882. Silver albumen print on cardboard. 4 ¼ × 6 ½ in (10.79 × 16.51 cm). The image is used by kind permission of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia.

28

Before-and-After Photography

her bony chest, but the rest of her body has disappeared into the bedding. While Van der Weyde consistently favored some combination of idiosyncratic draping and exposed shoulders, each costume’s “style”—for want of a better term—is distinct. Whether intended or not, the differences preserve a certain degree of individuality amidst the collective symptoms of emaciation and sunken eyes.

Staging realism Van der Weyde’s photographs are not simply records of illness and the health that succeeded it. The pictures themselves are performative, enacting the debasement of illness and the triumph of the cure.36 The central protagonists of these photographs, as they were originally conceived, were not necessarily the women portrayed, but the doctor who cured them and the photographer who represented the fruits of that success. In so doing, Van der Weyde’s near-theatrical staging was at times a bit overzealous.37 Patient 3 (Figure 2.6) was the only subject whose “after” picture was taken by a different photographer, a Mr. W. Hudson of Hastings. His studio was located in the same town as one of the anonymous women described in Playfair’s case studies, rendering her the only patient whose image can be directly linked to the doctor’s accounts. He described the woman from Hastings as “an unmarried lady of thirty one, who had overtaxed her strength during her mother’s illness.” Since then, she had confined herself to either her bed or sofa, had eaten almost nothing, and depended “on chloral and morphia for relief.” (Addiction to opiates was a common problem among his rest cure patients.) Without describing the course of treatment, Playfair wrote that its success was obvious: “A few days ago she came to town, a long railway journey, on purpose to announce to me her approaching marriage.”38 Mr. Hudson’s photograph shows an unremarkable, not unpleasant, somber young woman with an alert gaze. Her head inclines slightly, and a thick fringe of hair curls back from a smooth brow. The subject could be an attractive twentyyear-old boy. Her figure below the neck fades gently into the shadows around her, and shoulders are set off by a band of white across her chest—likely the yoke of a dress. The ordinariness of Mr. Hudson’s photograph sets into relief the radical nature of Van der Weyde’s interventions for the companion picture, which must have taken place prior to the actual making of the “before” photograph. While the subject of Hudson’s “after” photograph is faintly androgynous, Van der Weyde’s shows a woman who has been deliberately stripped of any sign of the feminine. Her bared torso is far too exposed; the skeletal body is torqued into an uncomfortable flexion, thrusting bony clavicles and sharp shoulders into view. Her hair is not simply smoothed back, but wet and plastered to her head with a force that has

BEFORE AND AFTER

29

left traces of the comb’s teeth behind. Patient 3a gazes irritably outward, as if to cast suspicion at her healthier self, who appears not to have achieved quite the dramatic transformation enjoyed by her peers.

Before and after We have grown almost immune to the before-and-after paradigm, overly familiar as it has become from the flood of highly suspect images promising weight loss and hair gain. For nineteenth-century doctors, however, the format offered one of the most effective weapons in their competition for medical primacy—in part because it echoed a widely used strategy for attracting middle-class consumers to the products of the industrial age. The traditional order of the innocent “before” state (i.e., Adam and Eve in the Garden of Paradise) and the shameful “after” (their Expulsion) was commonly inverted. “Before and after” trade cards advertised how life would improve beyond all expectations with the acquisition of just the right baking soda, the most efficient iron, or the newest gas lamp. Unsurprisingly, a number of medicinal “remedies” for various ailments were advertised in the very same way.39 While the tradition of contrasting healthy and ill subjects had existed in medical representations since the early nineteenth century, the rise of consumerism gave the practice a new force.40 In 1875, Playfair’s competitor William Gull had used “before and after” images to illustrate his first Lancet article on “Anorexia Nervosa.” Gull’s attitude toward the illustrations was purely pragmatic (Figure 2.8). To his patient’s referring physician, he wrote: “As the morbid state is not yet generally recognized, I should be glad if you would second my wish of having a photograph taken of Miss C. in her present state, that we may compare it with some later one, if, as I hope, our plan of treatment is successful, as in my experience it generally is.”41 Gull identified neither the photographer nor the engraver; the originals were likely discarded after use, the identity of their maker no more notable than that of the anonymous journeymen who produced the day’s mug shots and identity cards. Out of the three pairings that Gull used, the visual force of Miss C is the most startling. It is as if a birdlike old woman (before) has been transformed into a maiden (after)—a reversal of time that was a recurring trope in the rhetoric around the rest treatment. Once we become acclimated to Miss C’s near-grotesque features, it is obvious that all three patients are far more conventionally presented than Playfair’s. Gull’s patients are dressed decoratively and appropriately, with all the feminine trappings of the comfortable middle class; they wear hairnets, cameos, and lace collars whether they are sick or well, before and after. Even in their emaciated state, their modest gazes and somewhat coy gestures seem mildly seductive.

30

Before-and-After Photography

FIGURE 2.8  Illustration from William Withey Gull, “Anorexia Nervosa (Apepsia Hysterica, Anorexia Hysterica),” orig. Clinical Society’s Transactions, vol. vii (1874): 22.

Mis-resemblance A successful “before”-and-“after” clinical pairing—whether Playfair’s or Gull’s— demanded just the right degree of resemblance, or perhaps more accurately, misresemblance. Subjects should look similar enough for the viewer to recognize that Patient 2a and Patient 2b (Figure 2.7), for example, were one and the same, but sufficiently different to inspire awe at the transformation. Van der Weyde sharpened the contrast through hair and dress, but reinforced the uncanny doubling of the subject through a precise mimicry of the figure’s position from one state of health to another. Most of the women pictured in “a” and “b” pivot at the very same angle; their eyes gaze along the same trajectory; the brows arch in unison, and the lips are pressed together with the same firmness—or lack thereof. Van der Weyde may have staged Playfair’s patients, but presumably it was the doctor who chose the exemplary moments for representation. “Before” was most likely arranged with willing patients and their families shortly after the first consultation, in the manner that Gull described above. But how did Playfair identify the moment when “after” had been attained? Even if he had seen photographs of his patients before their illnesses, he had not known most of the women he treated

BEFORE AND AFTER

31

beforehand. He hoped, through Van der Weyde, to recover an image—a woman— he had never seen. And for the family, health restored to them a woman whom they may not have initially recognized. Playfair’s ideals, materialized by Van der Weyde, were based not upon an informed expectation of what his patients had actually looked like before they became ill (especially as many of them had been ill for years); but upon the conventions that shaped women’s painted and photographic portraiture in 1880s England. The “before and after” formulation may seem entirely predictable, but it is actually quite arbitrary, full of temporal ambiguities. In Van der Weyde’s photographs, “after” becomes a perpetual present, the end of the treatment, and presumably the doctor’s, as well as the photographer’s, interventions. (At least, that is the hope.) The sense of finality discourages us from anticipating the future, which might harbor a regression to “before”—a reasonable concern with any chronic illness. The women’s skeletal forms offer not just the intimation of death that is said to be embedded in every photograph (famously enunciated by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida).42 They are the living embodiment of the inevitable future. (The fact that the mortality rate from eating disorders remained alarmingly high only reinforces the association.) By applying the Weir-Mitchell method, Playfair believed that he could interrupt, or even reverse, that trajectory. In his book, he wrote: “I am not without hope that these papers may enable many to succeed, as I know that some have already done, in restoring to health—I might almost without exaggeration say to life—some of the miserable and helpless neurasthenic invalids who are so widely scattered over the country.”43

Playfair’s narrative arcs The doctor claimed that for the well-selected patient (free of “genuine mental disturbance,” epilepsy, or “cardiac mischief ”), treatment took six to eight weeks. While duration is naturally assumed in a pairing that contrasts moments in time, Van der Weyde’s images are not cinematic—no narrative links them together, other than the one we might project into the interval that lies between them. Playfair’s published case studies are the structural equivalent of Van der Weyde’s photographs. The doctor began each narrative with a description of the illness at its most dire and destructive, skipped over the actual treatment, and then concluded with the triumph of the cure, relying upon two rhetorical tropes throughout: the satisfaction of unrecognizability and the reversal of time. Playfair wrote of how, after months of near-complete immobility, a woman he had treated paid him a visit: “Only two days ago, she came to report herself to me, having travelled alone from the country by rail; and I positively did not at first recognize her, so different was the well-dressed, healthy looking woman, from the wretched invalid of a few months ago.”44 Another patient was “somewhat like a

32

Before-and-After Photography

prisoner brought into the world after being imprisoned.” But after treatment, “she now looks twenty years younger than when the treatment was commenced … and her friends declare her to be almost unrecognizable, which is indeed the fact.”45 Even more striking was Playfair’s frequent invocation of how often a patient failed to recognize herself: “My brother, whom I saw for the first time yesterday, said I am a miracle. I really do not know myself.”46 The doctor was especially eager to restore youth to the very young. He described an adolescent who had suddenly broken down and languished in her bed for four years—a “clever girl of highly developed nervous organization” who had been damaged by the “evil effects of overmuch education and mental strain.”47 While Patient 1a (Figure 2.5) may or may not be the girl described, the figure swathed in a blanket appears to have been Van der Weyde’s youngest subject. In her “before” picture, she stares at the viewer with a stoic resignation that one would associate with a much older woman. Her face has retained some of the softness of youth, but her hollowed-out eyes and fixed gaze exhibit none of its liveliness. Her hair is pulled tightly back from her face, reinforcing the sharpness of her cheekbone. In “after,” Patient 1 appears a decade younger. Her long straight hair has become a small mountain of curls. Her face is rounded and soft, the strained tendons now covered by flesh. As if magically, a real garment has replaced the coarse, shapeless blanket; their contours are quite similar. There is a distinct sense that the young woman did not dress herself. (We do know that Van der Weyde’s parlor-studio contained a rolling vanity table to allow for last minute touch-ups.) Patient 2 (Figure 2.7), enshrouded rather than dressed, seems to have left her youth far behind. Her head would be barely visible without the pillows that prop it up (presumably the photograph was taken in either the woman’s own home or the home hospital to which she was consigned). Someone has carefully fluffed up her hair to frame her face, an effort that clearly exceeded the patient’s capabilities. The utter absence of physical exertion and the glazed blankness of her eyes suggest that life has already expired. The cured patient bears only the faintest resemblance to the specter of her bedridden self. She is Playfair’s and Van der Weyde’s most astonishing success, as if here both men have exercised their godlike powers to their fullest. The ruffle that rose as a kind of brittle shield has blossomed into a garland of lace and flowers so luxuriant that the black netting sleeves can barely hold it up. In her “before” picture, this woman’s form had virtually disappeared; in Van der Weyde’s “after” photograph, she is dressed in a gown suitable for the opera, which expands to fill the frame. Her shining, softly rolled hair is crowned with a wreath of flowers, as if treatment has anointed her a latter-day goddess; she could serve as an allegory of feminine health at its most robust. Her eyes are raised as if to anticipate the future she now sees before her. Playfair has not only cured his patient, he has raised her from the dead.

BEFORE AND AFTER

33

Conclusion Shortly before he died, William Gull published another article on Anorexia Nervosa in the Lancet, also illustrated with “before and after” engravings. This time, the doctor identified the photographer: “The case was so extreme that, had it not been photographed and accurately engraved, some assurance would have been necessary that the appearances were not exaggerated, or even caricatured, which they were not.”48 The “before” figure (Figure 2.9) appears to be a grim, skeletal older woman; while a drape hangs limply from her outstretched arms, she is exposed from the waist up—not unlike an ethnographic photograph that matter-of-factly endorses the nudity of the indigenous subject. Gull’s narrative tells us that this figure is in fact an adolescent, and the “after” engraving shows us her now-rounded face and flowing hair. Yet, her body remains hidden beneath the outsized dress that pillows forth to surround her frame.49 Just over a month later, Playfair courteously but publicly rebuked Gull, disputing the latter’s diagnosis (anorexia was not a stand-alone mental illness) and treatment (the family should on no account be involved).50 But his most withering criticism was reserved for the illustrations Gull used. After expressing doubt about the permanence of the young girl’s cure, Playfair invoked his own superior practice, claiming that his “systematic treatment” offered a far more reliable remedy. And he had proof: “I have yet to

FIGURE 2.9  Illustration from William Withey Gull, “Anorexia Nervosa,” Lancet (March 17, 1888): 516–517.

34

Before-and-After Photography

meet with a case which has failed, and I possess a whole album of photographs which would cap those which Sir William has engraved.”51 Playfair’s complicity in Van der Weyde’s stagecraft did nothing to diminish the doctor’s confidence that he was adding to the body of scientific knowledge. Until the end of his career, Playfair lamented that the “protean forms” of neurasthenia were “nowhere adequately recognized and described.” Even the most enlightened discussions of symptoms were, as he put it, “almost totally silent on the still more important subject of how they are to be cured.”52 If Van der Weyde’s photographs— and Playfair’s case studies—suppressed the process of the treatment, their parallel images and texts enabled physicians to imagine that a cure was in reach, mitigating the hopelessness that often afflicted both healers and relatives. All of Van der Weyde’s artistry—the same formal concerns that would propel him into the Linked Ring—was marshaled in the service of persuasion rather than “accuracy.” Playfair displayed his pictures in a format much like a family album, an association that would not have been lost on his colleagues, whose wives and daughters were likely to have been the same class and age as his private patients. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, the distinction between art and nonart photographs was much disputed, as was the nature of the interaction between physical and mental illness. Van der Weyde’s “before and after” pictures exploited all the ambiguities within both photography and medicine—which surfaced with particular frequency in the psychiatric imagery of these years. But unlike so many psychiatric patients of these years—at Salpêtrière in Paris, Bethlem in London, and the Surrey Pauper Asylum—to name just a few institutions that employed photography—Playfair’s patients, as Van der Weyde pictured them, were neither conceived of nor represented as “Other” to the audiences outside their walls.53 The dividing line between the “normal” and the “deviant” was thin indeed.

Coda Neither man finally enjoyed the careers they had envisioned. Their professional reputations ascended through the 1890s, only to founder shortly after the beginning of the new century. After his involvement with the Linked Ring came to an end, Van der Weyde turned away from photography to a series of unfortunate investments and unrewarding inventions. Playfair became the target of a sensational lawsuit for invasion of patient confidentiality that resulted in the largest settlement to date for the plaintiff by the British courts. This widely reported humiliation ended his expectations for a knighthood from the Queen he had served so faithfully.54 Playfair’s name would be linked to Mitchell’s until the end of his life. At his death, an editor of the Lancet wrote: “There must be many hundreds of women in this country at the present day who have reason to bless the

BEFORE AND AFTER

35

Weir-Mitchell treatment and the name of Playfair as that of the medical man who brought it to their notice.”55 Playfair’s critique of Gull indicates that for him Van der Weyde’s photographs— however artfully composed—stood for some version of the real. Yet, it seems highly unlikely that the doctor had scientific objectivity in mind when he approached him—a photographer who excelled at conjuring ideal visions of his prominent subjects while retaining the features that made them recognizable to their public: the imposing musculature of the wrestler, Sandow; the languid elegance of Lily Langtry; the future Queen (Princess Alexandra) at her most regal. Van der Weyde’s photographs for Playfair both continued and countered his customary practice, for he was representing not only the ideal of bourgeois feminine health in England circa 1882, but at the same time formulating the signs of its utter debasement. The success of the pictures the doctor commissioned lay not in their wide circulation—as was true of Gull’s engravings—but in their capacity to elicit an empathic response from a skeptical audience. The photographs of the anonymous Patients 1 through 6 were simultaneously clinical evidence and singular objects of wonder. Although Playfair showed the pictures only to his colleagues—as far as we know—he did want everyone to know that he possessed them, as his public boast makes clear. Photography “in itself ” served as material evidence of his success as a healer, shaped by Van der Weyde’s shrewd understanding of how best to elicit that recognition. Van der Weyde’s art made Playfair’s medicine real.

Notes 1 William Playfair, Systematic Treatment of Nerve Prostration and Hysteria (Philadelphia: Henry C. Lea’s Son & Co., 1883).

2 Henry Vanderweyde (most often spelled as Van der Weyde), “The Proper Judges

of Art-Progress in Photography,” The British Journal Photographic Almanac (1876): 108–109.

3 Peter Galison, “Judgment against Objectivity,” in Caroline Jones and Peter Galison, eds., Picturing Science, Producing Art (New York and London: Routledge, 1998), 329. These ideas are extensively developed in Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007).

4 This was a special preoccupation of Van der Weyde’s. See especially his “Proper Judges,” 108.

5 Chris Amirault, “Posing the Subject of Early Medical Photography,” Discourse 16, no. 2 (Winter 1993–94): 51–75.

6 See especially Sander L. Gilman, ed., The Face of Madness: Hugh W. Diamond

and the Origin of Psychiatric Photography (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1976) and Martin Kemp’s essay, “‘A Perfect and Faithful Record’: Mind and Body in Medical

36

Before-and-After Photography

Photography before 1900,” in Ann Thomas, ed., Beauty of Another Order: Photography in Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 120–149.

7 Jennifer Green-Lewis, Framing the Victorians: Photography and the Culture of Realism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), 146.

8 Sabine T. Kriebel, “Theories of Photography: A Short History,” in James Elkins, ed.,

Photography Theory (New York and London: Routledge, 2007), 3–5, 42. In addition to the volume by Elkins, several texts have been especially helpful: Geoffrey Batchen, Each Wild Idea (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); Douglas Nickel, “History of Photography: The State of Research,” The Art Bulletin 83 (September 2001): 548–558; and Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson, eds., The Meaning of Photography (Williamstown, MA: Clark Art Institute and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). Walter Benjamin’s “Short History of Photography,” in Alan Trachtenberg, ed., Classic Essays in Photography (New Haven: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 199–216, and Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1982) remain indispensable. On the impact of Camera Lucida see Geoffrey Batchen, Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).

9 Richard Shiff, “Phototropism (Figuring the Proper),” in Retaining the Original:

Multiple Originals, Copies and Reproductions (Washington, DC, Hanover, NH and London: University Press of New England, 1989), 161–179, 176.

10 Patrick Maynard, “We Can’t, eh, Professors? Photo Aporia,” in James Elkins, ed., Photography Theory, 319–333, 332.

11 My thanks to Miranda Wilson for making available to me her father’s unpublished

biography of William Playfair—his great-grandfather. Sir John Stanier, A Victorian Dilemma: The Memoirs of a Royal Doctor (2004). For a biography of the photographer, see the essay by his great-great-grandson, Rogier van der Weyden, “Henry Van Weyde (1839–1924),” History of Photography 23, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 68–72. I thank Sandra Markham of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, who first guided me toward Michael Pritchard’s A Directory of London Photographers, 18441–1908 (Watford, England: PhotoResearch, 1994). Playfair and Van der Weyde were both sophisticated men with complex professional and personal histories, including direct experiences with the more violent political upheavals of their day. Playfair’s first years as a young doctor were spent in India, where he treated the horrific injuries incurred during the Indian Mutiny of 1857, and Van der Weyde fought in nineteen battles of the Civil War as a Union officer, enduring four months as a prisoner of war in Virginia.

12 Silas Weir Mitchell, Lectures on Diseases of the Nervous System, Especially in Women,

2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Lea Brothers & Co., 1885), 266, and Wear and Tear, or Hints for the Overworked, 5th ed. (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1891), 74. The literature on Mitchell is extensive. See especially Suzanne Poirier, “The Weir Mitchell Rest Cure: Doctors and Patients,” Women’s Studies 10 (1983): 15–40 and Barbara Sicherman, “The Uses of Diagnosis: Doctors, Patients and Neurasthenia,” Journal of the History of Medicine (January 1977): 33–54.

13 To date, the only published commentary on these photographs is by Jayne Morgan,

“Eadweard Muybridge and W.S. Playfair: An Aesthetics of Neurasthenia,” History of Photography 23, no. 3 (Autumn 1999): 225–231.

BEFORE AND AFTER

37

14 The two substantial discussions of Playfair’s practice and his legal troubles late in life

are Hilary Marland, “Uterine Mischief: W.S. Playfair and his Neurasthenic Patients,” in Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra and Roy Porter, eds., Cultures of Neurasthenia from Beard to the First World War (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2001), 117–137 and Angus McClaren, “Privileged Communications: Medical Confidentiality in Late Victorian Britain,” Medical History 37 (1993): 129–147. Playfair consulted regularly with a younger colleague, the neurologist Thomas Buzzard, Physician to the National Hospital for Paralysed and Epileptic.

15 The first announcement about the studio appeared in The Photographic News in an

anonymous article entitled “A New Method of Artificial Lighting for Portraiture” (March 23, 1877): 138–139. The phrase about light is quoted by Anne McCauley, “The Trouble with Photography,” in James Elkins, ed., Photography Theory, 403–430, 412.

16 H. Van Der Weyde, “Photography by the Electric Light,” The Photographic News

(February 24, 1882): 89, published simultaneously in the Journal of the Society of Arts (February 24, 1882): 370–371.

17 Two early descriptions of Van der Weyde’s studio are as follows: “A New Method

of Artificial Lighting for Portraiture,” The Photographic News XXI, no. 968 (March 23, 1877): 186–187 and in the “At Home” section of the same journal, “The Van Der Weyde Electric Studio in Regent Street” (December 17, 1880): 601–602. This description was included in H. Baden Pritchard’s The Photographic Studios of Europe (London: Piper & Carter, 1882): 72–76, 75.

18 Pritchard, Photographic Studios, 75. 19 Ibid., 76. 20 Van der Weyde, “Photography by the Electric Light,” 89. While the photographer

insisted that he never retouched his photographs, he would later be accused of doing just that for a Linked Ring exhibition.

21 Pritchard, Photographic Studios, 72. 22 Sir John Stanier’s biography details his close friendships with W. S. Gilbert, the

librettist for the Mikado and H.M.S. Pinafore, and John Singer Sargent, who would paint the doctor’s and his wife Millie’s portraits.

23 For a thorough description of the setting and Van der Weyde’s methods, see Pritchard, Studios of Europe, 72–76.

24 See van der Weyden, “Henry Van der Weyde,” 68. 25 These remarks of Van der Weyde’s are found in “The Proper Judges of Art-Progress

in Photography,” 108–109. On the Linked Ring, see Margaret Harker, The Linked Ring: The Secession Movement in Photography in Britain, 1892–1910 (London: Royal Society, Heinemann, 1979).

26 Playfair became a favored obstetrician to the Queen’s family through his older brother Lyle’s friendship with the future Duke of Edinburgh, whose wife, the daughter of the Tsar of Russia, had had two very difficult pregnancies. Playfair successfully delivered her third and fourth children, and later, her grandchildren.

27 See T. D. Acland, ed., A Collection of the Published Writings of William Withey Gull v. 147 (London: New Sydenham Society, 1894–96).

38

Before-and-After Photography

28 Playfair, Systematic Treatment, 87. 29 Playfair, “An Address on the Neurotic Complications of Uterine Disease,” The Lancet

(April 25, 1891): 920. Gull’s comment is found in, “Anorexia Nervosa (Apepsia Hysterica, Anorexia Hysterica),” delivered October 24, 1873, adapted from The Transactions of the Clinical Society of London 7 (1874): 22–28. Gull first identified the disorder in 1868 at approximately the same time as Dr. Charles Lasegue of Paris.

30 In twenty years of casebook notes from the public King’s College Hospital in South

London, where Playfair was Head of Obstetrics until his retirement, there is no evidence that photographs were made of any of his patients. His casebooks from that hospital are housed in the archives of King’s College in London.

31 Playfair, Systematic Treatment, 92. 32 Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986): 3–64, 7. Sekula

asks: “What general connections can be charted between the honorific and repressive poles of portrait practice?”

33 Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 17. This comes from their discussion of “blind

sight,” part of the history of “scientific objectivity”: “seeing without interference, interpretation or intelligence.”

34 See, in particular, Gilman, The Face of Madness “Plate 3,” which was engraved as

“Suicidal Melancholy,” and “Plate 7,” which was produced as “Melancholy Passing into Mania.”

35 The most comprehensive collection of Van der Weyde’s images is found in London’s National Portrait Gallery, which houses twenty-eight different portraits on cabinet cards.

36 The literature on photography and performance is vast. Particularly helpful have been Margaret Iverson, “Following Pieces,” in Elkins, ed., Photography Theory, 91–108; and Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1998). Here, I am using the term as Diarmuid Costello summarizes it: “a photography that does not function to document some event or entity in the world that precedes its being recorded, but is itself an agency that brings something into being through its own action,” “The Art Seminar,” in Elkins, ed., Photography Theory, 196.

37 For Jorge Ribalta’s development of the notion of a staged realism, see “Molecular

Documents: Photography in the Post-Photographic Era, or How Not to Be Trapped into False Dilemmas,” in Kelsey and Stimson, eds., The Meaning of Photography, 178–185.

38 Playfair, Systematic Treatment, “Case 2,” 44, 46. Playfair cites a “Dr. Julius of Hastings” as the referring doctor.

39 For information on the trade cards collected in England during this period, especially those related to medicinal remedies, I thank Joy Whitfield of the Egham Museum in Surrey, England.

40 The “before and after” trope had become commonplace in secular art after William

Hogarth’s moralizing series A Harlot’s Progress (1831) and A Rake’s Progress (1835). Colin Gale and Caroline Smith have written about the extraordinary “before and after” photographs taken by Henry Hering at the Bethlem Hospital in London, which

BEFORE AND AFTER

39

seem to be the earliest examples of sustained, systematic contrasts in psychiatric photography. I thank the authors for the English translation of “Namen en gezichten: patiënten in het Bethlem Hospital, door de lens van Henry Hering,” “Des noms et des Visages: Les Patients du Bethlem Hospital à travers la lentille de Henry Hering,” in Patrick Allegaert, Hendrik Defoort, and Mieke Renders, eds., Ziek: Tussen Lichaam en Geest/Malade: Entre Corps et Esprit (Gent: Museum Dr. Guislain, 2007), 35–39, 174–176.

41 William Withey Gull, “Anorexia Nervosa (Apepsia Hysterica, Anorexia Hysterica),” 502, as reprinted in Obesity Research 5, no. 5 (September 1997): 498–502.

42 On the impact of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, see especially Geoffrey Batchen,

ed., Photography Degree Zero, 2009. I have also benefited from Anne McCauley’s “The Trouble with Photography,” in Elkins, ed., Photography Theory, 403–430: “If … we need to shift discussions of photography away from issues surrounding its mode of manufacture and towards its reception and circulation in the world, then we would be well advised to revisit Barthes’ technique of examining our personal responses to images,” 421–422.

43 Playfair, Systematic Treatment, 2. 44 Ibid., 74. 45 Ibid., 56–57. 46 Ibid., 57. 47 Ibid., 98, “Case 2.” 48 Sir William Gull, Bart., M.D. F.R.S., “Anorexia Nervosa,” The Lancet, in “Clinical

Notes” (March 17, 1888): 516–517, 516. The photographer is a Mr. C. S. Ticehurst of Petersfield.

49 Curiously, this was not the only version of “after” that Gull had commissioned,

although it is the only one he published. Another engraving of the young girl was not published until 1936—this time suitably “fleshed out” and, as with the original “before” image—nude from the waist up. See John Ryle, “Anorexia Nervosa,” The Lancet (October 17, 1936): 893–896, figure 5.

50 W. S. Playfair, M.D. LL.D, F.R.C.P., “Notes on the So-Called ‘Anorexia Nervosa,’” The Lancet (April 28, 1888): 817–818.

51 Emphasis added. Ibid., 818. While it is entirely possible that Playfair commissioned a variety of photographers to represent his ill and cured patients, the six pairs he gave to Mitchell obviously had a special status.

52 Playfair had in mind the lectures of his eminent colleague Dr. Clifford Allbutt, Lancet (April 25): 919.

53 Albert Londe was the principle photographer working for Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot

at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. For an influential analysis of the photographs, most of which were published in Charcot’s Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpêtrière, see Georges Didi-Huberman, trans. Alisa Hartz, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

54 In 1891, Van der Weyde was photographed by a Mr. Walery for a folio called Our Celebrities 4, no. 51 (November 1891). He was identified as a “Photographer and

40

Before-and-After Photography

Artist,” who “Pioneered the use of artificial light in studios.” The narrative about Playfair’s trial and its aftermath is at the heart of his great grandson’s biography: Sir John Stanier, A Victorian Dilemma, 162–223 and is also told in McLaren’s “Privileged Communications,” 229–247. Playfair continued to be well respected by his colleagues, and received a letter of support from the former prime minister, William Gladstone, after his trial.

55 “Obituary,” Lancet (January 22, 1903): 575. See The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, An Autobiography 1 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 95, for a far more equivocal account of the rest cure. Gilman was one of S. W. Mitchell’s most prominent patients. Also see her “Why I wrote the Yellow Wallpaper,” Forerunner 4 (October 1913): 271.

BEFORE AND AFTER

41

3 IMAGING THE CRIMINAL BODY “Faces of Meth” and Galton’s Composite Photographs KRISTEN M. THOMAS-MCGILL

The body is the inscribed surface of events. –MICHEL FOUCAULT1

I should anticipate that a great number of those who commit certain classes of crimes would be found to show an entirely inferior mental and bodily organisation. –SIR EDMUND DU CANE2

One thing that i [sic] learned was how disgusting meth and all other illegal drugs can make your mouth and teeth, and how they hurt your body, inside and out. –TESTIMONIAL OF A STUDENT ON THE FACES OF METH WEBSITE3

In November 1999, the Office of the Governor of Oklahoma hosted a conference on methamphetamine (meth) abuse within the state. During a television interview at the conference, Governor Frank Keating said of the drug, “It’s a white trash drug. Methamphetamines largely are consumed by the lower socio-economic element of white people, and I think we need to shame it.”4 Governor Keating’s remarks

illustrate the complex intersections of class, race, meth abuse, the body, abjection, and punitive shaming in American culture. Keating’s accusatory references to a marginalized segment of the population (“white trash,” poor and generally rural underclass white citizens who are implied to threaten bourgeois values) did not pass without protest: a state senator called for an apology from the governor for “branding” citizens with racialized and “negative, stereotypical nicknames.”5 But the fact remains that a prominent public official acknowledged openly, while on television, and at a conference of drug abuse experts, his perception of the race and class makeup of methamphetamine users. Clearly Governor Keating believed his perceptions to be widely shared and palatable enough to his constituency to allow such remarks. Governor Keating’s comments demonstrate a widespread public view in the United States of meth as a drug for poor white people, in contrast with crack cocaine, which Keating referred to as a “black trash drug.”6 Keating’s remarks hint at the extent to which ideas about drug use and criminality in America are embedded within a matrix of subtle cultural, ethnic, and class markers that affect the attitudes of policymakers and their constituents. These markers are evidence of the socially constructed nature of ideas about drug addiction, criminality, and the body. Such markers are inherently elusive and abstract, but cultural artifacts are shaped by these societal attitudes and offer a foundation from which we can excavate these principles. Photographs of criminals are one such artifact that deals explicitly with criminality, the body, and Foucauldian discourses of power and the gaze. The motif of the before-and-after photograph of criminal bodies is particularly useful to the project of uncovering underlying attitudes toward drug use and embodied criminality. In before-and-after criminal photography, the disempowered criminal body is exposed to the viewer’s gaze not once but twice, inviting comparisons and moral judgments on the effects of crime. These images are an exercise in power exchange. The formerly powerful and dangerous criminal is tamed by the power of the law, returning the (presumably law-abiding) viewer to the position of power. The viewer’s gaze controls, exposes, and judges the criminal body and the changes it has undergone in the space between “before” and “after.” The purpose of this chapter is to explore some of the dialogues between hierarchical classed and racialized cultural meaning, criminality, the body, and the photographic gaze. This essay will rely on two photographic case studies: one a set of before-and-after photographs and the other a set of composite images. The main case study is the recent American before-and-after “Faces of Meth” antidrug campaign, in which images of arrested meth abusers are juxtaposed to highlight bodily decay and abjection as side effects of crime. The second case, Francis Galton’s Victorian-era composite photographs of “criminal types,” is then presented as a historical precursor to contemporary ideas about and images of the criminal body. Analysis will rely upon Foucauldian assumptions of social constructionism; that

44

Before-and-After Photography

is, that experiences of the reality of ideas such as “crime” and “race” and even “the body” are culturally and temporally dependent. A formal description of each case study will be socially contextualized. Finally, analyses of the racial and class implications of each set of photographs will lead to a comparison of Faces of Meth’s and Galton’s photographs’ messages produced about the criminal body.

Faces of Meth In 2004, Deputy Bret King was working in the Corrections Division Classification Unit of the Multnomah County Sherriff ’s Office (MCSO) in Oregon.7 He began compiling booking photographs of repeat methamphetamine users, comparing before-and-after shots of each of the arrested people to document the changes their bodies underwent in the interim, ostensibly as a direct result of their methamphetamine use. These before-and-after images would form the core of the Faces of Meth (FOM) drug awareness campaign, which focuses on demonstrating meth’s “distinct deteriorating effect on somebody’s physical appearance.”8 FOM uses these images of deterioration as a “pedagogical policing project” aimed at primary intervention—that is, preventing people from beginning to use a drug through techniques of education and empowerment.9 FOM depicts the drug’s decaying effect on the body by juxtaposing temporally separated booking photographs of the same methamphetamine user (Plate 1).10 The earlier picture is situated on the left and the latter on the right, conforming to the left-to-right directionality of most Western languages. This format implies sequence, if not cause and effect. Under the “result” photo, the amount of elapsed time since the first photo is listed. Finally, under some versions of the photos, the first name of the meth user is given; in other versions the Face of Meth is left nameless. These mug shots adhere to that genre’s contemporary conventions, with the subject situated before a monotone background and looking directly at the camera. The image shows only the head and shoulder area of the subject. Though the project is about bodily decay, the face is the prioritized body part for demonstrating that decay; this is a Face of Meth, not a Body of Meth. These images of bodily degeneration are made available on the FOM website for online viewing, free download, or on a purchasable CD. Four main images remain on the site, although the sherriff ’s office periodically releases more through other media. Additionally, Deputy King gives meth education presentations to local schools incorporating the FOM mug shots. Though no transcript or other details of the presentation are available online, the MCSO emphasizes that FOM is not a “scared straight” campaign, but a program that is simply “honest with kids.”11 The sherriff ’s office does not define “scared straight” tactics or state specifically how the strategies of FOM differ from them. Rather, the MCSO seems to rely upon

IMAGING THE CRIMINAL BODY

45

a commonly held view of “scared straight” programs as hyperbolic, ineffective, and disingenuous schemes in which convicted offenders attempt to deter young people from committing crimes by sharing shocking stories from their own criminal histories. This negative attitude toward these campaigns is reflected in a series of popular Saturday Night Live parody skits called “Scared Straight,” in which convicts tell young offenders a series of lurid, ridiculously improbable stories plagiarized from the scripts of popular films.12 FOM, the sherriff ’s office implies, is different from such “scared straight” programs because of its reliance upon the presumed inherent veracity and impartiality of the photographic record. Testimonials on the FOM website from students and educators praise the program for its “incredibly valuable” approach that “let[s] the evidence speak for itself.”13 The campaign’s emphasis on the visible physical effects of meth is particularly lauded as easily relatable and therefore especially relevant to teens. One teacher states that FOM “brought the problem of drugs back to a level that was comprehensible and realistic” by stressing the immediate embodied consequences of methamphetamine abuse.14 These comments imply that appearance-conscious teenagers are particularly affected by the physicality of the bodily decay depicted in the FOM images. The body is thus positioned as at once “comprehensible” and dangerous; as a means of reaching at-risk youth and as a vehicle for criminal destruction. FOM inscribes the body with the threat of decay. By displaying images of degenerating bodies, the campaign graphically warns viewers that their own bodily decline can be accelerated by drug abuse. The physicality of the booking photos and their perceived nature as incontrovertible proof of the dangers of meth are promoted as the leading virtues of the FOM campaign. However striking these images of bodily suffering, the assumption that these photos necessarily offer an eternal truth about drug use is misleading. FOM’s fundamental premise that the photographic record constitutes objective “evidence [that can] speak for itself ” is even more problematic.15 Images are born of context, and can be manipulated to elicit a desired response. As John Tagg has argued, “Every photograph is the result of specific and, in every sense, significant distortions which render its relation to any prior reality deeply problematic.”16 The specific images selected for representation in FOM construct a privileged narrative about methamphetamine. As the criminal justice scholars Linnemann and Wall point out, “Durations between mug shots are not uniform…suggested images were cherry picked for dramatic effect.”17 Further, they assert that the people in the photographs are likely users of other drugs, so to “name these images the ‘faces of meth’ or the ‘face’ of any other drug” is misleading. Finally, they excavate the racial and class implications of the photos, as all images on the FOM website appear to be of white people. FOM thus frames methamphetamine as an inconsistent yet powerful drug affecting white people—as precisely the “white trash drug” mentioned by Governor Keating.

46

Before-and-After Photography

The selected photos emphasize the abject nature of the bodies depicted. “It is… not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection,” Julia Kristeva theorizes, “but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules.”18 The bodies on display are not simply abject because, for instance, Theresa’s second photograph displays a white woman’s deep wrinkles. Rather, the abjection comes from the unexpectedness of the caption, “2.5 years later.” Bodies with meth inside them reject recognized norms of aging. It is the juxtaposition of the before with the after that gives these photographs their shocking power. The sense of abjection through bodily transformation is strong, and is clearly indicated in the online FOM testimonials. Says one high school student regarding the before-andafter images, “I think that having this sort of thingreally [sic] makes people see it and go ‘eewww, how nasty.’”19 Information omitted from the photos also creates unease within the viewer; devoid of location, of kinship, of usefulness, Theresa becomes a floating head. Her humanity has been reduced to a mug shot. This image is no longer the face of a woman named Theresa, but is now the Face of Meth. Even the name label, “Theresa,” is ephemeral: in some incarnations of the photos, the name is present, but in others it is missing. “Theresa” comes and goes. Further details of her life are never given by FOM. Does she have a partner, pets, children, a career? Her full name and story can be found, but not through the FOM website; her name (Theresa Baxter) is given in a PBS Frontline documentary, and she is featured in a 2004 story about FOM in The Oregonian newspaper.20 FOM minimizes the humanity and agency of its subjects not only through these formal aspects of the mug shots but also through the problematic policies of the campaign itself. FOM does not ask for the consent of those people whose photographs it features. Because the images are in the public record, the MCSO is able to display and distribute the photographs and given names without the agreement or even knowledge of the subjects.21 In 2014, The Oregonian described how a man featured in FOM—who only found out he was part of the campaign when a reporter contacted him—was ejected from a bar after being recognized from the mug shots.22 Though the photographs’ status as part of the public record makes the MCSO’s publication of them legal, ethical questions remain regarding privacy, bodily autonomy, and the nature of addiction. An editorial in Behavioral Healthcare criticized FOM’s treatment of substance abuse as a criminal justice problem rather than a public health problem.23 In this editorial, Douglas Edwards suggests that FOM should have blacked out the eyes of the subjects, and links his recommendation to medical literature, saying, “This is a common practice in the medical/scientific literature that allows viewers to see the results of a disease without compromising a person’s identity.”24 FOM leaves its subjects perfectly recognizable, though stripped of humanity, creating an abject Other by blurring the boundary between personhood and thingness.

IMAGING THE CRIMINAL BODY

47

These white faces are abject because they have disrupted broad notions of whiteness and bourgeois propriety.25 Historically associated with middleand upper-class respectability, whiteness has here been transformed by methamphetamine into an unkempt, hollow-cheeked, lesioned, sallow-faced stereotype of “trailer trash” and “rednecks.” In the public consciousness, the meth users of FOM have transgressed traditional markers of privileged whiteness and ventured into the liminal territory of perceived criminality, poverty, laziness, and addiction. The appellation “white trash” that Governor Keating applied to meth users marks the FOM subjects not as white people, but as a stigmatized class, low in the racial/socioeconomic hierarchy. The before-and-after format of the images emphasizes the rapidity with which it is possible to descend from privileged status to underclass and implies the starkness of class contrasts. Linnemann and Wall trace this hierarchization of whiteness to the early eugenics movement of the nineteenth century and to social Darwinism.26 That the specter of a concept as antiquated as eugenics should underscore the discourses embedded within the very twenty-first century FOM campaign at first seems startling. However, when FOM’s punitive shaming via images is placed within the context of the codevelopment of criminology, eugenics, and photography, it becomes clearer how a digital antidrug campaign could contain the remnants of nineteenth-century worldviews. In order to elucidate the links between eugenics, the criminal body, and the photographic gaze, we must turn to Francis Galton’s innovative composite photographs of criminal types.

