the Burns Method

Image at top is "Lower Hudson Street" about 1865, the other is "Washington Statue in Union Square" about 1860. 

At bottom is how I used the Union Square crop, which I thought was vaguely and abstractly menacing, in the Lincoln and New York exhibition at the New-York Historical Society. It was intended to help suggest (along with the engraving, etc ) the mounting popular dissatisfaction with Lincoln that led up to the Draft Riots.

NOTE 7-18: I shouldn't be surprised there's a Wikipedia entry about the "Ken Burns Effect"— I just cant believe I didnt know about it or the Apple reference.

One of the many things I admired about Ken Burns' famous Civil War series was not just the amazing evocation of the 1860s—but the exceptional sense of being enveloped in the 1860s. This was achieved, in part, with Burns' habit of dramatizing the photographs. By dramatizing I mean his practice of zooming into a small corner of a photograph, panning across it, and drawing back, at some point, so that the viewer sees the entire image. It's a journey across the image. Not only is this a clever way for a documentary filmmaker to increase the store of visuals he can draw from (each image can yield two or more scenes, especially helpful when sources are historical and of limited availability) it is also a method of revivifying, showing the life within the image.

Roland Barthes (Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography) speaks of the excitement of (select) images, the "the pressure of the unspeakable [within the image] which wants to be spoken." In his somewhat overwrought way, Barthes explains that the "adventure" and "animation" of certain images in turn animate the viewer. By isolating and framing small parts of a scene, or panning across a battlefield or streetscape, Burns extracts "adventure" from images that may, on first look, be quite standard or dull. Training the camera across a photograph recreates in a small way the experience of three dimensional world. It places the viewer in the setting and evokes the sensation of taking in that very scene. Also, by refocusing the eye on small corners, the viewer is privy to other stories that might escape notice when seeing the photo in its entirety. For Burns' camera, a single image of Richmond in ruins could offer up "resoluteness" in teasing out the tiny details of street life or it could reinforce "devastation" by lingering on each and every physical manifestation of war.

I was mesmerized by these latent stories in historical images. Limited only by the resolution (image quality) of the image one is working from there's the potential for extracting candid moments, where none seemed to exist. When I worked on the "Lincoln and New York" show at the New-York Historical Society I felt strongly that the galleries needed to have a sense of immediacy. Lincoln's walk through New York City on his way to his speaking engagement at Cooper Union should seem like the real walk it was. I had hoped to use photographic murals of New York street scenes only— no engravings—to place the visitor on those New York streets. (Of course others weighed in on the design and things got watered down, but still...) Above are two of several images I drew from— they're pretty powerful even without the Burns method, so my job was easy.

Why was I even thinking about this now? A typographer friend, Nick Sherman, created this amazing post of signage seemingly extracted out of nowhere from vintage photographs.

Automats and Einfühlung

While this image is not of the Automat at 1557 Broadway, it gives an idea of the chain's original ornamentation. Freeland mentions that the stained glass of the Horn and Hardart flagship Times Square location was created by the same artisan who did the glass for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

"Oh how I love the automat

the place where all the food's at"

Life magazine, March 1928

Doyers street, scene of the Chinese Theatre massacre

The sumptuous Atlantic Garden at 50 Bowery c.1870. All images, NYPL digital archive

At the Victorian Society awards a few weeks ago, I chatted with David Freeland, author of Automats, Taxi Dances, and Vaudeville: Excavating Manhattan's Lost Places of Leisure. Now, I get obsessive in my avocational interest in New York history—tracking down images, poring over details— but he does it on a professional level! It was a thrill to speak with someone whose New York knowledge is academically comprehensive but who also appears to be just as viscerally enthralled by the poignance of everyday details.

Freeland finds slivers of the city's past which, though difficult to spot, can come to light if you train your eyes to see them. He's not interested in simply documenting architectural loss (e.g. blogs like vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com) he's got the determination to ferret out and appreciate the bits that remain.

The book is a treasure hunt of sorts, all over Manhattan. Freeland crawls out onto rooftops, he follows circuitous underground passages through Chinatown, and peers at faint traces of ornamental frippery stranded amidst the bleak streetscapes of Manhattan economic expedience. With Freeland's perseverance, the reader is able to cut through the cultural detritus of places like Grand Slam tourist shop in Times Square to the remnants of the original 1912 Horn and Hardart Automat. Elsewhere he conjures up Bowery beer gardens, swank nightclubs, gambling saloons and revives the heyday of Tin Pan Alley.

