`Time's Relentless Melt'

Old photographs, even of strangers, have enormous power to move us. Out-of-focus family snapshots, poorly framed, under- or over-exposed, can be unbearably poignant. Their amateurishness even adds to their poignancy. In On Photography, Susan Sontag understood this phenomenon, though she blunts her own insight by contemptuously dismissing it as “nostalgia”:

“Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos….All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”

If this is nostalgia, let’s cherish it. And let’s add another elegiac layer of resonance by processing long-forgotten film found in old cameras. That’s the idea behind the web site Lost Films, which carries a fitting epigraph from Henri Cartier-Bresson:

“Photographers deal in things which are continuously vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.”

And a fitting motto – “Capio Articulus!” – meaning, I think, “Seize the moment!”

I can’t figure out who runs the site, though he seems to be based in Westford, Mass. His idea is ingenious: Collect old cameras and the accompanying film, process it, digitalize and optimize the results, post them, and provides captions that are funny, opinionated and sometimes as sad as the photographs. Scroll down to the photo labeled “Tower Seven and death,” click on it and scroll down again to “Frame 1” -- a grainy, black-and-white photo of a woman standing in a cemetery. Here’s the caption:

“This 1960's lady was photographed in a graveyard somewhere. Most likely she resides in one herself today. I think the trappings of death were more important in America when this photo was taken.”

Memento mori, indeed. By an irony of purest chance, camera and film are preserved, and a stranger salvages the forgotten images and reanimates them. Photographer and subject, probably, are long dead. Above one photo the stranger writes:

“I'm a sucker for old cameras that have exposed film in them. I just have to buy them. You never know what you'll find on those ancient negatives from the time when the world was black and white. I'm full of hope that I'll find something of historical importance. Something that'll make me as rich as a baseball player.”

I’m reminded of something Philip Larkin wrote in 1955 at the request of D.J. Enright, who was compiling an anthology and wanted brief statements about poetry from the contributors:

“I write poems to preserve things I have seen/thought/felt (if I may so indicate a composite and complex experience) both for myself and for others, though I feel that my prime responsibility is to the experience itself, which I am trying to keep from oblivion for its own sake. Why I should do this I have no idea, but I think the impulse to preserve lies at the bottom of all art.”

Anyone who photographs (or writes about, or paints, or films) someone or something he loves, wishes to preserve it – the memory of the beloved, but also, in some primitive way, the thing itself. Elsewhere, Larkin referred to “Unresting death,” our great, unspoken foe. In a picture, our loved ones, and strangers, can rest, unchanging and perfect, forever.

“A photograph,” Sontag writes, “is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs – especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past – are incitements to reverie.”

In 1978, John Berger wrote an essay, “Uses of Photography,” dedicated to Sontag and framed as a response to her book. Berger is a brilliant writer who too often mucks up his own brilliance with simplistic politics. At his best, he sticks to the human:

“What served in place of the photograph, before the camera’s invention? The expected answer is the engraving, the drawing, the painting. The more revealing answer might be: memory. What photographs do out there in space was previously done in reflection.”

What Lost Films does, in a sense, is reclaim memory and make us, in the absence of the original photographers, their proxy repository. It’s a trope worthy of cheap science fiction – or Borges: We claim the memories of others, give them a home.

My favorite Nabokov story is “A Guide to Berlin,” written in Russian in 1925. Nabokov called it “one of my trickiest pieces.” At the end of the story, the narrator and a friend are seated in a pub, looking into the proprietor’s apartment at the rear. A little boy sits at a table. His mother feeds him soup and he looks at a magazine. The narrator projects himself into the boy and looks back into the pub, at the narrator and his friend.

“He [the boy] has long since grown used to this scene and is not dismayed by its proximity. Yet there is one thing I know. Whatever happens to him in life, he will always remember the picture he saw every day of his childhood from the little room where he was fed his soup. He will remember the billiard table and the coatless evening visitor who used to draw back his sharp white elbow and hit the ball with his cue, and the blue-gray cigar smoke, and the din of voices, and my empty right sleeve and scarred face, and his father behind the bar, filling a mug for me from the tap.”

The narrator’s companion says, “I can’t understand what you see down there,” and the narrator thinks:

“What indeed! How can I demonstrate to him that I have glimpsed somebody’s future recollection?”

ADDENDUM: The indefatiguable Dave Lull reports that Lost Films "appears to belong to Gene McSweeney, who's quoted here and there on the web:

"`We try to grab pieces of our lives as they speed past us. Photographs freeze those pieces and help us remember how we were. We don't know these lost people but if you look around, you'll find someone just like them.'"

Thanks, Dave.