Galton’s composite photographs In 1879, the polymath Sir Francis Galton read a paper to the Royal Anthropological Institute describing a method he had developed for layering photographic images, resulting in a composite image reflecting a kind of average of its components. Galton’s technique would allow the production of “a generalised picture; one that represents no man in particular, but portrays an imaginary figure possessing the average features of any given group of men.”27 Galton states that the development of this technique sprang from conversations with Herbert Spencer, in which the two men discussed the need for an accurate way to compare various facial types and possible photographic solutions.28 This desire for a method of composite portraiture derived from a widespread belief in “an identifiable physical criminal type,” a type which, when known, could allow police to prevent crime before it happened.29 Galton’s composite portraiture would potentially allow the indexing of various criminal “classes” and the identification of the physical traits of each. Galton’s project was at once photographic, criminological, and physiognomic.

48

Before-and-After Photography

Galton was first introduced to the idea of the composite photography of criminal types by his close personal friend Sir Edmund Du Cane, who served as HM Inspector of Prisons and who supplied Galton with photographs of his inmates.30 Du Cane was among a group of British prison and medical experts referred to as the “English precursors of Lombroso,” who believed that inmates’ physiognomies held the key to their criminal behavior.31 Italian criminologist and physician Cesare Lombroso would soon go on to create the Italian School of Positivist Criminology and codify the nascent beliefs of Du Cane, Galton, and others into a system of anthropological criminology based on physical traits.32 Galton’s composite photographs are situated within the context of this emphasis on anatomy and physiognomy within the increasingly sophisticated fields of criminology and criminal justice. Bridging the gap between physiognomy and criminology was the emerging field of eugenics, whose name Galton himself coined in 1883.33 Although Galton’s work would inspire the creation of the Eugenics Education Society in 1907, the seeds of the movement had been planted far earlier.34 Pauline Mazumdar links the beginnings of the eugenics movement to nineteenth-century awareness of the social problem of poverty, and to “the Malthusian concept of the dangerous fertility of the poor.”35 Widespread belief that overcrowded slums caused crime to skyrocket was coupled with Galton’s cousin Charles Darwin’s new ideas about natural selection and the generation and degeneration of species.36 By the time of Galton’s lecture to the Royal Anthropological Institute, the social sciences “were quick to adopt [Herbert] Spencer’s initiative in extending biological concepts to socio-cultural phenomena.”37 Lombroso’s theories of criminality as an atavistic trait of savagery dovetailed well with this biologization of social structures.38 Social Darwinism offered a mechanism to explain the widely recognized social problems of poverty and crime; proto-eugenicists advocated for the improvement of humanity through social controls;39 Lombroso offered a criminological vocabulary of degeneration and underdevelopment; Galton had the technical ability to layer photographs: the stage was set for the composite portraits of criminal types. One of Galton’s composite portraits, likely created in the late 1870s using his signature method of photographing carefully aligned portraits, features criminals convicted of nonviolent larceny (Figure 3.1).40 Circulation information about the image is missing; it is not clear who would have seen these composite photographs, though Galton asserts that his composites and their sources were “frequently… exhibited.”41 The original source components are not provided in this instance, though in other Galton images both the composites and their component parts are given. Like the drug users in the FOM images, each composite figure sits before a monochrome background and faces straight toward the camera. In a visual language that carries through to today’s criminal mug shots, they are shown from mid-chest up, with the rest of the body omitted; the focus of criminal anthropology in Galton’s

IMAGING THE CRIMINAL BODY

49

FIGURE 3.1 Francis Galton, Prevalent Types of Features among Men Convicted of Larceny (Without Violence), 1879.

study is the face, not the entire body. The sitters all appear to be white and male. A short description of the subject matter, including the crime of the photographed men, labels the images. Above each of the four images, a number is given to indicate the number of components used to compile the composite image. The shadowy outlines of these component photographs can be seen ghosting around the edges of the composite figures, but the face of each composite is more or less legible. The resulting faces appear plausibly lifelike, though Galton is quick to point out that his method produces “the portrait of a type and not of an individual.”42 Though this particular set of composite portraits does not supply the original individual photographs, in his presentation to the Royal Anthropological Institute Galton evidently displayed the originals which constitute his composite. He notes rather patronizingly that the “special villainous irregularities” of each inmate’s face have been minimized by the composite process, and that “the common humanity that underlies them has prevailed.”43 This seems to contradict Du Cane’s expectation of an evidence of “an entirely inferior mental and bodily organisation” among criminals.44 Galton makes a special effort to assure his audience of anthropologists that such a result is to be expected: “All composites are better looking than their components.”45 Galton’s vocabulary here reveals something of

50

Before-and-After Photography

his thinking about the criminal types he studied. While he sees characteristics of irregular villainy in each of his subjects, the markers of villainy disappear through aggregation. One suspects that any perceived inherent facial villainy of his subjects would have been a result of Galton’s contact with proto-Lombrosian thinking of criminals as atavistic, primitive, and underdeveloped. In any case, Galton finds that bodily signs of villainous ugliness are remedied through composite portraiture. The resultant “criminal types” are thus missing the grotesqueness of evil so commonly associated with the “criminal classes” in Victorian Britain.46 Still, Galton refers to the criminal faces of his composites as “coarse and low types” common to the “criminal classes.”47 The grotesquely abject is missing from the portraits, though Galton still finds in the composite faces the traces of physical markers of criminality. Galton frames his perception of physiognomic signs of criminality and coarseness within a broader context of hierarchized racial and class social structure. When describing composite photography’s uses beyond criminology, he claims that the technique can be used for identifying common racial traits and tracing the heritability of physical characteristics.48 Galton’s belief in the power of composite portraiture to facilitate learning about the intersection of race and inherited traits—an intersection located quite close to eugenics—demonstrates his commitment to ideas of social Darwinism and a genetic hierarchy evident through physiognomy. Class, racial hygiene, crime, and photography are inextricably linked in the Galtonian project, which elucidates the long tradition of interplay between photographed criminal faces and the enforcement or production of racial and class hierarchies.

Past and present: Imaging the criminal FOM and Galton’s composite portraits of criminals are both projects with strong investments in criminal justice and crime deterrence. FOM is sponsored and operated by a county sheriff ’s office and aims to deter methamphetamine abuse by exposing the physical effects of the drug. Galton’s composites were intended to document Lombrosian criminal types to assist in preventive policing. The formal qualities and social contexts of these two photographic projects, however, expose differing concerns about and approaches to policing, criminality, the body, and the power of the image. The first point upon which the two sets of images differ is the type of series they represent. Ludmilla Jordanova identifies various categories of series common in the history of anatomical art/artistic anatomy, and while neither FOM nor Galton’s composites fit neatly into Jordanova’s scheme, these categories are useful

IMAGING THE CRIMINAL BODY

51

for thinking about the differing pedagogical and criminological strategies of the two. Jordanova’s series types are as follows: 1 Life cycle series showing development throughout a lifetime 2 Layered series sequentially exposing the interior depths of a body 3 Evolutionary series showing changes in complexity over long periods of

time

4 Moral series showing decline/uplift49

FOM most closely represents Types 1 and 4. Its juxtaposition of before-andafter photographs illustrates the natural changes associated with the aging process in the temporal interim represented in Theresa’s case by the label “2.5 years later.” Yet, this is not a simple Type 1 series of aging; the photographs’ situation within the context of FOM and their use as a pedagogical tool of warning also locates Theresa’s photos within the sphere of Type 4. The implication of the photos is that some kind of moral decline—in this case, the stigmatized ethics of drug abuse.50 The extent of the subject’s moral decline is represented by the discrepancy between the bodily changes expected for normal bodily change over 2.5 years, and the actual physical changes shown in Theresa’s second photo. It is the striking nature of this discrepancy that imbues the FOM images with their visceral power to deter criminal drug use by exhibiting the abject body. The Galton composites are more difficult to classify by series type and have a more complex relationship with policing than the FOM images. The portraits do not represent change over time, either the lifetime of the subject or vast evolutionary time. They do not explicitly depict changes in the subjects’ moral states, but rather start from an assumption about the fixed moral inferiority of the “criminal type.” The composites certainly do not physically peel back subjects’ skin and muscle, though they may be interpreted as metaphorically manipulating layers of individual sitters’ traits to expose underlying similarities. Galton’s interest in producing images of Lombrosian, atavistic bodily types of criminality most closely associates these photographs with Type 3. Although Galton has not attempted with these photographs to display a full sequence of a hypothetical eugenicist hierarchy, these images of criminality represent one class of person in the hierarchized worldview of Galtonian eugenics.51 Created at a time when both photography and criminology were beginning to flourish and when Linnaean and Darwinian ideas of scientific categorization were in vogue, Galton’s project of typology hints at the zeitgeist of the second half of the nineteenth century in Britain. By documenting and describing criminal types through photography, Galton’s work could potentially enable police to identify and manage criminals, just as the collector of seashells could effectively order an arrangement of items when armed with a good reference book on bivalve

52

Before-and-After Photography

species. The policing strategy used by FOM is different. Rather than document different types of meth users, the program declares a monolithic Face of Meth. The campaign’s efficacy arises from the abject nature of this scabbed and sallow face. While Galton’s composites rely upon principles of categorization and systemization, FOM draws upon fear of becoming the photographed transgressive Other. These two image sets also differ in the type of gaze they invite. Galton’s composites, presented at the Royal Anthropological Institute and published in scientific journals, were intended mostly for a professional audience. Although it is not clear if these images were made available to the general public, their circulation would have been more circumscribed than the digital images that circulate with ease. FOM is immensely popular on the Internet: “Drugs make you ugly” is a YouTube version of the images that has over eight million views.52 The FOM photos are regularly presented to school children and educators, and are accessible via a simple Google search. The accessibility of FOM has created a different level of discourse surrounding FOM than is evident for Galton’s composites. While the composite photos elicited comments such as Du Cane’s regarding “entirely inferior mental and bodily organisation,” commentary for FOM takes a very different tone. A July 2011 Buzzfeed article titled “20 New Faces of Meth” (and tellingly categorized as “Trashy”) begins with the subheading, “Yes! The Multnomah County Sheriff in Oregon has released some new faces of meth. Enjoy.”53 The Galton images are framed as scientific evidence for Du Cane’s hypotheses about inferiority, while the FOM photos are presented as “trashy” entertainment. “Enjoy.” The type of gaze elicited by the photos differs: the composites invite scientific curiosity akin to Foucault’s clinical gaze; FOM invites the voyeurism of the freak show.54 What unites these two photographic projects, so different in their uses of the series, policing strategies, and the type of gaze they elicit, are the race and class implications of their depictions of the body. By decontextualizing the photographic subject, by focusing on white, poor, and criminal subjects, the photos reinforce discourses about the nature of (white) drug criminality. The Face of Meth is framed as white, dishevelled, prematurely aged, and sickly; it does little to challenge or reshape Governor Keating’s description of meth as a “white trash drug.” The photographic composites position prison inmates as dour, scruffy white men of a criminal underclass to be studied and categorized like specimens in a natural history museum. Though both FOM and Galton’s composites purport to be purely pedagogical tools for criminology and crime deterrence, the social contexts in which they were produced and consumed leave indelible marks on their formal qualities. The before-and-after format of Faces of Meth, a digital campaign typical of the twenty-first century, allows FOM to draw its iconographic power from racial and class ideas stretching back at least to the nineteenth century. By comparing FOM

IMAGING THE CRIMINAL BODY

53

with Galton’s project of criminal-type portraiture, the particular biases and cultural assumptions underlying Governor Keating’s remarks about a “white trash drug” come into focus. The Faces of Meth are the inscribed surfaces of contemporary American anxieties and beliefs.

Notes 1 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Donald F. Bouchard, ed.,

Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 139–164, 148.

2 Francis Galton, “Composite Portraits, Made by Combining Those of Many Different

Persons into a Single Resultant Figure,” The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 8 (1879): 132–144, 143. doi: 10.2307/2841021.

3 Faces of Meth, Multnomah County Sherriff ’s Office, http://www.facesofmeth.us/ (accessed August 30, 2015).

4 Senate Communications Division, “Senator Asks Governor to Apologize for Racial

Comments, Dickerson Calls Keating Statements Inappropriate, Offensive” (November 12, 1999), http://www.oksenate.gov/news/press_releases/press_releases_1999/ PR991112.html (accessed August 30, 2015).

5 Travis Linnemann and Tyler Wall, “‘This Is Your Face on Meth’: The Punitive

Spectacle of ‘White Trash’ in the Rural War on Drugs,” Theoretical Criminology 17, no. 3 (2013): 315–334, 325. doi: 10.1177/1362480612468934; Senate Communications Division.

6 Senate Communications Division, “Senator.” 7 Faces of Meth. 8 Mitch Wilson, “The Meth Epidemic,” FRONTLINE, May 17, 2011, http://www.pbs. org/wgbh/pages/frontline/meth/ (accessed August 30, 2015).

9 Linnemann and Wall, “This Is Your Face on Meth,” 317; David M. McDowell and

Henry I. Spitz, Substance Abuse: From Principles to Practice (London: Brunner/Mazel, 1999), 251.

10 “Theresa” [downloadable photograph], Free Pictures, Faces of Meth, http://www. facesofmeth.us/main.htm (accessed August 30, 2015).

11 Faces of Meth. 12 “Scared Straight: Shoplifting with Shia LaBeouf,” Saturday Night Live (2008), [TV program] NBC, 10 May, http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/scaredstraight/n12247 (accessed September 1, 2015).

13 Faces of Meth. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid.

54

Before-and-After Photography

16 John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 2. The emphasis is Tagg’s.

17 Linnemann and Wall, “This Is Your Face on Meth,” 319. 18 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4.

19 Faces of Meth. 20 Wilson, “The Meth Epidemic”; Joseph Rose, “The Faces of Meth,” The Oregonian

(December 28, 2004), http://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/index. ssf/2004/12/the_faces_of_meth.html (accessed August 30, 2015).

21 Kasia Hall, “Faces of Meth, 10 Years Later: Anti-Drug Campaign Endures, as Does

Effect on Addicts’ Lives,” The Oregonian (December 27, 2014), http://www.oregonlive. com/portland/index.ssf/2014/12/faces_of_meth_10_years_later_a.html#incart_ story_package (accessed September 3, 2015).

22 Hall, “Faces of Meth, 10 Years Later.” 23 Douglas J. Edwards, “Faces of Tragedy,” Behavioral Healthcare (May 2008), 6. 24 Ibid., 6. The emphasis is in the original. 25 Linnemann and Wall, “This Is Your Face on Meth,” 323, 324. 26 Ibid., 324. 27 Galton, “Composite Portraits,” 132, 133. 28 Ibid., 132. 29 Neil Davie, “A ‘Criminal Type’ in All But Name: British Prison Medical Officers and the ‘Anthropological’ Approach to the Study of Crime (c. 1865–1895),” Victorian Review 29, no. 1 (2003): 1–30, 5 and 10, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27793508 (accessed August 30, 2015).

30 Francis Galton, Memories of My Life (London: Methuen and Co., 1908), 259. 31 Davie, “Criminal Type,” 5. 32 A full exploration of the work and influences of Lombroso is unfortunately beyond

the scope of this essay. For an overview of Lombroso’s work, see the article in Adalbert Albrecht, “Cesare Lombroso,” Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology 1, no. 2 (1910): 71–83, 72–73.

33 Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (London: Macmillan and Co., 1883).

34 Pauline M. H. Mazumdar, Eugenics, Human Genetics and Human Failings: The

Eugenics Society, Its Sources and Its Critics in Britain (London: Routledge, 1992), 7.

35 Ibid., 2. 36 Ibid. 37 David Green, “Veins of Resemblance: Photography and Eugenics,” Oxford Art Journal 7 (1984): 3–16, 8.

38 Albrecht, “Cesare Lombroso,” 71–83, 72, 73.

IMAGING THE CRIMINAL BODY

55

39 Mazumdar, Eugenics, 1. 40 Galton, “Composite Portraits,” 133, 134. 41 Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty, 10. 42 Galton, “Composite Portraits,” 133. 43 Ibid., 135. 44 Ibid., 143. 45 Ibid., 135. 46 For a full discussion of the Victorian association between ugliness and evil, see Marte

B. Sørensen’s “Places of Evil in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Master’s thesis, University of Tromsø, 2012.

47 Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty, 10. 48 Galton, “Composite Portraits,” 140–141. 49 Ludmilla Jordanova, “Happy Marriages and Dangerous Liaisons: Artists and

Anatomy,” in Deanna Petherbridge, ed., The Quick and the Dead: Artists and Anatomy (London and Berkeley: The Hayward Gallery and University of California Press), 102–104.

50 For more on the changing moral/ethical positioning of drug use in society, see Lawrence Driscoll, Reconsidering Drugs: Mapping Victorian and Modern Drug Discourses (New York: Palgrave, 2000).

51 See Mazumdar. 52 Linnemann and Wall, “This Is Your Face on Meth,” 320. 53 Matt Stopera, “20 New Faces of Meth,” Buzzfeed (July 28, 2011), http://www.buzzfeed. com/mjs538/new-faces-of-meth#.ocWPPL449 (accessed August 30, 2015). The emphasis is present in the original.

54 Although beyond the scope of this chapter, Foucault’s clinical gaze remains a crucial concept in any analysis of the body on display. See the bibliographic entry for The Birth of the Clinic for more information.

56

Before-and-After Photography

PART TWO

LANDSCAPE AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT

4 “NOISE ABATEMENT ZONE” John Divola’s Photographic Fulcrum JASON E. HILL

The communicative elegance of the generic “before and after” photographic dyad adheres in the apparent clarity of its structure: two points in time register, in their photographically devised spatial juxtaposition, some compelling change to an otherwise essentially stable subject. It is a fundamental condition of the genre that the first photographic exposure is produced in sure anticipation of the changes to be registered in the second.1 It is another that this change’s cause will remain unseen, only to be surmised by some beholder (the ever-present third term) in the central fulcrum supporting the two constituent and temporally consecutive photographs, often in relation to some external textual framing apparatus. What would be the photojournalist’s decisive moment—the propulsive event that a photographer might be so lucky to capture and with her photograph thereby explain, the “during”—is definitionally barred from inclusion in the “before and after” dyad’s visual field. Its instant legibility as “before and after” depends upon two further and tightly braided conditions: first, the essential stasis of the twicepictured subject—typically a given geographic position, structure, or body— which establishes the ground against which any change will be measured; and second, and more importantly because far less visibly, the rhetorical stasis of the measuring apparatus itself. This latter condition enables the satisfaction of the first, and in their union they provide the “control” guaranteeing the dyad’s proof. In other words, what is required is that the relation of the camera to what remains “essential” in its pictured subject remains fixed in place (if not in time). This sets into relief the dyad’s catalytic change as the salient concern. Difference is expressed to the same degree that the work of photography itself is withdrawn from view.

House Removals, LAX In its membership to this class of pictures, John Divola’s House Removals, LAX, E (1976) is exemplary (Figure 4.1). The picture’s singular horizon-long tracking in panoramic suburban space all but instantly clarifies as a sequential array in suburban time as well, and we will recognize the “before and after” dyadic rhetorical structure almost at once: two photographic images, printed cheek-byjowl upon a single 15 ½˝ × 36˝ sheet, together registering a single camera position in space on either “side” of some photographically catalytic event in time. Enough holds steady across the hinge between E’s constituent frames to anchor us quickly in place—the road, the curb, the foreground tree trunk and leafy palm at right, a low and bright white eave slanting in from the left, and a driveway angling in from bottom right. Secure now in our bearings, other details mark the passage of time, the progress of a recognizably Los Angeles winter. That tree has lost its leaves. The light is a bit cooler and its shadows have lost their edge. But it will be bigger changes, averred in the picture’s minimally descriptive title and delivered in its image, that compel primary attention. A lovely, Southern Californian suburban home, along with much of its landscaped flora, has, in an almost surgical excision, gone missing, leaving leveled earth but otherwise nary a blade of grass disturbed in its wake. The neatness of this absenting is matched only by the forensic evidentiary clarity of the photographic record it has produced.2 The hunt for some generative event, the thing that will explain what has changed from the first captured moment to the next, can now ensue, and its understanding will be sought in the fulcrum between. Divola has chosen a noisy subject. The calculated and precise erasure of a house is a distinctly compelling kind of incident, charged with pathos. “A house,” the phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard famously observed, “constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability…[it] is our corner of the world.”3 There is then a traumatic dimension in such an erasure, as what has been erased is not just wood and metal and glass but “a humble home,” one of

FIGURE 4.1  John Divola, House Removals LAX, E, 1976. Courtesy of the artist.

60

Before-and-After Photography

those key, quasi-universal anchors by which we locate ourselves spatially, socially, and, in time, and so in history.4 Such an anchor’s erasure—and that it would have proceeded so neatly, so deliberately—threatens the whole edifice: if a house will be our “proof ” of stability, then its deliberate erasure will be “proof ” of that same stability’s terrifying contingency. This is eventful stuff, the “traumatic encounter” of static norms with uncontrollable and unpredictable energies—such as might erase “humble homes” from the otherwise neatly ordered landscape.5 Photographs trafficking in such eventful plenitude will be the hardest photographs to see if what we seek to see is what a photograph is (i.e., as an artifact) rather than what it is of (i.e., what it points to), their subject matter most effectively “concealing the textuality of the photograph itself.”6 To activate the “before and after” dyad in the encounter with such an eventful erasure will therefore be to disarm criticality, to push the viewer away from a consideration of how an utterance is being made to focus instead upon what it is that utterance describes—it will be to withdraw the work of photography from view. That Divola in 1975–76 should have done so on 35-mm chromogenic film only reinforces the dyad’s amplification of inferred incident and its potential emotional resonance—“color images,” critic Irv Tybel had written in 1969, echoing the conventional wisdom, “seem meant … to be felt rather than thought about.”7 And so let us indulge the photographer John Divola in his artful misdirection here and take the bait to tangle for a moment with what it is that his picture would have us in its noisy eventfulness worry over: Whatever has become of this house? Digging around in that fulcrum from which radiate the “before and after” dyad’s two photographically hinged frames, we piece together clues. While almost aggressively resistant to exposition in its omission of supporting documentation (such as we might expect from a thematically adjacent work like Hans Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System of 1971), Divola’s photographic engagement with real estate here contains within it just information enough to offer entry into the facts of the case. House Removals, LAX, E is one of a larger series of twelve House Removals, each differing from E only in the particulars of the house removed. To survey this series is to discover, through its serial photographic logic, that a great many homes had been similarly eliminated in 1976, each bearing a striking architectural and environmental resemblance to that shown in E. Divola’s second, post-excision E exposure (the right half of the picture) has just revealed in its house’s absenting a building in the far distance: the Airport Marina Hotel, on Lincoln Boulevard in southwest Los Angeles, photographed from a point just north of Los Angeles International Airport, looking north-northeast. This same structure also appears in House Removals, LAX, A; the first dyad from the series (Plate 2). In that stage-setting picture the Airport Marina Hotel is revealed but now only in its subordinate adjacency to Eliot Noyes’s nearer 1962 IBM Aerospace Building,

NOISE ABATEMENT ZONE

61

allowing us to safely triangulate the photographer’s position at the heart of Los Angeles’ aviation economy, just southwest of the intersection of Manchester Avenue and Lincoln Blvd and just north of the Los Angeles International Airport’s (LAX’s) northernmost runway, somewhere very near to the corner of Colegio Drive and 93rd Place in the neighborhood of West Westchester. If such precise geographic detail seems at first beyond our scope here, this particular location takes on a peculiar resonance with the discovery of its evanescent cartographic purchase: like the excised homes they contained, this intersection, its neighborhood, and several others adjacent to it appeared on maps of the region for only a very short time, between approximately 1950 and 1980.8 Prior to 1950, this territory remained undeveloped “beanfield,” and after about 1980 its surviving physical imprint disappears from maps as a matter of navigational interest. Even for that most provisional city of Los Angeles, this marks a singularly convulsive spasm in postwar planning and development.9 The broader outlines of an explanation for all this can be gleaned by reference to the title of the larger project to which House Removals belonged as a subseries: Noise Abatement Zone: Los Angeles International Airport (about which more below). It turns out that Divola’s subject was noisy in more ways than one. Left to wonder what a “noise abatement zone” might be and what it will have to do with the wholesale clearance of a suburban, airport-adjacent Los Angeles settlement, we will need to turn away from Divola’s allusive dyads and turn to the world of journalism, whose own special competence lay precisely in the plain description of the kinds of incidents “before and after” pictures like Divola’s seem ontologically disinclined to relate, those that fall within their hinges. If all but lost to history, the planned and forced clearance of the middle-class neighborhoods immediately surrounding LAX in those years was widely reported, with the New York Times noting in July 1971, in almost farcical oblivion to its own reporting on the American firebombing of South Vietnam and Cambodia at that very moment, that “some of the streets in the doomed airport neighborhood are already reminiscent of parts of London after the blitz. In some blocks, only one house—the owner a holdout for a higher price—remains amid empty lots and driveways that lead nowhere.”10 In war, it is worth noting, homeowners generally do not negotiate payoffs for property or “hold out” for a better offer, but much of the peculiarly modern character of this disturbance to Westchester’s built environment survives the clumsy metaphor. The City of Los Angeles, the Times reported, was buying out and otherwise forcibly removing three entire neighborhoods (with their 2,000odd homes) adjacent to the airport in response to increasingly vocal and litigious complaints by residents about the disruptions—from physical pain to declining property values—introduced by “steadily worsening jet noise,” this in the wake of the introduction of commercial jet travel to the airport and the expansion of runways to accommodate it, beginning in 1959 and rapidly swelling ever since.11 The abatement of jet noise, by the city’s logic, required less the diminishment

62

Before-and-After Photography

of the “noise” itself than its minimization by zoning re-regulation, forcing the bodily and material relocation of local homeowners to a position further from the racket and costing the city some $144 million ($565m today) in compensation.12 In a bitter twist, the very neighborhoods being expropriated to clear the way for modern aviation (some 644 acres east, north, and west of the airport, all told) had been first developed beginning in the late 1940s by private developers on public subsidy precisely in order to house the rapidly growing (all-white, but economically integrated) workforce of the Southern California aviation industry that began concentrating in the area during the much quieter, propeller-driven years before, during, and just after the war.13 The erasure of homes in Divola’s dyads could not but clear a view onto the more ambitious architectural markers of the burgeoning aviation and aerospace economy.14 Different photographies will attend to such matters, in their essentials, according to their own professional or otherwise generative protocols. George Fry, shooting the subject for the Los Angeles Times, and so operating under a very different brief, offered his newspaper’s readers a remarkably lucid photographic accounting of the matter at hand in its more immediate material and economic causal and effective particulars. Fry’s dispatch of November 3, 1970, is a diamond of press photographic efficiency (Figure 4.2).15 Taken at a relatively early moment in the noise abatement dispute, Fry’s remarkable exercise in photographic synecdoche distills the affair in a single vivid instant, as a flatbed truck tows away a Westchester home just beneath the low-flying jet whose noise has sent it on its way. Five years later, and now shooting at virtually the same moment of Divola’s pre-extraction House Removals pictures, Fry

FIGURE 4.2  George R. Fry for the Los Angeles Times, November 3, 1970. Courtesy of Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive, Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

NOISE ABATEMENT ZONE

63

mobilized his own sequential photographic dyad for his paper’s readers. Directing his camera toward the human interest quotient wholly absent from Divola’s dyads, Fry documented the drama first as fifty-three-year-old Westchester resident Mahria Decker was dragged from her condemned home by police, and then as the city’s bulldozer pried Decker’s home from its lot, clearing the path for the subsequently “legal” tide of jet noise.16 Notably, Fry’s own “before and after” dyad here measures a temporal span still effectively and invisibly contained between Divola’s series’ more widely set temporal end-posts. Fry’s pictures all unfold within Divola’s eventful causal hinge: the shifting infrastructural demands of LA aviation’s globalizing capital and its violent incursion into local, middle-class property rights. His journalistic brief obviated any showing of the static conditions of a house first there and then gone; it was only the loud, tearful, and muddy interim that mattered. As a newspaper photographer, George Fry operated under thematic constraints particular to the tight temporal and topical norms of his profession. As Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge noted in their landmark 1965 study of journalism’s procedures of topical selection, the kinds of disturbances that are likely be reported in the press will typically correspond to the temporal conditions prevailing in their platform. Fittingly, Galtung’s and Ruge’s operative metaphor was an acoustic one: “The set of world events…is like a cacophony of sound. … Since we cannot register everything, [journalists] have to select, and the question is what will strike [their, and so our] attention.”17 The likelihood of an event being reported will then correspond fairly neatly to its bearing sufficient “amplitude” to elevate it above the surrounding din, and to its unfolding along a “frequency” discernable to the mediating apparatus—here, the newspaper— where by “frequency” the authors mean not the regularity of an event’s repetition but “the time-span needed for [it] to unfold itself and acquire meaning.”18 For a newspaper, this time span is a daily one, and so press photographers accordingly attend to events yielding some fullness of disturbance or incident within that same tight temporal register: precisely the time it takes for a jet to fly over a towed house or for police and bulldozers to pry a woman from her home and her home from its lot, with the disturbance of middle-class tranquility by giant machines carrying more than adequate “amplitude” to merit the airing. The pairing of “frequency” and “amplitude,” for Galtung and Ruge, conspires in the satisfaction of differentiating, as a matter of convention, the newsworthy “signal.” The rest, of course, is unreported “noise.”

Photography and noise In 1963, the Federal Aviation Agency, aiming to quell public concern about the sonic threat posed by the commercial jet engine’s encroaching proximity to the

64

Before-and-After Photography

collective American earshot, published A Citizen’s Guide to Aircraft Noise. Early in that pamphlet, the authors provide a helpful and succinct definition of the phenomenon under review: What do we mean when we speak of aircraft noise? Noise is often defined as unwanted sound. For example, in studies of communication, noise is considered as an undesired signal which interferes with the reception of a desired signal.19 By 1966, Stanford’s Sensory Research Center director Karl Kryter could reliably report the magnitude of such interference, observing that a jet flyover just after takeoff can generate noise enough to mask approximately twenty-five words of conversation.20 At a decibel level of around 140dB, a nearby jet engine of mid-1970s vintage was well within the range of the acoustic pain threshold of 135–150dB, and airport neighbors reasonably complained that “jet operations out of LAX caused severe vibrations, impaired mental health, interrupted schools, disturbed church services, hindered conversation, disrupted T.V. and radio reception, increased vacancies in rental units, and resulted in a decline in property values.”21 All this undoubtedly constituting enough nuisance, given the increasingly high incidence of such takeoffs from LAX in that moment, to warrant both human displacement and Fry’s photographic attention.22 But noise, a concept so helpfully appropriated by the FAA from communications  discourse, has further implications for the work of the photographer. As a journalist, Fry, whether photographing problems of jet noise or otherwise, was singularly committed to the productive photographic culling of the “desired signal” from any such “noise” as might obscure it. Most of that “undesired” noise in the present case consists of boring details like unscrupulous aviation industry lobbying and shortsighted real estate speculation, which unfold on a “frequency” of limited discernibility to newspaper editors and their frenetic newsrooms.23 But much of the noise from which Fry culled his signal, it must be said, invariably issues from press photography itself—that is, the convergence of bodily comportment, 35 mm camera, lenses, roll films, emulsions, papers, retouchers, halftone screens, rotary presses, inks, newsprint, and so on—allowing that we accept photographic noise here as a concept akin to Roland Barthes’s contemporary concept of “photogenia,” or that photographic quality whose connoted message is “the image itself, ‘embellished’…by techniques of lighting, exposure, and printing.”24 Or better still, to keep both Barthes and our aural metaphor in play here, it will be akin to the “grain” of the camera’s voice which expresses “the materiality of the body [that both of the camera and its operator in their unity] speaking,” above and beyond the character and content of the thing so said.25 It was Fry’s business to quiet all that noise—that photogenia, that grain— and get us to the clear ring of jet noise and its attending incident.

NOISE ABATEMENT ZONE

65

To the extent that Fry and Divola shared a common charge—“to photograph the impact of noise abatement upon habitation”—the photographer of the House Removals was guided by a wholly distinct brief, informed not by the strictures of journalism but by those of the fine arts and the atmosphere of medial inquiry into the properties of the camera and its outputs then prevailing around Robert Heinecken’s photography department at UCLA, where Divola had recently completed his MFA.26 Compelled by the House Removals’ own pictorial logic, we have so far pursued the trouble establishing Divola’s charge more than we have the cast of his larger reckoning with it. Returning our attention to that reckoning, we will discover a photographic enterprise attuned to an altogether different frequency and amplitude—attuned, that is, quite precisely to an inquiry into the problem of that photographic noise, that dimension of photography—its mediating material and embodied presence—that seems as remote to his “before and after” dyads as it does to the press-photographic field that their hinges have funneled us into.

The House Removals’ Fulcra: Interiors and Exteriors and Forced Entries The “before” and “after” pictures joined in any of the House Removals’ given photographic fields can be understood to bracket the eventful temporal span unfolding between. Again, Divola’s House Removals series comprises but one component of the larger, tripartite photographic project, Noise Abatement Zone: Los Angeles International Airport (NAZ hereafter), which incorporated two additional intermediary series—Forced Entries and Interiors and Exteriors, and which occupied the photographer from late 1975 and through 1976. In the time holding between the House Removals’ bracketing before-andafter pictures, in that conceptual hinge between the moment of his initial photographing of a condemned Westchester home and the subsequent picturing of the landscape left by its absence, Divola entered into a radically different photographic transaction with that neighborhood’s convulsive built environment, producing two functionally intermediary bodies of work, entitled Exteriors and Interiors and Forced Entries, respectively, each consisting of dozens of individual pictures. Taken together they reset the House Removals in altogether new light. In House Removals, Divola activated a baldly forensic photographic language whose “before and after” structure and affective depicted incident conspired to quiet photography’s work—its texture as an expressive, temporalized, and embodied mediating force, itself betrayed only by the subdued but decisive clue of its having being shot, quite against the forensic grain, chromogenically. The Exteriors and Interiors and Forced Entries series signal, on their own respective terms, precisely those same features of photography willfully sublimated in the House Removals.

66

Before-and-After Photography

Both those intermediary series stage an inquiry into the fact of an embodied photographic intelligence situated within a given built environment at a given moment, and into the relation of the particulars of that situation, in any one instance, to the photographic form it yields. This much becomes clear in the encounter with a picture like Exteriors and Interiors LAX6018F06 (Figure 4.3). Here, Divola has photographed a house pictured in the “before” frame of still another House Removal—LAX, D—but by repositioning his body and switching out his 35 mm camera and chrome film for a larger format Hasselblad and black-and-white film, he has remade that house’s space almost as radically as the city would, abandoning the Removals’ austerely frontal forensic formal logic in favor of an expressly artful composition privileging spatial massing and the interplay of value and volumetric form that also announces (as if for the first time) the use of black and white as an aesthetic rather than automatic choice.27 Where the House Removals seemed to deny composition as a problem, here composition is foregrounded, connoting

FIGURE 4.3  John Divola, LAX NAZ, Exterior Views/LAX6018F06, 1975–76. Courtesy of the artist.

NOISE ABATEMENT ZONE

67

the force of influence. We might, for example, now associate Divola’s approach with that of the great “modern” suburban LA architectural photographer Maynard Parker, who first photographed this same neighborhood’s homes in order to market them thirty years before, according to the formal protocols distinct to his own profession (Figure 4.4).28 Another picture from Divola’s series still more boldly signals its own compositional logic and membership in an identifiable western landscape tradition: Exteriors and Interiors, LAX1003F07 plainly evokes, as if by willful emulation, the formal and thematic character of the artist Robert Adams’s Newly Completed Tract House, Colorado Springs, the cover plate of that photographer’s watershed 1974 book, The New West (Figures 4.5 and 4.6).29 In both these pictures, Divola activates the noise of photographic style and its history as a visible resource, a menu from which a photographer might select tools in his registration of the visible world. But as striking as these pictures are in their formal echoing of Parker and Adams,  they are more striking still in their inversion of those photographers’ respective approaches. Where Maynard Parker framed his flattering views in order to sell aviation workers on the desirability of the planned communities and assembly-line-built houses before his lens, Divola’s picture takes a longer view, revisiting those communities and houses to show that same planning’s wretched endgame, as if the real estate speculation of the immediate postwar moment contained within it the promise of its own evisceration a generation later.30 Divola’s program might seem therefore closer in spirit to the “ecological citizenship” of Robert Adams’s project. Wholly antithetical to Parker’s western

FIGURE 4.4  Maynard L. Parker, Kaiser Community Homes, Exterior, c. 1947. Courtesy of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

68

Before-and-After Photography

FIGURE 4.5  John Divola, LAX NAZ, Exteriors and Interiors, LAX1003F07, 1975–76. Courtesy of the Artist.

salesmanship, Adams’s New West photographs instead lament the partitioning and subdivision of the western landscape at the hands of developers, but balance that lament against the photographic “proof ” of nature’s stubborn integrity in the face of that same development’s westward sprawl. As if challenging Adams’s tentative ecological optimism on the woeful evidence of West Westchester’s painfully compressed thirty-five-year lifespan, Divola flipped The New West’s sociallandscape procedure by staging not development’s incursion into the landscape but, conversely, suburban sprawl’s own inevitable undoing: not in its return to nature, but in its inhumane restructuring in the face of the Western landscape’s modernizing and monetized clearing as unpeopled buffer.31 But if this rerigging of Adams’s strategy appears at first to simply defuse The New West’s measured optimism, it in fact went rather further, performing, as we will see, a quite total upending of Adams’s theoretical and formal premises, at least as these were so

NOISE ABATEMENT ZONE

69

FIGURE 4.6 Robert Adams, Newly Completed Tract House, Colorado Springs, Colorado, 1968. Yale University Art Gallery. Purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund, and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund.

vividly expressed by Lewis Baltz in his spring 1975 Art in America review of Adams’, The New West. For Baltz, [Adams’] insistence on the ordinary and typical… acted as a prophylactic strategy against our culture’s increasing suspicion that photographs, if not outright lies, are at best naïve distortions of reality….This offer of mutual trust lays the foundation for Adams to assert a point in which he strongly believes… [that] there is a pure and glacial beauty that still resides in our wounded landscape.32 In making its own affirmative assertion of photography’s difficult relation with the world it might hope to figure, the third component of the NAZ project, Forced Entries, disavows both Adams’, thematic assertion of some stable fact of “pure and glacial” natural beauty prior to and surviving the wounds of residential development and that assertion’s “foundation” in the camera’s clarity as a confirming lens. For Divola, the photographic “distortion of reality” was both utterly real and anything but naïve, and that distortion’s frank admittance itself offered the best testimony to the notion that no such a priori “pure and glacial [natural] beauty” as that posited by Adams’s West could possibly hold. Where in Exteriors and Interiors Divola anchored his performance of photographic composition’s bodily, material, and intellectual causal armature on what structural integrity remained of the condemned “abatement zone”

70

Before-and-After Photography

houses prior to their legal erasure, for the Forced Entries he staked that same inquiry on the modest disturbances—broken glass, kicked-in doors—left behind by less legal violations of vandals and squatters. Considered together, two pictures from that series, attending to a single incident of decidedly low “frequency” and “amplitude,” work to richly express photography’s power to shape what can be known of the world in the unrelenting fact of that medium’s very technological obligation to “distort,” to bury what would be its culled signal (the thing pictured) in the stubborn fact of its—of photography’s—own noise. In their pairing, Forced Entries/Site 47 (LAX2039A) and Forced Entries/Site 47 (LAX1025F03) restage something of the House Removals’ generative logic; there is unmistakably a temporal interval here, but the change distinguishing the pictures is at first quieter, almost imperceptible: a bit more light presses through a curtain whose sail is just a bit more full (Figures 4.7 and 4.8).33 There is no

FIGURE 4.7 John Divola, LAX NAZ, Forced Entries/Site 47 (LAX2039A), 1975–76. Courtesy of the Artist.