Freeland's research and documentation is astounding: where was Rogers Peet? how much did the cooks at the Automat make? what drinks did the Atlantic Garden serve? The implications of the American Mutoscope Company's "How Bridget Served the Salad Undressed"? (I live on this stuff, though some readers might find the occasional tsunami of facts a bit overwhelming.)

As amazing to me as his storehouse of facts is his orchestration of essentially three narrative voices. Freeland shifts between the modern-day flaneur—an often poetic observer of the present reality, the historian—a neutral provider of historical fact, and the eye witness—a "you-are-there" recreation of period events.

Freeland is obviously quite given over to the idea that it is possible, in some way, to tap into-- experience-- the past. 

If time is just a continuum and the present, past, and future all exist together with the past and future hidden from view then New York's past is still there lurking just beyond the range of our vision.

In a favorite old post of mine I describe a similarly intense awareness.

To the extent that a [period] photographic image, the rectangle, is a metaphorical window, its frame blocks the rest of the world that continues just beyond those edges. The "glass" is immovable, the "window" shut. I wonder, though, about what is to the left or the right. Or what connection there might be, in that photo of yesterday, to what I know today. 

If I understand it correctly, the philosopher and essayist Johann Gottfried von Herder's term Einfühlung, often translated as "empathy," puts a name to this complicated and elusive state of mind that I know very well and which seems to pervade Automats.

... a "feeling into," [Einfuhlung is] projecting one’s mind into the object of one’s contemplation, of seeing and thinking and experiencing from its perspective and so coming to understand it better, of turning it into a subject and oneself into the object of its gaze.– Robert Daly (SUNY Buffalo)

Afterglow

Sunset and afterglow, November, 1883

November 9, 1883

Sunset, May 10, 1884

Sunset, May 10, 1884

Amber afterglow with crepuscular rays, September, 1885

Sustained light after sunset, July 12, 1886

Sunset and noctilucent cloud, July 6, 1885

I mentioned the British artist William Ascroft (1832-1914) at the end of the last post about volcanoes. I thought his remarkable, almost eerie series of sketches documenting the atmospheric effects of Krakatoa's eruption upon London's sunsets warranted a bit more attention. In the years after the 1883 explosion, Ascroft's rapidly drawn sketches recorded details that would have been otherwise ephemeral or merely described before the invention of color photography.

In a thoughtful April 15th New York Times Op Ed piece that I only just now saw, Simon Winchester, author of “Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded,” creates a wonderful image of Ascroft laboring to capture the "magic" in the sky:

An obscure Londoner named William Ascroft, astonished by the nightly light show along the Thames, turned out a watercolor [sic, they appear to all be pastels, not watercolors] every 10 minutes, night after night, working like a human camera. More than 500 Krakatoa paintings survive him. “Blood afterglow,” he jotted down on one canvas, noting the magic done by refractive crystals of dust; “Amber afterglow,” on another.

When The Eruption of Krakatoa, and Subsequent Phenomena, Report of the Krakatoa Committee of the Royal Society was printed in 1888, several chromolithographic prints of Ascroft's sunsets were painstakingly reproduced and included, having been deemed to have exceptional scientific import. Printed to the artist’s directions by the Lithographic Department of the Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company, the job required ten different 'stones' or printing plates.

As an aside, I found this photograph of "noctilucent clouds" over Hungary taken in 2006. Originally recognized as a polar atmospheric occurance, the clouds have now been spotted in much lower latitudes in recent years. It is thought that global climate change may be the cause.

Volcano notes

April 17, 2010. (REUTERS/Ingolfur Juliusson)

April 17 and April 19, 2010. Örvar Atli Þorgeirsson

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.

The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars

Did wander darkling in the eternal space,

Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth

Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;

Morn came and went -and came, and brought no day,

....

....

Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,

And their masts fell down piecemeal; as they dropped

They slept on the abyss without a surge—

The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,

The Moon, their mistress, had expired before;

The winds were withered in the stagnant air,

And the clouds perished! Darkness had no need

Of aid from them—She was the Universe!

In July of 1816, Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Mary's stepsister Claire, and Byron's physician, John Polidori, were spending their days indoors at the Diodati Villa, on a sojourn in Geneva, Switzerland. They were taking shelter from the inexplicable cold, "incessant rain" and mysterious fogs. "There was a celebrated dark day," Byron recalled, "on which the fowls went to roost at noon, and the candles were lighted as at midnight." Held captive by the weather, Mary drafted what would become her novel, Frankenstein, Dr. Polidori wrote The Vampyre, and Byron wrote "Darkness" (excerpt above), their creative energies sympathetic with the brooding elements.

