text:
Accuracy and Elegance in Cheselden’s Osteographia (1733)

By Monique Kornell
August 22, 2011

With its novel vignettes and its use of a camera obscura in the production of the plates, William Cheselden’s Osteographia, is recognized as a landmark in the history of anatomical illustration. Monique Kornell looks at its unique blend of accuracy and elegance.

A lavishly illustrated and particularly elegant book of human and comparative osteology in large folio size, Osteographia, or the Anatomy of the Bones, was published in London in 1733 by William Cheselden (1688-1752). However highly it is esteemed today, it was a financial failure for its author, unlike his earlier, less expensive and more general work, The Anatomy of the Human Body (1713), which went through numerous editions.
Cheselden, a successful surgeon based in London, first won fame for his perfection of the lateral method of lithotomy, or “cutting for the stone”.  At the time of publication of the Osteographia, he was already well established in his career. Surgeon to Queen Caroline, to whom the book is dedicated, he was also a Fellow of the Royal Society, surgeon at St. Thomas’s hospital and the first foreign member of the newly founded Royal Academy of Surgery in Paris.
Work was under way for the Osteographia already by 1726 when Cheselden states in the preface to the Anatomy of the Human Body that he would have replaced illustrations from the first edition:
if I had not been so much engaged about an Osteology in which every plate is twenty one inches long, and fifteen broad. All the bones will be done so large as the life, and the bones of the limbs and trunk, with sceletons as large as the plates will admit of; And besides these there will be some plates of the cartilages, ligaments and diseased bones; and every chapter will have a distinct head-piece and tail-piece, which will be chiefly made of the sceletons of different animals.
The Osteographia eventually appeared in 1733 with a double set of plates, 56 lettered and 56 unlettered, “to shew them in their full beauty” (ch. 8). Part of the delay was that the initial drawings for the plates were abandoned when Cheselden, in his desire for the greatest accuracy in the rendering of the skeleton, had his artists, Gerard Vandergucht and Jacob Schijnvoet, employ a camera obscura, the use of which is illustrated in a vignette on the title page. As described in chapter VIII, the artist drew upon a roughened glass set six inches inside; a sliding lens allowed him to adjust the scale. The resulting image was then traced on to paper. Many of the preparatory drawings survive in the collection of the Royal Academy, London.
In the production of the plates, Cheselden took a markedly active role. He chose the poses for the skeletons and oversaw each stage of the production, stepping in when necessary to correct both drawings and plates: “where particular parts needed to be more distinctly expressed on account of the anatomy, there I always directed; sometimes in the drawings with the pencil, and often with the needle upon the copper plate.” Cheselden was also attuned to the different effects that could be brought about in the engraving, and he comments that the use of unhatched, single lines to evoke the smoothness of the ends of the bones “was also my contriving”. Cheselden’s close involvement in making the plates and his desire for accuracy through mechanical means, as well as in the great expense incurred, parallel the contemporaneous efforts of the Dutch anatomist, Bernhard Siegfried Albinus, who had his artist, Jan Wandelaar, view anatomical preparations through a grid system of ropes.
An early influence upon Cheselden’s attention to illustration was the surgeon and anatomist William Cowper, with whom Cheselden resided while studying anatomy. Cowper was also a remarkable draftsman and provided illustrations for his own works and those of others. Cheselden then attended the first St Martin’s Lane Academy of Art in 1720 and would himself later contribute accomplished plates for his addendum to the translation of Le Dran’s Operations in Surgery (London 1749).
Much of the charm of the Osteographia lies with the vignettes of the animal skeletons, which are frequently depicted in lifelike poses. A cat with an arched back is startled by a dog; a young, antlered deer stops suddenly and turns to the viewer; a crane picks up a fish with its beak, yielding the conceit of a skeleton bird seeking nourishment from the bones of a fish. Cheselden’s comment concerning the skeleton of a bear indicates the care he took in the poses of the animal skeletons: “This skeleton being put together with stiff wires, I could not alter it into a properer posture” (ch. VIII).  The pose of the chameleon skeleton, set on a branch with its tail wrapped around a twig, seen at the head of the fifth chapter, was adapted from an illustration first published by Charles Perrault in 1669.
The inventiveness seen in the vignettes is likewise found in the decorated initials and the plates of entire human skeletons. Inspired by the meditative skeletons of Vesalius, Cheselden offers a lateral view of a skeleton kneeling in prayer (Tab. XXXVI), the pose chosen in order “to represent the figure in a larger scale.” In the Anatomy of the Human Body of 1740, the figure has been adapted for Tab. X and is shown with his arms tied behind his back.
The influence of Vesalius is also evident in the low-set Italianate landscape seen in some of the full-size skeleton plates, such as Tab. XXXII. Here the viewpoint manages to confer a monumental sense of scale to the skeleton of a year-and-a-half-old child, who is shown walking toward the viewer while brandishing an adult humerus. This bone serves as a comparison of scale but fails, nevertheless, to dwarf the skeleton in any way. The print that follows offers a comparison of scale and of species as well, as a skeleton of a boy of nine years is seen leaning against the skull of a horse, almost half his height. The frontal views of a male and a female skeletons are both after classical statues, the Apollo Belvedere and the Medici Venus. Cheselden has altered the pose of the latter, turning her head and placing her left arm out to the side rather than in the original “pudica” position, thus allowing for a better view of the pelvic bones.
In addition to developmental plates of the bones, there are several excellent plates with cross-sections of the bones and depicting cartilages and ligaments. The seventh chapter and the last nine plates of the book are devoted to diseased bones, dealing with cases from Cheselden’s own practice and those of his colleagues.  The preparation of the bones of the left arm, showing a congenital ankylosis of the elbow joint, which was sent to Cheselden by “Mr Goodwin” and survives today in the Hunterian Museum, London, is depicted in Tab. LXV, fig. 2. The fused “crooked skeleton” of Tab. XLIII is described as having been “dug out of a grave”.
In the Osteographia as well as in his other works, Cheselden favored a reliance on the image for elucidation rather than lengthy description: “I thought it useless to make long descriptions, one view of such prints shewing more than the fullest and best description can possibly do” (Address to the Reader). For example, in discussing the intricate bones of the foot he concludes the fifth chapter by saying that “for what remains see the plate, which makes a farther description needless”. The brevity of the text is certainly one valid criticism of the many made by John Douglas, a rival lithotomist, in his querulous pamphlet, Animadversions on a late pompous book, intituled, Osteographia . . . by William Cheselden (London 1735). Curiously, his brother James Douglas, the anatomist and physician, was a valued friend and collaborator of Cheselden’s.
The brevity of the text, the decorative vignettes and the luxurious production of the Osteographia was aimed at attracting a wealthy, general audience for the book. It is for this same potential market that Cheselden had earlier designed a course of anatomy, given with Francis Hawksbee, which was advertised in The Daily Courant of 21 March 1721 as, “chiefly intended for Gentlemen, Such Things only will be omitted as are neither Instructive nor Entertaining and Care will be taken to have nothing Offensive.”
From an advertisement in Cheselden’s Anatomy of 1740, we learn that only 97 of the 300 copies of the Osteographia printed had been sold. In an attempt to recoup his expenses, 83 of the remaining copies were cut apart so that the prints could be sold separately. In addition, 100 prints had been struck for a projected Latin or French edition. Some of these were used for an undated edition of the unlettered plates, issued without the text.
The plates of the Osteographia are magnificent and worthy of their fame. They are of a far finer quality than the crude depictions of skeletons, originally made for James Douglas, that appeared in Cheselden’s first edition of his Anatomy of 1713. Cheselden’s original plan, laid out in To the Reader, was for a three-volume work on human anatomy, all similarly decorated with plates of comparative anatomy.  It is regrettable that the Osteographia did not meet with the financial success necessary to allow the completion of the project.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Monique Kornell