NOISE ABATEMENT ZONE

71

FIGURE 4.8  John Divola, LAX NAZ, Forced Entries/Site 47 (LAX1025F03), 1975–76. Courtesy of the Artist.

invitation to incident in the hinge between these pictures, certainly no jets or police or bulldozers. There is only the noise of the camera and its film and its operator in their unity, voiced by that gentle blur that figures—by the camera’s always contingent alignment of time, light, and chemistry—the duration that held both within and between each exposure. Raymond Bellour could have been speaking of these pictures when he observed in the photographic blur the “sign of art that seeks to express a corporeal drive inscribing itself in a time rendered visible. This is the magic of blur: to seize an effect of the real, without ever taking itself for reality.”34 If Divola’s project can be said to engage some “prophylactic strategy” against any prevailing cultural assumption, it was against that shared in the unlikely agreement of Fry, Parker, and Adams—in the service of journalism, marketing, and fine art—who would each in their own way exploit the medium’s mythic

72

Before-and-After Photography

purchase on the facts of a changing western landscape so to simplify it and thereby make it knowable. Consider two final pictures from Divola’s Forced Entries subseries—Forced Entry, Site 13, Interior View A, and Forced Entry, Site 13, Interior View B—which again mobilize the logic of the generic “before and after” dyad, and again do so within that low frequency, low amplitude hinge Divola has so carefully articulated in the time and space between his House Removals’ forensic frames (Figures 4.9 and 4.10). As in that more colorful bracketing series, a Westchester house and its subsequent disappearance have been photographically “framed” and thereby “revealed,” and its lot returned  visibly to something that looks like nature. But the only “event” to be confirmed in the hinge between these pictures will be Divola’s own manual elevation and tilt of his camera, itself plainly revealed, both in its presence and relocation, by its flashlight’s bouncing back from two different positions in a single pane of broken

FIGURE 4.9  John Divola, Forced Entry, Site 13, Interior View A, 1975. Courtesy of the artist.

NOISE ABATEMENT ZONE

73

FIGURE 4.10  John Divola, Forced Entry, Site 13, Interior View B, 1975. Courtesy of the artist.

glass. In the interval between these pictures, the house photography might frame has remained fixed—only the camera has moved, and only just. Divola has, as Bellour had it, seized “an effect of the real, without ever taking itself for reality.” Any “pure and glacial [natural] beauty” such as might survive modernization’s sprawl emerges now as the pure function of the contingent encounter, through a condemned house’s shattered window, of photography and the work of a backhoe. “Noise,” according to the acoustician Leo Beranek, who was commissioned by the City of Los Angeles in the 1960s to investigate the problem of jet noise around LAX, “is an unavoidable price we must pay for a machine civilization. But if we cannot eliminate the noise of modern technology, we can at least control it to minimize its effects.”35 If Divola’s project was less concerned with the particulars of Beranek’s inquiry and the real estate disturbances its catalytic crisis generated,

74

Before-and-After Photography

Noise Abatement Zone, understood as a complex and cohesive photographic whole, shows the photographer to be in perfect agreement with the acoustician on the need to better “control” his own favored “modern technology” so to minimize the more perilous “effects.” For Divola as for Beranek, the careful analysis of the problem was the best first step toward any such mitigation. Perhaps counterintuitively, photography’s more perilous effects arise in the very suppression of those “effects” inherent to the medium: its “photogenia” or “grain”—its noise. And as we have seen, perhaps no photographic mode quiets that noise so completely as the generic “before and after” dyad, whose invitation to the ascertainment of facts about the world corresponds perfectly to its sublimated assertion of the transparency and fixity of the apparatus, the camera, charged with those facts’ measurement. For Divola, his own modern technology’s—photography’s—only sure purchase could be on the camera’s expression of that “corporeal drive” that inscribed itself “in a time rendered visible,” this, the otherwise invisible presence in place and time of the work of photography, being the only noise the medium is properly equipped as an instrument to measure.

Notes 1 This feature distinguishes generic “before and after” photography from its sibling

but very different mode, rephotography, which retroactively activates an otherwise functionally autonomous photograph by restaging or nearly approximating its conditions of production in the making of a new picture.

2 On Divola’s tricky play with the photographic aesthetics of the “forensic,” see David

Campany’s, “Who, What, Where, With What, Why, How, and When?: The Forensic Rituals of John Divola,” in John Divola: Three Acts (New York: Aperture, 2006), 131.

3 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon, 1994 [1969]), 17, 4. 4 Jan Tumlir has noted this body of work’s traumatic dimension in his “Interview with John Divola,” in John Divola: Three Acts, 138.

5 The formulation of “event” as such a “traumatic encounter” is Jean-Francois Lyotard’s. See Martin Jay, “Photography and Event,” in Olga Shevchenko, ed., Double Exposure: Memory and Photography (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2014), 93.

6 Victor Burgin, “Looking at Photographs” [1977], in Victor Burgin, ed., Thinking

Photography (London: Macmillan, 1982), 146. On this aspect of photographic visibility, see Geoffrey Batchen, Photography’s Objects (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Art Museum, 1997), 2.

7 For Tybel, “black-and-white images tend to be intellectual and cold, while color is anti-intellectual and warm.” See Irv Tybel, “How to Think about Color,” Color Photography Annual (1969): 50, quoted in Lisa Hostetler, ed., “Real Color,” in Katherine A. Bussard and Lisa Hostetler, eds., Color Rush: American Color Photography from Stieglitz to Sherman (New York: Aperture, 2013), 23. Prior to

NOISE ABATEMENT ZONE

75

William Eggleston’s summer 1976 MoMA exhibition, color remained an exotic choice for artists using photography.

8 Thomas Brothers maps have been my guide here. 9 On the convulsive character of Los Angeles’ built environment, see Dana Cuff, The

Provisional City: Los Angeles Stories of Architecture and Urbanism (Cambridge: MIT, 2000).

10 Robert Lindsey, “Jet Noise in Los Angeles Is Dooming 1,994 Homes,” New York Times July 21, 1971, 22. A story immediately adjacent to Lindsey’s byline reported “heavy United States air raids [breaking] a 24-day lull in the war” and a “new Cambodian drive.” “Saigon Units Open Drive in Cambodia,” New York Times July 21, 1971, 1.

11 The single best account of this all-but-forgotten episode remains Paul David

Friedman’s Fear of Flying: The Development of Los Angeles Airport and the Rise of Public Protest Over Jet Aircraft Noise, Masters Thesis, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1978.

12 Friedman, Fear of Flying, 150. 13 The offending jet engine was itself a military product of wartime innovation, and the

Los Angeles economy was substantially driven by its production. Commercial jet travel was introduced in the late 1950s, and a radically renovated LAX opened as “the first American jet-age airport” in 1961. See Vanessa R. Schwartz, “LAX: Designing for the Jet Age,” in Wim De Wit and Christopher James Alexander, eds., Overdrive: Architecture in Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2013), 163–183. Friedman (Fear of Flying) observes that Westchester’s development was “closely tied to aviation.” See Fear of Flying, 114–115. On the private development of Los Angeles’ Westchester neighborhood, James Thomas Keane, Fritz B. Burns and the Development of Los Angeles: The Biography of a Community Developer and Philanthropist (Los Angeles: Leavey Center for the Study of Los Angeles, 2001), and Cuff, Provisional City, 240–268.

14 For the classic account of Los Angeles’ careful positioning as a leading trade center in

the postwar globalizing economy, and of aviation’s priority therein, see Steven P. Erie, Globalizing L.A.: Trade, Infrastructure, and Regional Development (Stanford: Stanford, 2004).

15 George Fry, “Incoming and Outgoing,” Los Angeles Times, November 3, 1970, Part II, 1.

16 Jack Jones and George Fry, “Woman Loses Battle and Home in Airport Dispute,” Los Angeles Times, July 12, 1975, A1.

17 Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge, “The Structure of Foreign News,” in Howard Tumber, ed., News: A Reader (New York: Oxford, 1999), 21.

18 Ibid., 22. 19 A Citizen’s Guide to Aircraft Noise (Washington, DC: Federal Aviation Agency, 1963), 9.

20 Karl Kryter, “Evaluation,” cited in Friedman, Fear of Flying, 86. 21 Friedman, Fear of Flying, 127.

76

Before-and-After Photography

22 David Lipscomb, Noise: The Unwanted Sounds (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1974), 16–18. 23 Journalism’s lazy tendency to fixate on the “signal event” at the expense of thornier

underlying structural conditions is a central theme of Walter Lippmann’s pioneering 1922 study of journalism and democracy, Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1922).

24 Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” in Stephen Heath, trans., Image-MusicText (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 23.

25 Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” in Heath, trans., Image-Music-Text, 182. 26 On Heinecken’s pedagogy, see A. D. Coleman, “‘I Call It Teaching’: Robert

Heinecken’s Analytical Facture,” in Lynne Warren, ed., Robert Heinecken: Photographist (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999), 8–9 en passim.

27 On the conventions of architectural photography, see Andrew Higott and Timothy Wray, eds., Camera Constructs: Photography, Architecture, and the Modern City (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), 7 en passim.

28 See Jennifer Watts, ed., Maynard L. Parker: Modern Photography and the American

Dream (New Haven: Yale, 2012). On the importance of commercial real estate photography to the artists working with the medium in the 1960s and 1970s, see Britt Salveson, “‘Real estate opportunities’: Commercial Photography As Conceptual Source in New Topographics,” in Greg Foster-Rice and John Rohrbach, eds., Reframing the New Topographics (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2010), 71–86. Divola’s project was undertaken without direct knowledge of the New Topographics exhibition, which debuted at the George Eastman House in Rochester in October 1975.

29 Robert Adams, The New West: Landscapes along the Colorado Front Range (Boulder:

Colorado Associated University Press, 1974). Such was this book’s early reception that Divola could hardly have avoided knowledge of its cover. On that reception, see Finis Dunaway, “Beyond Wilderness: Robert Adams, New Topographics, and the Aesthetics of Ecological Citizenship,” in Foster-Rice and Rohrbach, eds., Reframing the New Topographics, 13–44.

30 On the assembly-line logic of Fritz Burns’s and Henry Kaiser’s Westchester

developments, see Greg Hise, The Magnetic City: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1999), 153–186, and “The Industrialized House: Greatest House-Building Show on Earth,” Architectural Forum, March 1947, 105–113.

31 On Adams’s “Ecological Citizenship,” see Dunaway, “Beyond Wilderness.” 32 Lewis Baltz, “The New West,” Art in America, March–April 1975, 63. 33 These pictures’ alphanumeric titles, understood in relation to the wider project’s idiosyncratic nomenclature, hint at the passage of hours if not days between exposures and strongly suggest that many other photographs were taken in the interim.

34 Raymond Bellour, “The Phantom’s Due,” Discourse 16, no. 2 (Winter 1993–94): 173. 35 Dr. Leo Beranek, as quoted in Gordon McKay Stevenson, The Politics of Airport Noise (Belmont, CA: Duxbury, 1972), 82.

NOISE ABATEMENT ZONE

77

5 THE ELUSIVE EVENT Frank Gohlke in Conversation with Rebecca Senf REBECCA SENF

American artist Frank Gohlke (b. 1942) photographs his country’s landscape, from New England to the Pacific Northwest, and has three major bodies of work that engage the before-and-after photographic trope, in which he subversively expands our expectations. Gohlke’s discussion of these bodies of work—which have never been written about together—provides new opportunities for contemplating the way photography necessarily intersects with, and yet fails to convincingly elucidate, time. On April 10, 1979, a massive tornado tore through Gohlke’s hometown of Wichita Falls, Texas, leveling houses and, as Gohlke has said, cutting “through the fabric of [his] memory.”1 Gohlke had maintained a close connection to the north Texas town: his parents still lived in the house in which the photographer had grown up, he had a network of close relatives and many friends, and he visited at least twice a year. He had even spent the fall of the previous year living in Wichita Falls while working on a commissioned art project for the telephone company AT&T. Reacting to the rupture within himself and his childhood community, damage that was emotional and physical, Gohlke went to Wichita Falls and spent two intense days—April 14 and 15, 1979—photographing the destruction. He left Texas and returned to daily life with the photographs serving as lasting visual touchstones of the ephemeral tornado and his brief experience of the aftermath. Roughly a year later he remade photographs from as near the same locations as This interview took place on June 1, 2015, at Frank Gohlke’s studio, Tucson, Arizona.

was possible. The photographs became before-and-after pairs, but ones in which the “before” already documents the tornado’s after effects (Figures 5.1 and 5.2). Surprisingly, the “after” images offer a scene of normalcy and hint at what we might have seen if there had been an earlier photo, one that that preceded the “before.” The ways in which the photographs are intrinsically connected to time, memory, destruction, and healing allow Gohlke to leverage the cultural expectation of the before-and-after pair and disrupt those expectations. Gohlke frequently refers to the Texas pairs as “after” and “after the after.” Gohlke’s sequential pictures of Mount St. Helens following the May 18, 1980, eruption similarly act as a series of “after” pictures for which no comparative “before” exists. The event is documented only through pictures whose change suggests the ongoing evolution away from the original destruction. In this project, rather than producing an exclusive set of before-and-after pairs (as with Wichita Falls), Gohlke creates temporal sequences that support a larger photographic investigation of the volcano, its destruction and inevitable change over a tenyear period of time. The unit of time over which change is tracked and marked photographically can also be a way to engage the before-and-after trope. If ten years is sufficient time to observe change following a volcano, how small a unit of time can render change in a pair of photographs? In contrast to the remarkable transformation visible in his Wichita Falls pairs, Gohlke’s 1995 before-and-after pairs made on the plains of North Texas are a study in negligible change. These diptychs combine two landscape views made ten minutes apart, and although the lighting and clouds subtly shift, little else in front of the lens changes. The pair seems to hinge on the nonevent of the planet rotating ever so slightly on its axis. With almost nothing to differentiate between the frames, viewers are compelled to contemplate the minimalism of the paired views and their conceptual and temporal implications. As Gohlke says in this interview, “The photograph has this way of supposedly stapling the moment in which it’s made to the continuum of time … but not necessarily.” Although individually, these three projects of Gohlke’s address specific places at specific times, places he was drawn to because of the meaning of the landscapes and the events that unfolded there, together they ask questions about the medium and its intrinsic limitations. Gohlke’s work challenges what photography can tell us, or what we as viewers expect it to do. Gohlke states it clearly when he says, “By putting two pictures together that are related … it makes you doubly aware of just how hard it is to say anything definitive about the world on the basis of photographic evidence.” RS: How did you come to make your series of before/after pairs entitled Aftermath in Wichita Falls, Texas? FG: Well, the simple answer is that after I had photographed the wreckage of the tornado, I was unsure what to do with the pictures. They were

80

Before-and-After Photography

FIGURES 5.1–5.2  Frank Gohlke, Aftermath: The Wichita Falls Tornado, 4503 McNeil, Looking North, April 14, 1979/June 1980. Courtesy of the artist.

THE ELUSIVE EVENT

81

disturbing to me partly because it was my hometown and partly because the common feeling of empathy and distress when you see people’s lives that have been completely turned inside out—to say nothing of the lives that were lost. And I was sensitive to the charge that I might be exploiting this event for my own purposes. I was very interested in the pictures; they were unlike most of the work I had done, but as I thought about it they seemed incomplete to me. It just didn’t feel like it was the whole story. Of course, what is the whole story? I started thinking about disasters in general and how they’re reported in the news media, and in general the narrative is that there was a prior state where things were whole and then we see photographs or video footage of places to which a kind of violence has been done that is so far outside the bounds of our ordinary experience that it brings us to a halt. The standard issue news story shows us the wreckage, talks to the people, if we get some footage from people who are determined to rebuild, who are going on in spite of it, that’s great, but really it’s the wreckage that we see. I didn’t really fancy myself as someone who had started chasing tornadoes, but at the same time I had witnessed this particular event’s aftermath (hence the title) and I didn’t want the photographs to become just another predictable tale of human beings and their works being in places where nature did what it did. And so I thought it would be a good idea if I could go back and see what had happened after the aftermath, so to speak. It seemed important to me to indicate that time didn’t stop for these people with the event. They have to carry on with their lives, and what does that look like? I was certainly aware of the power of rephotography from what I had seen of the rephotographic survey, and that seemed like the right way to go about it because the original pictures were very, very specific about the place and what had happened right there.2 For instance, what does a force five tornado do to a brick house as opposed to a framed house.3 When I was making the first set of pictures, I realized that the event had a shape, even though it created what looked like a great deal of chaos—and in many cases was chaotic. But as an expression of natural forces it had a shape, the forces themselves moved in a certain way, and if you were in the right place you could actually discern that. Since I wasn’t there for the tornado (thank God), I thought it would be possible to reconstruct what had happened to a degree—by allowing the camera to record those places where pattern was visible within the mess. And then when I thought about going back to retake the pictures, it was clear to me that it was important that I replicate the original point of view, or vantage point, as accurately as I could. That way the image of how the affected people had contended with the event would be as specific as the record of the impact of the event itself. I looked at the

82

Before-and-After Photography

work prints and did as good a job as I could of matching things up. At that point I didn’t know about Mark Klett’s techniques, which involve a good bit of geometry, so I was just eyeballing it.4 And you know for the most part I got pretty close. RS: Let’s back up. What compelled you to take the pictures in the first place? FG: It’s my hometown, and it was damaged. I felt it very personally. I had a lot of relatives in Wichita Falls and the closest any of them came to harm was an aunt and uncle whose house had its roof torn off. My aunt was in the house at the time and she knew enough to get to an interior hallway, but the wind shattered all the glass in the house and she ended up surrounded, so she got some cuts and things, but nothing serious. Others were not so lucky. Forty-five people lost their lives. I wasn’t sure if I was going to take pictures, but I didn’t see any reason not to take the camera. I would just decide when I got there if it was something that felt appropriate. When I saw what had happened it was so astonishing, I just couldn’t imagine not photographing it. And so, I used up all my film. Didn’t have that much. I was there for three days— photographed for two and then on Sunday I went to church with my family, and then I flew back to Colorado and went right back to teaching, so I didn’t really have time to digest it thoroughly. RS: But did the photographs of the tornado damage become something different once you’d created them? FG: Well yeah. I realized it was pretty interesting what the pictures did. And I began to suspect that people could easily misinterpret them. So I chose a way to show them that I thought left no room for that misinterpretation, but Fred McDarrah who wrote a little photo news column for the Village Voice, managed to misinterpret them, even though it’s a pretty clear pattern. RS: When you exhibited the photographs you showed them in a diptych, the earlier one is on the top and the second one is on the bottom, is that right? FG: I think at that show—that was at Light Gallery, they were in separate frames, with the earlier picture on the top. In reviewing the exhibition Fred McDarrah said, “Frank Gohlke photographed banal scenes in his hometown and then went back a year later and photographed them after they’d been destroyed by a tornado.”5 So, I thought, that’s really funny. McDarrah’s comment shows the power of the standard narrative, which is that life is going along on its ordinary tracks and then suddenly BOOM! And we’re not really interested in what happened before because it’s just ordinary life. But once it encounters this natural force, once it encounters this thing that is way bigger than it was built to survive, it becomes interesting in a macabre and often ghoulish way. So, I like the fact that the photographs reversed that narrative.

THE ELUSIVE EVENT

83

RS: But it does seem like the after pictures become a stand-in for the unphotographed before. That, as you were describing the typical journalistic approach, there is no before. All we care about is the moment of tragedy and the chaos and destruction. And so in creating the after that gives some sense of, if not closure, some sort of longitudinal aspect to it, it almost feels like the picture of the tornado becomes a pivot, where we’re looking at the after, but that is also a reflection of the before. FG: In some cases. I like the idea of the original picture as a kind of pivot. But, at the same time, it was an imperfect mirror because there were places that weren’t rebuilt. There was a little neighborhood of temporary housing for people at the Army Air Force base during World War II and it was still there in 1979. They were basically these little pasteboard things and of course they were completely obliterated, and the only things left were the slabs, the concrete slabs, and those stayed like that for at least ten years before anything was built there. One of my favorite pictures shows a view down the street and all the houses are rubble, and upside down in one of the yards is a notoriously bad automobile, an AMC Gremlin. Actually, it would look right at home on the roads today, but at the time it was ridiculous looking. Terrible cars. So there was this Gremlin, upside down. And the tree in the front yard was—well, all the trees that were in the path of the tornado were stripped bare. But a year later, the house had been rebuilt. Not every house on the street had been rebuilt, but that one had. A lot more brick than previously. And in the driveway was an AMC Gremlin. So, this was a family that was determined to restore the status quo ante. They could have bought a different car, but they bought another Gremlin. So, it’s a mirror but it’s not always accurate. Where the two reflections meet, which is in the event, certain things get left out and changed. So, if you try to use them as before pictures, you could do it with some of them if you don’t look too closely, but if you study them then it’s clear that it’s not the case. RS: Beyond this reviewer who misunderstood the whole premise, do you find that people are confused about the proper order? FG: Not anymore. Actually I think he was the only one I’m aware of who was really taken in. When these photographs were shown in an exhibition curated by Paul Berger, “Radical Rational/Space Time,” that was what he was most interested in, the way that they stood time on its head.6 That they wouldn’t stay put, that it was an unstable mix to put those two pictures together. Put it this way: the first pictures record a world in fragments. We can infer some things about what was there; but we can’t put it back together. There are too many pieces missing. And when people rebuild, it won’t be exactly the same. The conventional “before”

84

Before-and-After Photography

will always be absent. It’s an exercise in reconstruction in two ways: the reconstruction of the event, the tornado in the first set of pictures; and the reconstruction of the shattered world recorded by the pairs. Both are doomed to failure. So in trying to complete this original set of pictures, I ended up making something that was by its nature incomplete. And that was pretty interesting to think about. RS: Before you did the second set of pictures, before you created this set of before/after pairs, had you ever given the premise of the before/after photo pair much thought? FG: I did have occasion to think about it some, when, in the last couple of years of the grain elevator project, elevators started being torn down— ones that I had photographed.7 So I photographed them in the process, but I wasn’t doing it in a systematic way. I was just interested in how they were made and I really liked the fact that they were so hard to tear down. But no, I hadn’t really considered the sort of philosophical implications of trying to grasp time in that way. But after I’d made the tornado pairs, I started thinking a lot about the before/after paradigm and about just how elusive the notion of an event is. You know if you think of that tornado: when did it start? Well, maybe it started when the original storm system formed. Maybe it started when there was enough energy in the atmosphere to start the vortex going. Or maybe it was when the funnel cloud actually formed and then touched down. Maybe that was the beginning of the event. When I was photographing a particular house that had been destroyed, perhaps in that case the event started when the first shingle was blown off, before you encountered really the heart of the storm. Maybe it’s when the last brick falls. Who knows? Where? Where is it? And then when you extend this moment in time by making this peculiar parenthesis with a pair of pictures, it becomes even more enigmatic. What are these about, exactly? And what are its boundaries? And can you even define any boundaries except this arbitrary moment of exposure, followed by an equally arbitrary moment of exposure. The location is not arbitrary, but everything else is. RS: The first picture was made how soon after the tornado? FG: About three days. RS: Because the skies are clear. It’s not stormy, it’s daylight. FG: Oh no, it was gorgeous weather. RS: So there’s certainly a newness about the wreckage that’s strewn about, but there isn’t anything implicit in the pictures to tell you that the event happened three hours ago or three days ago. Nothing specific. And then the pictures that happened a year later—did you go on the anniversary? How did you determine when that closed parentheses was going to happen?

THE ELUSIVE EVENT

85

FG: No, I didn’t go on the anniversary because my daughter Jessica was in school. I had to wait until her school was out, and by then it was really hot. It was in June, and, that’s not ordinarily a really hot month in Wichita Falls, but that was a really hot June. I could’ve picked a better time. RS: And did you know either because of your relatives who lived there or because of some other sense that a year was going to be long enough for things to largely have had some order restored? Were you surprised by either how little had happened or how much had happened? FG: I was surprised by how quickly things got put back together. I thought, “Good job folks.” But you know the first thing I thought of was what happens when you mess up an ant bed. They go right to work. If they can sting you, they’ll send a few ants to do that, but otherwise … they don’t stop. They don’t stop and mourn. So it was like a bunch of ants. They just went, “Okay, time to get goin’.” Pioneer spirit and everything. RS: You were exploring concepts of time and recovery in another project at about the same time—with your Mount St. Helens’s photographs. FG: I started at Mount St. Helens the next year, in 1981. RS: When you began that project, did you envision that it was going to be a site that you returned to? FG: No. I didn’t know. I didn’t even know if it would be a place that I felt like photographing. The first trip was really entirely without any intention beyond just seeing it, and obviously I took my cameras so I was going to take pictures, but whether those pictures held any promise for me I didn’t know. And that first time was really about understanding just how big the affected area was, and how vastly different the effects had been in different spots depending on the direction from the mountain, and distance, and then just very specific local conditions. I just felt like if I were going to approach this as an effort at reconstructing something that had happened from the evidence that was available to me, to my eyes, than I really needed to see everything. That was insane, of course, because I could never see everything, but the longer I spent out there, the more clearly I understood which things were really important to look at and get close to, and which things I could allow to be subsumed into larger categories of the effect, and when I took the initial pictures, I wasn’t necessarily planning to come back and retake them, but when I saw the way things were changing the second year, it just seemed unavoidable. Inescapable. RS: What seemed unavoidable? FG: That I would want to follow certain sites. In some cases every year I was there, and in some cases selectively. And there were places I photographed in 1984 that I wanted to revisit in 1990, so it wasn’t all a matter of starting with the original set of pictures and following it every year. Sometimes

86

Before-and-After Photography

two was enough, sometimes three, sometimes the changes were so dramatic year to year that all five years were necessary. RS: It’s interesting to me to hear you describe both Wichita Falls and Mount St. Helens with this—I’m going to use this word and you can object to it— this forensic approach. FG: Yeah, definitely. RS: You observed visual evidence that helped you understand what you were seeing, and you then used photography to communicate that evidence and your conclusions. Was there a connection in your mind between the Mount St. Helens work and the Wichita Falls photographs? FG: Oh, totally. In both cases I couldn’t be there for the event. I was following it closely on the news as the mountain started acting up, and when it erupted I said “Okay, I’ve got to go there,” but I couldn’t go that summer. I was scheduled up through the summer with workshops and taking care of my daughter. And I wanted to be there in the summer to begin with, so I had to wait until 1981, and I thought, this is all reconstruction anyway, and I’ll work with what I have at whatever point I enter this continuum. It still works with an event that massive and hard to grasp in its extent. It’s 230 square miles or something like that, and it takes a long time to really look at 230 square miles. Just to get around when so many roads had been destroyed. RS: Is the amount of time between when the Mount St. Helens event happened and when you arrived analogous to when the Wichita Falls tornado happened and when you arrived? You just talked about the scale and the intensity of the devastation, but then so much more of the devastation happened in wilderness areas. Humans are like ants: they go right back to work building. But a forest takes more time. FG: That’s true. There was some designated wilderness around Mount St. Helens, but the majority of the land was owned by various timber companies, and it had been continually logged for over a hundred years, and you could see the evidence everywhere. And in a lot of ways the scale of the destruction of the northwest forests really dwarfed Mount St. Helens and what it did. It was just a very slow-moving disaster. But you could see that everywhere and you could see it right through the results of the eruption. Except right up near the crater, which had all been just wiped clean, you could trace the outlines of clear cuts. It wasn’t like you were looking at anything untouched. It was a very popular place, Mount St. Helens. For one thing it was such a perfect cone. It was gorgeous like Mt. Fuji. And this beautiful lake at its foot. Spirit Lake. A lot of people out there went to summer camp on the lake. And people had vacation cabins. It was a place that was really inscribed deeply into a lot of people’s affections. And I didn’t share

THE ELUSIVE EVENT

87

that aspect at all, but people would tell me about how they had felt the destruction as something personal. RS: It feels like, whereas the Wichita Falls project was a little more tightly inscribed, and exists as pairs, the Mount St. Helens work includes pairs and triptychs and suites, but also includes pictures about the place and the destruction that aren’t part of an exact pair or rephotograph. So how do the paired pictures function in relationship to the project as a whole? FG: Well, the singular pictures describe a moment in which I encounter a set of circumstances that appear rich in both pictorial and narrative possibilities. And it’s not as if I couldn’t have followed any one of those sites, but I thought some would be more revealing than others. I suppose initially it had to do with how much change there had been. When I went back the second time, I brought work prints of the original photographs with me, so I knew I was going to be doing the rephotography. And I had more or less decided that, with a handful of exceptions, I was going to restrict the temporal sequences to the panoramic format (Figures 5.3–5.6). It was a simpleminded equation of an extension, an extension of the picture area in space being equivalent to an extension in time. I felt that if the potential for change, rapid enough change so that it could be seen in the interval of a year or two years or nine years was there, then I would choose that site for revisiting. So, in some cases I made a photograph that I thought was complete, but then either the next year or in some subsequent year, when I was in the same area, the information had changed in ways that were uniquely revealing. And so, I would revise my sense of the completeness of the picture, but for the most part the sequential work by the third year was kind of cordoned off from the rest of it. That part of the work was necessary to the completeness of the whole project, because it supplied that sense of ongoing time that had to be inferred in the rest of the pictures, and I wanted something stronger than inference. Even by the fourth year, in 1984, there were things that I hadn’t seen that I knew were there. And either I hadn’t been able to see them because they were inaccessible (I’d seen them from the air, or I’d glimpsed them from a road that I knew did not connect with anything that went to this place), or it was too dangerous, too remote. There were places I didn’t go until 1984 just because it was a long hike and I thought it was kind of foolish to do it by myself, since there wasn’t a lot of traffic. [laughs] I could have gotten in some real trouble. RS: I’m glad you’re still here. I’m glad you didn’t go off the edge, way back then. So what were those temporal sequences doing? What would the inference have been that the temporal sequences made more concrete?

88

Before-and-After Photography

FIGURES 5.3–5.6  Frank Gohlke, Confluence of Pine Creek and Lewis River, 13 Miles Southeast of Mount St. Helens, Washington, 1981, 1982, 1984, 1990. Courtesy of the artist.

THE ELUSIVE EVENT

89

FG: In a very literal sense, erosion is happening. Plants are growing. Rivers are changing their courses. Things falling. Things continue to fall. Any number of things, but my feeling was that the sequences kind of spread their effect over all the rest of the pictures, so that you couldn’t simply look at any of the single photographs and say, “Well, that’s that. He was there, he took the picture, and that’s that.” Well, no. It’s very important that you understand that one of the effects of an interruption like this in the ordinary pace of change has vast ramifications down the line, so that the degree of disturbance is proportional to the speed of change. I was hoping that to look at some of these sequences and then to look at the singular images would allow you to keep in mind that whatever kind of formal completeness this picture might seem to have, temporally it was an arbitrary slice out of a—in many cases very rapidly moving— continuum. I was looking at the book the other day and I realized I did make one true before-and-after picture, which is the one of the people standing on the edge (Figures 5.7 and 5.8).

FIGURE 5.7  Frank Gohlke, Visitors on the Rim of Mount St. Helens, 1990. Courtesy of the artist.

90

Before-and-After Photography

FIGURE 5.8  Frank Gohlke, Ten Minutes Later, 1990. Courtesy of the artist.

RS: Oh yes,—you didn’t anticipate that happening, am I correct? FG: I made the picture, there was a little tremor and a bunch of rock dropped. I mean, dropped off the rim of the volcano a few hundred feet down, and it made a lot of racket, a lot of dust, but I had no idea that was coming. And I was delighted. RS: So that’s a before/after pair in that body of work, but as you were talking about the Mount St. Helens pictures for which you’ve used the term “temporal sequences” they seem different from the Wichita Falls pairs. The Mount Saint Helens are after and after. Or after, after, and after. Or after, after, after, and after. They show an evolution. It’s about these arbitrary moments unfolding … Whereas the Wichita Falls feel more concretely “this moment and a later moment.” FG: Right. Right. I did make a third set at one point. RS: Of Wichita Falls pictures? FG: Yes. In 1989, ten years after the tornado. And they didn’t really add anything. In a couple of cases it was sort of interesting. But not that interesting. It was like more of the same. You know, things keep changing.

THE ELUSIVE EVENT

91

Which somehow didn’t seem as compelling as basically the same structure in a place like Mount St. Helens. Not sure why that is. RS: I really like what you said about the sequences being able to inflect all of the pictures, and that unlike a project like the rephotographic survey where there were complete sets, that the Mount St. Helens feels like you were trying to build a whole effect with different methodological parts. So where a sequence of four told you something, you used a sequence of four but where a pair told you something, you used a pair. Then together all of these things invoked in the viewer a kind of understanding that seems appropriate for the vastness, complexity, and incomprehensibility of what Mount Saint Helens represented. Let’s talk about the “Ten Minute” pictures (Figures 5.9 and 5.10). Unlike these earlier projects where you didn’t set out to make before/after pictures, it’s my understanding that these North Texas ten-minute pictures were always imagined as pairs. Before/after pairs. FG: Like so many things, it started out with a certain motivation that then turned out to be less germane than what seemed to be happening as I was working. But originally there were two things. One: I’ve always been intrigued by the idea, as a landscape photographer, that there are no bad clouds. You can’t take a bad picture of clouds and sky. I’m not sure whether that idea is more facetious than factious, but it’s definitely both. Another thing was, I wanted to figure out a way to take pictures that were about the horizon and nothing else. However, I’d defeated that intention right from the beginning by using a fairly standard format which had foreground and background. The simplest solution would be to use a featureless plot of earth and a clear blue sky, and then there’d be nothing to look at except the line that divides them, but that seemed boring to me. And besides that there were things about the way the land mutates from really flat to gently rolling in North Texas that I’ve always loved, and wanted to call attention to in some way. But once I started doing them I realized that the relationship of time in the pair is almost completely abstract. In the Mount St. Helens work, the direction of the temporal arrow is pretty clear, and in the tornado pictures your mind plays tricks because of our susceptibility to neat stories. We like certain stories, we’re used to them, so we simply impose them on whatever set of phenomena we have to deal with. But with the ten-minute pictures, you really just have to take my word for it. There’s really not much to determine which way they’re going. And in some case it seems as though nothing has changed at all. And so, what do you do about that? Those pictures are like broken clocks. Are you looking at the future? Are you looking at the past? Is there any way to tell based on internal evidence?

92

Before-and-After Photography

FIGURE 5.9  Frank Gohlke, Ten Minutes in North Texas, #2—Clay County, Texas, 1995. Courtesy of the artist.

THE ELUSIVE EVENT

93

FIGURE 5.10 Frank Gohlke, Ten Minutes in North Texas, #6—Clay County, Texas, 1995. Courtesy of the artist.

94

Before-and-After Photography

RS: They’re about time, but we don’t know what they say about time. FG: Right. Just like we really don’t know what time is. Except we live in it. And maybe that’s what continued to interest me about them is that they force you to think about your life in time, about standing in one place while time passes and what does that mean? Because the photograph has this way of supposedly stapling the moment in which it’s made to the continuum of time … but not necessarily. So that was another thing that I really came to be more interested in about these pictures was that strangely enough, even though the interval was specified, it really meant nothing. They really unmoor you in time. You know something’s happened, but you don’t know how to locate yourself with respect to it. RS: Because it’s so imperceptible, or largely imperceptible in the photographs. FG: Largely imperceptible. Right. And because you don’t know all the things you’d have to know in order to tell whether the clouds were moving in one direction or another, whether the skies in the two pictures are the result of wind moving across from the west or the east. RS: Can you tell me a little bit about how you title those works and exhibit them? FG: I just call them “Ten Minutes in North Texas.” RS: Do the individual prints have titles? FG: No, it’s just #1A and #1B and so on. RS: And in terms of presentation? FG: Well, they’re about 60 inches by 40 inches. They’re flush mounted on aluminum. They’re printed with a large black border, but it’s not a matter of just putting the negative in a big negative carrier and printing the edge of the film, this was what took me so long to get them completed was that the technology wasn’t really there to match the image in my head, which was that the edges were clean and surrounded by black, and then they’re flush mounted to aluminum and just hung with cleats on the wall. Very, very clean. RS: Mounted up and down, so the earlier one on the top, the second one on the bottom. Like the Wichita Falls pictures. FG: Yeah. I don’t know why I liked that so much. Top and bottom. RS: The Wichita Falls pictures are thirty-six years old, and the “Ten Minutes in North Texas” pictures are twenty years old. Has the meaning of the before/after pair shifted since you made these various bodies of work, or is this before/after concept in photography something immutable? FG: Well, I would say any time you put two pictures together that seem to contain similar things, it’s certainly possible to invoke that structure. You could call it a trope. I think any time you put two pictures together, that’s a potential. It’s probably even more on people’s minds now because, if they aren’t [climate change] deniers, they’re thinking about what it’s going to

THE ELUSIVE EVENT

95

be like in five years. We are given estimations of what the world is going to be like in five years, ten years, in thirty years, in eighty-five years, in 2100. So I think it’s really hard for people to avoid it. And the before is always right now. And the after is a matter of great anxiety. The tornado, that’s easy. [laughs]. Boom. And you know something happened. But what we’re facing now is so gradual and manifests itself in sometimes really paradoxical ways. And it’s very confusing. Very disorienting. RS: Do you think people are looking for a visual reconciliation of that, or visual evidence of that to help them? FG: I think they are, and I think there has been some really pretty amazing evidence presented of melting glaciers and so on. This is an instance where rephotography becomes an incredibly important political tool. You have a picture of the Alps by the Alinaris, of the glaciers, taken in 1898, and the same place now, not a glacier to be seen. We don’t have to look that hard to see those things. And the whole idea of before and after is so interesting because before, well before what? Before the after. You know, they define one another, except when they don’t. The tornado was the slipperiest one in that way because they seem to define one another, but it’s not so clear. RS: They’re both on the same side of the event. FG: They’re both on the same side of the event. And, as you said, at least there’s an aspiration that’s come into play between the first and the second picture to make the second scene as much as possible like whatever was there before, which we don’t know. But what strikes one in thinking about “before and after” is just the complete arbitrariness of what before is, except when defined by a clearly related after. So it’s like a matter/antimatter pair. And to some degree they kind of annihilate one another. This is before only if there is this after. And this after could not necessarily have been predicted from this before. All you can say is that there are these two points in time, and something has happened between them. But then you have to think, “Well, what is it to happen? When does something happen?” And again you’re back, it’s like: where do you start the sequence? Where do you start the tape rolling? RS: Right, did the thing that’s visible in the after happen five minutes before the photograph was made, six months before the photograph was made, five minutes after the before picture was made? [laughs] FG: [laughs] Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I mean sometimes the evidence gives you clues, but no certainty. And in a way, by putting two pictures together that are related that way, it makes you doubly aware of just how hard it is to say anything definitive about the world on the basis of photographic evidence.