Strange weather, lengthy periods of darkness and record-cold temperatures swept across Europe and North America that summer. Prolonged, brilliant sunsets and twilights were frequently seen. On June 6, snow fell in Albany, New York, and Dennysville, Maine. Nearly a foot of snow fell in Quebec City. Lake and river ice were reported as far south as Pennsylvania.The resulting crop failures and livestock loss forced up prices, created panic and produced famine in many parts of the world. Some historians point to the weather conditions in New York and the Northeast of 1816 and '17 as spurring an early westward migration.

1816, The Year Without Summer or the Poverty Year, it was later determined, was the result of a volcano, erupting the previous year, thousands of miles away.

On Wednesday, April 10, 1815, Mount Tambora, a volcano in the Dutch East Indies, thought to have been dormant for 5,000 years, had begun a series of eruptions. On April 15th the final and largest blast spewed sulphur dioxide nearly 27 miles into the stratosphere. The finer ash particles stayed in the atmosphere up to a few years causing global climate changes. The pyroclastic flow killed over 10,000 local people immediately and another 70,000 or more were killed on neighboring islands in the aftermath of tsunamis, ash blanketing and the resulting agricultural devastation. Tambora was the largest volcanic eruption in at least 1,600 years— ten times the size of Mt. Vesuvius. 

Decades later John Ruskin gave a lecture at the London Institute on another meteorological anomaly. In a semi-apocalyptic conflation of atmospheric and psychological disturbance, Ruskin railed about ominous clouds:

For the sky is covered with gray cloud;—not rain-cloud, but a dry black veil, which no ray of sunshine can pierce; partly diffused in mist, feeble mist, enough to make distant objects unintelligible, yet without any substance, or wreathing, or color of its own. And everywhere the leaves of the trees are shaking fitfully, as they do before a thunder-storm; only not violently, but enough to show the passing to and fro of a strange, bitter, blighting wind.... It is a wind of darkness...It is a malignant quality of wind, unconnected with any one quarter of the compass; it blows indifferently from all, attaching its own bitterness and malice to the worst characters of the proper winds of each quarter....

—The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century

This was a year after the famous 1883 Krakatoa eruption. //

Following the August 27th Krakatoa eruption, artist William Ascroft documented eerily brilliant sunsets and other optical phenomena over England, attributed to the volcano's after-effects, until 1886. For a selection of his uncanny sketches, see the Science and Society Picture Library/

Twilight and after glow effects at Chelsea, London, Nov. 26, 1883

Shadows in living color

 

Images from top: Pearl Street and Peck Slip, October 7, 1942

Drink cart near the Battery, October, 1942

Wartime salvage, October 4, 1942

58 Mulberry Street

South East corner of First Street and the Bowery (and the same corner today in a desultory view from Google maps)

Charles Weever Cushman (1896–1972), dedicated amateur photographer, bequeathed approximately 14,500 Kodachrome color slides to his alma mater, Indiana University. The resulting Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection of the Indiana University Archives is a meticulously documented online repository (you can read the grant proposal, peruse online scans of Cushman's notebooks, find out about Charles, or read about the color restoration process).

Amassed by Cushman during a thirty-two year period from 1938 to 1969, the slides document a dizzying array of subjects, in part: fires, floods, train wrecks, train yards, harbors, street vendors, street scenes, churches, synagogues, saloons, advertisements, the steel industry, mining, ghost towns, farms, urban slums, mule auctions, and the filming of B movies. What particularly interested me were the shots of New York, many of which are from the early forties. Nearly all the images are preserved in uncanny, vivid color.

 

Kodachrome, the first modern color film, was introduced in 35mm still camera format in 1936. It reproduced a more natural color than earlier color processes, and nothing like it in photography had been seen before. Revolutionary as it was, Kodachrome would not come into popular use until after World War II. Cushman, however, began shooting with Kodachrome as early as 1938. In 1938 there were still Civil War veterans alive. In the 1942 of the Pearl Street image at top, the nineteenth century was only as distant in time as the Summer of Love (1967) is to us. It was still hanging on—in buildings not yet cleared by urban redevelopment, in horse-drawn work carts—and Cushman captured it's last shadows in color.
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ADDENDUM  I've come across Dino's NYC in which the author seeks to update the Charles Cushman views of New York (there are only 150 or so)! He's got some great information about the Pearl Street image in particular and it's definitely worth a visit. Be prepared, though, that it's a dirge-like procession of former streetscapes— however trash-strewn or gritty— turned to parking lots, off-ramps and highrises.