text:
Bugs and Beasts Before the Law

By Nicholas Humphrey
March 27, 2011

Murderous pigs sent to the gallows, sparrows prosecuted for chattering in church, a gang of thieving rats let off on a wholly technical acquittal -  theoretical psychologist and author Nicholas Humphrey* explores the strange world of medieval animal trials.

On March 5, 1986, some villagers near Malacca in Malaysia beat to death a dog, which they believed was one of a gang of thieves who transform themselves into animals to carry out their crimes. The story was reported on the front page of the London Financial Times. “When a dog bites a man,” it is said, “that’s not news; but when a man bites a dog, that is news”.
Such stories, however, are apparently not news for very long. Indeed the most extraordinary examples of people taking retribution against animals seem to have been almost totally forgotten. A few years ago I lighted on a book, first published in 1906, with the surprising title The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals by E.P.Evans, author of Animal Symbolism in Ecclesiastical Architecture, Bugs and Beasts before the Law, etc., etc. The frontispiece showed an engraving of a pig, dressed up in a jacket and breeches, being strung up on a gallows in the market square of a town in Normandy in 1386; the pig had been formally tried and convicted of murder by the local court. When I borrowed the book from the Cambridge University Library, I showed this picture of the pig to the librarian. “Is it a joke?”, she asked.
No, it was not a joke. All over Europe, throughout the middle-ages and right on into the 19th century, animals were, as it turns out, tried for human crimes. Dogs, pigs, cows, rats and even flies and caterpillars were arraigned in court on charges ranging from murder to obscenity. The trials were conducted with full ceremony: evidence was heard on both sides, witnesses were called, and in many cases the accused animal was granted a form of legal aid -- a lawyer being appointed at the tax-payer’s expense to conduct the animal’s defence.
In 1494, for example, near Clermont in France a young pig was arrested for having “strangled and defaced a child in its cradle”. Several witnesses were examined, who testified that “on the morning of Easter Day, the infant being left alone in its cradle, the said pig entered during the said time the said house and disfigured and ate the face and neck of the said child . . . which in consequence departed this life.” Having weighed up the evidence and found no extenuating circumstances, the judge gave sentence:
We, in detestation and horror of the said crime, and to the end that an example may be made and justice maintained, have said, judged, sentenced, pronounced and appointed that the said porker, now detained as a prisoner and confined in the said abbey, shall be by the master of high works hanged and strangled on a gibbet of wood.
Evans’ book details more than two hundred such cases: sparrows being prosecuted for chattering in Church, a pig executed for stealing a communion wafer, a cock burnt at the stake for laying an egg. As I read my eyes grew wider and wider. Why did no one tell us this at school? Why were we taught so many dreary facts of history at school, and not  taught these?
We all know how King Canute attempted to stay the tide  at Lambeth; but who has heard, for example, of the solemn threats made against the tides of locusts which threatened to engulf the countryside of France and Italy? The Pied Piper, who charmed the rats from Hamelin is a part of legend; but who has heard of Bartholomew Chassenée, a French jurist of the sixteenth century, who made his reputation at the bar as the defence counsel for some rats? The rats had been put on trial in the ecclesiastical court on the charge of having “feloniously eaten up and wantonly destroyed” the local barley. When the culprits did not in fact turn up in court on the appointed day, Chassenée made use of all his legal cunning to excuse them. They had, he urged in the first place, probably not received the summons since they moved from village to village; but even if they had received it they were probably too frightened to obey, since as everyone knew they were in danger of being set on by their mortal enemies the cats. On this point Chassenée addressed the court at some length, in order to show that if a person be cited to appear at a place to which he cannot come in safety, he may legally refuse. The judge, recognising the justice of this claim, but being unable to persuade the villagers to keep their cats indoors, was obliged to let the matter drop.
For an animal found guilty, the penalty was dire. The Normandy pig, depicted in the frontispiece of the Evans book, was charged with having torn the face and arms of a baby in its cradle. The pig was sentenced to be “mangled and maimed in the head forelegs”, and then — dressed up in a jacket and breeches — to be hung from a gallows in the market square.