96

Before-and-After Photography

RS: It’s ironic. That the addition of a picture makes what happened less clear. FG: Right. Yeah, you would think, “two, now we’ll pin it down.” No. It just becomes wavier. RS: And actually, I think the “Ten Minutes in North Texas” pictures do that really well. We have two pictures that raise questions. Maybe they raise more questions together than a single one might have. FG: Than they do separately. I guess on some level that was something I’d hoped for. I just figured it would give you a lot to think about to do that. RS: They’re also incredibly beautiful. FG: Oh thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I liked the way they came out. RS: Is there anything else you’d like to add? FG: It’s fascinating that we are these creatures who are embedded in time, and yoked to it, and can’t escape it, and yet we really don’t know what it is. What is this time that seems to be pulling me along, toward an inevitable end? RS: That’s uplifting. [laughs] FG: If you think about it in terms of being careful about how you occupy yourself in that limited span, then it may not be any happier, but it might be more helpful. RS: Right. Instructive. Well, thank you so much, Frank. This has been really— FG: It was fun. RS: Yeah, fun for me too.

Notes 1 Originally published in Frank Gohlke, “Aftermath: The Wichita Falls, Texas, Tornado, April 10, 1979,” Milkweed Chronicle (Summer 1985), and reprinted in Frank Gohlke, Thoughts on Landscape: Collected Writings and Interviews (Tucson: Hol Art Books, 2009), 100.

2 Here, Gohlke is referencing The Rephotographic Survey Project (1977–79). The

Rephotographic Survey Project (RSP) was led by Mark Klett, as chief photographer. In this role, Klett coordinated the efforts of five people, including JoAnn Verburg, Ellen Manchester, Rick Dingus, and Gordon Bushaw, who located the original lens position of dozens of nineteenth-century photographs produced by governmentsponsored surveys of the American West. The resulting publication, Second View: The Rephotographic Survey Project (1984), presents pairs of images: for instance, original views by Timothy O’Sullivan, William Henry Jackson, or John Karl Hillers alongside the rephotograph of precisely the same location. Viewed side by side, the photographs demonstrate change and comment on the intervening century’s cultural shifts.

THE ELUSIVE EVENT

97

3 Tornados are ranked on the Enhanced Fujita Scale (abbreviated, the EF Scale) based

on estimated wind speeds and related damage. An EF Scale ranges from 0, which means estimated wind speeds of 65–85 mile per hour three second gusts, to 5, which means estimated wind speeds of over 200 miles per hour in three second gusts.

4 Gohlke here refers to Mark Klett’s rephotographic method in which Klett compares a copy of an earlier photograph of a specific location to a Polaroid made by him in the same location. By comparing mathematical measurements of the distances and angles among key landmarks between the newly created Polaroid and the copy of the earlier image, Klett was able to precisely determine the location of the original photographer’s lens, and in this way make an incredibly accurate rephotograph.

5 The entire Village Voice entry by Fred McDarrah reads, “Frank Gohlke: Gohlke

photographed numerous banal street scenes in his hometown Wichita Falls. A year later a tornado devastated the landscape. He went back and took pictures of the identical scenes. The paired display is a venture in now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t. Through April 10, Light Gallery, 724 Fifth Avenue, 582–6552.” Village Voice XXVII, no. 12 (March 23, 1982).

6 “Radical Rational/Space Time: Idea Networks in Photography,” was curated by

guest curator Paul Berger for the North Galleries of Seattle’s Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington, and was on view from March 11 to May 15, 1983. An accompanying catalogue, published at the time of the exhibition, included essays by Leroy Searle and Douglas Wadden.

7 Gohlke, after arriving in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1971, began photographing grain elevators as a specifically American architecture situated within the flat expanses of the northern Midwest. Gohlke saw these utilitarian structures as having deep cultural significance, and was intrigued by their scale and presence within the landscape. The pictures were published as Measure of Emptiness: Grain Elevators in the American Landscape (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

98

Before-and-After Photography

PART THREE

NATURAL AND UNNATURAL DISASTERS

6 BEYOND IMAGES OF MELTING ICE Hidden Histories of People, Place, and Time in Repeat Photography of Glaciers RODNEY GARRARD AND MARK CAREY

Introduction The recent documentary film Chasing Ice (2012) captures the way glaciers— presented in time-lapse photography and a gripping narrative—are vanishing before our eyes, thereby offering a prime example of global climate change impacts. The film’s main protagonist, photographer James Balog, provides compelling images of vanishing ice around the world. His photographs and films allow the ice to speak for itself: it is disappearing everywhere as a result of climate change.1 From Alaska and the Alps to Greenland, this kind of repeat photography— photographs taken in the same exact location over many years or decades to reveal landscape change—shows without question that glaciers are shrinking, that ice is disappearing, and that climate change is irrevocably transforming the natural world. In consequence, ice has become one of the world’s principal symbols of global warming.2 Balog is not alone: news stories, media accounts, scientific research, nongovernmental organization (NGO) reports, and government policies

This chapter is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation grant #1253779.

worldwide increasingly highlight glacier recession and ice loss to focus attention on climate change impacts. From the New York Times showing paired images of Switzerland’s vanishing Rhone Glacier in 2008 since it was first pictured on an 1870 postcard, to the US Geological Society (USGS) presenting four photographs over a century of Grinnell Glacier in Glacier National Park (Figure 6.1), to glaciologist Lonnie Thompson using repeat photography to illustrate glacier loss on Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro—in all cases repeat photography of glaciers accompanied by descriptions of ice loss are commonly deployed to demonstrate climate change impacts and natural disaster risks.3 Yet, while repeat photography of glaciers is ideal for showing glacier change over time and publicizing climate change, its use can also create misunderstandings or raise new questions because it fails to explore why and for whom glacier retreat is a problem, or how to fix it. Repeat photography is comparable to “before and after” photographs, except that it can consist of several photographs taken over time rather than simply one photograph before an event or episode, and one after. Repeat photography often relies on historical photographs, which researchers try to replicate by taking a photograph in the exact same location and perspective to illuminate changing landscapes over time. To be sure, repeat photography reveals the specific extent of glacier retreat and landscape change,4 and some scientists are able to use it to analyze and document important cryospheric dynamics, which have implications for climatology and climate history.5 Repeat photography can also help to provide insight into how glaciers move and calve (when chunks of ice break off at the terminus, or end of the glacier), to identify key aspects of ice dynamics for further investigation, to corroborate results from other glacier studies, to allow a greater historical reach in present-day analyses, and to vividly display these changes for diverse audiences worldwide. Repeat photography monitors change via two or more images taken in the same spot over time.6 Plate 3 and Figures 6.1–6.3 are classic examples of repeat photography. The method can document change over three timescales: years, decades, or centuries; seasons; or one-off events such as when a glacier tongue detaches from the active glacier. Time-lapse photography takes the latter to the extreme.7 The successive photographs become part of a continuous record that offers understanding and prediction of natural landscape shaping forces ranging from changes in geomorphology8 and glaciers9 to historical architecture.10 Importantly, the authors express that personal knowledge of the site is beneficial to producing accurate accounts. Repeat photography of glaciers has evolved over time, starting with initial comparisons of landscape paintings of glaciers over several centuries to decipher colder temperatures during the Little Ice Age (roughly 1350–1850).11 Since the nineteenth century, repeat imaging of glaciers has changed to photography—from ground-level photographs to aerial

102

Before-and-After Photography

photography by the mid-twentieth century to satellite imagery after the 1970s and up to the present.12 But repeat photography can also obscure historical processes. It can oversimplify conditions, focus solely on loss and apocalyptic perspectives, mislead the public about the roots of glacier- and climate-related hazards, fail to explain how knowledge and cultural values of glaciers have changed over time, implicitly promote techno-scientific solutions to climate change and glacier recession, and neglect possible impacts on local societies because of the imagery’s emphasis on glaciers as scenery and mountaineering terrain. In recent decades, the underlying aim of most repeat photography of glaciers is to trigger alarm about vanishing ice, thus generating awareness of and action on climate change. But there is generally little portrayal or even recognition of human vulnerability to glacier hazards or climate change. This sharp divide in the connectedness of humans and ice—between culture and nature—contrasts with decades of scholarship seeking to blur nature-culture binaries.13 Most repeat photography analyses of glaciers leave society invisible, thereby concealing all the factors that create differential vulnerability to climate change and natural hazards, such as wealth, education, class, race, gender, infrastructure, building codes and protection policies (or lack thereof), access to government aid, and many other variables that affect risk to glacier loss.14 Repeat photography of glaciers creates its own discourse and narratives about ice, which in turn influence scientific assessments, public perceptions, and government policies. In essence, this chapter contends that, while repeat photography plays a vital role in scientific observation and public perception of glaciers, it can simultaneously yield misinformation by steering viewers toward false conclusions about changes over time, the drivers of those changes, and the production of the images. The above-mentioned description of repeat photography is from the vantage point of a specific discipline of study. This chapter analyzes four iconic glaciated regions, all of which are within UNESCO World Natural Heritage (WNH) sites, to examine how repeat photography at these sites neglects the hidden histories of people, places, knowledge, vulnerability, and the ever-evolving politics of glacier representation. The four case studies are the Aletsch Glacier in Switzerland, the Grinnell Glacier in the United States’ Glacier National Park, Glacial Lake Palcacocha in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca, and Nepal’s Khumbu (Mt. Everest) region. All these glaciers are powerful symbols of global climate change. Each case exposes how repeat photography presents different narratives about climate change. Moreover, we demonstrate how the method is not simply an unbiased “seeing is believing” approach, but rather presents an implied or overt argument—yet, one that misses many relevant underlying variables related to both effects of and solutions to glacier retreat and climate change.

BEYOND IMAGES OF MELTING ICE

103

Swiss Alps Jungfrau-Aletsch The glaciers of the Jungfrau-Aletsch region15 have dominated the lives of inhabitants who have lived among them for centuries. Accepting uncertainty and risking danger to seize opportunities reflects the dual nature of life among glaciers, qualities that are starkly apparent in the Jungfrau-Aletsch region. The region is emblematic because of its long history of collective strategies to confront glacier risks,16 and the equally well-established scientific understanding of glacier movements, which began in the early nineteenth century,17 in part due to the then new technique of photography. As a result, the region’s alpine villagers have absorbed knowledge of glacial phenomena, thereby altering their perceptions of risk and improving their ability to respond effectively to fresh hazards. With 167 glaciers in the Jungfrau-Aletsch region, the area represents the biggest connected ice area in the Alps. During the climax of the last ice age (24,000 years ago), large parts of the Jungfrau-Aletsch area lay under 1,400–1,500 m of ice. At the beginning of the postglacial period (11,700 years ago), the climate warmed gradually and the glaciers retreated, creating deep U-shaped valleys (e.g. Lauterbrunnental). The retreat, however, was interrupted by numerous glacial advance phases. For example, during the “Little Ice Age,” between 1350 and 1850, the ice masses advanced, causing severe and widespread devastation.18 This advance so terrified the inhabitants of the village of Fiesch that they swore, in 1678, to live morally and prayed for deliverance from the threat.19 And their prayers were apparently effective: today, the Grosse Aletschgletscher, the biggest and longest glacier in the Alps (81.7 km2 area, 22.6 km in length and weighing 28 billion tons), has withdrawn 2.9 km from its 1850 position (having lost 11.5 percent of its length) and is retreating at a rate of 24.5 m per year (Plate 3).20 The last maximum extension of the Jungfrau-Aletsch glaciers goes back to the year 1850. Since then, there has been continuous retreat of the region’s glaciers, only interrupted in the 1890s, 1910s, and 1970s by slight glacial advances lasting a few years.21 The retreat of the glaciers is not itself extraordinary, but the speed of melting gives reason for concern: between 1850 and 2013 the glaciers of the area lost 50 percent of their total ice volume.22 Since 1998, the melting accelerated further, presenting diverse challenges to the people in the alpine area. Our puzzle is to understand how the inhabitants of the Jungfrau-Aletsch region achieved a balance between the negative and potentially positive effects of glaciers in the past. The historical perspective provides a context for considering how mountain populations are likely to adjust to the similarly mixed results of climate and social change in the future. The glaciers of the Jungfrau-Aletsch region have been central to the local economy as the area has evolved. Beginning in the fifteenth century, extensive irrigation systems (Wasserleitung or bisses) capturing the seasonal runoff became

104

Before-and-After Photography

widespread due to a regional shift from grain production to a mixed production system based on herding in alpine meadows, alongside cereal grains.23 This new agricultural production system demanded that enough water be available during critical periods of the growing season, besides being reliable from year to year. The solution adopted in the Jungfrau-Aletsch region was to declare water a common property resource and resolve allocation issues on the basis of private property principles, a solution consistent with the general organization of the Swiss Alpine agro-pastoral system, which favored collective needs over individual preferences. Collective water management distributed costs as well as benefits throughout the alpine community to compensate for negative impacts of, for example, unusually long winters or years of low precipitation.24 The patterns and trends of ordinary lives in the Jungfrau-Aletsch region have nevertheless been disrupted by dramatic and deadly natural events, particularly during the aforementioned periods of glacial advance. But instead of praying for relief from advancing glaciers, local people developed the ability to respond and adapt due to improved understanding of glacier processes. One important product of these first phases of systematic observation of glaciers was the compilation of photos, making possible the methodical recording and observation of glaciers without artistic distortion.25 This led to a shift in social attitudes from fatalistic to probabilistic perceptions of glacial processes as outcomes of natural conditions, thus altering response behavior, a development that underscores the crucial role of scientific knowledge in reducing uncertainty.26 Here again, collective local institutions with the knowledge to devise appropriate actions were established to respond to glacial threats, and mechanisms were put in place to distribute risks among the community, with the goal of leveling disruptive variations in production27—important for minimizing the costs of incomplete knowledge about glacier hazards. From the mid-twentieth century, glacier water use reemerged, and has taken on another meaning via energy production with hydropower, and tourism, which have largely replaced agriculture as the region’s major users of glaciers and their water.28 Climate change will alter water dynamics, and the local institutions that have functioned adequately in the Jungfrau-Aletsch region are once again facing a situation resembling that of the Middle Ages, when changing property rights influenced resource use and shaped community institutions. Notable among these current changes is the loss of local control over water use for hydropower. Erosion of communal prerogatives is only one of the many changes in the Jungfrau-Aletsch region. An integrated system organized around agriculture has given way to a more diversified economy in which powerful interest groups representing industry and tourism have different views about risks and choices.29 Today, glaciers are popular destinations. In the summer of 2012, more than 765,000 people went to the Jungfraujoch to enjoy the impressive view of the glacier.30 With the retreat of the glaciers, tourism might have to do without its summer attractions, being already

BEYOND IMAGES OF MELTING ICE

105

confronted with great challenges because of the decline in security of the snow.31 The same will be true of hydropower, even if it can gain from the increased runoff in the short term. The future holds new challenges. The “before and after” images of the Grosse Aletschgletscher show a dramatic retreat since the end of the Little Ice Age, adding considerably to our awareness and understanding of glacial phenomena. However, what these images do not convey is the coupled nature of humans living alongside the glaciers, and their dependence on local resources. Our historical perspective suggests that adaptation to glacier risks and opportunities has been an ongoing process through the establishment of local institutions based on individuals’ and/ or a community’s perception that their way of life or status could successfully be preserved, and that economic disparities resulting from social and environmental change would be adequately compensated for. The details are local, but, as the remaining case studies show, these dilemmas confront all mountain populations struggling to deal with new environmental conditions and changing social contexts.

Glacier National Park, the United States In the United States, glaciers in Montana’s Glacier National Park (GNP)32 have consistently served as the principal emblem of climate change impacts. After all, Vice President Al Gore chose the park’s Grinnell Glacier as the backdrop for his famous 1997 speech pledging federal government commitment to tackling climate change.33 Ever since, the GNP glaciers have been deployed as climate change symbols, appearing in news stories, environmental group assessments, scientific studies, and policy reports.34 One of the more prominent ways in which the park’s glaciers are represented is through repeat photography, offering the visual shock of the ever-shrinking Grinnell Glacier, among others. The USGS Repeat Photography Project, created in 1997, has produced many of these panels, following extensive searches in GNP archives for past photographs that the USGS and others have recreated over the last two decades.35 The pictures vividly document glacier loss, while image analysis and corresponding studies have revealed biophysical and ecological effects of glacier shrinkage, including effects on downstream trout populations, soil moisture, and plant communities.36 Yet, circulation of the repeated images spanning from 1938 to 2013 can generate other interpretations when disseminated outside scientific papers and research communities. Specifically, repeat photography for GNP (1) focuses strongly on the aspects of loss and apocalyptic outcomes and (2) emphasizes iconic features, especially tourist scenery, rather than local societal or other impacts. Repeat photography of glaciers almost inevitably concentrates on loss of ice. Glaciers make

106

Before-and-After Photography

FIGURE 6.1  Repeat Photography of Grinnell Glacier, Glacier National Park, USA. Credit: United States Geological Survey. Photographs by T. J. Hileman (1938), Carl Key (1981), Dan Fagre (1998), and Karen Holzer (2006).

excellent climate change indicators because the melting is a fact, clearly evident to anyone who views this photography. Glacier images thus elevate the entire climate change discussion above economic agendas and potential political debates through demonstrable evidence not mired in skeptic/believer arguments.37 Nevertheless, the focus on retreat and loss neglects a critical aspect of glaciers: by definition, they move—and that movement generally manifests as either growth or shrinkage. Recent shrinkage may be alarming or problematic.38 The problem, however, is that repeat photography misses the nuance and, in some ways, misinterprets glaciers. While it is possible that the surface area of a glacier can remain constant so that it only moves internally through ice deformation, most glaciers constantly advance or retreat. By focusing solely on loss and shrinkage in repeat photographs at GNP, the narrative is that glaciers should be either static or advancing. But if they are static, they will no longer be glaciers; by definition, a glacier is only a glacier if there is movement, otherwise it is only a block of ice. Yet, if glaciers advance, new problems could emerge, such as glacier snouts advancing into moraine-dammed glacial lakes, possibly causing a host of new glacial lake outburst floods even more deadly than those hazards associated with today’s glacier retreat. What’s more, during the Little Ice Age, many European residents lived in fear of advancing glaciers that were invading pastures, destroying barns and homes, and inundating communities.39 Repeat photography also obscures the historical timeline of glacier change. In GNP, the images imply a recent loss of glaciers from climate change.

BEYOND IMAGES OF MELTING ICE

107

But of the estimated 150 glaciers in the park in 1850, only thirty-seven existed in 1966, with twenty-seven existing today.40 Most had thus already vanished fifty years ago. The hidden point in the repeat photography is that sustained climate change and glacier shrinkage have occurred since the end of the Little Ice Age around 1850, with ebbs and flows in the climatic conditions (warmer and cooler periods) and with warming and ice loss accelerating since about 1980. Popular media depictions, however, tend to focus implicitly or explicitly on the recent warming, ignoring the long-term processes and the complexity of climate-change drivers, including the transition out of the Little Ice Age more than 150 years ago that initiated worldwide glacier retreat. Repeat photography focused solely on the ice—and especially when removed from scientific discussions about global environmental change and complicated climatic forces—obscures the timeline of climate change and tends to focus on the present-day results: apocalyptic ice loss. Beyond the embedded loss narrative, repeat photography at GNP ignores societal implications of melting ice and cultural values of glaciers. The social aspects presented emphasize the glaciers as tourist scenery rather than explaining effects of ice loss on local people, economies, and livelihoods. The USGS Repeat Photography Project on GNP begins by noting that the park’s glaciers “have receded rapidly since the Park’s establishment in 1910, primarily due to longterm changes in regional and global climate.”41 While this is true, the report could instead have opened by saying that in the last two decades, cultural values of glaciers have skyrocketed and the interest in GNP’s glaciers has been deeply informed by the cultural value of US national parks, their scenery, and their place in tourism. People care about ice because of its cultural value: they have come to appreciate mountain landscapes and national parks, and this fascination with glaciers is recent, thus making people care more about vanishing glaciers today than they did in the 1950s, for example, when ice loss occurred largely without discussion.42 The societal impacts are not evaluated through GNP’s repeat photography exhibits either. Discussions of reduced glacier runoff from dwindling glaciers in GNP describe impacts on trout, but not on the nearby Hungry Horse Reservoir that people depend upon. Nor do studies or reports examine differential vulnerability to glacier retreat impacts on the neighboring populations, such as the Blackfeet Indian Nation, ranchers, urban residents, park staff, and businesses catering to the national park tourism economy, among many others. These groups will not be affected equally because vulnerability hinges on race, ethnicity, class, gender, and additional variables. But repeat photography images of the park’s glaciers contain no suggestion that their value transcends tourist scenery, or that ice loss might be felt differently by local indigenous residents compared with tourists from Philadelphia. Considering the hefty literature critiquing national park histories worldwide for being imperialist projects that set aside scenery for white, urban, wealthy residents to enjoy—often at the expense of local residents, especially indigenous

108

Before-and-After Photography

peoples who were in many cases forcibly evicted from parklands—it seems that repeat glacier photography perpetuates this view of national parks.43 Stripped of any mention of local societies, the iconic national park landscape presented in repeated glacier images becomes a visual commodity (glacier pornography?) for tourists and potential tourists who appreciate mountain scenery to enjoy from afar. The implication is that saving glaciers in the park would thus help wealthy, white, urban residents who do not live in Montana because, for the most part, this is the population that utilizes national parks and enjoys their scenery.

Peru’s Lake Palcacocha Peru’s Lake Palcacocha is one of the world’s most infamous glacial lakes. It is located in the Cordillera Blanca mountain range,44 which towers over nearby valleys and is draped with more than 600 glaciers. A quarter million Peruvians inhabit the surrounding area, and hundreds of thousands more rely on glacier runoff for water supplies, irrigated agriculture, and hydroelectricity generation. But the Cordillera Blanca has also produced some of the world’s most catastrophic glacier disasters.45 On December 13, 1941, Lake Palcacocha unleashed the world’s most deadly glacial lake outburst flood, killing 5,000 people and destroying a major part of the city of Huaraz, the capital of the Ancash Region in north-central Peru. A 1970 avalanche from Mt. Huascarán obliterated the city of Yungay, the death toll reaching nearly 8,000.46 Altogether, since 1941, Cordillera Blanca glacier disasters have killed nearly 15,000 people. Over the last seventy-five years, the Peruvian government has successfully contained glacial lake threats in the region: engineers have drained lakes and built artificial dams at thirty-five glacial lakes to prevent catastrophic outburst floods. Repeat photography has been used extensively to examine Cordillera Blanca’s glacier retreat—with Austrian geographer Hans Kinzl’s 1930s photographs, including those of Lake Palcacocha, providing a baseline for future comparisons. Sergiu Jiduc, for instance, presented repeat photographs of Palcacocha by placing Kinzl’s two Palcacocha images alongside his own 2012 National Geographic expedition photographs (Figures 6.2 and 6.3).47 Jiduc sought to evaluate regional glacier and vegetation changes, as well as chronicling “widespread glacier recession.” He concludes that knowledge of Palcacocha and its history—and potential future—of outburst flooding is essential “to craft effective emergency strategies to prevent human life loss.” Many others, especially Peru’s Glaciology and Hydrological Resources Unit, have effectively used repeat photography of glaciers to demonstrate clear evidence of ice loss in the Andes. Yet, in the extensive use of repeat photography in the region, three prominent themes invite more critical reflection: (1) the invisible society; (2) neglect of the evolution of environmental

BEYOND IMAGES OF MELTING ICE

109

FIGURES 6.2 and 6.3  Left: Lake Palcacocha, Peru, 1939. Photograph by Hans Kinzl. Right: Lake Palcacocha, Peru, 2013. Photograph by Paribesch Pradhan from the Glacier Photograph Collection, National Snow and Ice Data Center, Boulder, Colorado, USA.

110

Before-and-After Photography

knowledge and values related to glaciers and natural hazards; and (3) the politics of glacier representation. First, just as Glacier National Park repeat photography overlooked social analysis of vulnerability and downstream human impacts, representations of Palcacocha focus on glacier shrinkage and the glacial lake hazard, with the principal cause-effect dynamic emphasizing climate change impacts on ice, not on human vulnerability or the history of societal exposure to outburst floods below the lake. Researchers such as Jiduc mention the 1941 disaster and the renewed danger of an outburst flood during the past decade. But there is generally no analysis of who is most (and least) vulnerable to the lake hazards, by contrast with existing disaster research that conceptualizes risk as the integration of biophysical processes (the hazard) and human vulnerability.48 Repeat photography stresses changes to the glacier and glacial lake, not the processes by which Huaraz grew from 12,000 people in 1941 to more than 100,000 today. Nor is there recognition of the Peruvian government’s efforts over two decades after 1941, and for one decade after the 1970 earthquake devastated the city, to prohibit reconstruction of Huaraz in the area destroyed by the 1941 flood.49 Local residents endangered themselves by disregarding these zoning laws and recolonizing the floodplain. This missing context is probably more important for disaster prevention and climate change adaptation planning than the quantification of glacier thinning or lake expansion. Second, repeat photography, by neglecting the evolution of knowledge— including resident understandings and perceptions—from the 1930s to the present, makes the representations ahistorical. This is critical in the case of glacier retreat because seventy years ago, unlike today, most of the world’s people were not concerned about glacier retreat. Repeat photography ignores the history of controlling the lake through scientific studies and numerous engineering projects after 1941. Several attempts to drain it were made during the 1940s, and by the 1950s the government constructed an artificial dam at the lake. In the 1970s, engineers built a second security dam at Palcacocha to prevent a flood. It was partially destroyed in 2003 by a landslide into the lake. Methods for studying, draining, and damming the lake have evolved through time and continue to be discussed and researched.50 Third, repeat photography at Lake Palcacocha ignores the politics of representation embedded in the photographs and also at the glacial lake during recent decades. There is a long history of jockeying for control over the lake’s representation. In 2003, for example, the US space agency NASA issued a press release that (mis)identified an impending disaster, reporting inaccurately that a crack in a glacier indicated an imminent avalanche that could crash into Palcacocha, cause a catastrophic outburst flood, and inundate Huaraz, potentially killing 60,000 residents within minutes.51 NASA may have been trying to market ASTER satellite images rather than responsibly analyzing glacier hazards. As the director of the European Space Agency’s Earth Observation Programmes, José

BEYOND IMAGES OF MELTING ICE

111

Achache, remarked, it was “not ethical for an agency to refer to threats to people’s lives as a means of demonstrating the relevance of Earth-observation satellites.”52 Subsequently, there was a struggle within Peru for control over the discourse about Palcacocha.53 Government officials sought to dispute the disaster report because it negatively affected tourism. Engineers who had previously drained and dammed Lake Palcacocha argued that the lake was secure thanks to their work in the 1970s and the limited volume of water—actually a vast underestimate as the lake volume had grown through the decades from approximately 500,000 m3 in the mid-1970s to 17 million m3 by 2010. Repeat photography showing images from 1939 and 2012 gloss over these critical periods in Palcacocha’s history, representing the lake either as an impending catastrophe, as a successfully engineered and controlled body of water, as scenery in the rugged Cordillera Blanca mountains, or as a water source for downstream communities. While scientists today still do important work to try to understand the glacial lake conditions and the variables that could trigger another flood, these representational approaches, dividing nature from culture, overlook society and vulnerability-based solutions to glacier retreat and glacial lake instability.

Sagarmatha (Mt. Everest) National Park, Nepal This chapter’s first author utilized a novel application of repeat photography using a diachronic photo diary as a basis for interviews with local Sherpas in the Khumbu region (or SNP—Sagarmatha (Mt. Everest) National Park) to shed light on various aspects of landscape change as part of a broader PhD project (Figure 6.4 and Plate 4).54 Because of Everest’s gravitas, the retreat of its glaciers is an important yardstick for measuring the rate of climate change. As so often occurs in discussions of climate change, the local inhabitants’ responses to glacial retreat and the coupled nature of life among glaciers, with all its difficulties

FIGURE 6.4  Taboche and Khumbu Valley in the 1950s.

112

Before-and-After Photography

and opportunities in the Himalayas,55 are disturbingly absent from most media accounts and popular perceptions. The Khumbu region is an exceptional area of dramatic mountains, glaciers, and deep valleys, containing seven peaks over 7,000 m high, other than Mt. Everest (8,848 m). With over 4,000 residents in SNP who depend on the region’s glaciers for irrigation, sanitation and drinking water, the UNESCO WNH status recognized the park’s cultural landscapes56 from its inception.57 Ever since the Little Ice Age the area’s glaciers have been retreating, a change that has been particularly noticeable since the 1970s, as shown by satellite imagery58 and repeat photography revealing increased area and volume of a number of glacial lakes behind ice or moraine dams.59 There is still widespread glacier retreat in the Khumbu,60 which is set to continue and/or accelerate, and which already affects human well-being, economic livelihoods, and development infrastructure.61 Many of these “new” glacial lakes drain themselves of excess water periodically when an increasing lake level reaches natural outlets.62 Because of their topography, many lakes can release water catastrophically by breaking through their dams, such as Palcacocha in Peru, or by responding to large calving events or earthquakes, to produce devastating glacial lake outburst floods.63 The danger of these events was acutely felt in the Khumbu in 1985, when a 10–15 m high debrisladen wall of water swept 90 km down the region, causing extensive devastation, including damage to a new $1 million hydro-project. Fortunately, the flood did not occur during the main trekking season, so the loss of human life was lower than it otherwise would have been. A variety of adaptation strategies provide means of coping with glacial lake outburst floods, but so far there has been very little emphasis on engineering solutions and considerably less on social measures to reduce vulnerability. Only after climate change became a sexy topic in the mid-1990s did anyone consider producing an inventory of potentially hazardous glacial lakes in SNP. Climate change and glacier research on the region has subsequently skyrocketed, with much discussion and concern surrounding a possible future outburst floods from Imja Tsho and Tsholo Tsho Lakes in particular. However, if we think in terms of strategies for adaptation to climate change, we should probably look at the entire range of social development needs in the Khumbu. For example, the ten-year Maoist conflict (1996–2006) in Nepal caused significant suffering in the greater Khumbu region. The root causes of the conflict, all closely related, include inequitable socioeconomic and political access, poor governance, and widespread poverty. Of course, there are more commonplace disasters. While the availability of modern medical services is present in SNP, off the popular trekking trails the lack of medical facilities is arguably the cause of nearly every single death in the region’s more remote areas. How do we assign priorities for hazard mitigation when the aggregate cost of ordinary flash floods and landslides during the monsoon rains probably exceeds anything we might

BEYOND IMAGES OF MELTING ICE

113

attribute to a certifiable disaster such as a glacial lake outburst flood? And the more intense rain predicted for the future64 will only exacerbate the problems of landslides and floods. On the other hand, there is a danger of paralysis in the headlights of equity. To do nothing unless the whole picture is addressed is unrealistic. The main theme is that melting glaciers are just the tip of the iceberg. The perception of the local Sherpa of the Khumbu is that there are more significant drivers of change: migration, population growth, and changes in land-use.65 On the other hand, Sherpa people have better access to roads, electricity, education, and communication. Remittances bring new prosperity, and tourism is increasing. But urbanization, male outmigration, ineffective park management, and problems with waste disposal are also having a marked effect. Repeat photography shows effects of globalization and climate change being felt in even the most remote Himalayan environments.66 The signs are visible, but there are very few solutions to date. In many ways, the story of the Imja Tsho and Tsholo Tsho lakes, and the lack of integrated disaster management/social development plans so far, are just as alarming as the hazard threat itself. There is a clear community consensus that the future viability of the Khumbu is tied to the reduction in hazard at Imja Tsho and Tsholo Tsho Lakes, and to infrastructure development within the park itself. This must be done sensitively with respect to both the physical and social environments and should include the provision of electricity and other social benefits. This chapter’s first author disputes the accuracy of certain media reports that local Sherpas are ambivalent to current glacial lake outburst flood threats. Contrary to assertions that the Sherpas were not disturbed by the threat because they considered many of the lakes to be sacred, the authors point out that the apparent lack of fear was probably due to local belief systems, and that they are acutely aware of the glacier-related hazards.67 To a large extent, adaptation and social development priorities to date have ignored local knowledge, which includes resident understandings and perceptions of change. Even if all of these issues were resolved, an additional matter would remain to be addressed: the regional dimension of both climate change impacts and responses. Many potential glacial lake outburst floods actually originate in Tibet.68 Moreover, decision-making over watershed management and hydropower generation in particular affects neighboring countries in India and China.69 These decisions therefore not only involve national discourses on the linkages between climate change and development, but must take place within the context of regional discussions that can formulate coordinated strategies. As consideration of climate change so often does, the discussion of local responses to glacial retreat shows the dual nature of life among glaciers in the twenty-first century, with all its attendant difficulties and opportunities. The “before” and “after” images produced by repeat photography may be interrogated at the number of levels: from the “spot-the-difference,” to close and

114

Before-and-After Photography

exacting scrutiny, to a personal exploration of a place depicted. They also provide stimulus for discussion at the local level, stimulating anecdotes and drawing intimate knowledge from local people responding to the photographic images70 and the local experience can be transferred to and compared at an international level—the first step toward unraveling the complexities of change, describing commonalities, uniqueness, and lessons that can be transferred, which is crucial for achieving long-term sustainability of such regions.

Conclusion This chapter has looked beyond the before-and-after photo pairs to highlight some of the hidden narratives and key aspects of human–glacier dynamics. For one, the dynamics and historically produced societal contexts for human vulnerability to glacier and climate change are overlooked. Additionally, glacier change itself can be misrepresented through the repeat photography method. Our historical perspective shows that the first generation of glacier photos in the  nineteenth century, in part, shaped institutional developments and the evolution of scientific knowledge that will determine how effectively populations can adjust to the natural and social environments of tomorrow in the context of climate change and increasingly integrated markets and societies. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, glaciers are once again playing a major role in shaping our understanding of the planet. However, the nineteenth-century image of a glacier being modified by very slow processes has been replaced by the image of glaciers being altered by rapid processes as a result of climate change. Since the mid-1990s, however, a new glacial phenomenon has been constructed— the phenomenon of catastrophic glacial calving, the mistaken claims of glaciers vanishing, and the proliferation of glacier hazards such as outburst floods. Today, it seems mere glacier retreat is not bad enough; now it must be catastrophic to be worthy of attention. All of the case studies presented are situated at the nexus of changing protected area values. Current societal as well as political trends make the acceptance of WNH sites increasingly dependent on their delivery of economic benefits in addition to their core aim of conserving natural resources.71 Because of their iconic status, the glaciers presented are particularly exposed to this trend. For well over a century, it is the architects, the tourism stakeholders, and more recently the environmentalists who have portrayed glaciers as protected wilderness areas, where human intervention remains subtle, and “natural” and special care is given to preserve this narrative. As a result, the research agenda with glacier repeat photography has been to choose the elements and relationships of the photo which they wish to bring to attention (mainly for tourists and city dwellers) (e.g.

BEYOND IMAGES OF MELTING ICE

115

the loss narrative outlined below). As we have shown, the people most affected by glacier retreat are usually absent from the iconic, repeated images, or the emphasis is on the photographer, rather than the local populations being affected by climate change and the socioeconomic changes that have similar levels of uncertainty. The apocalyptic environmental degradation and the loss narrative—which is common in the environmental movement more broadly—can only suggest certain solutions.72 First, it portrays a future in which things can only get worse. There is nothing to look forward to in a world without ice, which can be crippling and demoralizing rather than sparking useful action. Second, the loss narrative for glaciers directs attention to the ice and what caused it to melt—that is, global climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions. The implied solution to save glaciers, then, involves reducing carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gas emissions. The solution is, in this framing, not in the hands of local residents living (or dying) with glaciers, but rather with those responsible for climate change in the first place: polluters and policy makers. To be sure, repeat photography can offer both specific empirical information as well as holistic or synthetic perspective.73 However, assessing changes through photo pairs necessities a contextualized understanding of many processes, agents, and events that help shape landscapes, and this includes perception. If done well, repeat photography can serve as a valuable entry point to explore key aspects of climate change impacts and human–glacier dynamics, especially since identifying “real” threats and adapting to them, requires integrating local knowledge, recognizing power imbalances, and grappling with complex social-ecological systems. With respect to critical dialogue, repeat photography can create an informal conversation away from statistical predictions and political arguments, which are easily dismissed as often the argument for climate change is not as solid as the argument for the changes themselves. For this reason, it is important to consider not just what is photographed but also what is left out of the pictures. In terms of the larger picture, this chapter aspires to be an initial step in influencing current repeat photography practices toward broader participation from communities affected. Currently, most techno-scientific solutions to climate change bypass local community actors, thus leaving them powerless and vulnerable to environmental change. Furthermore, glacier melt should not be exaggerated and generalized to characterize entire regions, nor should the impacts be articulated to a single simplistic and often unsubstantiated cause. This only serves to deflect attention from the extent of impacts local people face. Nor is it an attempt to blame media for such large gaps of misinformation. While the media is certainly culpable, it is bilateral agencies, UN institutions, governments, NGOs, and others advancing specific environmental agendas who frequently failed to show larger societal contexts and cultural values and to separate cause and effect and provide solutions, whether intentionally or not. In practice, this adds additional weight to

116

Before-and-After Photography

the widespread suppression, or at least lack of adequate concern about the wellbeing of large numbers of vulnerable mountain people.

Notes 1 James Balog, Ice: Portraits of Vanishing Glaciers (New York: Rizzoli, 2012). 2 Elizabeth A. Allison, “The Spiritual Significance of Glaciers in an Age of Climate

Change,” WIREs Climate Change 6, no. 5 (2015): 493–508; Mark Carey, “The History of Ice: How Glaciers Became an Endangered Species,” Environmental History 12, no. 3 (2007): 497–527; Karine Gagné, Mattias Borg Rasmussen, and Ben Orlove, “Glaciers and Society: Attributions, Perceptions, and Valuations,” WIREs Climate Change 5 (2014): 793–808; M. Jackson, “Glaciers and Climate Change: Narratives of Ruined Futures,” WIREs Climate Change (2015). doi: 10.1002/wcc.351; Ben Orlove, Ellen Wiegandt, and Brian H. Luckman, “The Place of Glaciers in Natural and Cultural Landscapes,” in Ben Orlove, Ellen Wiegandt, and Brian H. Luckman, eds., Darkening Peaks: Glacial Retreat, Science, and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 3–19.

3 Andrew Revkin, “A Farewell to Ice,” New York Times, March 18, 2008: http://dotearth. blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/a-farewell-to-ice/?_r=0 (accessed July 25, 2015); United States Geological Society, “USGS Repeat Photography Project Documents Retreating Glaciers in Glacier National Park,” USGS, 2013: http://nrmsc.usgs.gov/ repeatphoto/ (accessed July 27, 2015); Lonnie G. Thompson et al., “Glacier Loss on Kilimanjaro Continues Unabated,” Science 106, no. 47 (2009): 19770–19775.

4 Dawna Cerney, “The Use of Repeat Photography in Contemporary Geomorphic

Studies: An Evolving Approach to Understanding Landscape Change,” Geography Compass 4, no. 9 (2010): 1339–1357.

5 For example, Daniel B. Fagre and Lisa A. McKeon, “Documenting Disappearing

Glaciers: Repeat Photography at Glacier National Park, Montana,” in Robert H. Webb, eds., Repeat Photography: Methods and Applications in the Natural Sciences (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2010), 77–88; Bruce F. Molnia, “Repeat Photography of Alaskan Glaciers and Landscapes from Ground-Based Photo Stations and Airborne Platforms,” in Robert H. Webb, eds., Repeat Photography: Methods and Applications in the Natural Sciences (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2010), 59–76; Alton C. Byers, “An Assessment of Contemporary Glacier Fluctuations in Nepal’s Khumbu Himal Using Repeat Photography,” Himalayan Journal of Sciences 4, no. 6 (2007): 21–26; Jeffrey Kargel et al., “ASTER Imaging and Analysis of Glacier Hazards,” in Bhaskar Ramachandran, Christopher O. Justice, and Michael J. Abrams, eds., Land Remote Sensing and Global Environmental Change, Remote Sensing and Digital Image Processing 11 (New York: Springer, 2011), 325–373; A. A. Bjork et al., “An Aerial View of 80 Years of Climate-Related Glacier Fluctuations in Southeast Greenland,” Nature Geoscience 5, no. 6 (2012): 427–432.