In an old post I featured this detail of a 1912 photograph of Elizabeth Street, which I colorized in Photoshop. I think one reason the past becomes so foreign, so removed, is that we so often see it in black and white. As if the past were a different dimension. The Past: some time disconnected from my existence. The monochrome abstracts the subject, creates an artistic chiaroscuro— but leaches the immediacy from the scene. How I wish I could see the nineteenth century in full color!

That Gummy Epileptic! What a coffee-mill!

Emilie Marie Bouchaud was born May 14, 1874, in Algiers (though "of pure French stock" she was quick to add). Arriving in Paris about 1890, she styled herself Polaire and became a cabaret and stage sensation. Noted for her skittish energy and frenetic performances, she was given the nickname "la gommeuse épileptique." Google Translate renders it rather comically as "the gummy epileptic." (I'll assume we're losing a lot in English*...descriptive idioms turned hilarious crazy-talk in literal translation.) We read by way of explanation:

the gummy epileptic, she throws her head back, moving from one foot to another with clenched fists in song recitals with mocking words ... By her own admission, her feet are dancing alone in her shoes!

A petite 5 foot 3, she was celebrated for her tightly corseted wasp waist—ostensibly fourteen inches (although many promotional images seem to be retouched to alarming extremes). Decadent poet, novelist and dandy Jean Lorain evokes her mesmerizing performance as equal parts Orientalist seductress and fearsome whirling Dervish:

Polaire! The agitating and agitated Polaire! The tiny slip of a woman that you know, with the waist slender to the point of pain, of screaming out loud, of breaking in two...the phosphorus, the sulphur, the red pepper of that ghoulish, Salome-like face, the agitating and agitated Polaire!
What a devilish mimic, what a coffee-mill and what a belly-dancer! Yellow skirt tucked high, gloved in open-work stockings, Polaire skips, flutters, wriggles, arches from the hips, the back, the belly, mimes every kind of shock, twists, coils, rears, twirls... trembling like a stuck wasp, miaows, faints to what music and what words! The house, frozen with stupor, forgets to applaud.

What was performed on the stage in Paris of 1900 evidently took some time to get to America. Ten years later, after bubbling up from brothels and low dance halls, the "young set" of this country went "dance mad." (See an earlier post about the Grizzly Bear, Bunny Hug and the Turkey Trot)

Sheet music, drawing by C. Lavigne, 1900
M. DuFleuve, listed top right, is her brother
Picture from Polaire 1900

I'd love to get the back-story of this "Zippy the Pinhead" look. The intentionally grotesque character is fascinating for such a beautiful performer. Picture from Polaire 1900

My favorite image (above)— so vibrant, so kooky
Picture from Polaire 1900

postcard by Nadar, 1900
(the retouched photographer's stand, to help the subject keep still for the exposure, can still plainly be seen behind her legs) Picture from Polaire 1900

"the Female Torpedo" by Charles Leandre Picture from Polaire 1900

poster by Toulouse Lautrec, 1895. This seems to be her "gummy epileptic" dance!

Picture from Polaire 1900

Polaire was touted as having a 14-inch waist, though many of her publicity images (including this one) are noticeably retouched

As with a good many French performers, Polaire did not age well. She died in 1939.

Image above of Polaire (only) from Polaire 1900

Why is it that so many French women of a certain age seemed to shrivel into little hobgoblins? In later life, each appeared to have been issued a perennially dyspeptic expression, a slash of drawn-on brow, and an aureole of frazzled cotton-candy hair (often an unnatural shade of orange --see Jean-Claude Christo, and Sonia Rykiel).

* Michael Leddy tells me gommeuse may be "fop"—any French readers out there with additional information?

Images of Polaire are drawn from these very comprehensive French sites.

Connecticut sketches

For a brief moment I thought perhaps I should write a post about the new UK Space Agency logo or some other topical, relevant subject I've pondered recently. But then almost nothing of what I've written on this blog has ever bowed to the dictates of timeliness or relevance, so why start now. And so:

C O N N E C T I C U T

Historical Collections,

containing a

General Collection of Interesting Facts, Traditions,

Biographical Sketches, Anecdotes, &c.