But, as we have seen with Chassenée’s rats, the outcome of these trials was not inevitable. In doubtful cases the courts appear in general to have been lenient, on the principle of “innocent until proved guilty beyond reasonable doubt”. In 1587, a gang of weevils, accused of damaging a vineyard, were deemed to have been exercising their natural rights to eat — and, in compensation, were granted a vineyard of their own. In 1457 a sow was convicted of murder and sentenced to be “hanged by the hind feet from a gallows tree”. Her six piglets, being found stained with blood, were included in the indictment as accomplices. But no evidence was offered against them, and on account of their tender age they were acquitted. In 1750 a man and a she-ass were taken together in an act of buggery. The prosecution asked for the death sentence for both of them. After due process of law the man was sentenced, but the animal was let off on the ground that she was the victim of violence and had not participated in her master’s crime of her own free-will. The local priest gave evidence that he had known the said she-ass for four years, that she had always shown herself to be virtuous and well-behaved, that she had never given occasion of scandal to anyone, and that therefore he was “willing to bear witness that she is in word and deed and in all her habits of life a most honest creature.”
What was the purpose of these lengthy and extravagant procedures? A desire for revenge cannot have been the only motive. Evans cites cases of inanimate objects being brought before the law. In Greece, a statue that fell on a man was charged with murder and sentenced to be thrown into the sea; in Russia, a bell that peeled too gleefully on the occasion of the assassination of a prince was charged with treason and exiled to Siberia.
The protection of society cannot have been the only motive either. Evans tells of the bodies of criminals, already dead, being brought to trial. Pope Stephen VI, on his accession in 896, accused his predecessor, Formosus, of sacrilegiously bringing the papal office into disrepute. The body of the dead pope was exhumed, dressed in the pontifical robes and set up on a throne in St. Peter’s, where a deacon was appointed to defend him. When the verdict of guilty was pronounced, the executioner thrust Formosus from the throne, stripped him of his robes, cut off the three benedictory fingers of his right hand and threw his body “as a pestilential thing” into the Tiber.
Taken together, Evans’ cases suggest that again and again, the true purpose of the trials was psychological. People were living at times of deep uncertainty. Both the Greeks and medieval Europeans had in common a deep fear of lawlessness: not so much fear of laws being contravened, as the much worse fear that the world they lived in might not be a lawful place at all. A statue fell on a man out of the blue, a pig killed a baby while its mother was at mass, swarms of locusts appeared from nowhere and devastated the crops, the Holy See was becoming riddled with corruption. At first sight such misfortunes can have appeared to have no rhyme or reason to them. To an extent that we today cannot find easy to conceive, these people of the pre-scientific era lived every day at the edge of explanatory darkness. No wonder if, like Einstein in the twentieth century, they were terrified of the real possibility that “God was playing dice with the universe”.
The same anxiety has indeed continued to pervade more modern minds. Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, having declared that “Everything is permitted”, concluded that were his thesis to be generally acknowledged “every living force on which all life depends would dry up at once”. Alexander Pope claimed that “order is heaven’s first law”. And Yeats drew a grim picture of a lawless world:
Turning and turning in the widening gyreThe falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
Yet the natural universe, lawful as it may in fact have always been, was never in all respects self-evidently lawful. And people’s need to believe that it was so, their faith in determinism, that everything was not permitted, that the centre did hold, had to be continually confirmed by the success of their attempts at explanation.
So the law courts, on behalf of society, took matters into their own hands. Just as today, when things are unexplained, we expect the institutions of science to put the facts on trial, one can see the whole purpose of the legal actions as being to establish cognitive control. In other words, the job of the courts was to domesticate chaos, to impose order on a world of accidents -- and specifically to make sense of certain seemingly inexplicable events by redefining them as crimes.
I read some years ago another report in a London newspaper:
A jilted woman who attempted suicide by leaping from a 12th floor window but landed on and killed a street salesman has been charged with manslaughter. Prosecutors in Taipei, Taiwan said 21-year-old Ho Yu-Mei was responsible for the death of the food salesman because she failed to make sure that there was no one below when she jumped. Ho had argued that she thought the man would have moved away by the time she hit the ground. She also said she had threatened earlier to sue the salesman because “he interfered” with her freedom to take her own life. If convicted, Ho could be imprisoned for two years.
Who says that the medieval obsession with responsibility has gone away?
But it was with dogs as criminals I began, and with dogs as criminals I’ll end. A story in The Times some years ago told how a dead dog had been thrown by an unknown hand from the roof of a sky-scraper in Johannesburg, had landed on a man and flattened him -- the said man having in consequence departed this life. The headline read -- oh, how un-newsworthy! -- DOG KILLS MAN. I wonder what Chassenée or E.P.Evans would have made of that.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Nicholas Humphre