6 Robert H. Webb (ed.), Repeat Photography: Methods and Applications in the Natural

Sciences (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2010); Trudi Smith, “Repeat Photography as a Method in Visual Anthropology,” Visual Anthropology 20 (2007): 179–200.

BEYOND IMAGES OF MELTING ICE

117

7 Stanley Trimble, “The Use of Historical Data and Artefacts in Geomorphology,” Progress in Physical Geography 32, no. 1 (2008): 3–29.

8 Cerney, “The Use of Repeat Photography in Contemporary Geomorphic Studies.” 9 Byers, “An Assessment of Contemporary Glacier Fluctuations in Nepal’s Khumbu Himal Using Repeat Photography.”

10 Peter Moore, “Photography and Rephotography in the Cairngorms, Scotland, UK,”

in Robert H. Webb, ed., Repeat Photography: Methods and Applications in the Natural Sciences (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2010), 262–273.

11 Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate Since the Year 1000 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1971).

12 Wilfried Haeberli, “Changing Views of Changing Glaciers,” in Benjamin S. Orlove,

Ellen Wiegandt, and Brian Luckman, eds., Darkening Peaks: Glacier Retreat, Science, and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 23–32.

13 Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western

Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967); J. R. McNeill, “Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History,” History and Theory 42 (2003): 5–43; Marc Tadaki et al., “Nature, Culture, and the Work of Physical Geography,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (2012). doi: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00495.x; R. Lave et al., “Intervention: Critical Physical Geography,” Canadian Geographer-Geographe Canadien 58, no. 1 (2014): 1–10.

14 Diana M. Liverman, “Assessing Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability: Reflections

on the Working Group II Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” Global Environmental Change 18 (2008): 4–7; Cynthia Rosenzweig and Thomas J. Wilbanks, “The State of Climate Change Vulnerability, Impacts, and Adaptation Research: Strengthening Knowledge Base and Community,” Climatic Change 100 (2010): 103–106; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation. A Special Report of Working Groups I and II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

15 The Jungfrau-Aletsch protected area is the first UNESCO WNH site in the Alps, inscribed in 2001.

16 Wilfried Haeberli and Hanspeter Holzhauser. “Alpine Glacier Mass Changes during

the Past Two Millennia.” Pages News 11, no. 1 (2003), 13–15: http://www.pages-igbp. org/download/docs/newsletter/2003-1/science_highlights/Haeberli&Holzhaus er_2003-1%2813-15%29.pdf (accessed June 20, 2015)

17 Micheal Zemp, Frank Paul, Martin Hoelzle, and Wilfried Haeberli, “Glacier

Fluctuations in the European Alps 1850–2000: An Overview and Spatio-temporal Analysis of Available Data,” in Benjamin S. Orlove, Ellen Wiegandt, and Brian Luckman, eds., Darkening Peaks: Glacier Retreat, Science, and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 152–167.

18 Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300–1850 (New York: Basic Books, 2000).

118

Before-and-After Photography

19 Sarah Achermann and Karina Liechti, Die Gletscher des Welterbes Jungfrau-Aletsch

im Spiegel der Zeit (Centre for Development and Environment CDE Universität Bern, 2012): https://www.cde.unibe.ch/News%20Files/LOW_Unesco_Gletscher_EinblickeAusblicke_2012.pdf (accessed June 5, 2015)

20 Mauro Fischer, Matthias Huss, Chloé Barboux, and Martin Hoelzle, “The New Swiss Glacier Inventory SGI2010: Relevance of Using High-Resolution Source Data in Areas Dominated by Very Small Glaciers,” Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research 46 (4) (2014): 933–945.

21 Heinz J. Zumbühl and Hanspeter Holzhauser, “Glaziologie. Annäherung an 3500 Jahre Gletschergeschichte,” in A. Wallner, E. Bäschlin, M. Grosjean, T. Labhart, U. Schüpbach, und U. Wiesmann (Hrsg.), Welt der Alpen. Erbe der Welt. UNESCO Welterbe-Region Jungfrau-Aletsch-Bietschhorn (Bern: Haupt Verlag 2007), 47–72.

22 Fischer, Huss, Barboux, and Hoelzle, “The New Swiss Glacier Inventory SGI2010.” 23 Darren S. Crook and Anna M. Jones. “Traditional Irrigation and Its Importance to

the Tourist Landscape of the Valais, Switzerland,” Landscape Research 19, no. 1 (1999): 49–65.

24 Zemp, Paul, Hoelzle, and Haeberli. “Glacier Fluctuations in the European Alps 1850–2000: An Overview and Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Available Data.”

25 Heinz J. Zumbühl, Die Schwankungen der Grindelwaldgletscher in den historischen Bildund Schrift quellen des 12 bis 19 Jahrhunderts (Basal: Birhauser Verlag, 1980).

26 Dominic Kniveton, Emma Visman, Arame Tall, Mariane Diop, Richard Ewbank,

Ezekiel Njoroge, and Lucy Pearson. “Dealing with Uncertainty: Integrating Local and Scientific Knowledge of the Climate and Weather,” Disasters 39 (2015): s35–s53.

27 Zemp, Paul, Hoelzle, and Haeberli. “Glacier Fluctuations in the European Alps 1850–2000.”

28 Wilfried Haeberli, Paul Frank, and Martin Zemp, “Vanishing Glaciers in the

European Alps,” in Fate of Mountain Glaciers in the Anthropocene (Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Scripta Varia, 2013), 118.

29 Ibid. 30 Achermann and Liechti, “Die Gletscher des Welterbes Jungfrau-Aletsch im Spiegel der Zeit.”

31 Fischer, Huss, Barboux, and Hoelzle. “The New Swiss Glacier Inventory SGI2010.” 32 GNP was designated a UNESCO WNH site in 1995. 33 For Gore’s speech text, see http://clinton3.nara.gov/WH/EOP/OVP/speeches/glacier. html (accessed July 27, 2015).

34 Mark Carey, “The Trouble with Climate Change and National Parks,” in Mark Fiege, Jared Orsi, and Adrian Howkins, eds., National Parks beyond the Nation (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, in press); Christopher White, The Melting World: A Journey Across America’s Vanishing Glaciers (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2013).

35 See http://nrmsc.usgs.gov/repeatphoto/overview.htm (accessed July 27, 2015).

BEYOND IMAGES OF MELTING ICE

119

36 Fagre and McKeon, “Documenting Disappearing Glaciers”; M. H. P. Hall and D. B. Fagre, “Modeled Climate-Induced Glacier Change in Glacier National Park, 1850–2100,” Bioscience 53, no. 2 (2003): 131–140.

37 Henry Pollack, A World without Ice (New York: Penguin Group, 2009). 38 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC, “Working Group I Contribution to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Summary for Policymakers” (2013).

39 Fagan, The Little Ice Age. 40 White, The Melting World, 7. 41 USGS, “USGS Repeat Photography Project Documents Retreating Glaciers in Glacier National Park.”

42 Mark Carey, “The Trouble with Climate Change and National Parks.” 43 William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong

Nature,” in William Cronon, eds., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1996), 69–90.

44 Huascarán National Park covers most of the Cordillera Blanca, designated a UNESCO WNH site in 1985.

45 Mark Carey, “Living and Dying with Glaciers: People’s Historical Vulnerability to

Avalanches and Outburst Floods in Peru,” Global and Planetary Change 47 (2005): 122–134; Mark Carey, In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers: Climate Change and Andean Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

46 S. G. Evans et al., “A Re-Examination of the Mechanism and Human Impact of

Catastrophic Mass Flos Originating on Nevado Huascarán, Cordillera Blanca, Peru in 1962 and 1970,” Engineering Geology 108, no. 102 (2009): 96–118.

47 Sergiu Jiduc, “NatGeo 2012 Expedition to the Peruvian Andes,” online expedition blog (2012): http://natgeoperuexpedition.tumblr.com/ (accessed July 27, 2015).

48 IPCC, Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation.

49 Barbara Bode, No Bells to Toll: Destruction and Creation in the Andes (New York:

Paragon House, 1990); Carey, In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers; Anthony OliverSmith, The Martyred City: Death and Rebirth in the Andes (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986).

50 Adam Emmer et al., “Glacier Retreat, Lakes Development and Associated Natural

Hazards in Cordillera Blanca, Peru,” in Wei Shan et al., eds., Landslides in Cold Regions in the Context of Climate Change (New York: Springer, 2014), 231–252; D. S. Rivas et al., “Predicting Outflow Induced by Moraine Failure in Glacial Lakes: The Lake Palcacocha Case from an Uncertainty Perspective,” Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences 15 (2015): 1163–1179; Vít Vilímek et al., “Influence of Glacial Retreat on Natural Hazards of the Palcacocha Lake Area, Peru,” Landslides 2 (2005): 107–115; Alcides Ames, “A Documentation of Glacier Tongue Variations and Lake Development in the Cordillera Blanca, Peru,” Zeitschrift für Gletscherkunde und Glazialgeologie 34, no. 1 (1998): 1–36.

120

Before-and-After Photography

51 Mark Carey, “Living and Dying with Glaciers”; Kargel et al., “ASTER Imaging and

Analysis of Glacier Hazards”; Georg Kaser and Christian Georges, A Potential Disaster in the Icy Andes: A Regrettable Blunder (Austria: University of Innsbruck, 2003); David E. Steitz and Alan Buis, “Peril in Peru? NASA Takes a Look at Menacing Glacier,” NASA Press Release, April 11, 2003.

52 Nature, “NASA Feels the Heat as Glacier Pictures Cause Unrest in Peru,” Nature 422, no. 794 (2003): doi:10.1038/422794a.

53 Carey, In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers. 54 Rodney Garrard, “Landscape Dynamics in Sagarmatha (Mount Everest) National

Park, Nepal: Impacts on Selected Environmental Services and Adaptive Capacities,” A Ph.D. project. Mountain Research Initiative (MRI) Newsletter 4 (2010).

55 As we were writing this chapter, news from the devastating April 25, 2015, 7.8

Earthquake in Nepal reached us. This extremely sad event shows once again that mountains are high-risk areas for multiple hazards—including earthquakes in geologically young regions—and mountain people are increasingly exposed to natural disasters.

56 Marc Antrop, “Why Landscapes of the Past are Important for the Future.” Landscape and Urban Planning 70 (2005): 21–34.

57 SNP was gazetted as a national park in 1976 and designated a UNESCO WNH site in 1979.

58 For example: Bajracharya et al., Impact of Climate Change on Himalayan Glaciers and

Glacial Lakes: Case Studies on GLOF and Associated Hazards in Nepal and Bhutan (Kathmandu: ICIMOD, 2010); Shea et al.,“Modelling Glacier Change in the Everest Region, Nepal Himalaya,” The Cryosphere 9 (2015): 1105–1128; Thakuri et al., Glacier Response to Climate Trend and Climate Variability in Mt. Everest Region (Nepal) (Italy: Graduate School of Earth, Environment and Biodiversity, University of Milan, 2013); Yong et al., “Glacial Change in the Vicinity of Mt. Qomolandgma (Everest), Central High Himalayas since 1976,” Journal of Geographic Sciences p. 20, no. 5 (2010): 667–686.

59 Byers, “An Assessment of Contemporary Glacier Fluctuations in Nepal’s Khumbu Himal Using Repeat Photography.”

60 Shea et al., “Modelling Glacier Change in the Everest Region, Nepal Himalaya.” 61 For example: Rodney Garrard et al., “Depicting Community Perspectives: Repeat

Photography and Participatory Research as Tools for Assessing Environmental Services in Sagarmatha National Park, Nepal.” ecomont 4, no. 2 (2012): 21–31. Rodney Garrard et al., “An Ever-Changing Place: Interpreting Landscape Change in Sagarmatha (Mt Everest) National Park, Nepal: Re-photographic Survey and Encounter.” ecomont 4, no. 2 (2012): 49–55; Stan Stevens, “National Parks and ICCAs in the High Himalayan Region of Nepal: Challenges and Opportunities.” Conservation and Society 11, no. 1 (2013): 29–24.

62 Helgi Björnsson, “Jökulhlaup in Iceland: Sources, Releases and Drainage.” In D. M.

Burr, P. A. Carling and V. R. Baker, eds., Megaflooding on Earth and Mars (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 50–64.

BEYOND IMAGES OF MELTING ICE

121

63 Jack Ives et al., Formation of Glacier Lakes in the Hindu Kush-Himalayas and GLOF Risk Assessment (Kathmandu: ICIMOD, 2010).

64 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation.

65 Rodney Garrard, Thomas Kohler, Urs Wiesmann, Martin F. Price, Alton C. Byers,

Ang Rita Sherpa, and G. R. Maharian, “Land Use and Land Cover Change in Sagarmatha (Mount Everest) National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the Himalayas of eastern Nepal,” Journal of Mountain Research and Development 36, no. 3 (2016).

66 For example: Byers, “An Assessment of Contemporary Glacier Fluctuations in Nepal’s

Khumbu Himal Using Repeat Photography”; Rodney Garrard et al., “An EverChanging Place.”; Marcus Nüsser, “Change and Persistence: Contemporary Landscape Transformation in the Nanga Parbat Region, Northern Pakistan,” Mountain Research and Development 20 (2000): 348–355; Marcus Nüsser, “Understanding Cultural Landscape Transformation: A Re-photographic Survey in Chitral Eastern Hindukush, Pakistan,” Landscape and Urban Planning 57 (2001): 241–255.

67 Rodney Garrard et al., “Depicting Community Perspectives.” 68 Bajracharya et al., “Impact of Climate Change on Himalayan Glaciers and Glacial Lakes.”

69 Ives et al., Formation of Glacier Lakes in the Hindu Kush-Himalayas and GLOF Risk Assessment.

70 Rodney Garrard et al., “An Ever-Changing Place.” 71 Catherin Conradin and Urs Wiesmann, “Does World Heritage Status Trigger Sustainable Regional Development Efforts,” ecomont 6, no. 2 (2014): 5–11.

72 Diana M. Liverman, “Conventions of Climate Change: Constructions of Danger

and the Dispossession of the Atmosphere,” Journal of Historical Geography 35, no. 2 (2009): 279–296; Erik Swyngedouw, “Apocalypse Forever? Post-political Populism and the Spectre of Climate Change,” Theory Culture & Society 27, no. 2–3 (2010): 213–232.

73 Smith, “Repeat Photography as a Method of Visual Anthropology.”

122

Before-and-After Photography

7 NATURAL CYCLES Naoya Hatakeyama’s Photographs of the 2011 Tohoku Tsunami LISA SUTCLIFFE

Disastrous events pin down time. The earthquake and tsunami that devastated the Eastern Coast of Japan on March 11, 2011, created a pivot point around which images and their meanings are interpreted: before and after this event. The tsunami triggered by the earthquake was photographed and recorded immediately and comprehensively due to the advanced alert and response system and the accessibility of high quality cameras. As soon as the massive temblor struck off the eastern coast of Tohoku, helicopters armed with high-resolution video cameras were dispatched to follow the progress of the waves as the sea swept ashore. Japanese artists also responded to the Tohoku events immediately—in greater numbers and more quickly than in past disasters because of the vast reach of the tragedy.1 Despite the ubiquitous footage of this event, it is impossible to capture the full scope of the aftermath of the earthquake, tsunami, and resulting nuclear disaster in a single photograph. In contrast to the sea of images in mass media, artists help to define the power and scope of the tragedy by making pictures that explore the human emotional impact that transcends the event. This chapter will examine the Tohoku disaster through the lens of Naoya Hatakeyama, who has thoughtfully and continuously recorded the evolution of the landscape in his hometown of Rikuzentakata, which was leveled by the tsunami. Because this tragedy greatly affected Hatakeyama’s life, his photographs not only document the aftermath but also offer a unique perspective on his own personal trauma and the transformation of the landscape from someone associated with the event itself. This chapter will also look at his response to the Japanese tsunami in the context of his larger body of work and how his pictures of Rikuzentakata

have evolved as time has progressed. A close examination of his 2012 publication Kesengawa offers an opportunity to survey the effect these events have had on his practice and on collective understanding of his preexisting photographs. Ultimately, Hatakeyama’s pictures present a conscious example of how an artist witnesses a traumatic event that diverges from the typical before and after trope, providing a broad and cyclical understanding of a place over time.

Naoya Hatakeyama Born in 1958 in Iwate Prefecture on the northeastern coast of Japan, Hatakeyama took early inspiration from the limestone quarries surrounding his hometown. He was drawn to industrial subject matter, and his first artistic explorations took the form of paintings of the cement factory that he passed each day in his youth. This native setting also inspired his first photographic series, Lime Hills (Quarry Series) (1986–91), an investigation of the nearby limestone quarries and their corresponding factories.2 This series initiated a career dedicated to a thorough examination of the ways in which human and natural forces are intertwined. In the essay for Lime Works (1996), the artist declared: There has never been a time in our history when the space about us was so fraught with artificial objects as today. We who live in cities have tossed away the sea, the mountains, the rivers, yet we receive their fruits for our consumption through a vast distribution system.3 In his larger oeuvre, Hatakeyama traces these systems of production from their point of departure, for instance, beginning at a limestone quarry and tracing the mineral’s path through factories to the urban fabric of cities, and finally to the moment of its destruction—whether by human or natural forces. Taken together, his work focuses on a systematic and poetic examination of the infrastructure society creates to claim and process natural resources. Calling on the traditions of Romantic painting, the large-scale color photographs for which Hatakeyama is known blur the lines between man-made and natural environments, transforming industrial settings into awe-inspiring pictures. Yet, his work moves beyond Romanticism: whether photographing sewers, factories, or demolition sites, the artist approaches his subjects in a calm and distanced manner, representing them from multiple viewpoints and across time. The sublime has long interested Hatakeyama, who is drawn to examine man as an integral part of the forces of nature. His investigation of limestone quarries ultimately led to an extended series, entitled Blast (1995 ongoing), which captured the explosions designed to free limestone from cliffs in a series

124

Before-and-After Photography

of still frames. Simultaneously documenting the mining process and offering a conceptual understanding of the blast as sculptural event, these photographs are dramatic and overpowering. For Terrils (2009–10), Hatakeyama transformed the man-made waste of slag heaps into impossibly conical peaks to reveal a complex natural environment that incorporates human developments. When photographing the Swiss Alps in Untitled (Another Mountain) (2005), the artist captured the imposing peaks from vista points designed to inspire and awe visitors with their impressive views. Hatakeyama’s use of scale suggests that despite an increasing desire to commune with nature, natural forces will continue to assert the futility of human efforts to shape the environment. The unpredictability of nature was forcibly evident on March 11, 2011, when a 9.0 magnitude earthquake sent a massive tsunami hurtling toward shore, where it made impact less than an hour later and devastated the northeastern coast of Japan, ultimately triggering a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Since that time Hatakeyama has halted the rest of his artwork to chronicle the catastrophic impact of natural forces on his hometown. Rikuzentakata, 95 miles north of Fukushima and roughly 80 miles from the epicenter, was one of the towns hardest hit by the tsunami. Although the city was surrounded by 6.5-meter (roughly 21 foot) tsunami walls, the waves reached a historically unprecedented height of 17 meters (roughly 55 feet), which effectively leveled the town and killed 10 percent of its population.4 The artist lost members of his family as well as friends and neighbors. In the weeks, months, and years that have followed, Hatakeyama has made many photographs of the wreckage, focusing on the disaster’s impact on the local topography and his community. These pictures are remarkably clear and unsentimental, recording the land as it changed: first littered with destroyed buildings and detritus, and then gradually cleared until virtually nothing remained of a once vibrant village but a flat, empty tract of earth. These photographs, made with the quiet precision that marks all of Hatakeyama’s work, reveal the ultimate fragility of our relationship with nature. Hatakeyama’s photographs of his hometown provide a personal record of the catastrophe and its consequences. One panorama comprised of two interlocking personal snapshots taken in July 2004 depicts a bustling Rikuzentakata on a lush summer day (Plate 5). Another diptych taken from the same perspective in the weeks after the tsunami reveals the vast scope of the wreckage (Plate 6). The destruction from this perspective is shattering: the only elements of the town that remain unchanged are the Kesen River and the road that slices haphazardly through the flattened earth, the last clue that a town once stood alongside it. That Hatakeyama’s original picture was never intended to become a “before” image in a disastrous comparison only heightens the shocking contrast. This example of photographing the same place from a consistent perspective over time is unusual for Hatakeyama, whose photographs often respond to more nuanced changes in place.

NATURAL CYCLES

125

In 2012, Hatakeyama published the Japanese edition of Kesengawa, a compilation of pictures of his hometown prior to the tsunami and in its wake. This work offers a comprehensive vision of this one place evolving through time: life in the years leading up to the event and the wreckage that follows in its wake. Moreover, it chronicles the transformation in Hatakeyama himself as an observer and victim of the tragedy through the changing style of his pictures, which shifts radically as the book progresses. Named for the Kesen River, which creates a fertile delta on which the town was built, the book begins with the artist’s casual snapshots, representing personal memories, taken in the years preceding the event (Plates 7 and 8). Hatakeyama began making these pictures, which he never intended to share publicly, after his fortieth birthday in 2000. They were produced when he returned home to celebrate the New Year, and during the Obon Festival, the traditional summer memorial service to honor the spirit of their ancestors. His written commentary is interspersed throughout this section of pictures and reads like a diary of his journey north in the days following the earthquake, and includes his remembrances of family and the town itself. When discussing these pictures, the artist remarks on the personal and nostalgic nature of the exercise, “I’d get lost in a reverie, looking at the photographs and thinking about the wonders and cruelty of the passing of time.”5 These snapshots focus on Hatakeyama’s family, friends, neighbors, their lives along the river and the festivities of Obon. Water figures prominently in the pictures as a community celebrates life alongside the quiet river. In these photographs the river shimmers and sparkles, reflecting the brightly colored floats of the festival. Birds, fish, and wildlife flourish amid lush vegetation along the river, and rituals and rhythms of the town as they honor those who have passed away take center stage. These serene and poignant pictures, which had been made to record a magical daily life, now seem prophetic: a small wave carries the threat of an ominous future; tsunami walls loom in the background of images; Hatakeyama’s partner, Corinne, stands waist deep in the ocean, her hands on her hips as she stares meditatively into the sea. In the wake of the tsunami these details, which might have originally seemed peripheral, mark a significant alteration in the interpretation of the images. If there is a central figure, it is Hatakeyama’s mother, who perished in the tsunami, and who is seen repeatedly throughout the sequence alongside friends and neighbors. These are glimpses of life carried on under the shadow of potential danger, an inescapable reality in a region long accustomed to facing the threat of earthquakes and their terrifying aftermath. The meaning of these initial photographs is ultimately transformed and shaped by the unexpected pictures that follow. After sixty personal snapshots and accompanying text, the presentation of pictures in Kesengawa shifts to twenty photographs made in the disaster’s aftermath. An image of two figures paddling peacefully along the river is followed by one of Hatakeyama’s sister wandering through wreckage (Plate 9). The stark

126

Before-and-After Photography

contrast between the series of photographs is illuminating, both in subject and style. The earlier pictures are smaller, printed with a generous border on facing pages, whereas the post-tsunami photographs spread across two pages, enlarging the destruction and debris and bringing it closer to the viewer’s perspective. Taken from Hatakeyama’s point of view, the pictures mimic the experience of walking through the landscape itself, creating a palpable immediacy. Peaceful and still photographs infused with light and vibrant color are replaced by harsh and jagged compositions, dull hues, and dead light. Where once there were celebrations of life, festivals, and community, now there is nothing but ruin. Comparisons between the pictures taken before and after the disaster prove revelatory to understanding the reach of the destruction. Knowing that the original pictures were meant only as snapshots, but were later infused with meaning by the events of March 11, 2011, enhances their poignancy. In addition, the shocking transformation in style as the book progresses illuminates the altered state of the photographer himself. Unlike his panoramic pair of pictures (not included as a pair in the book), these images deviate from a conventional before-and-after pairing. Hatakeyama does not return to scenes from his earlier pictures to show how one scene is altered. Nor does he accentuate dramatic changes from one viewpoint. Instead, he presents his own poetic exploration of place to symbolize a lost personal landscape. One picture shows a tree that has been strung with gohei, paper streamers on wooden wands used in Shinto rituals. In a picture taken after the disaster, a cautionary rope hangs from a battered tree trunk that withstood the raging waters; the contrast is startling (Plates 10 and 11). Indirect relationships between pictures such as these make Kesengawa a powerful and moving publication. Hatakeyama explained that the gohei streamers are said to “breathe and contain the spirit in the air,” and in much the same way his photographs create a lasting memorial for the town and its inhabitants, their ancestors and traditions.6 In a town where one in ten died, and virtually nothing of the original village remains, Hatakeyama’s personal snapshots provide a link to the past and a record of the collective history that was lost. Preceding the events of 3.11 these images held personal significance for Hatakeyama, his family and friends, as well as residents of Rikuzentakata. In this new context, the images are transformed into an elegiac memorial, taking on greater meaning for a larger audience. He notes: After March 11th, 2011, these photographs … began to hold completely different meaning. People I photographed by chance had died. A girl who was playing the flute at a festival became a girl without a father. Bridges and buildings in the photographs were swept away by the tsunami…. After our photo albums, filled with memories, disappeared in the tsunami, I realized that images of the peaceful town from the past remain only in my mind and in the few photographs I had taken.7

NATURAL CYCLES

127

These photographs create the beginning of an archive for remembering what was lost. Although Hatakeyama has shown his earlier snapshots in exhibitions in Tokyo, San Francisco, and Boston as a slide show, he does not consider it part of his larger oeuvre, but as an important counterpoint to his work made following the tsunami.8 Showing the work in slide format contrasts with his traditional method of presenting fine prints and suggests his desire to separate the two. Ultimately, Kesengawa serves as the one place in which the pictures exist side by side and provides a nuanced example of both the newly charged meaning of his personal photographs and the shocking conversion of Hatakeyama’s photographic style.

Before-and-after comparisons One of the most monumental and inspiring efforts following the disaster was the establishment of the “Memory Salvage” project in Yamamoto-cho, Miyagi Prefecture, to clean and digitize lost family photos in order to return them to owners. More than 1,000 volunteers worked to clean and identify over 750,000 pictures—a colossal task. Pictures that were so severely damaged that they could not be recognized were used to create Lost and Found Project: Family Photos Swept Away by 3.11 East Japan Tsunami, a traveling exhibition that shared the disaster with an international audience as a means of memorializing and fund-raising. Their mission states: “Today, we can take pictures whenever and wherever, but one is reminded that a single photograph can have a value that nothing else can replace.”9 The original meaning, relevance, and context carried by each picture has been altered, damaged, or erased, mimicking the destruction to the towns that were washed away. What remains is evidence of a force so destructive that it is not only capable of destroying emulsion, but towns, their inhabitants, and all the memories they carry with them. This act of painstaking labor by a community united suggests an underlying belief in the power of these pictures as talismans. This project conveys a desire to restore these memories through the photographic object in order to keep their stories from being wiped out by the event. After examining the life evident in Hatakeyama’s photographs of Rikuzentakata before March 11, 2011, the violence of such an erasure carries heavy weight. The final presentation of thousands of destroyed pictures ultimately communicates what was lost more powerfully than those that were restored and returned. In 2014, the Tate Modern presented Conflict, Time, Photography, an exercise in “looking back, considering the past without becoming frozen in the process.”10 Proposing the importance of how temporal distance from an event affects how society reads an image, the exhibition focused on images of man-made conflict, which function in similar ways as those of disaster. Hatakeyama’s personal pictures were not the only photographs infused with meaning by the events of 3/11 and

128

Before-and-After Photography

the nuclear crisis it precipitated. In 1994, Taishi Hirokawa published Still Crazy: Nuclear Power Plants As Seen in Japanese Landscapes, which documented the frequency of nuclear power plants that dot Japan’s coastal perimeter. In 1994, the pictures expressed an anxiety that now reads as eerily prescient. At the time of publication, Hirokawa wrote: Are we to live forever with this edifice of convenience, or have we taken into hands something ungovernable? One thing for certain is that human beings and nuclear energy have become inseparable, and that we enjoy its benefits at all times …11 Like Hatakeyama, Hirokawa’s pictures focus on these human structures as an integrated part of the Japanese landscape, however uneasy that may make him. Children play on the beach with reactors looming in the distance; sprawling nuclear sites interrupt lush hills. Neither artist relies on figures in his pictures, instead allowing the structures humans build to stand for their presence. After the nuclear disaster at Fukushima Hirokawa added a note to his website, “Where should we go from here? I think the time has come for us to reconsider our future direction.”12 The events at Fukushima have indelibly changed the ways in which these pictures are interpreted in much the same way the meaning of Hatakeyama’s personal photographs have been altered. By using a stylistic shift to underscore the trauma of this jarring event, Hatakeyama utilizes the book presentation to convey his own internal fracture. Examining vernacular, personal, and artistic responses together provides a more comprehensive examination of the ways in which loss is pictured. Beforeand-after comparisons are one of the most common methods of reading and measuring the scope of such disastrous events. Assessing the same place over two or more moments in time offers a tangible and clear way of observing the amount of destruction, dramatic alterations to the landscape, and gradual, but ongoing changes. The term “before-and-after” is slippery in the case of Hatakeyama in that the pictures were not originally made to be paired or compared. In addition, many vernacular before-and-after couplets measure events immediately following a disaster against the slow progress of reconstruction. The narrative changes depending upon the moments in time chosen for comparison. “After” pictures often reveal barren landscapes that not only visually demonstrate the loss of life but also communicate photography’s inability to fully picture or represent what is lost. In addition, they act symbolically in place of imagery that is too horrible, grotesque, physically impossible, or traumatic to look at. After the Tohoku disaster, photographers working for Getty Images, Reuters, and the Associated Press independently conceived and constructed various series of “before-and-after” combinations, returning periodically to rephotograph scenes from exactly the same perspective.13 Whereas in historical disasters before-and

NATURAL CYCLES

129

after-photographs were published for dramatic effect, the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami gave rise to sustained photography of the same view repeated again and again. Looking through these pictures, viewers are able to recreate the progression of destruction and renewal and see reconstruction through time. The Atlantic published an ongoing online series from these pictures, beginning immediately following the event and then to mark anniversaries and gauge the progress of reconstruction.14 The comparisons reveal dramatic change. One year after the tsunami, the rehabilitation is evidenced by an organized attempt to sort the debris into discreet piles: tires, metal, wood. After two years, the pictures can be divided into scenes of resilience and complete devastation. In some places, towns and cities have been rebuilt and daily life resumes, leaving fewer signs of the massive destruction. Others reveal cities wiped clean: absences where towns used to be. The Atlantic’s online before-and-after series features a “click-to-fade” function that allows cameras to rephotograph a scene from the exact coordinates of the original perspective. This presentation replaces a “before” image with an updated picture, overriding previous moments with new ones, and rejecting previous constructions of linear time as side-by-side comparisons that maintain a historical narrative. It is as if to suggest a kind of enforced amnesia as the past is constantly rewritten and updated as the trauma recedes. Moreover, the 2011 Tohoku tsunami may be the first tragedy that offers an evolving visual thread, each scene photographed once a year for the foreseeable future, producing a stop-motion progression that allows a viewer to visually witness the passage of time.15 In contrast, Hatakeyama is not attempting to create a portal view of one place through time by returning to the same point again and again to photograph its evolution from the same perspective. In comparison to the aerial or bird’s-eyeview pictures often published online, his photographs are taken from the ground and reveal an intimacy with the landscape that many press photographs lack. He is not interested in using shock or drama to entice viewers. Whereas the press pictures communicate the power of nature through pictures of absence that reveal dramatic destruction and loss, Hatakeyama’s pictures create a narrative on a more human scale. His photographs of Rikuzentakata reflect a deeper understanding of the effects of the tsunami by focusing on one town and its collective history. Because his identity is, in part, formed by the place and its people, his pictures are more nuanced, witnessing disaster and chronicling both the death of a place and a part of himself. The press photographers who commonly photograph disasters often have no connection to the event and their pictures are made for a remote audience. This distant and objective perspective can often be said to allow for a neutral style of photography. It is unusual for the public to see an extended series of photographs taken by someone connected to and affected by the event itself. Hatakeyama has considered whether he can be considered an outsider to this event despite his deep personal connection:

130

Before-and-After Photography

I lost family there, our home was carried away, and the town I remember fondly has disappeared. So I feel that I was very much within the disaster … For the past four years, the most troubling problem for me while photographing has been this issue of the swaying “outside/within” boundary, and the issue of how others apply this “outside/within” to me.16 His sustained consideration over the four years since the earthquake is a testament to his deep engagement with the subject. Hatakeyama argues this “problem of positionality” gives him power that he must observe carefully. Once the viewer becomes aware of Hatekeyama’s relationship to the disaster, his pictures would likely be given more weight than those made by someone from the outside. The artist himself considers this in the discussion of a photograph of a ruined foundation shot in Rikuzentakata: Let’s say a photographer I don’t know is standing close to me in the disaster zone. He and I are both taking photographs of the foundation of a house that was swept away by the tsunami. Our photographs may come out looking similar. But suppose I point at the foundation and tell him, “My home used to stand here,” what would happen? The difference in our reasons for taking the photographs will become clear. My reason is “personal.” His reason is “not personal.” I am “within” and he comes from “outside.” The moment he discovers that, he may no longer feel comfortable and decide to stop taking photographs.17 Once the artist explains that he is photographing the remnants of his home, the picture carries a deep personal impact that evokes empathy on the part of his viewer as well. That Hatakeyama considers this power of knowledge and what he calls “the problem of positionality” suggests that he is aware of the complications of photographing something that has such emotional and personal resonance. In comparison to photographers arriving from the outside, Hatakeyama cannot claim to be objective and neutral in making photographs. Instead, he makes his position transparent and offers his observations with context and consideration. Because so many artists were directly affected by the events of March 11, 2011, Hatakeyama is not alone in contemplating this issue. The events of March 11, 2011 not only transformed the Tohoku region but also indelibly marked Hatakeyama’s photographic practice. By examining his work made in the same town before and after a disaster, it is possible to see how this traumatic event can transform one artist’s work, methods, and style. The pictures made in the weeks following the event are not immediately recognizable as the work of Hatakeyama, known for his calmly composed and often abstract works. The artist himself admits that the “photographs of Rikuzentakata had a distinctive quality that would seem out of place in the context of my other work.”18 He explains

NATURAL CYCLES

131

that rather than setting out to make a photographic project, these pictures “were created as a result of my getting involved in an unexpected, unfortunate event.”19 Calling the discrepancies between his larger oeuvre and these documentary-style pictures into question, Hatakeyama asks: Do we really need art that can sustain itself only by insisting on “consistency?” Fundamentally, what artists show us is not how they engage their own works of art, but how they engage their own world … To be honest, since the tsunami, I think I have been photographing without wondering whether my photographs are “works of art” or not.20 The tsunami and its aftermath have clearly altered Hatakeyama’s photographic practice. Before March 11, 2011, his photographs reflected a consistent artistic style, but the events of that day were so shattering that he is no longer interested in making such work. Instead he has dedicated himself to chronicling the changing landscape of Rikuzentakata. In Kesengawa specifically, Hatakeyama fundamentally alters the conventions of the before and after trope. His pictures do not rely only on describing a change in the visible subject, but also reveal a dramatic internal shift through how he sees and stylistically responds to this place.

Natural cycles Disasters such as the tsunami that destroyed the eastern coast of Japan on March 11, 2011, also offer opportunities to envision progress and future renewal. In the case of Rikuzentakata, the involvement of artists has been transformative. For the 13th International Venice Architecture Biennial in 2012, the Japanese Pavilion featured architect Toyo Ito’s Home for All, a project using saltwater-soaked trees from the area to build a community center that would provide common space to those who lost homes. Hatakeyama’s large-scale panoramic vista of the decimated town was wrapped around the pavilion as photographic wallpaper (Plate 12). The inclusion of this photograph as a backdrop for the architectural models provides an example of the generative nature of the disaster. In this context, Hatakeyama’s image of a barren and flattened landscape is the blank canvas upon which artistic collaboration can be based and future projects imagined. When Home for All was realized in Rikuzentakata in 2012, the pictorial backdrop became reality. The presentation illustrates the role of photography in visualizing a more positive future. Since the tsunami of 2011, people in Rikuzentakata have had to consider how to rebuild and reimagine their way of life. The city center, which once sat at the edge of a flat alluvial plain, is being elevated upon rock fill. As plateaus are being

132

Before-and-After Photography

cut into the surrounding mountains for new buildings, civil engineering projects including a massive conveyor belt system and suspension bridge are carrying rock and soil across the Kesen River. Hatakeyama has continued photographing the evolution of the landscape as heavy machinery takes over the flat barren land and the earth is moved and reconfigured. As the reconstruction in Rikuzentakata has progressed, Hatakeyama’s photographs have come to resemble his earliest work. Once again Hatakeyama examines the relationship between man and nature through civil engineering, which once took the form of quarrying limestone in Lime Hills. The pictures are not just similar in subject, but in his use of golden light that imbues the work with Romanticism. Hatakeyama has recently claimed that these landscapes no longer feel exclusively personal and that four years after the tsunami he feels as if his “body that was within the event is gradually being pulled out as time passes.” He says, “[Rikuzentakata] is entering a new phase by making a clean break with the memories of the past. There are now far fewer ‘memories’ in my photographs.”21 That Hatakeyama’s most recent photographs return to a more abstract and contemplative style suggests the cyclical nature of trauma: that it can be generative despite its tragedy. This cyclical history suggests a new way of understanding disaster photography as linked to an evolving set of fluctuating and fleeting moments, rather than a linear progression of definitive moments. Hatakeyama’s photographs create an important and lasting visual record that helps in the process of understanding the physical, emotional, and spiritual toll of disasters. In a town built upon the ring of fire, the past and present are inextricably tethered; these events are likely to repeat themselves in a circular progression throughout the course of history. Through this lens, Hatakeyama’s pictures suggest a complicated narrative of time and memory: the personal pictures from Kesengawa represent the past, pictures in the wake of the tsunami embody the present, and his most recent pictures of Rikuzentakata under construction symbolize the future. But the interpretation of these images is constantly evolving. As an artist who has chronicled the intersection of human and natural forces for twenty-five years, Hatakeyama has developed an intricate understanding of the dynamic relationship between them. Although no one picture can define the event, the experience of a life’s work can offer a meaningful and profound consideration of how these forces coexist.

Notes 1 The instantaneous availability of expansive documentary footage was likely a contributing factor.

2 Hatakeyama’s father was also employed by a cement factory for a time during the artist’s youth. Naoya Hatakeyama, Lime Works (Kyoto: Seigensha, 2008), 119.

NATURAL CYCLES

133

3 Ibid., 118. 4 Danielle Demetriou, “Japan Tsunami Anniversary: Revisiting Rikuzentakata, the

Town ‘wiped off the map’,” The Telegraph, March 10, 2012, http://www.telegraph. co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/9134474/Japan-tsunami-anniversary-revisitingRikuzentakata-the-town-wiped-off-the-map.html (accessed April 24, 2015). Mark Mackinnon, “Tsunami Preparation Leads Citizens into Low-Lying Death Traps,” The Globe and Mail, March 15, 2011, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/ world/asia-pacific/tsunami-preparation-leads-citizens-into-low-lying-death-traps/ article1943381/ (accessed April 24, 2015).

5 Naoya Hatakeyama, “Personal Landscape” (lecture presented at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, April 22, 2015). His notes were subsequently emailed to the author.

6 Naoya Hatakeyama, email message to author, March 2, 2012. 7 Hatakeyama, “Personal Landscape.” 8 The prints made after the tsunami have been shown as prints and the personal

snapshots have been shown in slide show format. Both were presented in Naoya Hatakeyama: Natural Stories at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography (October 1–December 11, 2011); Huis Marseille, Amsterdam (December 16, 2011– February 26, 2012); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (July 28–November 4, 2012); and most recently in In the Wake: Japanese Photographers Respond to 3/11 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (April 5–July 12, 2015).