Relating to the

History and Antiquities

of Every Town in Connecticut,

with

Geographical Descriptions.

Illustrated by 190 Engravings.

by John Warner Barber.
 second edition.
New Haven:
Published by Durrie & Peck and J.W. Barber,Price: three dollars. *
1838 

I purchased this book for a few dollars at a local flea market not too long ago. It was gratifyingly cheap because the condition is so poor— the cover has fallen off, the fold out map is barely tethered to the spine, and virtually all the pages have foxing or are totally discolored. But every page is intact, including one at front with an inscription in brown ink ("H. P. Havens/ bo't 28 March 1838). I like the heft of the book, the substantial rustle of its 550+ cottony pages, the dark whorls of its marbled end papers. 

The numerous little engravings are of a piece: restrained, bucolic, charmingly naive. Within this engraver's earnest but narrow visual repertoire, most every town in Connecticut looks like another: white steepled churches and a few plain buildings set amidst gently rolling hills, enlivened, now and then by a coach, or a chimney belching smoke, that curious 19th century conceit that signals prosperity and purposeful diligence.

Content is a hodgepodge of pedantic identification ["South view of Fair Haven (western part.)"], colorful local lore (there's a surprisingly empathetic Indian presence), liberal use of extracts from old newspapers and town records on a seemingly random array of subjects, and curiously, transcriptions of epitaphs "copied from the monuments" in local burying grounds. This last practice appears to be de rigeur for the author, Mr. JW Barber, for imparting to his readers the true essence of each town: past highlights, if you will. An inscription found in Tolland:

Cap't Amos Fellows was captivated [sic] by ye British troops on ye Island of New York, Sept. 15, 1776, and was closely confined for several months, and there suffered repeated hardships, probably insupportable, died in captivity Feb. 16, 1777, in ye 48th year of his age. His remains are there still, and that his memory may be perpetuated, this monument is here erected by his son. A tribute of a tear is due to him who in his country's cause has lost his life.

Here's one for Molly, a young woman who died in 1792, aged 24:

Molly, tho' pleasant in her day,
was sudd'nly seiz'd and sent away.
How soon she's ripe, how soon she's rotten,
Laid in the grave and soon forgott'n.

Mr. Barber comments on the "rather unrefined" sentiment in that one.

Our author/narrator/tour guide compiled and edited this text in 1837, long ago in our past, but it isn't the 1830s that we learn much about— it's the people of his past that come most clearly into view. Barber relates or reprints many a stirring episode from the Revolution or from Colonial days, and a good number of odd and dramatic local anecdotes of fifty or a hundred years previous. When he returns to his own time, his narrative powers fail him and we're more likely to hear about the height of high tide or the situation of the local quarry.  

In Wethersfield we learn in detail about the tragic Beadle family murder-suicide: mother and five children "consigned over to better hands" by the father, who was "impatient to visit his God."
 
In Ridgefield we get the sad back story of Sarah Bishop, hermitess:

Her father's house was burnt by the British, and she was cruelly treated by a British officer. She then left society and wandered among the mountains near this part of the state, where she found a kind of cave near Ridgefield, where she resided till about the time of her death, which took place in 1810. She sometimes came down to Ridgefield to attend public worship on the Sabbath. It is said that the wild animals were so accustomed to see her, that they were not afraid of her presence. The following account of a visit to this hermitess, is taken from a newspaper printed at Poughkeepsie, in 1804. "She was without form. Her dress appeared little else than one confused and shapeless mass of rags, patched together without any order, which obscured all human shape, excepting her head, which was clothed with a luxuriancy of lank grey hair depending on every side, as she had formed it, without any covering or ornament. When she discovered our approach, she exhibited the appearance of a wild and timid animal, she started and hastened to her cave, which she entered, and barricadoed the entrance..."

Among the many extracts from old newspapers are several advertisements in this vein, reprinted without comment from the author :

Litchfield, Oct. 6, 1761.
Notice is hereby given, that there is now in Litchfield gaol, a mulatto fellow who calls himself Caesar Sambo, about 5 foot 10 speaks good English, well made, sprightly, about 25 years of age: says he is free... he was traveling without a pass...

A Likely Negro Wench and Child to be sold. — Inquire of the Printer. To be sold by the subscriber, of Branford, a likely Negro Wench, 18 years of age, is acquainted with all sorts of House Work; is sold for no fault. June 15, 1763.

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*In 1838, this book cost $3 (or about $71 in today's money according to this site). I paid not too much more than the original price.