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
Love and Longing in the Seaweed Album

By Sasha Archibald
March 9, 2022

Combing across 19th-century shores, seaweed collectors would wander for hours, tucking specimens into pouches and jars, before pasting their finds into artful albums. Sasha Archibald explores the eros contained in the pressed and illustrated pages of notable algologists, including “the most ambitious album of all” by Charles F. Durant.

I love the sea as my soul. Often, it even seems to me that the sea really is my soul.1—Heinrich Heine, 1826
The soul of a man is of the same texture as the [seaweed] polypus.2—George Eliot, 1856
Seaweed’s appeal may not be immediately obvious. It comes to beauty by way of strangeness. The texture is uncouth and the shapes irregular; the reference to “weed” does it no favors. Seaweed’s core self proves elusive. Some varieties are delicate, filmy, and slick, and others dense and meaty, prone to intractable knots. I’ve used seaweed as a jumping rope, but I’ve also liquified tendrils with a forefinger’s stroke.
Nowadays, the plant begs respect for its utility. Seaweed prevents oceanic erosion, we are told, and nurtures biodiversity. It’s a nutritious edible that can be cultivated with a light ecological footprint. Most impressively, marine forests are far more efficient than land-based forests at absorbing atmospheric CO2. Seaweed has become commonplace: a children’s snack, a type of massage, an ingredient in face lotion, shampoo, and Bloody Marys. Seaweed deserves our attention, the argument goes, because it is so tremendously useful.
Naturalists of the nineteenth century took a different angle. Although they understood that seaweed “conferred a positive benefit on the atmosphere”, its appeal was precisely its lack of utility.3 The same word that described seaweed on shore — “rejectamenta” — also described anything more generally considered detritus. Seaweed seemed to be a weird, surplus embellishment that existed for no particular purpose except to express the wonders of the deep ocean. When the preeminent algae scholar William H. Harvey decided at age fifteen to devote his life to algology, it was the same as if he’d pledged allegiance to profitless esotericism. He wrote his former teacher that he intended “to study my favourite and useless class, Cryptogamia. I think I hear thee say, Tut-tut! But no matter. To be useless, various, and abstruse, is a sufficient recommendation of a science to make it pleasing to me.”4 No other field of study was so delightfully feckless.
Interest in the plant signaled refinement. Flowers were the Victorian middle-class obsession, but those of greater discernment favored seaweed. The exclusive fabric designer William Kilburn led the way by printing muslin chintz with a seaweed pattern in the 1790s, and his client, Queen Charlotte, showed her exquisite taste in wearing the fabric to a ball.5 Eighteenth and nineteenth-century seaweed enthusiasts were a motley bunch, but their cultural tastes were consistently out of the ordinary. Harvey, for instance, was very fond of his pet ostrich; other seaweed fans obsessed over butterfly genitalia, paper adverts, beetles, and ballooning.6 Such men took pride in nonconformity. The author of the first American book on seaweed, Charles F. Durant, fit this type exactly: brilliant and cavalier, an intellectually-restless iconoclast. Durant and his ilk embraced seaweed as the niche preference, the obscure art film to the cineplex blockbuster.
The most avid fans became collectors. A serious seaweed habit required canvassing miles of shoreline, tracking the ground for hours at a time, stooping occasionally to clip a specimen and tuck it inside a leather pouch or glass jar. Collectors tended to work in damp solitude. The best time to go out, advised nineteenth-century how-to guides, was after a storm. Wind and waves churn the compost on the ocean floor, uprooting deep-water plants and spitting them onto sandbanks a dozen miles away.7 A disheveled beach might be laden with treasures, chief among them fibrous bits of jewel-like red seaweed. Seaweed was then organized by color; the three types correlated to hue. There was the “grass green” Chlorospermae, the “olivaceous” Melanospermae, and the “red” Rhodospermae.8 This last class, which included violet, copper, and persimmon-orange varieties, was arguably the most beautiful, and the most elusive.
Like any physical exercise, collecting seaweed cleared the head and strengthened the body. “Many a head-ache, and a heart-ache too, would be relieved if its owner could be brought to feel an interest in the shells or seaweeds which are strewed on the beach”, reflected one collector.9 These therapeutic effects seem to have been especially pronounced for women. Margaret Gatty, for instance, a celebrated children’s book author and exhausted mother of seven, was advised to take up seaweed collecting to restore her vim. She dedicated fourteen years to British Sea-Weeds (1863), which remained a standard text of classification into the twentieth century. Her devotion to seaweed is indisputable, but it’s Gatty’s pleasure in shedding the constraints of femininity that shines off the page: “to walk where you are walking, makes you feel free, bold, joyous, monarch of all you survey, untrammeled, at ease, at home!”10 She praises seaweed hunting as the best excuse a woman has for “imitating the costume of a man” — petticoats were impractical for clambering over rocks and kneeling in tide pools — and addresses her readers throughout as her “sisterhood”.11 At least one literary historian speculates that it was the summer collecting seaweed in 1856 that gave George Eliot the courage and presence of mind to try her hand at writing fiction.12
Seaweed collectors worked to many different ends. Specimens were used as the subject of ink drawings, watercolor paintings, and a variety of early photography techniques. Anna Atkins produced cyanotypes in which the seaweed appears as a white silhouette against a page of cornflower blue, and the botanical illustrator Alois Auer pioneered a method of nature prints that worked exceptionally well with seaweed. (The specimen was pressed between soft lead and steel to create an impression carefully filled with colored ink.13) For many collectors, however, representations did not suffice. They sought to preserve the tactility of the original, so that rather than paint or draw or photograph their seaweed, they kept it as it was, pressing it between pages of paper to be later bound into a book: a seaweed album.
Seaweed destined for an album was typically washed of sand, floated in water to resurrect its buoyancy, and then captured by a thick piece of paper skimmed underneath. While still moist, the seaweed fronds could be adjusted, gingerly, with a camel hair brush or porcupine quill. An especially fastidious collector might coax various specimens into tableaus — wreaths or bouquets or monograms — that were called “marine paintings”. All wet seaweed has some amount of mucilage, so that many varieties stuck to paper with no aid at all. Others needed a bit of glue, typically made of fish gelatin. A seaweed that refused to lie flat was fastened down with fiddly paper tabs.
Making a seaweed album was a fairly common Victorian pastime. The same sort of person who collected shells or ferns, or outfitted a home aquarium, might purchase a kit of preprinted paper that would help her assemble a seaweed book. Queen Victoria is said to have made a seaweed album as a young girl, presenting it as a gift to the Queen of Portugal. Albums were exchanged amongst tweens, gifted to grandchildren, or donated, like a quilt or a pie, to a charity auction. One collector sold albums to buy blankets for the poor in her parish, and another to raise money for wounded soldiers.14