9 “Lost and Found Project: Family Photos Swept Away by 3.11 East Japan Tsunami,” http://lostandfound311.jp/en/about/ (accessed April 1, 2015).

10 Conflict, Time, Photography was curated by Simon Baker at the Tate Modern

(November 26, 2014–March 15, 2015). It was an exhibition that “concerns the relationship between photography and sites of conflict over time, as time itself is fundamental to the photographic medium.” Simon Baker, “Armageddon in Retrospect,” in Conflict, Time, Photography (London: Tate, 2014), 195.

11 Taishi Hirokawa, Still Crazy: Nuclear Power Plants As Seen in Japanese Landscapes (Tokyo: Korinsha Press, 1994), Introduction.

12 Taishi Hirokawa, “Still Crazy,” http://hirokawa810.com/top_e2.html (accessed March 25, 2015).

13 Although most of the news outlets running these pictures have been American or International, the photographers who constructed these combinations are largely Japanese.

14 Alan Taylor, Photo Editor at The Atlantic, in a conversation with the author on

March 31, 2015. The Atlantic series was taken from Getty, Reuters and Associated Press. The photographers went out in helicopters as soon as the earthquake hit and followed the tsunami into shore. They took it upon themselves to rephotograph sites from the same perspective over the course of time. Taylor chose pictures to give a complete and varied narrative of the event and picked photographs he liked from many options. http://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2012/02/japan-earthquake-beforeand-after/100251/ http://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2012/03/japan-earthquake-oneyear-later/100260/ http://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2013/03/japan-earthquake-2years-later-before-and-after/100469/#img01 (all accessed March 25, 2015).

134

Before-and-After Photography

15 It is interesting that this evolution has happened simultaneously in film with Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014), filmed intermittently with the same actors between 2002 and 2013.

16 Hatakeyama, “Personal Landscape.” 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid.

NATURAL CYCLES

135

PART FOUR

SOCIAL “IMPROVEMENTS” Assimilation and Reform

8 STAGING EMANCIPATION Race and Reconstruction in American Photographic Humor TANYA SHEEHAN

In 1863, the commercial portrait studio of Morse and Peaslee, operating in Nashville, Tennessee, distributed a striking pair of cartes de visite. In the before picture (Plate 13), an African American boy in tattered pants and an oversized shirt sits atop a trunk, staring at the camera with a vacant expression. In the after (Plate 14), only the boy’s expression has changed, as he displays a wide toothy grin for the camera. Inscriptions scrawled across the bottom of each carte attribute the sitter’s physical and emotional transformation to a specific source: the Emancipation Proclamation, announced by President Abraham Lincoln on September 22, 1862, and put into effect on January 1, 1863, as the devastating war between the northern and southern American states waged on. That Morse and Peaslee chose to stage on a black body the effects of Lincoln’s decree, which declared free “all persons held as slaves” within the “rebellious states,” had as much to do with their experiences as working photographers during the US Civil War as with Tennessee’s particular place within the conflict. Algenon Samuel Morse had relocated to Nashville in the early days of the war and claimed affiliation with the Union Army of the Cumberland, documenting with his camera its men and their activities. While less is known today about his business partner, William A. Peaslee, photographic records indicate that the pair was producing studio portraits for the army together by 1864.1 Morse and Peaslee thus made a name for themselves in Tennessee when the state was under Union control (1862–65) but before the local government outlawed slavery at the end of the war (1865). When they created their before-and-after photographs around 1864, in other words, these studio owners knew that Lincoln’s words had not freed

the local black population; that would require Tennessee’s ratification of a new state constitution and the Thirteenth Amendment.2 Such knowledge, if shared by viewers, was one of many factors contributing to the humor of the cartes de visite. After all, it would have been ridiculous for a black boy to smile so broadly in response to an announcement that would not alter his own enslavement—an idea to which we will shortly return. Pairing the images in temporal succession was another factor, as American humorists in the second half of the nineteenth century were fond of using visual comparisons as comic devices. Laughter resulted from viewers perceiving an incongruity in the pairing—that is, when they interpreted the after as following illogically from the before, or when social expectation rendered their juxtaposition absurd. To the creators of photographic humor, the emancipation of African-Americans was primed for comical treatment, since public discourse framed Lincoln’s proclamation as a turning point in the social development of the nation, despite the limitations to its scope experienced by the people of Tennessee and the states along the Confederate border. The year 1863 created a before that some Americans could regret and others could look upon nostalgically; it also anticipated an after whose possibilities generated significant cultural anxieties, in the North and the South. Would freed blacks come to be seen as the social and political equals of whites? If so, what would happen to whiteness after the reevaluation, and potential destruction, of racial hierarchies? To understand how the genre of before-and-after photography addressed these questions in the United States, let us first consider how white middle-class viewers, who purchased the pair of cartes de visite from Morse and Peaslee’s studio, would have interpreted the gesture at the heart of their joke: the toothy grin. American commercial photographers spilled much ink in the 1860s thinking about how to arouse each sitter’s happiest mood and translate it into a “pleasing expression” that could be recorded quickly, faithfully, and permanently. As trade manuals for photographers maintained, the ideal expression for a studio sitter in this period was a closed mouth because it was believed to connote evenness of temper, intelligence, respectability, and, by extension, whiteness. Expressions of extreme happiness, such as might cause the lips to part and the teeth beneath them to come into view, were reserved for subjects deemed socially deviant or inferior. African-Americans were among those othered subjects who were caricatured in photographic humor as simple minded, unrefined, excessively emotional, and morally weak—thereby “free” to smile broadly. Their representation in visual humor shows us how extreme displays of happiness came to be associated with certain socially marked photographic bodies, and denied to others, in midnineteenth-century America.3 We can read the boy’s expression of excessive joy in “After the Proclamation” as both supporting and challenging social expectations. On the one hand, his toothy smile is transgressive, insofar as it defied the aesthetic and cultural conventions

140

Before-and-After Photography

of white studio portraiture in the 1860s. Such a display of excessive emotion was presumably occasioned by Lincoln’s declaration of emancipation and thus spoke to viewers’ anxieties that blacks could not be easily contained or controlled without the institution of chattel slavery ensuring their subjugation. On the other hand, white viewers were unlikely to expect decorous behavior from an African-American boy, and so his exaggerated grin would have confirmed popular racial stereotypes. Any social power the boy might derive from defying bourgeois social codes, moreover, would have been mitigated by the fact that he functions as the prop of white photographers as well as a widely circulated commodity; as instructed, the black sitter strikes a pose to amuse the patrons of Morse and Peaslee’s Nashville studio. It is likewise difficult to see the boy’s action in the after photograph as transgressive if one reads the object of his happiness as white paternalism. The pairing of the cartes suggests that African-Americans can and should feel beholden to the generosity of Lincoln and other northern whites, who alone had the power to “proclaim” their freedom and contentment. In this way, Morse and Peaslee’s photographs belong to a large genre of images and texts that circulated the Atlantic world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, propagating ideas of the “grateful slave” and the “benevolent master,” and specifically venerating Lincoln as the “Great Emancipator.”4 In The Horrible Gift of Freedom, cultural historian Marcus Wood describes this genre as “a series of justificatory, indeed self-serving, rhetorics that take liberty and dress it up as a gift in the various costumes created, at different times and different places, by the ‘emancipation moment.’” They “represent liberation or emancipation as an enforced donation from the empowered possessors of freedom to the unfree and disempowered slave.”5 In American art and visual culture of the Civil War era, it therefore became common to depict the moment when a slave learns of his freedom, especially the seconds just before or during a reading of Lincoln’s transformative words. One of the best-known artworks to celebrate this moment was an engraving titled Reading the Emancipation Proclamation (1864); in it we see a group of enslaved men, women, and children in a humble domestic interior gazing anxiously and imploringly at a Union soldier, their agent of liberation, poised to read aloud from the Proclamation.6 Within the discourse of the “gift of freedom,” then, Morse and Peaslee’s cartes de visite offered a stark view of what came before and after the emancipatory moment. Importantly, they encouraged viewers to see those two temporal states as distinct and as occurring in rapid succession—that is, without an expansive during. Again, Marcus Wood can help us understand how and why depictions of acquired freedom invested in particular articulations of time. Referring to the cartes in his recent book on the visual culture of slavery in the Americas, Wood writes: What the frozen states of this black boy’s face are supposed to tell us is that under slavery there is eternal sadness distilled onto the countenance of all

STAGING EMANCIPATION

141

slaves, and in a state of freedom this changes immediately to a perpetual living joy. Because of the assumption that the snapshot is supposed to tell the truth about human appearance, and to tell the truth most emphatically when reality is caught at its most unstable, this image claims to put on display the real experience of freedom.7 While one might quibble with Wood’s characterization of the Morse and Peaslee photographs as “snapshots” and with the public conception of studio photography as undeniably truth-telling in the 1860s, he astutely observes that the cartes reduced the experience of emancipation to an instant and to its simplest, crudest form. The ridiculousness of that simplicity solicited laughter, to be sure. But what is unclear is whether the Nashville photographers wanted viewers to laugh at the preposterousness of reducing a complex affective experience to a comic gesture. After all, in their work for the Army of the Cumberland Morse and Peaslee may have encountered many southern slaves seeking freedom behind Union lines and witnessed firsthand something of their emotional lives. Or, was the butt of the joke the naïve black subject and his presumed inability to comprehend the gravity of the emancipatory moment? Were the photographers, moreover, critiquing or celebrating the Emancipation Proclamation when they invoked its name below the image of their black sitter? Even if viewers of the cartes were prepared to see emancipation as a gift of freedom from northern whites to African-Americans, political leaders of the 1860s primed them to see the many strings attached to that gift. I already noted that Lincoln’s decree was limited to the abolition of slavery in the Confederate states, and specifically to slaves who were able to escape captivity, seek the protection of the Union Army, and acquire the status of “contraband.” It has been estimated that approximately 500,000 people managed to obtain their freedom by such means after the Proclamation went into effect in 1863, leaving 3.4 million African-Americans in bondage until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865.8 These statistics suggest that emancipation required African-American self-determination and agency, dispelling the notion of freedom as bestowed onto blacks. Most southerners, of course, viewed emancipation as a most unwelcome gift forced upon them by a president whom they did not acknowledge as their own. For them, Morse and Peaslee’s before-and-after photographs would have signified differently; perhaps supporters of the Confederacy could see themselves in the caricatured black body, forced to smile on cue, puppetlike, when the Great Emancipator uttered his pronouncement. On November 8, 1862, the popular Richmond-based newspaper, Southern Illustrated News, turned to the before-andafter trope to express this view of Lincoln and his document (Figure 8.1). Captioned “King Abraham before and after Issuing the Proclamation,” the illustration depicts

142

Before-and-After Photography

FIGURE 8.1  Unknown artist, “King Abraham before and after Issuing the Proclamation,” Southern Illustrated News, November 8, 1862.

Lincoln as a devilish figure, pulling back a mask of amiability and gentility that represents how Americans saw him before he set out to abolish slavery in the southern states. The source of the South’s perceived troubles—the 1863 declaration of emancipation—rests on the ground before him. In the distance, the Washington Monument, still under construction, has been converted into a makeshift gallows, foreshadowing what southerners hoped would be Lincoln’s fate after the war. Exempted from the document’s terms, many Tennesseans would have been sympathetic to the cartoon’s critique, as they were divided in their feelings about the freedom that the Emancipation Proclamation promised. Some of the bloodiest

STAGING EMANCIPATION

143

battles were fought on their soil, and they lived for years in a state of military occupation. Many landowners, moreover, remained committed to the workforce that slavery provided them and resented what they saw as the unjust devastation of the antebellum economy.9 It is also important to acknowledge the ambivalence with which many black leaders responded to the Proclamation. The former slave and African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass, for instance, recounted in numerous public speeches to multiracial audiences the feelings he experienced and witnessed on January 1, 1863, as he stood among thousands of men and women in Boston’s Tremont Temple, waiting to hear by telegraph that the Proclamation had been signed. “I never saw enthusiasm before,” he recalled. “I never saw joy before. Men, women, young and old, were up; hats and bonnets were in the air, and we have three cheers for Abraham Lincoln and three cheers for about everybody else.”10 He offered a similar account in 1876 of the “outburst of joy and thanksgiving that rent the air when the lightning brought to us the emancipation proclamation,” but added: In that happy hour we forgot all delay, and forgot all tardiness, forgot that the president had bribed the rebels to lay down their arms by a promise to withhold the bolt which would smite the slave system with destruction; and we were thenceforward willing to allow the president all the latitude of time, phraseology, and every honorable device that statesmanship might require for the achievement of a great and beneficent measure of liberty and progress.11 In recalling the unparalleled happiness of the emancipatory moment, Douglass simultaneously admitted what that joy necessarily concealed. Without undermining the singularity and significance of that moment, in other words, he acknowledged how much it cost the nation and its African-American population, while implying that being pronounced free is, at best, a multidimensional experience—one that could and should never be relegated to a dopey grin. Indeed, the boy’s broad smile in Morse and Peaslee’s “After the Proclamation” effaces the difficult work, messiness, and uncertainty associated with transitioning from bondage to freedom. It makes invisible the reconstitution of black families divided by slavery, the establishment of new systems of education and labor for the freed to promote social and economic equality, the migration of blacks to areas of the country that could offer opportunities for work and social integration, and the enfranchisement required to ensure full inclusion in the democratic process. This is to say nothing of the toll that emancipation took on individuals and communities, who were confronted with a flood of conflicting emotions regarding the abolition of an institution that had rendered them the property of white men, subhuman things to be bought and sold. To be declared suddenly a citizen with the rights of any other—surely that would produce a mix of happiness, delight, relief, and

144

Before-and-After Photography

perhaps gratitude. But wouldn’t it also generate sadness, anger, and resentment for what came before, for needing to be proclaimed free at all? As well as a good dose of skepticism and trepidation about what lay ahead, in the after?12 Morse and Peaslee, we can conclude, enabled viewers to derive a chuckle from two very different readings of their cartes. While a viewer sympathetic to abolition might object to the inadequacy of the caricatured smile to encompass the range of feelings embodied by emancipation, another viewer could take pleasure in that inadequacy, finding in the images confirmation of the perceived social, moral, and intellectual inferiority of African-Americans. Either way, they would recognize the absurdity of breaking into a toothy smile—the same gesture that whites associated with blacks’ so-called fondness for eating watermelon—when confronting new criteria for American citizenship.13 Comparison to a final set of images sheds further light on the pleasure that white viewers could have derived from the cartes and their invocation of the Emancipation Proclamation. I refer here to another pair of cartes de visite created by Morse and Peaslee, on October 10, 1864 (Figures 8.2 and 8.3). Shot at a Union army camp in Tennessee, they present an African-American man named Hubbard Pryor before and after his enlistment in the Forty-Fourth US Colored Troops Infantry. Scholars have cited these photographs as important yet problematic efforts to picture black masculinity and citizenship for the first time in U.S. history. The white commander of the Forty-Fourth, Colonel Reuben D. Mussey, commissioned the obviously contrived images for a report on the recruitment of African-American soldiers in Tennessee that he prepared for the Bureau of the United States Colored Troops. As visual evidence of Pryor’s transformation, from a contraband in tattered clothing before enlistment to an armed man in federal uniform after, the cartes reached a larger audience of white, middle-class northerners when reproduced as wood engravings in Harper’s Weekly on July 2, 1864.14 As Erina Duganne has observed, the Pryor photographs ironically “limit the actual freedom represented through them … [H]is manliness and place within the body politic is bounded by the submissive terms of his slavery past, which serves to differentiate him and thus deny him full access to American freedom and equality.”15 Maurice Wallace similarly incorporated the pictures into his discussion of the visual culture of black masculinity and its origins in the United States, complicating their place within that culture by describing the after image as displaying a “coerced agency” and “simulated contentment.”16 That the same Nashville photographic studio produced both the “Proclamation” and the Pryor cartes reveals just how astute Wallace’s description may be. At the very least, reading the two sets of before-and-after photographs in relation to one another challenges conceptions of the Pryor photographs as portraits, or pictures that claim to represent the identity of an individual person. Like the unnamed sitter in the “Proclamation” photographs, Pryor is stripped of his individuality in the images and required to don the trappings of two distinct

STAGING EMANCIPATION

145

FIGURE 8.2  A. S. Morse and William A. Peaslee, Photograph of Private Hubbard Pryor before Enlistment in 44th US Colored Troops, October 10, 1864, National Archives, 849127.

146

Before-and-After Photography

FIGURE 8.3  A. S. Morse and William A. Peaslee, Photograph of Private Hubbard Pryor after Enlistment in 44th US Colored Troops, October 10, 1864, National Archives, 849136.

STAGING EMANCIPATION

147

stereotypes. Harper’s Weekly emphasized the pictures’ expression of type by omitting Pryor’s name from its description of them, identifying him as a “negro slave, who fled from Montgomery, Alabama, to Chattanooga.” Captioned simply “The Escaped Slave,” the before presents “the poor fugitive slave oppressed with the weariness of two hundred long miles of dusty travel, a journey interrupted by a thousand necessary precautions, and harassed by timid suggestions of a fate more horrible than death if he is discovered; with his meagre [sic] covering of rags about him.” In after, to which Harper’s attached the title “The Escaped Slave in the Union Army,” readers witnessed “the soldier crowned with freedom and honor.”17 But what if the two sets of cartes staged by Morse and Peaslee shared even greater affinities and, specifically, elements of humor? If we look carefully at the Pryor photographs, it is difficult not to see exaggeration in them; they appear to overstate not only the conditions associated with each type that Pryor performs but also the rapidity with which enlistment in the Union army made over those conditions. Don’t Pryor’s clothes in the before seem too-perfectly tattered and emphatically patchwork? Doesn’t his posture in the after strike you as too erect, divulging the performative character of that pose and the sitting itself? It is as if the cartes parody the construction of black masculinity that Maurice Wallace attributes to photography during and after the Civil War. We might even read them as comic meditations on the Emancipation Proclamation for, in addition to declaring slaves in the “rebellious” states free, the document announced the acceptance of African-American men of “suitable condition” into military service, resulting in the enlistment of almost 200,000 black soldiers and sailors by the end of the war. Would period viewers have seen Pryor the contraband, the subject of the before photograph, as worthy of the phrase “suitable condition”? We can easily imagine Tennesseans chuckling at the notion that an impoverished, enslaved African-American, such as the squatting figure of Pryor, could ever be suited to fighting for a cause as urgent and noble as that of reconstructing a divided nation. The strangeness of the after image encourages such a response by presenting Pryor as uncomfortably playing the role of a Union soldier. In effect, this photograph draws attention to important assumptions of the period— namely, that the so-called proper subjects of American military service and studio portraiture were white and male. Further inciting laughter is the fact that the two photographs were clearly made in the same place and on the same day, rendering absurd the radical social transformation they claimed to document. In this case, duration would have made the performance more believable; these before-and-after photographs nevertheless fail to capture a sense of change over time. Historians are privy to an additional, tragic absurdity: the Confederate Army captured Pryor in battle just three days after the photographs were taken,

148

Before-and-After Photography

returning him to a physical and social condition akin to that of the fugitive slave. Harper’s Weekly likely recognized the comic potential of the original photographs and therefore chose to alter numerous details before reproducing them as wood engravings (Figure 8.4). The Harper’s artist made considerable and meaningful changes to the after photograph, relocating the scene from a Union camp to an imagined battlefield and recreating Pryor’s costume and pose. The engraved figure towers over an idyllic landscape, leaning casually on the barrel of his rifle, sporting a well-fitting uniform with grace, and carrying his soldier’s pack with ease. The figure’s facial expression is likewise altered significantly from the original photographs. In both the before and after photographs, Pryor’s gaze remains stoically fixed on the camera, framed by deep furrow lines. In the remade after engraving, however, the face has softened tremendously. While the corners of the figure’s mouth arch slightly upward, in perfect imitation of the pleasing expression idealized in bourgeois studio portraiture, his eyes focus on a point in the distance, beyond our line of sight. That gaze tells us we are encountering a man with a keen sense of purpose and resolve; he controls his own destiny and, in turn, the destiny of the embattled nation. It is this detail—the transformation of Pryor’s expression in print—that endows the otherwise serious before-and-after images in Harper’s with almost laughable irony. For if there were any sign of Pryor’s own subjectivity and power in the photographs, it would be his constant expression; we might call it one of resignation or even displeasure. Harper’s had to remove this visible sign of selfpossession, which seemed so very out of place in the photographs, in order to create its own fantasy of black agency, one that ultimately says much more about whiteness than it does about blackness. The assumptions about racial difference that Morse and Peaslee’s before-andafter photographs expressed continued to fuel the production of photographic humor in the postbellum period. The “Proclamation” cartes themselves gained wider circulation sometime after Reconstruction when they were reproduced as glass lantern slides for a new generation of viewers who consumed racist representations of African-Americans in record quantities. That the lantern slides were outfitted with printed labels rather than handwritten captions confirms that the titles “Before the Proclamation” and “After the Proclamation” had always been integral to the images. As this essay demonstrates, they were also key to the meanings they conveyed to white viewers, who struggled to come to terms with the radical social transformations that the Civil War enacted.18 Emotionally charged responses to those transformations were performed through the photographic trope at the center of this book. In this way, the before-and-after photograph contributed to the very delineation of national identity and selfhood in the United States.

STAGING EMANCIPATION

149

FIGURE 8.4  “The Escaped Slave” and “The Escaped Slave in the Union Army,” Harper’s Weekly, July 2, 1864, 428, wood engravings after photographs by A. S. Morse and William A. Peaslee.

150

Before-and-After Photography

Notes 1 See Richard B. McCaslin, Portraits of Conflict: A Photographic History of Tennessee

in the Civil War (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2007), 6. McCaslin casts some doubt on Morse and Peaslee’s official involvement with the Army of the Cumberland, noting that many photographic studios claimed Union affiliation.

2 John Cimprich, Slavery’s End in Tennessee, 1861–1865 (University: University of Alabama Press, 1985).

3 For more on the photographic smile as an expression of American racial identity and difference, see Tanya Sheehan, “Looking Pleasant, Feeling White: The Social Politics of the Photographic Smile,” in Elspeth Brown and Thy Phu, eds., Feeling Photography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 127–157.

4 George Boulukos, The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century British and American Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

5 Marcus Wood, The Horrible Gift of Freedom: Atlantic Slavery and the Representation of Emancipation (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 2.

6 For discussion of this and related images of the emancipation moment, see Harold

Holzer, “Picturing Freedom: The Emancipation Proclamation in Art, Iconography, and Memory,” in The Emancipation Proclamation: Three Views (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 83–136; and Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer, Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013).

7 Marcus Wood, Black Milk: Imagining Slavery in the Visual Cultures of Brazil and

America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 247. Brief discussion of the cartes previously appeared in Brian Wallis and Deborah Willis, African American Vernacular Photography: Selections from the Daniel Cowin Collection (New York: International Center of Photography, 2005), 115.

8 See Ira Berlin, “Who Freed the Slaves? Emancipation and Its Meaning,” in David W.

Blight and Brooks D. Simpson, eds., Union and Emancipation: Essays on Politics and Race in the Civil War Era (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1997), 105–121; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Did Lincoln Really Free the Slaves?,” The Root, January 27, 2014; and David Williams, I Freed Myself: African American Self-Emancipation in the Civil War Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

9 On responses to the Proclamation and the abolition of slavery in Tennessee, see

Cimprich, Slavery’s End in Tennessee, 1861–1865; and Bobby L. Lovett, The AfricanAmerican History of Nashville, Tennessee, 1780–1930 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1999).

10 Douglass’ Monthly, March 1863; quoted in Williams, I Freed Myself, 115. See also Frederick Douglass, “The Proclamation and the Negro Army,” February 6, 1863, Cooper Institute, New York.

11 Frederick Douglass, “Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln,” April 14, 1876,

Washington, DC, delivered at the unveiling of the Freedmen’s Monument in Lincoln Park.

STAGING EMANCIPATION

151

12 See Edna Greene Medford, “Imagined Promises, Bitter Realities: African Americans

and the Meaning of the Emancipation Proclamation,” in The Emancipation Proclamation: Three Views (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 1–47; and Lonnie Bunch, “Emancipation Evoked Mix of Emotions for Freed Slaves,” Washington Post, September 7, 2012.

13 On the pairing of smiling black bodies with watermelon in photographic humor, see Sheehan, “Looking Pleasant, Feeling White.”

14 “The Escaped Slave and the Union Soldier,” Harper’s Weekly Harper’s Weekly 9, no. 392 (July 2, 1864): 422 (illustrations at 428).

15 Erina Duganne, “Black Civil War Portraiture in Context,” http://mirrorofrace.org/ blackcivilwar/#8a (posted April 5, 2012) (updated July 5, 2013).

16 Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith, eds., Pictures and Progress: Early

Photography and the Making of African American Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 259. See also Robert Scott Davis, Jr., “A Soldier’s Story: The Records of Hubbard Pryor, Forty-Fourth United States Colored Troops,” Prologue 31, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 267–272.

17 “The Escaped Slave and the Union Soldier,” 422. The illustrations published on 428 of the July 2 issue incorrectly identify the photographer as “T. B. Bishop.”

18 Here I am referring to a pair of lantern slides currently in my personal collection.

152

Before-and-After Photography

9 FACING THE BINARY Native American Students in the Camera’s Lens JACQUELINE FEAR-SEGAL

At the start of 1880, US President Rutherford B. Hayes received a package of photographs. They were images of Lakota students enrolled at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (1879–1918). Among the “views of the buildings and groups of Sioux youth,” sent to him personally by the school’s founder and first superintendent, Captain Richard Henry Pratt, were two arresting before-and-after pairs.1 The first of each duo showed a large group of students “on arrival” at the school (boys and girls in separate images), dressed in their traditional clothing with long, braided hair, elk-teeth trimmings, and eagle feathers. The second, taken at a later date, presented the same boys or girls after experiencing the “civilizing” effects of Carlisle’s reeducation program: cropped hair, trim uniforms, and carefully ordered bodies. The visual narrative embedded in the photographs powerfully suggested that a dramatic change had taken place in the children, and deftly implied that their exhibited exterior changes had been matched by analogous interior changes. President Hayes and his administration had actively supported the founding of Carlisle and Pratt’s mission to eradicate Native cultures and train Native children for citizenship and assimilation into mainstream society. These first Carlisle before-and-after photographs (and others that followed) were intended as indisputable proof of the success of this federally sponsored campaign of cultural transformation.2 They carried a forthright message of a seemingly straightforward and easy transition from “savagery” to “civilization” in binary pairs that elided all reference to the processes of change. Yet, despite their beguiling, apparent simplicity, these photographs are highly complex visual constructions that carry a series of covert narratives with multiple shifting and convoluted meanings.

This chapter will analyze these multilayered Carlisle before-and-after images through the lens of photographic traditions, and within the wider perspective of Indian–white relations and America’s national history. It will argue that these important visual texts can reveal and illuminate the historical processes driving the federal campaign to school Native children, and that when examined closely within their historical context, the images disclose meanings about race, land dispossession, and the geopolitical project of the United States that are far more intricate and multifarious than the simplistic transformations they purported to display. Before scrutinizing these photographic images, a few words about Pratt, Carlisle, and the school’s place in United States’ history are necessary to inform the context and circumstances of their creation. Established in the disused Carlisle Barracks in 1879, this first government-supported boarding school supplied the blueprint for the system of federal Indian schools that was set up across the United States in the final quarter of the nineteenth century. Over 10,500 Native students would be transported east to attend Carlisle during its near fortyyear history (1879–1918), with thousands more enrolled in similar institutions established on every reservation across the West. The federal government was now entering the final stages of Native conquest and dispossession. After the Red River wars (1874–75), which brought crushing military defeat to tribes of the Southern Plains, Captain Pratt had been placed in charge of seventy-two captured Cheyenne, Kiowa, Comanche, Arapahoe, and Caddo leaders and warriors, who he transported to St. Augustine, Florida, for indefinite imprisonment in Fort Marion. It was here, as their jailer, that Pratt first utilized the before-and-after photographic motif. He used pictures of the prisoners, in disorganized groups wearing just breach clouts, and then later lined them up in military formation wearing surplus Union soldier uniforms to publicize the changes Pratt boasted he had achieved in these “savage” warriors. A fortress school he organized for the younger men inspired Pratt’s passionate conviction that instead of warfare, education and assimilation offered an enlightened and humane way to solve America’s intractable “Indian Problem”: Here were men who had committed murder upon helpless women and children sitting like docile children at the feet of women learning to read. Their faces have changed. They have all lost that look of savage hate, and the light of a new life is dawning on [sic] their hearts.3 The prisoners were released after three years and Pratt then took a group of seventeen to the Hampton Institute in Virginia to continue their education. Hampton’s founder, General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, had built a successful program for freedmen and was now eager to expand his race educational experiment to include Indians.4 Pratt worked with Armstrong for a year. When he went west to recruit a contingent of students for Hampton’s nascent Indian

154

Before-and-After Photography

Program, Armstrong reminded him to “be sure to get a variety of styles of firstclass photographs of Indian youth you bring, letting them appear in their wildest and most barbarous costume.”5 Once in Virginia, the students were quickly dressed in school uniforms so that the before-and-after pairs could be completed and disseminated to publicize Hampton’s work. Pratt was not content to remain at Hampton. Determined that Indians should not be associated with any of the racial prejudice directed toward ex-slaves, he was also ambitious to run his own school. And the mood was right in Washington where, just three years after the combined forces of the Northern Cheyenne and Lakota had wiped out Custer’s Seventh Cavalry, the federal government was very keen to support an educational experiment promising to pacify and civilize Native children, who could also “be hostages for the good behavior of their people.”6 In response to Pratt’s request, secretary of the interior Carl Schurz gave him permission to recruit 125 students and to convert the disused US Army barracks in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, into an Indian School. Far from their reservation communities, Pratt insisted that the Carlisle program would strip away all vestiges of the children’s traditional cultures, and reeducate them in the religion, language, values, behavior, and appearances of white society. He optimistically predicted that a system of similar schools would ensure that “Indian” elevation from “savagery” to “civilization” could be accomplished in a single generation. Most nineteenth-century Americans were social evolutionists and believed that all societies advanced through three separate stages: savagery, barbarism, and civilization. They judged Indians to be in a state of “savagery” and that their progress to “civilization” would of necessity be slow. By contrast, Pratt was a staunch and unwavering Universalist who insisted that Indians had the same capacities as whites, and, if placed in the right environment and given training they could readily advance and compete in mainstream society: From long experience and wide observation I have come to have little patience with the science or ethnology that consigns a man, or race of men, to generations of slow development.7 If Indians were to achieve this progress, then all aspects of their cultures had to be obliterated. Pratt insisted that it was necessary “to kill the Indian and save the man.” From today’s perspective Carlisle’s educational program of cultural genocide appears harsh and destructive. But to contemporary reformers, who called themselves “friends of the Indian,” Pratt’s methods were regarded as progressive because they assumed Indian capacities to be equal to whites’ and, if properly educated, fully able to take their place in the American Republic. The Carlisle experiment gained traction from a long-standing Enlightenment American reform tradition, dating back to Thomas Jefferson, which viewed environmental factors as fundamental to the shaping of human development.8

FACING THE BINARY

155

From the start, photography was vital to Pratt for publicizing the Carlisle experiment. Before the first contingent of pupils had arrived in Pennsylvania from Dakota Territory, Pratt had already enlisted the services of local photographer J. N Choate. Choate brought his mobile studio onto campus to ensure their “before” images were captured the very first day. Pratt’s objective was double stranded: firstly, to Americanize Native children in preparation for assimilation into mainstream society; secondly, to convince white Americans that this project to transform Native youth from “savagery” to “civilization” was both desirable and possible.9 The before-and-after photographs he sent to President Hayes were created by Choate using a stereoscopic camera and glass plate negatives. They were mass produced as albumen boudoir and cabinet prints, and also distributed to congressmen, government officials, and prospective local donors. At Choate’s downtown studio and on campus, they were also sold to members of the public. Choate quickly grasped the profit he could make selling pictures of Indians, and he developed a commercial catalog of Indian School images, totaling more than a hundred in under two years. The original pairs remained prominent and always featured at the top of the series list that was printed on the back of all the images. They were advertised widely in local newspapers. This commodification, described by cultural studies scholar Curtis Marez as “the photo-conversion of Indians into property,” thus permitted white voyeuristic ownership of images of Native students. Purchasing and possessing these images, and perhaps arranging them in the plush albums so popular at the time, encouraged white Americans “to combine visual and tactile registers and take sensual pleasure in the imaginary experience of controlling or ‘owning’ Indians.”10 The huge and enduring popularity of images of Native peoples can in part be linked to an emotion that Renato Rosaldo called “Imperialist nostalgia,” a paradoxical phenomenon linked to “mourning for what one has destroyed.”11 As the white population expanded westward, local white photographers exploited a market hungry for images of “vanishing” Indians. In Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the arrival of Native students and visiting delegations of leaders gave Choate the opportunity to share in this insatiable market. As Native populations were defeated and safely confined on reservations, interest in seeing them grew, and this was perhaps best reflected commercially in the sets of “American Indian Chiefs” offered as free gifts by Allen and Ginter tobacco company from the 1870s. These were issued simultaneously with the founding of Carlisle.12 This public delight in images of “wild” Indians casts the Carlisle “before” images into a more complex, oscillating light. Although they ostensibly depicted progress, it was the image of “savagery” that most Americans wanted to see. The Carlisle before-and-after images of Native students were participants in a wider visual conversation, but they were neither unique nor original in their visual methodology. They fell within a new photographic genre that was developed by

156

Before-and-After Photography

social reformers in the United States and Europe in the mid-nineteenth century. In America, during the Civil War (1861–65), the Society of Friends had distributed before-and-after photographs of enslaved children who had been taken from their owners to be educated in the North, at the Philadelphia Orphans’ Center. Barefooted enslaved children in rags were displayed alongside the clean, welldressed examples of respectability they were purported to have become. These duos were a vital part of the abolitionists’ campaign to raise funds and at the same time to convince northerners that slaves could readily become respectable citizens.13 Similar carefully constructed visual evidentiary two-piece social narratives were also used in England in the 1870s. For the Protestant evangelist Dr. Thomas Barnardo, photographs became an essential part of his crusade to rescue destitute and deprived children in the East End of London. He had photographic images made of each boy admitted to provide a record of his work, and also use for propaganda and fund-raising. Pauper children, taken into Dr. Barnardo’s Home for Working and Destitute Lads (opened in 1870), were carefully arranged and photographed on admission, looking filthy and listless and in rags. Then, after their “redemption,” a second photograph displayed them scrubbed, clean, and usefully employed. Captions attached to each pair enforced its meaning: No.27 “Once a Little Vagrant” … No. 28 “Now a Little Workman.”14 Barnardo’s beforeand-after images were very popular with the Victorian middle classes, who bought them singly and in packs of twenty for five shillings. But Barnardo’s construction and use of before-and-after photographs provoked controversy. He was accused of exaggerating the children’s poverty and posing them in pitiful positions to stage the photographs, and, more seriously, he was also charged with misappropriating donations. When the court case against him was heard in 1877, Barnardo was cleared of the financial charges, but he agreed to drop his practice of creating and circulating before-and-after photographs.15 At first glance, the parallels between all these before-and-after images are striking. All of them were used as propaganda for social reforming projects; focused attention on children who had been detached from their own family and community; privileged institutional discipline and custodial control within visual narratives of rescue, improvement, and progress; sequenced a typology of difference, with the unspoken assumption that the one could become the other (with the process invisible); and foregrounded the visual values of respectability. But the many visual similarities shared by these before-and-after images of social reform can obscure their vital differences. The photographs of Native children were produced out of a very distinct history, and they engaged with the developing national agenda of the United States of America in unique ways. This is crucial when working to see beyond the narratives they present, to discover the facts and stories they hide. If we set aside the English Barnardo images and focus on the before-andafter American slave pictures, some of the hidden characteristics of the Carlisle

FACING THE BINARY

157

images become clearer. Africans had been transported to America as slaves, and with the founding of the Republic had been excluded from the benefits of American citizenship. They were a vital, free labor force. After the Civil War and emancipation, the struggle of the majority of the ex-slaves and their descendants down the years was to gain equal rights under the Constitution in a society that consistently discriminated against them. By contrast, at the time European settlers arrived Native Americans were free and independent peoples. Their goal was to retain their land, resources, and sovereignty and resist being engulfed into the American nation. Down the years their rights to the continent had been progressively eroded. Originally classified and treated as sovereign nations, their sovereignty was curtailed by the Supreme Court in the 1830s when they were given the unique designation of “domestic, dependent, nations.” Yet, treaties continued to be signed with these nations, until 1871 when the size and power of the United States meant that the treaty process could be unilaterally terminated. From this date, Native nations officially ceased to exist (except in Indian Territory). Having absorbed most of their lands, the federal government now needed to legitimate their actions and assimilate the surviving tribal remnants. When read within their historical context, these photographs can contribute to our understanding of the wider national geopolitical project, in which the Carlisle Indian School played a vital role, and the need to legitimate Native land dispossession. Recent studies of settler colonialism illuminate how processes governing the settler colonial project in the United States and a wide range of other settler nations are inherently violent and destructive for indigenous peoples.16 As Patrick Wolfe explains, unlike traditional forms and definitions of colonialism that exploit indigenous labor and extract indigenous resources, the paramount goal of settler colonialism is the acquisition of land. The settler has come to stay. Settler colonialism is therefore “premised on displacing indigenes from (or replacing them on) the land,” and an associated objective is always the replacement of native societies. Taking his line of reasoning a step further Wolfe argues that “the ruling logic of elimination” is the essential characteristic of the settler colonial project, which seeks always to eliminate rather than incorporate indigenous peoples.17 To achieve the nation’s geopolitical goals, the United States needed to subjugate Natives militarily, expunge all Native title to land, and transform the surviving remnants of the tribes into acceptable neighbors by eliminating their cultural heritage. Carlisle was integral to this project. When the Carlisle first opened its doors, the tribes had been defeated and confined to reservations, but the “Indians” had not vanished as previously predicted. To accomplish this goal, the last Indian war would be fought in the classroom, against children. The project to school Indians was voiced in the American educational rhetoric of progress and possibility, but its goal was “education for extinction.”18 This is the main reason that, although they appear to embody similar processes and purposes, the Carlisle before-and-after are very different from the

158

Before-and-After Photography

duos of social reform discussed above. All are rooted in narratives of rescue and improvement, glossed with the veneer of middle-class respectability. But if we read them within their wider historical context, remaining alert to the power of the American state that lay behind the Carlisle educational experiment, and also the long-established, enduring narrative of the Vanishing American, then we are able to see them from a different perspective, and integral to Wolfe’s “ruling logic of elimination.” We can engage with and understand them as part of what Ted Jojola from Isleta Pueblo describes as “a magic act called ‘The Vanishing American,’”19 and as what Anishinabe writer Gerald Vizenor calls, “the evidence of a vanishing race, the assurance of dominance and victimry.”20 This “evidence of a vanishing race” in the before-and–after images was first subjected to serious scholarly analysis, by Lonna Malmsheimer. In her seminal article, “‘Imitation What Man’: Images of Transformation at the Carlisle Indian School,” Malmsheimer opened up discussion of these before-and-after images within the fields of cultural history and visual anthropology.21 Since then, her findings have become integral to scholarly discussions of these images: for further close-up visual analysis, for understanding the boarding school experience, and for exploring the silent support they gave to Manifest Destiny.22 Jolene Rickard, Tuscarora scholar, photographer, and artist, selected the before-and–after Choate photographs of Chiricahua Apache to discuss in her response to the Native Nations: Journeys in American Photography exhibition in London (1998). Rickard, reading these images in the twentieth century, sees not progress but removal, confinement, and, in particular, land loss: They are not overtly photographs of the “land” but are documents of the systematic removal of Indians from their homelands. The sense of institutional confinement is not only represented in the obvious physical changes of the children but also in the framing of the image. The rigid bodies of the children occupy about ninety per cent of the visual frame with scant detail about their environment.23 Rickard thus shows us how these photographs, which unquestionably fall within the before-and-after genre of social reform, also carry deeper meanings about the histories of Native peoples within the United States. For Pratt, photographs were powerful visual instruments to convince Americans that under white tutelage, control, and surveillance, Native youth could be “civilized.” The first before-and-afters Pratt sent to Hayes displayed many of the pictorial features that would also characterize the later pairs and so warrant close analysis. The ostensible purpose of the “befores” was to denote the state of savagery and show the school’s so-called point of departure—we can plainly see the children’s traditional dress—but the same picture also clearly demonstrates the civilizing mission of the school already at work. If we look at

FACING THE BINARY

159

the before photograph of the boys from Rosebud and Pine Ridge, they have been carefully positioned in front of the brick building that was to be their dormitory (Figure  9.1). Quite deliberately, the whole building has been incorporated into the picture, complete with white-painted porches and columns. (A second building is also visible, signaling an extensive campus.) It provides both the context for the process of transformation and a “civilized” backdrop for the picture. The boys have been lined up in two, long, straight rows, parallel to the building line, denoting order and discipline, with the smaller ones seated in front, as in modern school photographs, hinting at care and succor. Four rows with less of the building in sight would have made a very different picture. The two Indian interpreters, Charles Tackett and Louis Roubidoux, dressed in suits (white clothing), flank the group on the extreme right (with Tackett’s Native wife, Sarah, standing between them), and on the left, with a small but telling space between him and the main body, Pratt, standing with hat in hand and legs separated and braced, holds the group under his profiled, surveilling gaze. The alien exoticism of savagery is thus visually enclosed and contained by suited figures of male authority and bounded by the ordinance of straight architectural verticals and horizontals. In this carefully constructed picture, the voyeuristic white eye is invited to gaze on the savagery and exoticism of the children’s clothes, long hair, and feathers, while seeing the

FIGURE 9.1 Sioux Boys as They Appeared on Arrival at Carlisle Indian School, October 6, 1879, J. N. Choate. Courtesy of Cumberland County Historical Society.

