Unsuspecting Souls. Barry Sanders
computer, various sorts of electronic games, and a variety of handheld devices—BlackBerrys and personal digital assistants—each with its own tiny touch screen. Even with all that innovation and invention, I grant the old and familiar still camera center stage in this book. I will spend an appreciable amount of time talking about the camera’s importance in shaping perception in the nineteenth century. But, equally as important, I also use the camera as a tool for converting the succession of chapters in this book into a more graspable reality.
I ask the reader to consider each chapter as a “snapshot,” a term that first described a way of hunting, dating from 1808, which involved a hurried shot at a bird in flight, in which the hunter does not have enough time to take perfect aim. Sir John Herschel, who coined the word “photographic,” applied the phrase snapshot, in 1860, to capturing events, in a hurried and offhand style, with a still camera. Here’s the first instance of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary: “The possibility of taking a photograph, as it were by a snap-shot—of securing a picture in a tenth of a second of time.” For Herschel, time is crucial—do not think, just shoot. By 1894, the phrase had made it into newspapers and journals, and into the recognized organ of the profession, the American Annual of Photography: “Many think it is just the thing to commence with a detective camera and snap-shot.”
An odd locution, the “detective camera,” but by 1860, when Herschel used the phrase, cameras had become small enough and light enough so that even amateurs could use them with agility and speed. Manufacturers designed the Concealed Vest Camera, one inch thick and five inches long, so a person could hide it under a coat or jacket with the lens poking through some small opening in the cloth, with the idea that one could use such a camera for all kinds of detective work—professional and amateur—in sleuthing or where the person wanted to capture real candid situations. The camera, in a sense, disappeared from sight.
The camera captures shadows, the dreamy images that make up so much of experience. The phrase “shadow catcher” got attached to the photographer and ethnographer Edward Sheriff Curtis, who set out in the 1890s to document the rapidly vanishing American Indians. He attempted to make a permanent record of some eighty tribes across North America that he saw disappearing in his own time. William Henry Fox Talbot, who invented the negative and positive technique for taking and developing photographs, so intimately connected with the early days of the camera, says, not so much about Curtis, but about the process of taking photographs itself: “The most transitory of things, a shadow . . . may be fettered by the spells of our ‘natural magic,’ and may be fixed forever in the position which it seemed only destined for a single instant to occupy.”5
It is all about shadows, about the past. We can try to capture the past with some specificity, but events come to us only as shadows. The camera captures this better than any other appliance, certainly better than any other nineteenth-century invention. This is especially true of the detective camera, working its magic while completely out of view. I have tried, myself, to recede as much as possible in order for the extraordinary events of the nineteenth century to fully display themselves.
I offer the reader a series of snapshots, a quick and spontaneous look at some key events and ideas and inventions of the nineteenth century, of which there seem to be almost an endless supply. I do not intend this book as detailed history. It is rather the history of an idea, the disappearance of human essence. As the reader moves through these chapters, I hope that these stills, as they did in the nineteenth century, will begin to take on an animated life, creating a kind of moving picture with a clear narrative—that is, a more complex and flowing and continuous story about the period.
As Curtis did with Native Americans, I am trying to record a record of disappearance—no easy feat. I am trying to offer up a positive that I have developed out of a negative. The original has long since vanished. I can only click and snap, knowing full well that I am dealing with perhaps the most evanescent subject imaginable, disappearance. Jean Baudrillard, the French critic, talks about what he calls the “genealogy of disappearance.” He argues that “it’s when things disappear that you seek to verify them . . . and the more you verify, the more reality fades . . . Things present their credentials through language. But that merely holds up a mirror to their disappearance.”6 I attempt here; I try. My project is one of reconstruction and assemblage. I work with remnants and scraps of information: I am sleuthing.
As photography records shadows, this book opens just as the century dawned, in 1800, with a shadow falling across Great Britain, Europe, and America, and growing longer and longer as the years went by. The book closes with a story of a wandering young man, in a German fairy tale, who sells his shadow to a magician. In the middle looms the dark outline of the Civil War, the horrendous struggle over black and white—the substance and form of writing with light, but not the kind of ghost writing we do with the word processor. I refer to one much older, to the nineteenth-century invention called photography, also an immersion, etymologically, in writing with light: phos (light) + graphia (writing).
I have chosen as a title for this introduction “Pictures at a Deposition.” My title plays, of course, with Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, which Mussorgsky wrote in 1874 as a series of piano pieces in homage to his architect friend Viktor Hartmann. Mussorgsky intended his music to replicate the rhythm and pace of a visitor walking through the galleries of an art museum and pausing periodically to look at works of art. And while Mussorgsky’s title refers to paintings, his use of the word pictures also deliberately echoes the new technology of reproduction, the camera.
And finally, I have changed the exhibition to a deposition, shifted the scene from the gallery to the courthouse, from the painter to the policeman, from art to the art of killing. I am trying in this book to make sense out of a terribly violent and important crime scene—the murder of the human being. In a certain sense, I want to interrogate the evidence—as Sherlock Holmes or Sigmund Freud, or a perceptive art historian like Giovanni Morelli, might do—to reach the truth of things, to uncover a revealing theme from the period. I do it not for the sake of the nineteenth century alone, but for what the clues might tell us about our own time and our own condition. I do it so that we might learn something about what we are doing wrong in this period. I am troubled by the violence and terror of our own period and, by understanding it, I hope to change it.
Over the course of these pages, we are witness to a deposition, then, an inquiry about the meaning of this mass disappearance of the human being in an attempt to finger the culprit or culprits. At a deposition, witnesses give testimony under oath. We listen to what they say, and we try to determine if they are telling the truth. We do not necessarily take all witnesses at their word. We look for details and listen for alibis. We concern ourselves with consistencies and inconsistencies. This requires close reading and careful listening, and it also involves a good deal of very careful looking. Body language offers a glimpse at honesty—gestures and expressions, too. For—to continue with my controlling image—the camera does lie. It’s a recording machine, but it does indeed lie. We need to be on guard. Consider our iconic prisoner from earlier in this introduction, the one draped in his pointed hood and with electrical wires dangling from his hands.
We now know his name. Or at least we know his nickname. Thanks to an essay by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris titled “Exposure: The Woman Behind the Camera at Abu Ghraib,” in The New Yorker, we know that his captors, for some reason, called him Gilligan. Nicknames that the GIs gave their prisoners, like Claw, Shank, Mr. Clean, Slash, Thumby, and so on, made them “more like cartoon characters, which kept them comfortably unreal when it was time to mete out punishment.” And so, perhaps, we have here a passing reference to Gilligan’s Island. We also learn, according to an Army sergeant named Javal Davis, that almost “everyone in theatre had a digital camera” and sent hundreds of thousands of snapshots back home. Davis said that GIs took pictures of everything,
from detainees to death. . . . I mean, when you’re surrounded by death and carnage and violence twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, it absorbs you. You walk down the street and you see a dead body on the road, whereas a couple months ago, you would have been like, “Oh, my God, a dead body,” today you’re like, “Damn, he got messed up, let’s go get something to eat.” You could watch someone running down the street