The more intellectually-inclined hobbyists adapted the conventions of the seaweed album to scholarly purposes. They often attempted a comprehensive collection of a distinct geographical area, for instance, and rather than pasting in seaweed willy-nilly, they arranged their specimens systematically. They noted where and when each vegetative scrap was found, provided labels that followed scientific nomenclature, and included ponderous introductions that make reference to seaweed scholarship. These hobbyists were in the habit of sending long, detailed queries to Dr. Harvey at Trinity College Dublin, with samples of their most unusual finds. (The gatekeepers of academic botany were usually apprehensive about feminine incursions, but Harvey was warm and welcoming.)
Nineteenth-century seaweed albums have a baked-in melancholy. Despite the best intentions, they do not flatter seaweed. The samples are brittle where the plant was pliant, opaque when once translucent, flaccid where previously ballooned. The displacement from sea to paper steals a measure of the plants’ integrity, and time leaches away the rest. In every respect, the wonders of seaweed have fled the book. And yet, these albums still speak — not of seaweed exactly, but of the collector’s care and devotion. There is a particular kind of eros that thrums between a receptive human and the natural world; the contours and depth of this eros is the true subject of a seaweed album.
The best example of seaweed love is the most ambitious album of all: Durant’s opulent Algology: Algae and Corallines of the Bay and Harbor of New York. Published in 1850, it aspires to be much more than a Victorian craft set piece. The covers are bound in Moroccan leather and intricately tooled with gold flourishes. Seaweed albums were typically one-offs, but Durant managed an edition of about fifteen, and grandly announced one hundred. In the most robust version of Algology, 293 specimens follow 46-pages of letterpress-printed text. There is a glossary with definitions of “lanceolate”, “pedicel”, “capitate”, and other fanciful words, and the samples themselves are numbered and artfully arranged. “As an example of bookmaking it is in a class by itself”, noted the Staten Island Association of Arts and Sciences.15 The book sold for $100, about half the cost of a new piano.
Unlike the typical seaweed collector, Durant was not a British woman but an American man, an inventor and scientist. Born in 1805, he seemed to assume, like many educated men of his era, that no aspect of the mechanical, physical, or natural world was beyond his ken. His biography is a litany of claims-to-fame.16 With a hot-air balloon ascent from Battery Park, New York in 1830, he made his name as the first American aeronaut, staying aloft for two hours in a balloon he’d sewn himself. His second ascent, in 1833, was attended by President Andrew Jackson and thousands of others, during which Durant dropped leaflets featuring his own ecstatic poetry. These poems, about the virtues of ballooning, seem to have been the world’s first instance of aerial propaganda. He was the first US manufacturer of silkworm gut, a filament used for fishing line, and his raw silk and cocoons took high awards. He turned his attention then to Mesmerism, a faddish belief in clairvoyant hypnosis that was sweeping the nation. After infiltrating Mesmerist circles by pretending to find the practice credible, he wrote one of the first anti-Mesmerism screeds to be published in America, in which he debunked the supposed science with great relish.17 After that book, Durant became interested in hydraulics. He maintained a year of technical correspondence with Ellis S. Chesbrough, chief engineer of Boston’s waterworks, and soon-to-be engineer of Chicago’s sewage system. Their letters were published as Hydraulics: On the Physical Laws that Govern Running Water (1849).
Durant’s turn toward seaweed seems at first counterintuitive. What internal logic connects hydraulics, ballooning, silkworms, and poetry with aquatic plants? I can only guess. Perhaps the difficulty of riding wind and channeling water prepared Durant to appreciate the grace of a plant that is rooted and yet in constant motion, a life form intensely subject to the vagaries of its environment, and yet also a freestanding marvel. Undoubtedly, Durant fell in love with seaweed. As evidence, there is the tender labeling, the rhapsodizing about the shoreline, the curlicue flourishes, the sumptuous crimson cover, the dreamy air of contentment that pervades the book’s introduction.
The key to Durant’s heart was the vastness of his subject. I imagine he began collecting with the assumption that he would learn and conquer and publish, as he had before. Instead, he was “admonished” by seaweed; his research served only to remind him, again and again, how partial his knowledge. Algology is a concession, and a surrender too. Durant seems to bow his head before the “unfathomable abyss” of his topic, which proves “too wide, too deep, too vast for perfect exploration”.18 Seaweed chastened his ego, and abasement made space for love.
Perhaps the most overt signal of Durant’s affection is his heretical suggestion that seaweed is an animal rather than a plant. He implies that the taxonomist Carl Linnaeus, responsible for the categorizing, was wrong, dryly noting that Linnaeus “resided at a very inconvenient distance from salt water”.19 Durant on the other hand, who has now spent “two thousand hours” in the company of seaweed, can attest that seaweed appears to have locomotion, a core characteristic of animals as Linnaeus defined them. Even more damning, however, is Durant’s opinion that seaweed feels pain. Durant describes how this discovery dawned on him: noticing that his fresh specimens tended to flatten and then crumple up and then flatten again in a cyclic pattern that ended with stillness, he recoiled, realizing with horror that these pulsating movements are in fact the “agonies of death”.20 Durant’s distress in this passage is palpable; he has unwittingly killed the object of his affection. The phonetic echo between “algology” and “apology” suddenly seems of great consequence.21
Reviewers claimed Durant’s Algology was the first work on seaweed ever published with actual specimens. This is not true. At least one book preceded Durant’s efforts, Mary Matilda Howard’s Ocean Flowers and their Teachings of 1846, which seems to climax with the frontispiece: a dainty seaweed cornucopia. Algology was, however, the first book on American seaweed. Durant’s collection centered on the shore of New Jersey, from which he lived “within ten minutes’ walk”, but also included specimens from Red Hook, Staten Island, Ellis Island, and the East River.22 The landscape of the New York Harbor was far less populous in 1850, and Algology mentions landmarks that have long since disappeared: a famous bathhouse in Lower Manhattan; a series of treacherous rocks that were soon blasted apart with dynamite; a floating chapel that serviced sailors. Durant’s bits of seaweed are souvenirs of a landscape gone extinct.
Although Durant gifted copies of Algology to various charity auctions, and a few ended up in venerable libraries, they seem to have been rarely consulted or referenced. When a Curator of Botany at the Central Museum of the Brooklyn Institute (now the Brooklyn Museum) found the book in the early twentieth century, he described it as “unrecorded and forgotten”.23 Later generations of seaweed scholars failed to note that Durant’s Algology contained several “types”, a designation for the first specimen of a plant found and labeled, and Durant was not given proper credit for his scholarship.
It may have just been bad timing. The very same year Durant published Algology, Harvey was invited by Harvard University to tour the United States. He gave many lectures and collected seaweed from Key West to Halifax. Shortly before his return, he was commissioned by the nascent Smithsonian to publish his findings. The resultant three-volume tome, Nereis Boreali-Americana or Contributions to a History of the Marine Algae of North America, became the definitive study of American seaweed.24 Unlike Durant’s valentine, it had no specimens and certainly no indication that a lovesick author had wrestled with moral and ethical questions about collecting the natural world. Algology was consigned to the nethermost regions of seaweed scholarship. In the end, it was nothing more or less than “a quaint old work on seaweeds”.25
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Sasha Archibald