160

Before-and-After Photography

“savage” children as already living reassuringly under the order, control, discipline, and command of the white-run school. Similar visual strategies were used to photograph the girls (Figure 9.2). As the group was smaller, the exotic design of blankets, the detail of elk-tooth dresses, and the adornment of parted, braided hair, can be presented with greater clarity. On the right-hand side, the girls are framed by a suited figure of male authority, but on the left side of the line they are held under the watchful eye, not of Pratt, but of a white woman in middle-class attire, Sarah Mather. Mather had worked with Pratt at Fort Marion, Florida. She accompanied him to Dakota to help recruit the girls, and although she did not remain at Carlisle, Mather retained a keen interest in the school and she plays a vital role in this photograph. Her upright, respectable, surveilling presence signals that even though the Carlisle student body included both boys and girls (on the orders of General Sherman24), the girls would be properly safeguarded and “civilized” according to the gender roles and doctrines of white women’s middle-class respectability. Far from the “savage” camps of their communities, the Carlisle students are shown to have found new parental figures in Pratt and Mather and, by implication, a new “family” at Carlisle. These “before” photographs were not taken out West on the reservations of Pine Ridge and Rosebud. The children’s “point of departure” constructs them as being

FIGURE 9.2  Sioux Girls as They Appeared on Arrival at Carlisle Indian School, October 6, 1879. J. N. Choate, Courtesy of Cumberland County Historical Society.

FACING THE BINARY

161

without kith or kin, in their new institutional “home.” Significantly (as noted by Rickard), they are also without a land base, or any aspect of their own cultures, apart from the clothes they stand in. Photographing them on their own lands would have suggested not just residence but also ownership. Placing them within the school grounds wiped any reference to their homes or communities from the viewers’ awareness. Visually absent, the land could be deemed unnecessary and legitimately appropriated. These two “before” photographs served Pratt’s purposes well when Carlisle first opened, and they remained a continuing asset. When students began to arrive wearing American clothes, these images were still reproduced in school publications. The 1902 catalog features both “before” photographs at the front, with the children described as being “in native dress and the traditional blanket, with hair long and faces painted, and their persons adorned with beads and other ornaments.”25 These were the visual signifiers of the “savagery” Carlisle sought to eradicate. And yet, as Pratt well understood, they held constant appeal to white Americans. The novelty of the new trope of Carlisle’s “civilized” student quickly paled, because, as Ted Jojola observes, “The public was not interested in civilized natives. Quite the opposite,” their imaginations were sparked by “blood-thirsty savages.”26 This tension was built into the pairs. Cultural theorist Stuart Hall has noted that with all binary oppositions, such as savage/civilized, power inequalities always make one dominant over the other.27 In the Carlisle pairs, however, this dominance is tangled. Created by whites for their propaganda agenda and with Native children as their subjects, the asymmetries of power embodied in the image are incontestable. Nevertheless, the visual and imaginative power of the duo lies more strongly in the first image, which was therefore essential to what Pratt called his “propaganda.” The “civilizing” objective of the school, embodied in the second image, is less compelling and was far less interesting to white viewers and purchasers. In the early years of the school, children dressed in Carlisle military uniforms did command a novelty value; they had not been seen before. But as fear of the tribes diminished in proportion to their declining military prowess, public fascination with “savage Indians” triumphed and would soon be fostered and served by William Cody’s spectacular touring attraction, “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West,” which began traveling through the United States in 1883. Although visually less captivating, the Carlisle “after” images complete the narrative that is compressed into the before-and-afters, and they too warrant analysis (Figures 9.3 and 9.4). The first “afters” are not as honed as later photographs, when Choate had gained experience and made improvements to his practice of the genre. The most obvious development was his later direct matching of the children in both images. This was not an attribute of the first pairs, for which the “afters” present larger groups where individuality is not the dominant motif. The boys’ “after” image uses their dormitory as a display case. Lined up with caps in

162

Before-and-After Photography

FIGURE 9.3  Sioux boys at Carlisle Indian School, 1880. J. N. Choate, Courtesy of Cumberland County Historical Society.

FIGURE 9.4 Sioux girls at Carlisle Indian School, 1880. J. N. Choate, Courtesy of Cumberland County Historical Society.

hand, they present a repetitive sameness, dressed in army-style uniforms and too far from the camera’s lens for facial features to be recognized. Here, the viewer’s eye is no longer invited to identify the differing exotic features of their Native garb, but instead to take in the military regularity and sameness of the three lines.

FACING THE BINARY

163

Carefully organized by size, with smaller boys in front, the whole group has now melded into and is held in place by the straight lines and military architectural structures of the Carlisle Barracks. White viewers’ fears of what they regarded as the chaos, wildness, and ferocity of savagery are reassuringly countered by an image presenting order, composure, and regularity. Well on their way to becoming “civilized,” the overt and visible surveillance here has been withdrawn. The girls in their “after” image are presented as less military (although they too were marched daily on the parade ground) and more variety has been allowed in their uniforms. They are mostly seated, with trees and a pagoda (school bandstand) softening and feminizing the picture. The watchful eyes of the staff are constructed to suggest protection rather than surveillance. Choate became Carlisle’s unofficial photographer. Until his death in 1902, he made hundreds of student portraits—individuals, couples, groups—for the Carlisle school records, and carefully crafted some of these into pairs which he mass reproduced in his studio. Of these, the best known and most widely disseminated was of Navajo student, Tom Torlino (Figures 9.5). Torlino arrived in 1882 with a group of twelve Navajo who were also made subjects of a before-andafter pair (Figures 9.6 and 9.7). Two years later, Choate made the Torlino “after” portrait after choosing from several images and then deliberately cropping a threequarter-length portrait to make it match the earlier image. The striking changes Choate succeeded in displaying in Torlino’s dress, hair, ornamentation, gaze, and

FIGURE 9.5  Before: Navajo, Tom Torlino, 1882; After: Navajo, Tom Torlino, 1884. J. N. Choate, Courtesy of Cumberland County Historical Society.

164

Before-and-After Photography

FIGURE 9.6 Navajo Students at the Carlisle Indian School, Before: October 1882. Courtesy of Cumberland County Historical Society.

FIGURE 9.7  After: Some Months Later. J. N. Choate. Courtesy of Cumberland County Historical Society.

even skin color made his transformation appear particularly dramatic. Although Torlino returned home after just two years of schooling, it was his “before” portrait which became and still remains the most compelling and iconic. Even in the twenty-first century it is reproduced and marketed on notelets.

FACING THE BINARY

165

Choate produced almost a dozen known pairs to the same formula by posing groups of various sizes and from different tribes. He became increasingly skilled in creating “after” images, utilizing traditional middle-class poses and studio props to evoke respectability.28 One of the most widely circulated pairs was of a group of Chiricahua Apache children from Geronimo’s band. They arrived at the school as prisoners of war in poor physical health after a period of imprisonment. Their filthy, shabby clothes, bare feet, and dilapidated building backdrop are replaced by short hair, clean identical uniforms, and careful studio grouping. But even Choate’s attentive choreography cannot totally suppress the defiance detectable on some faces. As Gerald McMaster noted after studying many boarding school photograph collections, the students “represented the colonial experiment, a type of colonial alchemy: transforming the savage into a civilized human being. Yet somehow their resistance remains visible.”29 Carlisle’s twinned pictures served a variety of purposes for the school. Their message of transformation, repeated over and over using different subjects, could be conveyed and received in varying degrees of intensity. Readers of one of Carlisle’s newspapers, the Indian Helper, who signed up ten new subscribers for the paper, were rewarded with a choice in the level of contrast they wished to view in their 40-cent “prize.” The paired pictures of Tom Torlino were deemed the most sensational: Two photographs, one showing a group of Pueblos as they arrived in wild dress, and another of the same pupils three years after, or, for the same number of names, we give two photographs showing still more marked contrast between a Navajo as he arrived in native dress, and as he now looks, worth 20 cents a piece.30 Pratt always selected the images for the Carlisle publications very carefully. In the pamphlet published in 1895 to advertise the school and exhibit its fifteenyear history, still relying on the before-and-after theme, Pratt selected a duo of pictures that did not display the glaring disparities of the Tom Torlino pair (Figure 9.8). When integrated into a front-cover pictorial collage, the two inset, circular photographs of Chauncey Yellow Robe present a clear chronicle of Indian progress, yet there is no trace here of a narrative of savagery or wildness. Tropes of Indianness are instead utilized to signal nobility and peace. The “before” picture of Yellow Robe uses a skillfully doctored Choate studio portrait to represent “Indianness.” Behind his calmly seated figure, tipi seams have been superimposed on the interior backdrop to create the impression of an authentic, plains location. Encircled by a representational Indian shield, with feathers decorating its rim, he gazes out from the picture, meeting the viewer’s eye directly and his hair, though long, is kempt. Clean, handsome, and noble looking, his clothes are not buckskin but cloth, with a row of large jacket buttons plainly visible and a tied neckerchief at

166

Before-and-After Photography

FIGURE 9.8 Carlisle Indian School Catalog, 1895, with Before and After inserts of Chauncey Yellow Robe.

his throat. Although an Indian blanket is slung over his arm, his moccasined feet (along with his companions in the original photograph) have been cropped from the picture.31 It is mainly the large, signifying eagle feather and tell-tale dark skin that indicates this is an Indian boy. Beneath him, a tipi encampment illustrates where he has come from. In this, a lone Indian, with no visible community but holding a signifying bow, is seated (so not warrior-like) and is joined by a wandering dog to compose a harmonious, almost domestic scene. From this young boy, the eye is drawn up the page to a matching circle displaying a larger-scale, mature Yellow Robe. Clean-cut features, short hair, and wing collar with tie accentuate his dignified, sideways gaze. An elaborate picture frame, contrasting with the primitive shield containing his boyhood picture, and a giant, semi-furled American flag, underpin this dominant image of the collage. Beneath it, a three-story frame house with porch and chapel alongside, depict his home of arrival. Printed in red, white, and blue, the collage has a patriotic flavor. Its prevailing mood, however, is one of domesticity, accented by the incongruous wallpaper design background, on which the pictures have been mounted, which surrounds not only house and flag but also tipi and quiver. This schematized construction of Chauncey Yellow Robe’s history serves to exhibit the progress of a real-live individual Indian, which is confirmed on page 22 of the pamphlet by Yellow Robe’s inclusion in the “Seventh Class of Graduates.”32 Just as importantly, it presents a peaceable, romanticized, usable Indian past from which Pratt sought

FACING THE BINARY

167

to persuade whites, the Indian on the plains was merely awaiting the opportunities offered by Carlisle to claim his place in the Republic. By this time, Pratt was defining “savagery” very differently. It should be noted that most of Choate’s before-and-after pairs date from Carlisle’s early years. The school’s mission never altered, but white attitudes to Indians and public levels of visual sophistication moved forward. So, when the school was entering its third decade, Pratt commissioned the well-known photojournalist Frances Benjamin Johnston to visit Carlisle to make pictures.33 Johnston’s Hampton Album had been exhibited in Paris the previous year, clearly demonstrating her impressive skills in constructing classroom tableaux and her commitment to racial assimilation. Pratt was delighted with her Carlisle work, describing it as “excelling anything we have ever had before.”34 In her “Class on Hiawatha,” Johnston referenced the before-and-after motif by incorporating both elements in a single image and elevating it to a new level of sophistication (Figure 9.9). The “before” is referenced in cradleboard, buckskin, blanket, no longer used or worn by the children but now exhibited as educational wall hangings. The “after,” the promise of American citizenship, is signaled in the portrait of George Washington looking down on the students. They are all reading Henry

FIGURE 9.9 Class on Hiawatha at the Carlisle Indian School, Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1901, Library of Congress.

168

Before-and-After Photography

Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “Song of Hiawatha” and a section of the poem is chalked on the blackboard. The students are learning about “Nokomis” and her “home by the Big Sea Water,” the emblemized Indian presented in the McGuffey Reader, just like all other American children. Johnston’s images present Native students as already assimilated and their cultures relegated to items of fascination for display: the apotheosis of Carlisle’s mission. The message may be less jarring than in the early before-and-afters, but it is more chilling. Photography, with its power to construct a reality, shows the elimination of cultures and extinction of peoples as completed. Reflecting on photography and how it has “abused” Native Americans, Gerald Vizener demands, “How should we now respond to photographs that have violated … natives?” Many Native photographers have used the camera to “shoot back” and some, like Larry McNeil in “Tonto’s TV Script Revision,” have specifically countered the boarding school experience.35 Responding directly to the before-and-after photographs, Pulitzer Prize winning Kiowa author, poet, and artist N. Scott Momaday created a powerful riposte in a painting he called “Carlisle” (Figure 9.10). Instead of the single, specific message proposed by Choate’s before-and-afters, Momaday offers his viewer a multilayered and compound perspective.36 Repudiating the binaries embedded in the paired photographs, he paints a single face, but nevertheless makes explicit reference to the photo duos by its bifurcation with a clear, black line. We are never in any doubt that this is a single individual, because a matching pair of sad eyes gaze out, and the blotched mouth overlaps the central line. That this is a Carlisle portrait is made also visually explicit by the blue, military cap perched on the “civilized” side of the head. Encapsulated in this image is all the pain and distress the student has had to endure while undergoing the transformation process demanded by Carlisle— everything that is missing in the photographs. Some of this horror is evoked by the ghostly and skull-like quality of the head, which seems to float free in the middle of the picture, attached to neither neck nor body. Chilling and disturbing, artistically this painting seems to reference the grotesque and troubling portraits made by the British painter, Francis Bacon (1909–92), and it is interesting that Bacon used photographs as the basis for his portraits. Just like the Carlisle photographic pairs, this painting needs to be read from left to right. It subverts the before-and-after photographs in part by pinpointing and exaggerating the signifiers of the white-constructed Indian: the intense, caricatured, crimson red skin of the “savage” face; the long, flowing hair. The black paint of the hair has been applied so thickly that in places it is threedimensional, making it the dominant motif of the painting, as well as a direct visual reference to the Tom Torlino “before” photograph. But savagery here comes with a different message. The black hair softly contours the left side of the face, creating a contrast with the angular, bare, white outline of the “civilized” side. And

FACING THE BINARY

169

FIGURE 9.10  N. Scott Momaday, Carlisle, 2012, acrylic on board.

the long hair trails down into the representational river, which flows boldly across the bottom of the picture. The hair is the strong feature that anchors the face in its surrounding environment. And representational geographical features—river and mountains—always so notably missing from the photographs, place the hovering head within a natural environment. Though the viewer’s eye may be drawn to the

170

Before-and-After Photography

left side of the painting with it colors and contours, Momaday ensures that the gaunt horror of the right side commands equal visual attention. It is a disturbing, gruesome image. None of the horrors of rupture, loss, dispossession, and pain are concealed. As such, the painting stands as both illumination and retort to the Carlisle photographs.

Notes 1 R. H. Pratt to President R. B. Hayes, January 28, 1880, in Richard Henry Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom: Four Decades with the American Indian, 1867–1904 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), 249.

2 Preserved today in the Hayes presidential archive, these photographs were the first of more than three-dozen Pratt sent to the president, which today are held in the Lucy Webb Hayes Photograph Collection (Hayes-Ph-2), Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library, Ohio.

3 Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom, 163. 4 J. F. B. Marshall, “Reminiscences,” in Twenty-Two Years’ Work at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, Virginia (Hampton: Normal School Press, 1913), 16.

5 Samuel Chapman Armstrong (SCA) to Richard Henry Pratt (RHP), August 6 and 27, 1878, R. H. Pratt Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University.

6 Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom, 220. 7 Richard Henry Pratt, Addresses and Proceedings of the National Education Association (Washington, DC: National Education Association of the United States, 1895), 763.

8 Jacqueline Fear-Segal, “Nineteenth-Century Indian Education: Universalism Versus Evolutionism,” Journal of American Studies 33, no. 2 (1999): 323–341.

9 Richard Henry Pratt, “Indian School Commencement,” Valley Sentinel, June 4, 1891: 2. 10 Curtis Marez, “Looking Beyond Property: Native Americans and Photography,” Rikkyo American Studies 29 (March 2007). http://www.academia.edu/8671758/ Looking_Beyond_Property_Native_Americans_and_Photography (accessed February 28, 2016).

11 Renato Rosaldo, Culture & Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 69.

12 For example, Allen & Ginter, 50 card tobacco set, “American Indian Chiefs,” 1888,

full-color lithographic images, were distributed in packs, alongside baseball players and boxers.

13 Barbara Krauthamer and Deborah Willis, Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013).

14 Numbers 27 and 28, Photographer Unknown, Before and After Photographs of Young Boys, c. 1875. Albumen prints, Barnardo Photographic Archive, Ilford, England.

FACING THE BINARY

171

15 Believe in Children (London: Barnardo’s, 2007), 3. 16 Fiona Bateman and Lionel Pilkington, eds., Studies in Settler Colonialism (London:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Walter L. Hixson, American Settler Colonialism: A History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

17 Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), 1.

18 David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995).

19 Ted Jojola, “Photographs from Hell,” in Simon J. Ortiz, ed., Beyond the Reach of

Time and Change: Native American Reflections on the Frank A Rinehart Photograph Collection (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004), 79.

20 Gerald Robert Vizenor, Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 155.

21 Lonna Malmsheimer, “‘Imitation What Man’: Images of Transformation at the Carlisle Indian School,” Studies in Visual Communication 11, no. 4 (1985): 54–74.

22 Doris Seale and Beverley Slapin, A Broken Flute: The Native Experience in Books

for Children (Lanham: Rowman Altamira, 2006), 73; Hayes Peter Mauro, The Art of Americanization (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2011), 71–92; Martha A. Sandweiss, Print the Legend: Photography and the American West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 239–240.

23 Jolene Rickard, “The Occupation of Indigenous Space as ‘Photograph’,” in Native

Nations: Journeys in American Photography (London: Barbican Art Gallery, 1998), 60–61.

24 Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom, 218. 25 Catalogue of the Indian Industrial School, Carlisle, PA, 23rd Year (Jamestown, NY: printed by the journal, 1902), n.p.

26 Jojola, “Photographs from Hell,” 76. 27 Stuart Hall, Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (New York: Sage Publications Ltd, 1997).

28 Pueblo trio: Mary Perry, John Chaves, and Ben Thomas (1880 and 1884); Lakota Trio: Wounded Yellow Robe, Henry Standing Bear, Timber Yellow Robe; Navajo twelve: 1882 and four months later.

29 Gerald Mc Master, “Colonila Alchemy: Reading the Boarding School Experience,”

in Lucy R. Lippard, ed., Partial Recall: Photographs of Native North Americans (New York: The New Press, 1992), 79.

30 Indian Helper, November 8, 1889, Vol. 5, no. 12. 31 Cropped from the original group studio photograph, John Nicholas Choate,

“Wounded Yellow Robe, Henry Standing Bear, Timber Yellow Robe, upon their arrival at Carlisle,” [before] n.d Cumberland County Historical Society, this images pairs with a second photograph of the same three boys, in uniform with short hair, “Taken 6 months after entering the school.”

172

Before-and-After Photography

32 United States Indian School, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 1995, Dickinson College Library Rare Books Pamphlet Collection.

33 Bettina Berch, The Woman behind the Lens: the Work of Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1864–1952 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 56.

34 Richard Henry Pratt, Red Man and Helper, April 5, 1901, 1, no. 36, 3. 35 Larry McNeil, “Tonto’s TV Script Revision,” 2006, shows Tonto in the role of sheriff, arresting Richard Henry Pratt to bring him to justice: http://blog.larrymcneil.com/ tag/tonto/

36 N. Scott Momaday, “Carlisle,” 2012, acrylic on board, 12˝–15˝.

FACING THE BINARY

173

PART FIVE

FROM TWO TO THREE Before-and-After Time, Complicated

10 BEYOND “THIS-CAUSED-THAT” The Temporal Complexities of Before-and-After Photographs KRIS BELDEN-ADAMS

Before-and-after photographs appear to have a distinctive and straightforward manner of representing temporality. Bound to a narrative framework of linear sequential time and causality, the images speak to the transformative consequences of a traumatic event or situation upon a photograph’s subjects. Before-and-after photographs refer not only to the temporal experiences of the past but also to future-, present-, subjunctive-, and compounded-tense experiences, among many possibilities. As stilled visual fragments distilled and separated from their respective ongoing temporal continua, before-and-after photographs also characteristically reference unrepresented scenes from the flow of time that viewers do not see. Thus, they invite observers to create a cohesive linear causal narrative for the photographs, even though such accounts may conflict with information in the images. An expanded look at the interpretive frameworks of the beforeand-after image thus challenges suppositions about photography’s documentary status while it underscores the gravity of causal, sequential narrative as a temporal convention. In her series of photographs of British Army soldiers before, during, and after deployment in Afghanistan, We Are The Not Dead (2010), for example, Lalage Snow reveals innocent, wide-eyed faces that irreversibly metamorphose into haunted shells (2010). But a closer examination of exemplary before-and-after photographs by Snow and other practitioners from the medium’s history reveals that these images are yet more complex in their references to time. Using Snow’s

series as a central case study, this essay examines the multifarious nature of time and narrative in before-and-after photographs. Snow’s photographs are shaped by normative assumptions about the temporal operations of before-and-after photographs that are almost as old as the medium itself. Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre’s surviving sequential exposures of the Boulevard du Temple in Paris made from 1838 to 1839, for instance, helped establish a persisting expectation of before-and-after photography’s manner of presenting a linear sequence of separate-yet-related moments that reveal the result of time’s agency. This chapter explores those norms and the manner by which images from Snow’s series support and expand upon these conventions. Snow’s portraits of soldiers also provide an opportunity for examining the role of temporal narratives in framing before-and-after photographs. Snow enlists the legacies of photographers such as Eadweard Muybridge and Harold Edgerton, for example, to alter images in her series to shape viewers’ expectations, while sometimes introducing details that suggest counternarratives. As such, a closer look at key images from We Are The Not Dead suggests that before-and-after images, much like the medium of photography itself, have a sculptural, multifarious manner of expressing temporality.

Temporal conventions of before-and-after photography: A case study In 2010, journalist/photographer Lalage Snow interviewed and photographed members of the First Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Scotland over eight months while she was embedded with the group during training.1 Participating soldiers were asked to look directly at the camera. Each portrait emphasizes a frontal view of the subject’s face, tightly cropped in a manner consistent with the conventions of portraits that appear on driver’s licenses, on passports, or as “mugshots” accompanying stories in newspapers, magazines, or news websites. Snow captured another portrait of each subject after they had served about three months in active combat in Afghanistan. She then took a final image of each soldier a few days after they returned home. The portraits are accompanied by contextualizing captions written by Snow and based on her interviews with the subjects. Three images of each soldier are displayed in chronological order as a triptych. They read from left to right to reveal the narrative of a soldier’s life “before,” “during,” and “after” war. The title of the series also frames viewers’ expectations. We Are The Not Dead is based on a documentary film and book of poetry by contemporary English writer Simon Armitage, who interviewed two generations of British soldiers who served in the Middle East and Bosnia.2 In his poem “The Not Dead,” Armitage amalgamates

178

Before-and-After Photography

his interviews into a meditation on the silent toll of war on psychologically “morbidly ill” soldiers who survived, only to become “creatures of a different stripe—the awkward, unwanted, unlovable type—/haunted with fear and guilt,/ wounded in spirit and mind.”3 Armitage pointed out that all of his subjects suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after their return home.4 Since British soldiers have been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, PTSD has received extensive coverage in the British media.5 In an interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation, Snow stated that she intends for her photographic series to increase public awareness of PTSD among a younger generation of soldiers returning from combat.6 Its symptoms include depression, alcohol and drug abuse, anxiety disorders, and anger management issues.7 Snow’s series is premised on an arguable assumption that the physical appearance of a photograph’s subject cannot help but reveal hints of the sitter’s interior psychology. However, by framing her series as a study of the external traces of the internalized experience of PTSD, Snow also provides a temporal narrative framework for the project. The “before” panel on the left side of the triptych anticipates the pivotal and traumatic event of participating in warfare, and it provides a benchmark for comparing the psychological and physical changes (which are assumed to be inseparable) brought by the war experience in the two later panels. The triptych’s center photograph is an image of a soldier during his/ her war experience. The audience is primed to read the final photographs on the far right of Snow’s triptychs as encapsulations of the physical traces of war, and of the invisible-turned-visible traces of PTSD. The captions further position the duration of time captured in the image within that soldier’s individual war story or inner thoughts and, sometimes, within a broader cultural narrative of global politics. Snow’s triptychs thus abide by the temporal narrative schema first proposed to outline key elements of dramatic plots by Aristotle in Poetics (c. 335 BCE), the first-known essay on literary theory: A whole is what has a beginning and middle and end. A beginning is that which is not a necessary consequent of anything else but after which something else exists or happens as a natural result. An end on the contrary is that which is inevitably or, as a rule, the natural result of something else but from which nothing else follows; a middle follows something else and something follows from it.8 Implicit to this temporal model are time’s linear flow, its irreversibility, and its essential sequential order that emphasizes causality. These also are a few of the governing temporal attributes of before-and-after photographs. Another attribute is the representation of the same subject before and after a pivotal situation, in an endeavor to reveal time’s irreversible agency upon that subject. This often is achieved with a two-panel format, with one panel testifying to a “before” and the

BEYOND “THIS-CAUSED-THAT”

179

other panel revealing an “after.” However, Snow’s triptych offers a variation on this convention by offering a scene of the transformative experience itself, revealing that the before-and-after photographs need not only take on the diptych format to express the consequences of an experience. Among the earliest-known sequentially exposed images of the same subjects were those made by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, who made multiple photographs at different times of day, under varying lighting conditions at the Louvre, the Boulevard du Temple, the Tuileries, and the Place de la Concorde. In these images, details such as the strength of light and shadow, glints of light on windows, and the presence and strength of shadows cast by buildings and trees provide clues about the time during which each exposure was made. However, Daguerre’s preoccupation with time was limited to a study of the shifting agencies of both time and light—which inherently were intertwined. Yet, as photography historian Geoffrey Batchen notes in a study of Daguerre’s two views of Boulevard du Temple, Paris, a comparison of two exposures of the same subject made under different lighting conditions “not only calibrated the passing of time in the form of changing shadows and degrees of legibility but presented time itself as a linear sequence of discrete but related moments.”9 Each image thus references the specific thin slice of exposure time that it materializes, and invites viewers to place the images in linear order according to exposure time chronology. The audience then creates a linear narrative to explain the changes between the images. This process, which inherently privileges the materialized exposure duration as the main means of referencing time, is an integral first step in the interpretation of before-and-after photographs. However, this is only one of many ways that before-and-after images relate to time. Snow’s triptych of Private Chris MacGregor begins with an image of MacGregor before the war (Plate 15). MacGregor, then age 24, stares back at viewers with wide eyes while at army training base camp in Edinburgh, Scotland. Given a framing narrative of PTSD, MacGregor possesses an irretrievable, unreclaimable innocence in the first image as he anticipates combat deployment. This first image, which is contextually anchored in the exposure time before experiencing the war, offers a that-has-been, in Roland Barthes’s terms.10 MacGregor cannot return to this temporal “otherness” of his past naivety. Thus, this image provides a peculiar collision of past and present by offering “an image of the real, of something that was, that we can hold in our hands … but that does not physically exist in our time and space,” as Barthes explains.11 Here, that irretrievable “real” is MacGregor’s innocence. The caption accompanying the “before” image of MacGregor temporally situates this image in the future, as the soldier speculates: “Obviously I’ll miss family but other than that I am going to miss my dogs more than anything. They are my de-stressers and keep me sane.” MacGregor also confesses that he will also miss television and family, and that he tries not to think “about the worst case

180

Before-and-After Photography

scenario”—presumably, dying during his service in Afghanistan. This collision of past, present, and future tenses in Snow’s photographs and captions provides what Barthes called photography’s “madness.”12 As an example, Barthes examines a portrait by Alexander Gardner in 1865, of 21-year-old Lewis Payne sitting in his jail cell waiting to be hanged for attempting to assassinate Secretary of State William Seward and for his involvement in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln (Figure 10.1). As Barthes looks at the image of Payne, he cannot help but ponder “with horror” the event of Payne’s then-future death, although

FIGURE 10.1  Alexander Gardner, Portrait of Lewis Payne, 1865.

BEYOND “THIS-CAUSED-THAT”

181

it is a “catastrophe which has already occurred.”13 Barthes suggests that the interpretation of photographs necessarily engages this future-anterior sense of temporality.14 As viewers behold MacGregor’s image “before” war, they likewise know that his trauma (the formative “catastrophe” of combat service) “already has occurred.” Yet, this experience lies in the future for the “before” image of MacGregor, as viewers consider the tragic inaccessibility the innocence they see in the “before” photograph. Snow rephotographed MacGregor on June 19, 2010, while he served in active combat at Compound 19, Nad-e Ali, Afghanistan. MacGregor’s cheekbones are noticeably more well defined as a result of rigorous physical training. His face is marked with smudges of dirt and a scattering of stubble. His hair sticks up, in a noticeable departure from the way he wears it in the “before” and “after” images. Lapses of personal hygiene are not unusual during deployments, during which access to showers is sporadic. Glints of light illuminate MacGregor’s eyes, which have narrowed and have lost their softness and vulnerability from the “before” image.15 MacGregor, like all soldiers in combat zones, is trained to be hyperalert at all times. Within one week of MacGregor’s arrival, fourteen British soldiers died in active duty in Afghanistan.16 Of those, a third died in firefights while on patrol or while guarding the compound and another third died in the denotation of improvised explosive devices (IEDs). As one recent veteran who identified herself as “Sophia” stated in an interview with anthropologist Zöe Wool, war service shapes soldiers’ habits of vision: “It changes you, it changes the way you see people. When you come back everything, everyone, is a suspect. Anything and everything, everyone is dangerous.”17 Thus, MacGregor’s narrow and keenly alert eyes can be interpreted as a physical translation of that state of mind. The caption for MacGregor’s central triptych image supports this conclusion, as he comments on the traumatic, temporally immediate experience of witnessing an IED blast that cost an Afghan soldier his legs. He comments that “[i]t’s your fear that keeps you alive here.” MacGregor locates his thoughts firmly in the necessity of his full, intense mental absorption in the present. Yet, in other parts of the caption, a disillusioned MacGregor also begins to place the mission within a broader narrative as he questions the ultimate future outcome of the mission in Afghanistan, given its high toll on participants: “You ask what they died for and what we are achieving here. I am not sure any more. That Afghan soldier losing his legs just now … I don’t know.” Henri Bergson suggested in his essay “Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness” that time’s experience is innately subjective, “psychical in its nature and psychological in its order.”18 Combat time, for MacGregor, is saturated with stimuli that keep him psychologically rooted in the durée of the present, for his own survival. But MacGregor’s mission’s place in the future narrative of politics and history remains unclear to him. He inhabits an immediate, psychologically

182

Before-and-After Photography

charged present “micro”-time. Yet, MacGregor’s mind also wanders to the future and to “macro” temporal narratives. The central image also provides a pivotal point for the narrative plot of the triptych. It establishes the purpose of the “before” image and anticipates the trauma that haunts the “after” image. Action unfolds sequentially as Aristotle suggested, only featuring an interaction of text and image with gaps of time between the frames. In this sense, despite the radical difference in content, Snow’s triptychs function analogously to the narratives in cartoons and comic strips. In “Rhetoric of the Image,” Barthes elaborates on the semiotic operations of this form of communication: Here (in cartoons and comic strips) text (a snatch of dialogue say) and image stand in a complementary relationship. The words, as well as the images, are fragments of a more general syntagm, and the unity of the message is realized at a higher level, namely, at the level of the story, the anecdote, the diegesis.19 As long as the “fragments” (text and photographs) are mutually supportive of the same message, Snow’s overall unifying message (diegesis) may be discerned: the grave reality of PTSD. In the first two images and captions of the triptych, MacGregor anticipates and experiences the psychological trauma of war that viewers anticipate will result in the potential consequences in the final frame. The final photograph of the triptych is framed by a caption that mentions the reason for MacGregor’s discharge from the Afghanistan tour: an acute knee injury from overuse: “After: My legs just gave up. I think it was the weight—135 pounds [of gear] or something. I just had to accept, my body was telling me to give up as I had pushed it. I was telling it to go, it was telling me to stop.” The caption emphasizes MacGregor’s mental strength, which supersedes his physical pain—to a fault. In Snow’s final portrait, MacGregor’s jaw and cheekbones remain defined, muscular, and symbolically hardened by the war experience. Three deep horizontal ridges mark the center of his forehead and testify not only to potential skin damage due to intense sun exposure but also to the subject’s accelerated aging from exposure to the extreme stress of war. Critics have lauded Snow’s triptychs for their capacity to reveal “the innocent expressions of these men transformed into gaunt, sullen faces in less than a year” as “boys that went in came back as men with experiences beyond their years.”20 MacGregor maintains the narrowed eyes that first appeared in the center photograph. Lighting from above casts a shadow from his brow upon his eyes, suggesting that his state of mind literally has been darkened by the war experience. The bags under his eyes suggest sleepless nights. A caption concurs with these assumptions about MacGregor’s readjustment to civilian life, and supports Snow’s:

BEYOND “THIS-CAUSED-THAT”

183

When squaddies come back they still have a bit of adrenaline and anger in them. I had to have anger management after Iraq. If I get like that now, I just go for a walk with the dogs. It is the best way to deal with it, instead of being all tense and ready to snap at folk. MacGregor here notices the symptoms of PTSD in his own behavior. In her studies of soldiers after combat, Wool points out that the affliction of PTSD is based on the idea that “the past may pathologically haunt the present, but it is past nonetheless.”21 However, Wool also suggests that “the looming presence of PTSD has consequences that likely have endured beyond the confines of the frame and into the present.”22 Snow’s photographs of MacGregor then break the “third wall” of the viewers’ image-reception-experience time. Because MacGregor’s war trauma is ongoing, viewers are left to wonder about MacGregor’s fate, which adds a subjunctive temporality to the images’ interpretation. The photographs do not reveal whether MacGregor is currently alive, whether he was redeployed, and if so, whether he survived. We do not learn whether MacGregor sought treatment for PTSD, or what its lasting impact on his life has been.23 Viewers are thus left to draw their own conclusions and create their own speculative narratives. The triptych’s temporal information (as the material manifestation of three distinct exposure durations) may be finite, but these images inspire viewers’ creation of a narrative that exists in their present, from beyond the purview of the frame. In sum, MacGregor’s portrait triptych suggests that instead of possessing a straightforward relationship to time as linear, sequential, and consequential images that relate to the past, before-and-after images reveal myriad references to time, as futureanterior, future, subjunctive, narrative, viewer-created, and psychological—to name a few possibilities.

