Another Shorpy photo - this one "Boy with Dog", Long Island 1904.
Why is it, I wonder, that we react so differently to a photograph like this than to a painting. Just a boy and his dog posing momentarily, not giving it much of a thought, yet here we are, over 100 years later, looking at that moment caught in time, and we inevitably think about that, about the passing time, about the fact that boy, dog and photographer are all dead, and like all old photos it acquires that poignancy; time interrupted, then restarted. A memento to mortality. Little did they know, we think to ourselves, what fate had in store. How innocent; how human.
Yet a painting of a boy and a dog, no matter how realistic, entirely fails - for me, at any rate - to conjure up anything like such thoughts. My chief point of attention will be the aesthetics of the piece, and the skill of the painter. I may vaguely wonder about the lives of the subjects, I suppose, but not with the same immediacy that I would with a photograph: no more than if I was reading about them. Some Reynolds portrait, say, of the son of Lord Somebody, with his pet dog: the fact that the child actually existed at that time, posed for hours in front of Sir Joshua, then grew up (or maybe didn't) and then died, is something I'm clearly aware of, but these are facts with no emotional content. Maybe, you might think, if the portrait was powerful enough you'd get that emotional content: but that's a different kind of feeling, I think, more to do with the character of the sitter and the skill of the portraitist.
Is that just because photography's a newer art form? That we're more used to paintings, and so have lost that sense of the power of a portrait that perhaps our forebears felt? In which case we should expect our descendants, in a few hundred years time, when photos of people who died centuries before will be utterly commonplace, to have lost that feeling of...of what? Sadness? Poignancy is the word I've used, and I don't know how else to describe it.
It's plausible, I suppose, but there seems to be more to it than that: something about the reality of it, even if, as sophisticates, we've been told not to rely too much on that naive trust in what's real and what isn't. We still see a person - not a portrait, a person - looking back at us from the distant past, and we get some kind of shiver, some intimation of mortality.
I think one of the differences is that the photo seems less contrived, it seems more honest. A painting like this is just sentimental and commercial. I am aware that a photo, at that time, took a lot of setting up and preparation. Anyway, that's how it comes off to me.
Posted by: Fred Bell | June 09, 2008 at 02:24 AM
Another thing ... There is nothing in this picture that is similar to my own childhood (which I spent in the inner city), but for some reason it sets me off thinking about the usual stuff ... simpler times, carefree afternoons at a lake, and so on. A painting would never have that effect on me.
I think it's related to another phenomenon. I recently purchased the ship's log that recorded my father's arrival at Ellis Island, and I have pictures of him working as a young boy, and I have pictures of him at his high school graduation. I would rank them in that order, from best to least -- ship's log, working, graduating.
Posted by: Dom | June 09, 2008 at 03:34 AM
The camera ever lies.
Posted by: dearieme | June 09, 2008 at 08:27 AM
Good chance he became part of the landscape in Europe -1918, or succumbed to the Spanish Flu. Not a particularly auspicious time to have been a child (coincidentally, this kid was likely born about the same time as my own father --1900).
Posted by: DaninVan | June 10, 2008 at 08:33 PM