text:
Laughter in the Time of Cholera

By Vlad Solomon
November 10, 2021

Political instability, popular unrest, and an impending pandemic? Welcome to France in the early 1830s. Vlad Solomon explores what made Parisiens laugh in a moment of crisis through the prism of a vaudeville play.

The year 1832 in France still conjures up images of rebellion and barricades thanks to the enduring pathos of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. For the real-life Parisians, however, who inspired the novel’s iconic characters, it was not only a year of lost causes, bloody street battles, and political disillusionment. It was also, in the parlance of our times, a “pandemic year” during which thousands — more than 18,000 in Paris; 100,000 across France1 — succumbed to a wave of cholera that had been causing havoc throughout Asia, Russia, and parts of East Central Europe since the 1820s. Although germ theory was still in its infancy at the time, people were quick to grasp the contagious nature of the disease and sought to speedily bury their dead as authorities scrambled desperately to meet the demands of an unprecedented public health crisis. A recent transplant to Paris, the German poet Heinrich Heine noted in a letter penned in mid-April 1832 — less than a month after the first recorded case of cholera in the French capital — the “disagreeable” sight of “great furniture wagons used for ‘moving’ now moving about as dead men’s omnibuses . . . going from house to house for fares and carrying them by dozens to the field of rest.”2
Parisians had been vaguely aware of the advancing wave of choléra-morbus, as the disease was then known, since at least 1830, when papers began regularly reporting on outbreaks in the Russian Empire’s eastern provinces.3 By early 1831, news of the ravages caused by the pandemic in Poland and East Prussia was already circulating by word of mouth in the capital. Legitimists (ultra-conservative supporters of the exiled Bourbon dynasty) imagined rootless political radicals spreading the disease with the same ease that they proselytised the “dangerous classes”, while the Church foresaw in the potential upheaval an “opportunity to renew its ties with a population that had shown itself unfaithful to the Catholic religion and the Bourbon dynasty”.4 Medical authorities, meanwhile, were certain that “the topographical situation of France is so advantageous that there is little to fear in this country from choléra-morbus or any other pestilential epidemic”.5
It is less certain what ordinary Parisians made of the alarming news, but those with money and time to spend on leisure turned to popular entertainment for comfort and comic relief. The early 1830s saw a spectacular resurgence of satire in France — the sort that could be both brilliant and crass, as the drawings of Honoré Daumier attest — but what is usually forgotten is that not all satire was printed for an exclusively reading public. Much was meant for the stage, particularly in 1831 when the July Monarchy’s promises of free speech did not yet ring entirely hollow.6 Only the previous year, French theatre had experienced one of the most tumultuous episodes in its venerable history with the so-called Battle of Hernani, a skirmish — at times quite physical — between the Romantic rebels congregated around Victor Hugo and the classicist fogeys who saw in Romanticism only the glorification of deformity and vulgarity.7 That was, however, the “serious” theatre of the Comédie Française which, generally speaking, only the educated bourgeoisie and aristocracy had any real interest in, as Hugo himself was forced to concede.8 A petit-bourgeois office clerk or shop assistant with no particular interest in the rarefied culture wars of the day — the sort that Balzac, and later Flaubert, caricatured without mercy — was much more likely to go for a one-act farce at one of Paris’ several vaudeville theatres.
Since the days of the French Revolution, vaudeville, a form of light theatre with roots in medieval minstrelsy, had both reflected and challenged the social and political upheavals of the day in ways that government figures usually found objectionable. In 1807, Napoleon reduced the number of Parisian theatres to just eight and while the regimes that followed the fall of the Empire proved slightly less persecutory at first, they too eventually introduced strict censorship laws.9 As a result of this stifling atmosphere, vaudeville writers (known as vaudevillistes) only ever managed to skirt the political arena for most of the nineteenth century and rarely came close to embodying an actual political consciousness. One unintended effect of this self-censorship was that vaudeville gradually increased both the scope and sharpness of its critique by refocusing its sights on society at large. If the folly of kings, emperors, prelates, and ministers could only be hinted at with a mischievous wink, the state of France itself (and Paris in particular) provided virtually unlimited fodder for the theatrical imagination.
As theatre historians have recently argued, the secret to vaudeville writers’ enduring success throughout the nineteenth century — a success that extended well beyond France10 — rested not on their literary talents, which were rarely substantial, but on their skill in employing “finely sketched . . . satirical portraits” to depict “the social and political idiosyncrasies” of their times.11 It was this skill in particular that enabled them to play a leading role in the “modern spectacular culture” that began taking shape in the Paris of the 1830s and 40s.12 Vaudevillistes were, mutatis mutandis, the sitcom screenwriters of their age, serving up the sort of light yet topical satire that simultaneously lampooned and affirmed the “performative dimensions” of social interaction, status seeking, and personal identity.13 Think Fawlty Towers punctuated by brief musical interludes.
Hundreds of vaudevilles inundated the stages of popular Parisian theatres throughout 1831, but one play stands out with its inventive use of emerging social panics as a springboard for an absurd yet trenchant critique of politics and culture. Entitled Les pilules dramatiques, ou le choléra-morbus (The dramatic pills, or the cholera), the play followed the time-honoured musical revue format in which a few humorous scenes are tied together by short comical songs. Its surreal and cleverly “meta” plot centres on personified versions of Paris’ most emblematic theatres as they check themselves into the sanatorium of a certain Dr Scarlatin, “médecin des théâtres” (theatre doctor), convinced they have contracted the cholera.14 Their condition, it gradually becomes apparent, is not the result of any infection or indeed curable by any doctor’s pilules since it derives solely from ressentiment and insecurity. The vaudeville theatres feel overshadowed by exclusive establishments like the Paris Opera and want to “rise above” their present condition while the more respectable theatres fear the end of censorship and the increased competition it promised to bring about. Adding to the confusion of the plot, some theatres are represented, purely for comedic effect, by abstract concepts like Illusion or by exaggerated versions of controversial historical characters such as Jacques Dupont, a brutal officer of the early Bourbon Restoration who still embodied the worst excesses of monarchical reaction.15
A dubious bourgeois named simply Bourgeois, who is introduced as a capitaliste looking to exchange “the Stock Market backstage for that of the theatre world”, attempts to sell life insurance to Dr Scarlatin, but only ends up giving unsolicited advice to the theatres, urging them to stick to the tried and tested “honest comedy” of former times.16 Spectators would have detected, in this ostensibly innocent piece of advice, an ironic commentary on the process of embourgeoisement that vaudeville had been undergoing for some years thanks to the incredibly prolific and successful dramatist Eugène Scribe (1791–1861). Scribe, whom Hugo despised as the epitome of crass commercialism and whose reputation rapidly waned following his death in 1861, had almost single-handedly managed to revolutionise vaudeville in the 1820s by shearing it of its atavistic carnivalesque excesses and forcing it into a corset of respectability — something which typically amounted to simple plots and minimal minstrelsy. Despite his shady past and insipid comments, Bourgeois is the only character who manages to make any sense, illustrating the ease with which vaudeville writers could simultaneously satirise and flatter their largely middle- and lower-middle-class audiences.
Doctor Scarlatin, whose name is tellingly reminiscent of a disease — scarlatine, French for scarlet fever — is naturally more than willing to offer his would-be patients medicine. The 1830s marked the dawn of a great age of réclame (advertisement) in France and spurious ads for all sorts of miracle drugs and vitality-restoring contraptions were becoming increasingly frequent in the popular press. “To cure all of your illusions, take my pills”, Scarlatin announces , but their effect is not the intended one.17