Altering the series: Narrativity and counternarrativity Other triptychs from Snow’s series further complicate the diegesis of PTSD and leave room for reception-based, subjective, viewer-imposed temporalities. For instance, the captions for Snow’s portraits of Lance Corporal David McLean challenge the coherence of Snow’s narrative (Plate 16). The caption below McLean’s “before” photograph reads: “I’m not really bothered about going … [I]t will be good to finally get out there.” The central “during war” image is framed by this text: “Nothing has really happened so far. It’s quiet and I’m a bit bored. … What do I miss? Home, women and alcohol. Simple.” McLean also complains about the food on the army base. As the caption for the final image of the McLean triptych recounts the incident that sent him home—being shot in the leg—the soldier

184

Before-and-After Photography

does not mention feeling any pain: “I could just feel warm on my calf.” McLean, according to the text, even began “casevaccing myself,” or moving away from the site of the firefight to a more secure area from which he could be evacuated by helicopter for medical care. McLean thus is anything but an apparent victim of PTSD. Instead, he is a self-sufficient, self-casevaccing hero who took a bullet proudly and is/was not afraid. He is not concerned about death, or what the future may hold. Instead, McLean focuses entirely on the tasks and details of the present, give or take some speculation about the women and alcohol he might be missing at home. McLean’s account of the war experience differs from that provided by MacGregor, and it invites viewers to imagine a counternarrative: the story of a heroic, fearless, adrenaline-fuelled soldier who thrives on combat. As Alan and Sara Finnegan’s study of PTSD in the British Army has suggested, soldiers do not see the risks of combat or embody its psychological consequences in a universal manner.24 Armitage noted from his interviews with soldiers who served in combat that McLean’s statements are not unusual: “The Army is a MAN’S WORLD. Trained soldiers are not encouraged to open their hearts, confessing feelings of vulnerability, insecurity, and fear.”25 Nonetheless, the addition of McLean’s story complicates Snow’s narrative of PTSD, unless viewers assume that this affliction will impact McLean later. But then again, maybe it never will. Discounting the difference in lighting between the panels, a comparison of the “before” and “during” photographs of McLean reveals only subtle changes in the soldier’s expressions. This raises questions about light’s role (and thus, Snow’s) in enhancing the dramatic intensity of the triptychs. Throughout the series, lighting of the central triptych images is stronger. In them, the shadows are darker, highlights are brighter, and light creates a more detail-rich view of the central portraits. For instance, the middle image of MacGregor is infused by additional light positioned below the subject’s chin level to the photographer’s/viewer’s right. The enhanced intensity of lighting in the Afghanistan images suits the psychological intensity of present-time experience of combat in the middle frames. The central frames thus represent a time that is saturated with stimuli, activity, and intensity. In comparison, the lighting of the “before” images is more even and diffused. The “after” images also are lit evenly, but with the addition of overhead lighting that creates shadows under the subject’s eyes. In the final image of MacGregor, for example, a haunting darkness falls over his eyes in the last image (“after” war), and persists, presumably, as a lasting consequence of his engagement in the war. Varied lighting enhances Snow’s desired diegesis and dramatizes the temporal experience of each experience of war: “before,” “during,” and “after.” The task of supporting a sequential linear temporal narrative that upholds a degree of veracity posed a challenge not only to Snow but also to other photographers, as well. Eadweard Muybridge’s The Horse in Motion: “Sallie Gardner,” Owned by Leland Stanford: Running at a 140 Gait over the Palo Alto

BEYOND “THIS-CAUSED-THAT”

185

Track, June 19, 1878, features a horse depicted in silhouette that strides in front of a white-gridded background that is marked by consecutively numbered segments in a uniform size (Figure 10.2). “Sallie” ran at an estimated speed of about 40 miles per hour past Muybridge’s battery of twelve cameras, which were equipped with stereoscopic lenses.26 The group of photographs represents a duration of elapsed time that is assumed to be linear and continuous, and is expressed in twelve separate images, each of which represents a light exposure of an estimated 1/1,000th of a second. These images are “read” in a linear sequence, from top to bottom, and from left to right. One-half-second-long gaps of temporal duration lie between each of Muybridge’s images, implying elapsed unseen time, during which “Sallie’s” body presumably moved to the position we see in the next frame. Time’s passage is therefore implied by changes in the spatial location of “Sallie” and her various body parts over time. These half-second-long durations of unseen time provide temporal spaces for viewers to fill with their own narratives, given the interpretive framework offered by Muybridge’s didactic title. However, in defiance of Muybridge’s title, “Sallie’s” run ends amazingly abruptly in the final image (Figure 10.3). In the twelfth photograph, numbers on the grid defy the previous sequential order, and Muybridge seems to have disregarded the estimated half-second interval that appears to have elapsed between the other frames. Even if the grid’s numerical count repeated between the last two photographs, the rider would have undergone a sudden change in speed—from an average speed of covering one quadrant per half-second to a “slow-down” speed

FIGURE 10.2  Eadweard Muybridge, The Horse in Motion: “Sallie Gardner,” Owned by Leland Stanford: Running at a 140 Gait over the Palo Alto Track, June 19, 1878. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

186

Before-and-After Photography

FIGURE 10.3  Detail of the Eleventh and Twelfth Photos of Figure 10.2.

of covering at least five quadrants per half second. In other words, “Sallie” would have accelerated to five times her speed, to about 200 miles per hour, between the last two frames. This is implausible for two reasons: first, racing horses reach a peak running speed of only about 55 miles per hour. Secondly, it would have been impossible for “Sallie” to come to an abrupt and complete stop in one-half of a second. The final image thus breaks the temporal cadence of a half-second gap of elapsed time between each 1/1,000th-of-a-second exposure, and it fractures the linear progression of time viewers are conditioned to expect from the other images. It is therefore probable that Muybridge added this image from another sequence of photographs in order to give an expected narrative closure to this series—and to indicate the completion of the act of running. Muybridge was known for making alterations to his other motion studies by adding nonsequential photographs to provide his desired diegesis, or narrative.27 Muybridge’s decision to insert a concluding image of Sallie at rest closes the series as a finished duration, as a “becoming” that finally “became.” The final photograph in the series provides temporal closure. Likewise, Harold Edgerton’s stroboscopic series Death of a Light Bulb/.30 Caliber Bullet, 1936 (Figure 10.4) consists of four photographs arranged in two rows of two images each. The title of the series provides the diegesis, by which the collective meaning of these images is framed. When “read” in sequential order (from top to bottom, left to right), the four photographs represent the sequential passage of a bullet through a light bulb, broken into presumably equal intervals of time. Edgerton leads his viewers to follow a plot of “death” from its inevitability (implied by an approaching bullet) in the first frame to the slow entry and internalization of the bullet by the bulb in the next two frames. In the final photograph, the bullet exits, leaving a spattering of dust and a cracked, soon-to-collapse bulb in its wake. The unfolding of Edgerton’s narrative plot depends upon viewers to associate the images with each other, in linear order, and to imagine the unseen events that transpired within the durations that transpired between and after these images.

BEYOND “THIS-CAUSED-THAT”

187

FIGURE 10.4  Harold Edgerton, Death of a Light Bulb, 1936, printed later. Gelatin silver print; image: 30.1 × 46.8 cm (11 7/8 × 18 7/16 in.) sheet: 40.5 × 50.5 cm (15 15/16 × 19 7/8 in.) Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Transfer from the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, 2.2002.544 Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Closer examination of the cracks in the second, third, and final images reveals that Edgerton’s photographs were not taken in consecutive microseconds, or with an even interval between exposures. The sequence is not sequential and linear. Instead, the death of a light bulb is comprised of four images of four different light bulbs as they are penetrated by four bullets. As an altered series, Edgerton’s four chosen photographs reveal microseconds of nonconsecutive, nonlinear, creatively reconfigured time to make a new narrative: the Death of a Light Bulb (not of four light bulbs). A photographer’s diegesis reveals itself to be another way of imposing a set of temporal relationships upon a group of photographs.

“Before-and-After Time,” complicated A closer look at the multiple temporal references in Snow’s We Are The Not Dead series reveals the expression and interpretation of time in before-and-after

188

Before-and-After Photography

photographs to be subjective and multifarious. As such, consideration of Snow’s series and others suggests that before-and-after photographs express time in many more ways than as a view of the temporal past. Viewers and photographers are quick to interpret and activate a narrative for the series (or diegesis) that is located both inside and outside the picture frame, and often surpassing and supplementing the material facticity of exposure time duration and sometimes, a photographer’s intentions. These expressions of temporality are sculptural, and individually and subjectively experienced, not unlike time itself. Before-and-after images engage viewer-centered, subjective projections of plural, mutable photographic truths. As such, these images invite discussions of the inadequacy of describing time in any one objective manner, but embrace its fluidity.

Notes 1 This series of photographs can be accessed at: Lalage Snow, “We Are the Not Dead,”

Artist’s Statement/Professional Website: http://lalagesnow.photoshelter.com/gallery/ We-Are-The-Not-Dead/G0000_eT5QooYacY (accessed June 9, 2015).

2 Simon Armitage, The Not Dead (Keighley, West Yorkshire: Pomona Books, 2008), 5.

The related documentary film was released and broadcast one year earlier: Brian Hill, dir., Simon Armitage, writer. The Not Dead (London: Century Films, 2007).

3 Armitage, The Not Dead (2008), 5. 4 Ibid., xi. 5 Alan Finnegan et al., “Serving Within the British Army: Research into Mental Health Benefits,” British Journal of Nursing 20, no. 19 (2011): 1257.

6 Dan Cairns, “Afghanistan Soldier Photos ‘Show Effect of War,’” British Broadcasting Corporation, January 13, 2012: http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/16544986/ afghanistan-soldier-photos-show-effect-of-war (accessed June 9, 2015).

7 Several of Snow’s portrait subjects suffered additional injuries. One soldier was

injured by an IED. Another had to be resuscitated, and yet another one of her subjects was shot in the leg. Cairns, “Afghanistan Soldier Photos ‘Show Effect of War.’”

8 Aristotle, “Poetics,” in Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Vol. 23, trans. W. H. Fyfe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1932), 1450b27: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0056% 3Asection%3D1450b (accessed June 22, 2015). Italics are my emphasis.

9 Geoffrey Batchen, “Ectoplasm: Photography in the Digital Age,” in Carol Squiers,

ed., Over Exposed: Essays on Contemporary Photography (New York: The New Press, 1999), 13.

10 Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 135. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 96.

BEYOND “THIS-CAUSED-THAT”

189

11 Ibid., 115–119. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 96. Italics are Barthes’s emphasis. 14 For example, Barthes looks at a photograph of a group of twenty-five wedding guests

and comments: “I read the date and I compute: 1910, so they must all be dead, except perhaps the little girls, the baby (old ladies and an old gentleman now).” Ibid., 84.

15 Natural lighting places the photographs in a different places and times. While the

“before” image of the MacGregor triptych was made at Edinburgh, which had cloudy weather and temperatures ranging from 29 to 44 degrees Fahrenheit that day, Nad-e Ali sustained full sunlight and heat of above 100 degrees Fahrenheit from 10:30 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. on the day Snow photographed MacGregor. “Nade Ali Historical Weather, Afghanistan,” World Weather Online: http://www.worldweatheronline.com/ Nade-Ali-weather-history/Helmand/AF.aspx. http://www.worldweatheronline.com/ Edinburgh-weather-history/City-Of-Edinburgh/GB.aspx (accessed June 20, 2015).

16 “UK Military Deaths in Afghanistan: Full List,” British Broadcasting Corporation,

Updated March 4, 2014: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-10629358 (accessed June 22, 2015).

17 Zoë Wool, “On Movement: The Matter of US Soldiers’ Being after Combat,” Ethnos 78, no. 3 (2013): 415.

18 Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1910), 105–106, 115–116, 120–121.

19 Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” in Stephen Heath, ed. and trans., Image, Music, Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 41.

20 “We Are Not The Dead: Soldiers’ Faces Before, during and after Serving in

Afghanistan,” The Telegraph [London], Picture Galleries/U.K. News Section: http:// www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/uknews/9013365/We-Are-Not-TheDead-soldiers-faces-before-during-and-after-serving-in-Afghanistan.html (accessed June 9, 2015).

21 Wool, “On Movement,” 215. 22 Ibid. Italics are my emphasis. 23 A public profile on LinkedIn reveals that MacGregor continued to work for the British Army until December of 2012, served additional combat roles in Iraq, and survived them all. He has since pursued training as a licensed security- and drug-detection dog handler. “Public Profile: Chris MacGregor, Military Professional,” LinkedIn, https:// uk.linkedin.com/pub/chris-mcgregor/62/705/154 (accessed June 22, 2015)

24 Finnegan et al. “Serving within the British Army,” 1257. 25 Armitage, The Not Dead (2008), xii. 26 Muybridge published his motion studies in these volumes: Eadweard Muybridge,

Animals in Motion (London: Chapman and Hall, 1899); Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: The Muybridge Work at the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1888).

190

Before-and-After Photography

27 Marta Braun has noted that an estimated 40 percent of Muybridge’s motion studies

completed under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania were altered: Marta Braun, “The Expanded Present: Photographing the Moment,” in Ann Thomas, ed., Beauty of Another Order: Photography in Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 153.

BEYOND “THIS-CAUSED-THAT”

191

AFTERWORD JAMES ELKINS

This interesting and diverse collection of essays has made me wonder whether before-and-after photography might be an even larger subject than it appears. In their introductory chapter, Kate Palmer Albers and Jordan Bear distinguish before-and-after photographs from “the ‘then-and-now’ pair,” the “series,” and rephotography. Other contributors consider variants: photographs that stand alone (in Jason Hill’s chapter), apparently identical pairs that look “like broken clocks,” and photographs that are “are after and after. Or after, after, and after. Or after, after, after, and after,” as Frank Gohlke says of his images of Mt. St. Helens. The editors suggest that before-and-after photographs and related practices “obtain their special identity from the ways in which the photographs relate both to one another, and, most intriguingly, to a third, generally unseen, event,” a “missing pivot,” which requires “the viewer’s imagination of what happens outside of the photographic frame.” The metaphor of a pivot, a single unseen event, seems appropriate in some cases, for example in photographic pairs showing house removals or the effect of the 2011 tsunami, but in others what is missing is not an event as much as an imagined change that may well have been continuous, or even indiscernible as change–for example, in photographs of people aging, falling ill, and recovering from “neurasthenia.” In such cases, before-and-after photography, rephotography, and other forms make us think of plausible narratives as much as they prompt us to visualize appearances: the metaphor of what is missing may not be either unitary or visual. I wonder if the category of before-and-after photographs might be an explicit instance of a condition that is general in photography. Any collection of photographs of one person—in a digital album, in frames on a mantelpiece—is likely to include pairings and sets that are effectively before-and-after photographs. Indeed every photograph of a person—every snapshot, every selfie—is implicitly a before-or-after photo, because the person in the picture will have had other pictures taken when they were younger, and in the normal course of things there

will be more photographs taken in the future. In this sense, the expression “beforeand-after photography” is redundant, because photography itself—in its “nature,” as Barthes famously wrote—may be understood as a medium that directs our attention to two or more moments in time and the unrepresented intervals before, after, or between them. I would like to say all photographs do these things, even those shown individually, but that the invitation to fill in what is unrepresented is explicit when photographs are shown in pairs or series.

1 Let me make this concrete with a trivial example. When I was researching for the book What Photography Is, I bought some sets of anonymous vernacular photographs on eBay. The idea was to examine the magnetic pull of photographs of places and people that I could never know. I was interested in the sort of residual attraction we feel for the subjects of photographs, and what that groundless sort of nostalgia leads us to think. Among the sets was a package with a half-dozen photos of an unidentified family, taken sometime in the late 1920s or 1930s. In one photograph, three children, a boy and two girls, sit against a picket fence (Figure A.1). On the left, a figure leans in rather strangely. The fence is punctuated by a palm tree, a piece of corrugated aluminum, two wooden posts, and a taller stick with a deep shadow cast over it. The shadow seems to be too high to be a chimney; perhaps it’s a factory smokestack. Only the left-hand margin of the photo is in focus, possibly because the picture was made with a low-quality box camera.

FIGURE A.1  Unknown photographer, Unknown title, c. 1920s–1930s.

194

Before-and-After Photography

The image looks composed, as if the photographer had looked at Cartier-Bresson or Neue Sachlichkeit—but other photos in the same batch made that very unlikely. A second photograph from the same batch also seemed carefully composed: three sunlit figures occupy one-third of the space; they are framed by a tree and a corner of a rustic gazebo (Figure A.2). Inside the gazebo are five more people, but in deep shadow. The right third of the photo is empty. I was interested in the illusion of trained photography, of aesthetic intent, and also in the possibility that some elements of modernist aesthetic had ended up in vernacular photography. It wasn’t until sometime later that I realized both photos show two female figures with a male figure. Given that the group of photos was from one family, and that it was a small collection, it wasn’t impossible that these were the same three people. That possibility set in motion a very different kind of seeing: I got interested in what might have happened between the photographs, what could have happened, or even, more speculatively, what I might be wanting to imagine. I am very sympathetic with Kris Belden-Adams’s observation in this book (Chapter 10) that before-and-after photographs “refer not only to the temporal experiences of the past, but also to future-, present-, subjunctive- and compounded-tense experiences.” Later in her chapter, she observes that before-and-after photographs may involve “myriad references to time, as future anterior, future, subjunctive, narrative, viewer-created, and psychological.” That seems right: even in this afterword, I have already made use of the future perfect, in the phrase “the person in the picture will have had other pictures taken.” These two photos from eBay were definitely conjuring complex hypothetical temporalities.

FIGURE A.2  Unknown photographer, Unknown title, c. 1920s–1930s.

AFTERWORD

195

The kind of looking that the two photographs set in motion was not a veridical comparison, as in most of the chapters in this book. My response had to do with my imagination, but not in the sense Albers and Bear mention: I wasn’t hoping to recover a sense of the event, or events, that were unrepresented between these two photographs. I was engaged in an imaginative tour of possibilities, none of which might ever have been true. (That “might have been” is a modal verb catena, another sign that Belden-Adams is right when she mentions compounded tenses.) I would like to think of these two photographs, which may or may not be connected, which may or may not have been intended to represent a before and an after, as the general condition of before-and-after photography. And I do not know how I would distinguish these as a pair from either one alone: all photography, I think, potentially sets these hypotheticals in motion; they are what propel the currents that run through Camera Lucida. Before-and-after photographs of “neurasthenic” women, houses, and glaciers are specially restricted examples of a general phenomenon. Even Barthes’s “that has been” is a sample, as much simpler than the entire field of possibilities as one photo is from all its possible antecedents and descendants.

2 This kind of reasoning about the “nature” of before-and-after photography has to do with subjectivity, imagination, the real, and temporality. As Albers and Bear point out, a philosophic reference point here is the difference between Bergson’s sense of continuous time and Muybridge and Marey’s representation of intervals. The editors quote Michael Roth’s verdict that “photography is the perfect antiBergsonian technology because it records through segmentation,” and it fits the case of before-and-after photography very well. The contributors to this book mainly have historians’ questions. Susan Sidlauskas is concerned with the ways the photographs she studies integrate art and science “with such subtlety and calculation that it is impossible to disentangle them.” Kristen M. Thomas-McGill is interested in using before-and-after photography for “uncovering underlying attitudes toward drug use and embodied criminality.” For Hill, what matters is the interplay of ontology and politics in the photography of houses in noise-abatements areas. Rodney Garrard and Mark Carey look at how “repeat photography” of glaciers can “obscure,” “mislead,” and “fail to explain,” trading “awareness” or even “alarm” for fuller scientific information. Lisa Sutcliffe is interested in how Naoya Hatakeyama’s photographs not only document his town, but “reveal a dramatic internal shift through how he sees and stylistically responds.”

196

Before-and-After Photography

In an approximate summary, then, the concerns of this book may be divided into two large and porous categories: philosophy and history. Under the first heading are the ontological and epistemological claims about before-and-after photography’s relation to lived time and to the real. Under the second heading are the contributors’ social art historical concerns about the ways people understand before-and-after photography, and the inquiries into its use as evidence, as art, or as science. I am putting things this way in order to suggest a third position, entangled in philosophy and history but also outside them. In addition to what we may be able to say about these photographs as historians, there are also the ways they make us behave: the kinds of looking they elicit, the intensive and almost forensic scrutiny they seem to require, the meditations on time they seem to embody, and above all the subjunctive possibilities they seem to present. In pondering the book What Photography Is, I spent some time looking at rephotographic projects, and the more I looked the more I became aware of the strangeness of my looking. The pairs—Mark Klett’s and others’—appeared to be requiring me to look with a kind of intense, systematic rigor, because they seemed to be asking me to compare them at the level of the tiniest represented forms. I ended up making a strange record of the nearly uncountable, minuscule changes I’d found in some of the rephotographed images. As Barthes said of photography in general, time became immobile, “engorged,” frozen in “an excessive, monstrous mode,” in “a strange stasis, the stasis of an arrest” (Camera Lucida, 91).” I became catascopic: I saw the photographs from above, but I was only looking at tiny things, and at the same time I became anascopic: I saw the tiny details, and I had to struggle to come back up to something resembling ordinary seeing. Because I am not sure how to distinguish rephotography from before-and-after photography, or before-and-after photography from individual photographs, I prefer to think of those odd experiences as extreme cases of the sorts of seeing that are provoked, unexpectedly and in general, by photographs of many kinds. If seeing photographs involves self-indulgent, myopic, or even anascopic seeing, and if it elicits subjunctive, reparative meditations on what was, what came between, and what came after, then before-and-after photography may be more an extreme kind of photography, a limit case or test case, than a separable genre or mode or practice. It may be a kind of photography that helps us to understand what some photography can be.

AFTERWORD

197

INDEX

abjection 7–8, 44, 47–8, 51–3 Adams, Robert 68–70, 72 adaptation 106, 111, 113–14 aesthetic standards, photography 1, 9, 17, 20, 22, 25 aftermath 8–9, 79, 82, 123, 126, 132 Aftermath in Wichita Falls (Gohlke) 79–81, 83, 86–8, 91, 95, 97 n.1. See also tornado, Wichita Falls album 18, 24, 35, 168, 193 Aletsch Glacier in Switzerland 103–6 Allen and Ginter tobacco company 156 Anthropology 49–50, 159, 182 Armstrong, General Samuel Chapman 154–5 army 17, 84, 139, 142, 145, 148, 155, 163, 177, 180, 184–5 assimilation 2, 9, 153–4, 156, 168 Balog, James 101 Barnardo, Dr. Thomas 4, 157 Barthes, Roland 32, 37 n.8, 40 n.42, 65, 77 n.24–5, 180–3, 190 n.14, 190 n.19, 194, 197 Batchen, Geoffrey 1, 11 n.1, 37 n.8, 40 n.42, 180, 189 n.9–n.10 beauty 6, 70, 74 Before and After: Navajo, Tom Torlino 164 before-and-after photography. See also pairs of photographs; repeat photography; rephotography of African American boy 139–42, 144–5, 148–9 of criminals 43–54 Faces of Meth (drug awareness campaign) 7, 43–6, 53–4

generic logic 59, 73, 75 n.1, 140 glaciers 101–17 individual photographs 197 medical subjects 15–36 national identity, U.S 149 Native American students 153–71 noise abatement zone 59–77 philosophic and historical concerns 195–6 race and reconstruction in U.S 139–50 temporal conventions (case study) 178–184 time zone 1–10 tsunami 123–33 Bellour, Raymond 72, 74, 77 n.34 Beranek, Leo 74–5, 77 n.35 Bergson, Henri 3–4, 11 n.5, 11 n.7, 182, 190 n.18 Blast (1995 ongoing, Hatakeyama) 124 body black body 129, 142 Carlisle student 160–1 criminal photography 44–53 geographical position 59–60, 65, 67 medical photography 16, 19, 22–4, 27, 29, 34–5 Muybridge’s images 186 Camera Lucida (Barthes) 32, 37 n.8, 40 n.42 Cane, Sir Edmund Du 43, 49–50, 53 Carlisle images See Native American students Carlisle Indian School 167–8, 170 Carte de visite 2, 4, 139–41, 145 case studies

Aletsch Glacier in Switzerland 103–6 composite photographs 48–51 Faces of Meth 45–8 Grinnell Glacier (U.S) 103, 106–9 Khumbu (Mt. Everest) region 103 Palcacocha, Peru (glacial lake) 103, 109–12 Playfair’s patients 29, 31–3, 35 temporal conventions 178–84 tsunami 123, 125–8, 130–3 causality 177, 179 cause and effect 2, 7, 45, 116 change bodily 52 catalytic 59 costume 4 imagined 193 interval 90 process 148, 153 speed 186 temporal or visible 6, 71, 80, 132 Chasing Ice (2012, documentary film) 101 children 47, 53, 129, 141, 153–9, 161–2, 166, 168–9, 194 Choate, J. N Carlisle Indian School photos 160–3, 168 Chiricahua Apache, before and after photographs 159, 166, 169 stereoscopic camera, use of 156 Torlino “after” portrait 164–6 Yellow Robe photos 166 circulation 16–17, 36 Civil War 16–17, 20, 139, 141, 148–9, 157–8 civilization 74, 153, 155–6 class climate-related hazards and 103 crime and 45 drug criminality and 46, 53 elevated 24 Galtonian eugenics 52 Keating’s remarks 43–4 lower 7 middle 4, 7, 30, 48, 62, 64, 140, 145, 159, 161, 166 socioeconomic heirarchy 48, 51 upper 48 view of national parks 108

climate change. See also glaciers adaptations 113 before and after photography 8 cause-effect impacts 111 global impacts 101–3, 108, 114, 116 GNP glaciers as symbols 106 greenhouse gas emissions and 116 repeat photography of glaciers 101–3, 106, 108–9, 111–16, 196 techno-scientific solutions 103, 116 visual impact 2 clothing/costume 4, 24, 27, 29, 141, 149, 153, 155, 160 composite images 44, 48–51, 53. See also Galton, Francis Conflict, Time, Photography (Modern) 128 constructed images 129, 160 costume 4, 24, 27, 29, 141, 149, 155 Creative Evolution (Bergson) 3–4 crime bodily decay 44–6 poverty and 49 race and 45 criminal photography. See also Galton, Francis before and after images 44 gaze 44, 48, 53 sense of abjection 44, 47–8, 51–3 criminality See also Faces of Meth (FOM) bodily types 44–53 drug use and 44, 48, 52–3, 196 FOM (Faces of Meth) portraits 51 Galton’s composite portraits 51 Lombroso’s theories 49, 51–2 physical markers 51 policing strategies 51–3 criminals bodily signs 50–1 past and present imaging 51–4 photographic gaze 44, 48, 53 photography of 44 signature method of photographing 49 Darwinism 48–9, 51 death 32, 35, 109, 113, 130, 148, 164, 181, 185, 187–8 Death of a Light Bulb (Edgerton) 188 decay 4, 44–6 degeneration 2, 8, 45, 49

INDEX

199

destruction 32, 46, 79–80, 124–5, 127–30, 140, 144 details 20, 45, 47, 60, 65, 106, 126, 149, 178, 180, 185, 197 development 2, 6, 48–9, 52, 62, 69–70, 105, 113–15, 125, 140, 155, 162 digital photography 53, 193 disaster 82, 87, 102, 109, 111–14, 123, 125–33 Divola, John 8, 59–64, 66–75 concept of time 59–62, 64, 72–3, 75 House Removals LAX 60–3, 66–7, 71, 73, 193 LAX NAZ, Exteriors and Interiors 66–72 Dr. Barnardo’s Home for Working and Destitute Lads 157 drug abuse 44, 46, 52, 179 duration 2–4, 32, 46, 72, 148, 179–80, 184, 186–7, 189 earthquake 9, 111, 113, 123, 125–6, 130–1, 134 n.14 eBay 194–5 ecological citizenship 68, 77 n.29, 77 n.31 Elkins, James 9–10, 37 n.8, 37 n.10, 38 n.15, 39 n.36, 40 n.42, 193–7 What Photography Is (book) 194, 197 emancipation 9, 140–5, 147–8, 151 n.6, 158 emotion 9, 21, 61, 79, 123, 131, 133, 139–42, 144, 149, 156 engraving 21–2, 30, 34–6, 39 n.34, 49 n.40, 141, 145, 149 environment 8, 61–2, 66–7, 106, 108–9, 114–16, 124–5, 155, 159, 170 erasure 8, 60–1, 63, 71, 128 Escaped Slave in the Union Army 148, 150, 152 n.15, 152 n.17 eugenics 48–9, 51–2 event 2–9, 39 n.36, 64, 80, 102, 105, 113, 116, 123–3, 127–9, 131–3, 187, 196 evidence 4, 7–9, 15–16, 25, 36, 44, 46, 50, 53, 69, 80, 86–7, 92, 96, 107, 109, 128, 130, 145, 159, 197 Faces of Meth (FOM) 7, 43–6, 53–4 accessibility of 53 before and after images 45, 48, 53

200

INDEX

case study 45–8 iconographic power 52–3 punitive shaming via images 48 sense of abjection, through bodily transformation 47 testimonials 43, 46 flood 19, 30, 107, 109, 111–15, 144 Foucault 44–5 frames 2, 5, 24, 33–4, 46, 51, 53, 60–1, 67–8, 73–4, 80, 82, 125, 140, 149, 159, 161, 167, 177–9, 183–7, 193, 195 Fry, George 63–6, 72, 76 nn.15–16 low-flying jet photo 63 Fukushima 125, 129 Galton, Francis anthropological system 49 case study 48–51 composite photographs of “criminal types,” 44–5, 48–54 generalized picture 48 on irregular villainy 50–1 perception of physiognomic signs 51 principles of categorization 52–3 projection of typology 52, 54 technical ability 49 gaze 16, 22, 29–31, 33, 44, 48, 53, 56 n.54, 149, 160, 164, 167 gender 103, 108, 161 glaciers. See also repeat photography hidden histories of people 103–5, 108–9, 111–12, 114–17 human impacts 103, 106, 109, 111, 113, 115–16 knowledge 102–5, 109, 111, 114–16 places 103, 105, 108, 113–16 global warming 8, 101 Gohlke, Frank (b. 1942) 8, 79–80, 83, 89, 93–4, 97 nn.1–2, 98 n.4, 98 n.7, 193 Aftermath: the Wichita Falls tornado 81 concept of time 79–80, 82, 84–7, 90, 92, 95–7 Grinnell Glacier in Glacier National 102–3, 106–9 repeat photography 101–3, 106–9 Gull, Sir William Withey 21, 30–1, 34, 36 on Anorexia Nervosa 31, 34

“before and after” images 30–1, 34 as Playfair’s competitor 30, 36 on treating women patients 21 Haacke Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System of 1971 61 Hampton Institute in Virginia 154 Hatakeyama, Naoya 9, 123–33, 133 n.2, 134 nn.5–8, 196. Seealso Rikuzentakata photographs disaster photography 123, 125–33 hometown photographs 125–7 landscape photographs 123, 127, 129–30, 132–3 on natural cycles 132–3 personal snapshots 126–9 Romanticism 124, 133 tsunami, before and after photographs 128–32 use of scale 124–5 water images 126–7 Hayes, Rutherford B. 153, 156, 159, 171 nn.1–2 health 7–8, 20, 23–25, 29–33, 36, 47, 65, 166 home 8–9, 18, 21, 25, 33, 60–4, 68, 84, 107, 126, 131–2, 162, 165, 167, 169, 178–9, 184–5 house 8, 21, 60–4, 67–8, 73, 79, 82–5, 116, 131, 167, 193, 196 Hudson of Hastings 28–9 imagination 2, 9, 162, 193, 196 improvement 6, 9, 49, 157, 159, 162 index/indexicality 3, 5–6, 9–10, 48 Indian Program 154–5 infrastructure 103, 111–14, 124 invisibility 5, 9, 64, 75, 103, 109, 144, 157, 179 Jefferson, Thomas 155 Johnston, Frances Benjamin 168–9 Jojola, Ted 159, 162 Keating, Governor Frank 43–4, 46, 48, 53–4 Kesen River 125–6, 133

Khumbu (or SNP—Sagarmatha, Mt. Everest), Nepal 103, 112–15 King Abraham before and after Issuing the Proclamation 142–3 landscape 1, 6, 8, 60–1, 66, 68–70, 79–80, 92, 101–2, 108–9, 112–13, 116, 123, 127, 129–30, 132–3, 149 light 18–19, 23–4, 27, 60, 66, 71–2, 112, 127, 133, 145, 154, 156, 180, 182, 185–8 Lincoln, Abraham 139–44. See also emancipation Linked Ring 20, 35 Little IceAge (roughly 1350-1850) 102, 106–8, 113 Lombroso’s theories 49, 51–2 London 15, 17–18, 26, 35, 62, 157, 159 Los Angeles 8, 60–3, 74 Malmsheimer, Lonna 159 Marey, Étienne-Jules 3, 196 Marez, Curtis 156 markers 2, 44, 48, 51, 63 medical photography (nineteenth century). See alsoPlayfair, Dr. William (1836-1903); Van der Weyde, Henry (1839-1924) case studies (Playfair) 32–3 complementarity 17–18 food and light 18–19 forms of portraiture 25 Gull’s patients 21, 30–1, 34, 36 Hudson’s patient 28–9 mis-resemblance 31–2 Playfair’s patients 7, 17–21, 24–5, 27, 29–36 traditional order 30–1 Van der Weyde’s patients 17–29, 31–3, 35–6 Weir-Mitchell method 18 medicine 17, 20–1, 35–6 methamphetamine, use of 7, 43–8, 51, 53 middle-class 4, 7, 25, 30, 48, 62, 64, 140, 145, 159, 161, 166 Morse, A.S., and Peaslee, William A African American boy photos 139–42, 144–5, 148–9 army portraits 139

INDEX

201

before and after photographs, Pryor’s gaze 145–50 cartes de visite 139–41, 145 expression of happiness 140–1 gift of freedom photographs 141–2 Nashville studio 139–42, 144–5, 149, 151 n.1 Mount Kilimanjaro, glacier loss 102, 117 n.3 Mount St. Helens’ photograph (Gohlke) 80, 86–8, 91–2 movement 3, 48–9, 104, 107, 116 Muybridge, Eadweard 3, 37 n.13, 178, 185–7, 190 n.26, 191 n.27, 196 narrative 1–2, 6, 8, 10, 22, 32, 34, 46, 101, 103, 107–8, 115–16, 129–30, 134 n.14, 153, 157, 159, 162, 166, 177–80, 182–8, 193, 195 Native Americans 9, 158, 169. See alsoChoate, J. N children 154–7 conquest and dispossession 154, 158 students 154, 156, 169 Native Nations:Journeys in American Photography (Choate) 159 natural disaster 129–30, 133 natural hazards 103, 111 neurasthenia 7, 18, 21, 35, 193 newspaper 20, 47, 63–5, 142, 156, 166, 178 noise abatement zone. See also Divola, John Beranek’s definition 74 Divola’s style 68, 72–3, 75 dispute 62–3 Peirce on 5 photographic metaphor 8, 64–6 Noise Abatement Zone, series (Divola) 8, 62, 66, 75 noisy subject 60–2 nongovernmental organization (NGO) 101, 116 The Not Dead (2010, Snow) 177–8, 188, 189 nn.1–3 objectivity 3, 16, 19, 25, 36 observation 103, 105, 111–12, 131, 155, 195

202

INDEX

pairs of photographs 2–6, 8–10, 17–18, 80, 115–16, 153, 155–6, 159, 162, 164, 166, 168–9, 193–4, 197. See also before and after photography Palcacocha, Peru (glacial lake) 103, 109–12 Parker, Maynard L. 68, 72 Peirce, Charles Sanders 5 perform/performance 5, 7, 25–9, 39 n.36, 69–70, 148–9 photo journalism. See Divola, John photography aesthetic standards 1, 9, 17, 20, 22, 25 affirmative assertion 70 art-progress 15–16, 20 Bergson’s perception 3 documented functions 15 natural disaster 129–30, 132 noise and 64–6, 71 of criminals 44, 48–9, 51–2 of patients 35–6 power of 82, 169 studio 142 temporal complexities 177–8 vernacular 195 visual evidence 87 war 148 work of 59, 61, 66, 74–5, 79 Playfair, Dr. William (1836-1903) 7, 17–21, 24–5, 27, 29–36 “before” photographs 17, 32 food and light, use of 18–19 Gull as competitor 30 narrative arcs 32–3 patients 21–5, 27 professional reputation 35–6 women, case studies 29, 35 portraiture 25, 32 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) 179–80, 183–5 poverty 48–9, 113, 157 Pratt, Captain Richard Henry Carlisle program 153–70 cultural transformation mission 153, 156 savagery, definition 167 use of before and after photographs 154, 156, 159, 162 prisoners 154, 166

privacy 7, 9, 16, 21, 35, 63, 105 proof 5, 8, 10, 34, 46, 59, 61, 69, 153 public 4, 7, 16, 18, 36, 44, 47–8, 53, 63–4, 103, 130, 140, 142, 144, 156, 162, 168, 179 race 2, 44–5, 51, 53, 103, 108. See also, Morse, A.S., and Peaslee, William A African American boy 139–42, 144–5, 148–9 slavery and 139, 141–5, 151 n.9 representation 140, 149 transformation 139, 143–4, 145, 148–9 Reading the Emancipation Proclamation (1864) 141 recognition 24, 36, 103, 111 Red River wars (1874-75) 154 repeat photography 101–3, 106–9, 111–16, 117 nn.3–6, 118 nn. 8–10, 121 n.59, 122 n.66, 122 n.73, 129 n.61, 196 rephotography 6, 75, 82, 86, 88, 96, 193, 197 representation 2–4, 9, 21, 30–1, 46, 103, 111–12, 140, 149, 166, 170, 179, 196 Rhone Glacier 102 Rickard, Jolene 159 Rikuzentakata photographs 123, 125, 127–8, 130–3, 134 n.4 savagery 49, 153, 155–6, 159–60, 162, 164, 166, 168–9 Scared Straight campaign 45–6 Schurz, Carl 155 science 3–4, 16, 25, 49, 101 serial photography 3, 61 series 2, 7–8, 17, 35, 46, 51–3, 61–2, 64, 66–8, 71, 73, 80, 124, 127, 129–30, 153, 156, 177–9, 184–5, 187–8, 193–4. See also Divola, John Sherpa people 112, 114 Sioux youth 153, 160–1, 163 slavery 139, 141–5, 151 n.9 Snow, Lalage MacGregor’s rephotograph 181–4 PTSD awareness to public 179–80, 183–5 soldiers, portrait 177–9, 184–8 temporality, expression 177–80, 182–9 social reform 157, 159 Society of Friends 157

staging 25, 29–30 Still Crazy:Nuclear Power Plants As Seen in Japanese Landscapes (Hirokawa) 129 subjectivity 149, 196 subjects of photographs (unknown photographer and title) 194–5 suburban space 60, 62, 68–9 Taboche Valley 112 technology 3, 74–5, 196 temporal or visible change 2–4, 6, 8, 10, 32, 52, 64, 66, 71, 80, 88, 90–2, 128, 140–1 before-and-after photography 177–89, 195 temporality 2–4, 6, 8, 10, 32, 177–8, 182, 184. Terrils (2009–10, Hatakeyama) 125 Texas 8, 79–80, 92–5, 97 then-and-now 2, 193. See also before and after photography Thompson, Lonnie 102, 117 n.3 time-lapse photography 101–2 Tohoku disaster. See tsunami tornado, Wichita Falls 79–81, 83, 86–8, 91, 96, 97, 98 n.5. See also Gohlke, Frank before and after effects 80, 82–5, 92, 96 intensity of devastation 87 ranking 98 n.3 visual touchstone 79–80 transformation 4, 6–10, 18, 30–1, 47, 80, 123, 126–7, 139, 143–4, 145, 148–9, 159–60, 165–6, 169 trauma 9–10, 20, 60–1, 123–4, 129–31, 133, 179, 182–4. See alsoSnow, Lalage tsunami 123, 125–8, 130–3, 134 n.8, 134 n.14, 193. See alsoHatakeyama, Naoya “Memory Salvage” project, tsunami 128 UNESCO World Natural Heritage (WNH) 103 US Army 155 US Geological Society (USGS) 102, 106, 108, 117 n.3, 120 n.41

INDEX

203

Van der Weyde Light 19, 23, 27 Van der Weyde, Henry (1839-1924) 17–29, 31–3, 35–6 celebrity subjects 25–9 forms of portraiture 25 patients photographs 22–4, 26–8 Playfair, collaboration with 19–20, 33, 35–6 women, representation of 21–2 vanishing race. See Native Americans

204

INDEX

visibility 2–10, 16, 19, 22, 33, 46, 49, 68, 72–3, 75, 80, 114, 132, 149, 160, 164, 166–7 Vizenor, Gerald 159 Wallace, Maurice 145, 148 Walter, Benjamin 37 n.8 war 2, 10, 16–17, 20, 62–3, 139, 141, 143, 148–9, 166, 178–80, 182–5 western landscape 68–9, 73 Wolfe, Patrick 158–9

PLATE 1  “Theresa,” Faces of Meth, http://www.facesofmeth.us/main.htm. Courtesy of the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office.

PLATE 2  John Divola, House Removals LAX, A, 1976. Courtesy of the artist.

PLATE 3  The Grosse Aletschgletscher in 1856 and 2011. Credit: F. Martins, Alpine Club Library London, courtesy of H. Holzhauser.

PLATE 4  Taboche and Khumbu Valley in 2012.

PLATE 5  Naoya Hatakeyama, Imaizumi, July 2004. Courtesy of the artist.

PLATE 6  Naoya Hatakeyama, Imaizumi, April 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

PLATE 7  Naoya Hatakeyama, Kesen-cho, Imaizumi Sanbonmatsu, October 27, 2002. Courtesy of the artist.

PLATE 8  Naoya Hatakeyama, Takata, Matsubara plage/beach, August 4, 2002. Courtesy of the artist.

PLATE 9  Naoya Hatakeyama, Kesencho, Imaizumi, Nakamachi, March 19, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

PLATE 10 Naoya Hatakeyama, Kesencho, Imaizumi, Nakai, sanctuaire/shrine, Kitanojinja Imaizumi Tenmangu, August 7, 2002. Courtesy of the artist.

PLATE 11 Naoya Hatakeyama, Kesencho, Imaizumi, Nakai, sanctuaire/shrine, Kitanojinja Imaizumi Tenmangu, June 14, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

PLATE 12  Installation shot of the Venice Architecture Biennale with Naoya Hatakeyama, Rikuzentakata photograph as wallpaper. Courtesy of the artist.

PLATE 13 A. S. Morse and William A. Peaslee, Before the Proclamation, c. 1863, albumen print carte de visite, International Center of Photography.

PLATE 14  A. S. Morse and William A. Peaslee, After the Proclamation, c. 1863, albumen print carte de visite, International Center of Photography.

PLATE 15  Lalage Snow, Private Chris MacGregor. We Are The Not Dead series, 2010. Reproduced by courtesy of the artist.

PLATE 16  Lalage Snow, Lance Corporal David McLean. We Are The Not Dead series, 2010. Reproduced by courtesy of the artist.