Having taken the miracle cure, the theatres go predictably “mad” and descend into an ever more cacophonous airing of grievances. They are momentarily brought to order by Monsieur Jovial, a well-known vaudeville character of the day,18 who assumes the title of Attorney General and stages a mock trial for “these dangerous theatres”. Declaring himself a “good doctrinaire” — a mocking reference to the Restoration-era moderate royalists who found themselves in power under the July Monarchy — Jovial sentences the offenders to “keep quiet when it comes to kings . . . bourgeois . . . lovers . . . mothers . . . and the deceased” and to “refrain from ridiculing the multitude”.19 While censorship was relatively lax by Restoration-era standards, the genuinely free press enshrined in the Charter of 1830 — the July Monarchy’s founding document — remained stubbornly elusive. Periodicals were still subject to security deposits and stamp duty and publishers (along with authors, editors, and vendors) could still face prosecution for writings or drawings deemed overtly libellous of the king and his government.20
The play’s stand-out scenes are undoubtedly the final two, during which the world itself abruptly comes to an end, pointing to the banalisation of an intense political disillusionment that was no longer the preserve of embittered republicans. Having just announced, “with pleasure”, that the world is about to be turned to ashes thanks to a comet set on a collision course with Earth, Dr Scarlatin joins the other characters in a jaunty danse macabre. More than an amusing plot twist,      the comet too reflected the stuff of everyday life. Biela’s Comet, first spotted in the 1770s and named after the German astronomer Wilhelm von Biela, who had demonstrated its periodicity in 1826, was widely rumoured at the time to return within a “worrying” distance of Earth in 1832.21 Some even openly prayed that it would finally make a clean sweep of all “earthly tyrants”.22
“The human race, starting tomorrow, will wake up in bed, quite dead!” the characters all sing, awaiting their own destruction while Monsieur Jovial excitedly proclaims “Oh! The machine is creaking!” In a time of cholera, the only remedy that can cure political anger (colère) and the social malaise of ressentiment — bringing peace to a society saturated with interminable conspiracies, rivalries, betrayals, and vendettas — is, it turns out, complete annihilation. Courtesans, bankers, rentiers, misers, and “old Crassuses” must all contend with the realization that all of their “cash will be turned to trash”.23
The show, however, always means to go on and, in a moment of proto-Dadaist absurdity, the comet itself is transformed into a character. This parodic version of the Final Judgement would likely not have passed muster with the censors earlier in the century (or after 1835, when censorship laws became much more stringent). The personified Comet — a flamboyant stand-in for all feared and imagined apocalypses, including the encroaching cholera — informs the other characters that no reprieve will be possible; everyone and everything must go and, in any case, “the end of the world is a rather curious spectacle that one can hardly be annoyed at having to witness at least once in life”.24 Not wishing to appear callous, however, the Comet demands its victims to elaborate on what anyone “down here” could possibly have to regret and, with this cue, the other characters break into one final song. Its lyrics neatly sum up the sources of national decadence as they would have been recognised by a theatre-going public of the 1830s:
The press has everywhere thrown off its quest for truth [a jeté ses lumières]And by its torches the whole world is bedazzledYour fathers were all subject to abject ignoranceBut you are all undone by an excess of knowledgeAll can be understood, all can be said, all is explained:All peoples, proud of having won their laws through struggle,Have used up every option, from monarchy to the republic,And rack their brains defining all their rights . . .You’ve seen your great men of the peopleFight battles in the cause of freedomOnly to then go begging for a sinecure [quêter des ministères]Like vagrants who search endlessly for alms.Your literature amounts to nothing nowHaving picked up all of romanticism’s errors,Its writings all reveal the face of Nature,Poor and decrepit, surrounded by great horrors.And if it’s love and its enchanted powersYou now seek with regret to call to mind,Trembling with fear before your politicians,All love, alas! has flown away into the yonder.Deists have finally found refuge in your midst,And now, as if to prove their power and his own,God, whom the Saint-Simonians25 would see dethroned,Destroys the world and owes you nothing more.
The Comet then turns to the audience and defiantly invites spectators to boo should they find the piece deserving of nothing else, “since the world is drawing to an end [anyway].” In fact, audiences loved it — “it is full of wit, honest malice . . . bitter criticism . . . and verve”, the critics announced26 — and it is easy to see why. Shady capitalists (a term which already carried strong connotations of unscrupulous speculation), out-of-touch thespians, self-seeking politicians, shameless quacks, decadent art, godless cabals, and a press consumed with selling copy while pretending to enlighten — all are lampooned with unusual frankness to the toe-tapping music of popular tunes.
If vaudeville’s preoccupation with imitation, competition, forgery, hypocrisy, and status consciousness appears slightly more politically charged than the brooding nostalgia of Romanticism, the navel-gazing of realism, or the austere moralizing of naturalism, it is, of course, not because vaudeville writers were any more perceptive or foresighted than their romantic, realist, or naturalist contemporaries. It is because vaudeville remained immanently focused on the “bourgeois” reality that more sophisticated and imaginative authors sought merely to excoriate, escape, or earnestly moralise on. As Alexandre Dumas fils noted in the preface to one of his vaudevillesque comedies, “We [playwrights] have nothing to invent, we have only to see, to feel and to restore, in a special form, that which all spectators must immediately recall having heard or seen without becoming aware of it until [they see it on stage].”27
Vaudeville writers who lacked Eugène Scribe’s commercial genius and influence were typically paid a pittance for their efforts and often worked in teams in order to maximise productivity and secure the patronage of theatre directors by having them appear as co-authors. It is no surprise then that the author of Les pilules dramatiques, identified only as “M. le docteur Mesenthère” (Doctor Mesentery) on the title page, was in fact four authors: Michel Masson, Claude-Louis-Marie de Rochefort, Ferdinand de Villeneuve, and Adolphe de Leuven. They were all veteran vaudevillistes well-versed in the difficult art of pandering to popular taste. While it is tempting to see in their one-act farce merely an amusing distraction for a nerve-racked public, beyond the surreal silliness and slapstick, the play’s vaguely “anti-system” message contained the inchoate essence of a pessimistic outlook that would mature later in the nineteenth century.
Although the relatively relaxed cultural atmosphere brought about by the July Monarchy did not survive for long, versions of the politically-charged motifs in Les pilules dramatiques found a home in many nineteenth-century vaudevilles, even in times when censors were able to indulge their zeal (such as during the authoritarian Second Empire). More importantly, these same tried-and-tested motifs provided a key ingredient in a new kind of political journalism that emerged in France in the mid-to-late-nineteenth century; a brash, violently worded, decadence-obsessed opinion journalism epitomised in the 1880s by the writings of populist pamphleteers like Édouard Drumont and Henri Rochefort. The former was a failed vaudevilliste28 who turned to a lifetime of colère against imagined Jewish cabals, while the latter was none other than Claude-Louis-Marie de Rochefort’s son and a successful vaudevilliste in his own right who used his theatrical reputation to launch a successful journalistic career in the mid-1860s.29
Despite reports of “nine hundred dead each day” being common in mid-1832, many Parisian theatres remained open as the cholera pandemic raged and even after the death (also from cholera) of Prime Minister Casimir Perier plunged the capital into political chaos.30 By early June the general disenchantment, which the authors of Les pilules dramatiques had made a literal song and dance about the previous year, exploded into a republican insurrection quickly and brutally suppressed by government troops and later immortalised in Les Misérables. “Few vaudevillistes”, noted Le Figaro a couple of weeks after the abortive revolt, “can escape the contagion of playing the opposition at the moment . . . such is the importance that is placed on a rhyme or a bit of wordplay [in the belief that they] can topple governments”.31
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: November 10, 2021

author: Vlad Solomon


text:
The Kept and the Killed

By Erica X Eisen
January 26, 2022

Of the 270,000 photographs commissioned by the US Farm Security Administration to document the Great Depression, more than a third were “killed”. Erica X Eisen examines the history behind this hole-punched archive and the unknowable void at its center.

The first killed negative I encounter is of a field. It’s a Carl Mydans shot, and a drought has reduced the land to a flat, cracked expanse out of which only a few tenacious scraggles of crabgrass have managed to sprout. Nothing notable here, no action, no grand geometries — except that the center of the negative has been pierced by a perfect circle, as though in counterpoint to the sprocket holes running along the photo’s edge. Briefly I imagine that this circle is what has doomed the land, a well into which all the precious waters must have run. Months after coming across the photograph, it is that void, more than any peripheral scenery, which remains anchored in my memory — that and the caption describing the picture as “killed”.
Begun as part of the alphabet soup of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal policies, the Farm Security Administration (FSA), under the aegis of which Mydans’ ill-fated photo was taken, had been tasked with resettling struggling farmers onto more fertile ground, providing education about agricultural science, and giving loans for the purchase of land, feed, and livestock. Arguably its most enduring legacy today, however, is the hundreds of thousands of photographs the agency1 produced to document the plight of destitute farmers, many of whom were trapped in an inescapable pit of debt made deeper still by the environmental devastation of the Dust Bowl. The project’s head, Roy Emerson Stryker (1893–1975), would shop his favorites around, going from newsroom to newsroom “with pictures under his arm”, as Dorothea Lange would later recall, in an attempt to secure placements in major papers.2 Stryker had encyclopedic ambitions: tasked with the mission of “introducing America to Americans”, the FSA’s photography wing would soon see its remit balloon far past images of rural poverty to encompass everything from aerial shots of utopian building projects to Kodachrome still lifes — all of which could find a home within what Stryker called simply the File.3
Yet despite the File’s colossal scope, there were still images that Stryker deemed unfit for inclusion. These photographs had to be, in his parlance, “killed” — marked for exclusion, usually with a merciless hole-punch through the middle. By the time the project came to a close, the FSA’s photographers had captured some 270,000 images, of which a staggering 100,000 were killed.4 These include work by pioneering Black filmmaker and photographer Gordon Parks; by Russell Lee, who would go on to document the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War; by Marion Post Wolcott, the FSA’s first full-time female photographer. They also include images of which not even a punctured trace survives. Stryker only used the hole-punch method on 35mm negatives; when presented with sheet film he felt was unsuitable, he simply discarded it.5
Stryker’s career had a ping-pong trajectory: he dropped out of the Colorado School of Mines to become a rancher before being shipped off to fight in World War I, then returned to the U.S. and studied economics at Columbia. There, he researched utopian socialism with Rexford Tugwell, a professor whose emphasis on the pedagogical and psychological impact of visual aids left an impression on Stryker. After Tugwell became part of Roosevelt’s “Brain Trust” of key advisers, he called upon his former student to join him in Washington and head up the photography arm of the Resettlement Administration, which, in 1937, was folded into the Farm Security Administration.6 Though not a photographer himself, Stryker nevertheless had a clearly defined sense of the medium as an instrument of social action and knew what he liked and did not like in an image. He would often send his photographers into the field armed with pages-long scripts detailing what exactly he wanted them to capture, itemized lists that sometimes approached aphoristic form: “The baseball diamond as an important part of our general landscape”; “Pressed clothes”; “The wall decorations in homes as an index to the different income groups and their reactions”; “Old tires piles”; “(What will happen to the roadside hamburger stand?)”; “Pictures of men, women, and children who appear as if they really believed in the U.S.”7
Stryker’s editorial philosophy occasionally brought him into conflict with the photographers he employed. His refusal to use the captions Lange painstakingly composed for her own images greatly frustrated her (despite praising Migrant Mother as the pinnacle of the FSA photography program’s output, Stryker would fire Lange on three separate occasions).8 Photographer Edwin Rosskam remarked bitterly that Stryker’s hole-punching habit “was barbaric to me. . . I'm sure that some very significant pictures have in that way been killed off, because there is no way of telling, no way, what photograph would come alive when”.9 Another FSA staffer, Ben Shahn, referred to Stryker’s style as “a little bit dictatorial”:
He ruined quite a number of my pictures. . . . Some of them were incredibly valuable. He didn't understand at the time. . . . Later on, during the war . . . I went to look for [a] negative and he[‘d] punched a hole through it. Well, I shot my mouth off about that. But, I didn't know what was done with a lot of my negatives, naturally. He learned, then, not to do that, you see, because this was an invaluable document of what life was like in 1935 and when I was looking for it in 1943 or '44 it didn't exist anymore.10
A chastened Stryker eventually granted veto power to photographers over which of their images would be killed.
By the time he took a job at the Pittsburgh Photography Library in the 1950s, Stryker had transitioned to indicating killed negatives by having them pasted onto cards marked with an incongruously cutesy blue star. Sometimes, however, the old temptation for more abrasive methods seemed to take hold — other cards were branded by a special KILL stamp. In still other cases the destroying angel seems to have taken Stryker over completely and caused him to slash across the doomed images in marker.11 Even those pictures that he favored were not immune from these kinds of interventions: squiggles, lines, and written notes instructed his employees to crop and straighten, addenda that sometimes smudged and marred the photo Stryker was trying to perfect.12
Most of the negatives Stryker killed, by all accounts, were redundancies nixed in favor of a similar image with stronger composition, clearer focus, and facial expressions better comporting with the themes of suffering and endurance he sought to draw out of the FSA’s subjects. Shot through, these unloved alternates have become almost more interesting than their perfect twins. In contrast to the carefully captioned File images, killed negatives have no names attached, often no notes on provenance: what little we know about them is only by analogy to those photos that were saved, clues about location gleaned from landscapes, clothing, faces. As such, the killed photos demand a more active viewer, one willing to piece together, to parse, to consign some things to the realm of the curious and unknowable.
Did Stryker give much thought as to where to put the hole through when he made his killings? These voids obliterate the hand of a little boy in fringed gloves who stares back calmly at his shooter; they slice through the pavement of an unnamed street where a pair of identical twins walks on unawares. They run like a sniper’s bullet through the legs of a man bending over to pick a fruit, whizz past the ear of a cop. A black hole tarnishes the pale lapel of a floppy-bonneted woman as she looks the other way; it hovers over a man’s head like a grim fate narrowly avoided. In one rare example, a vicious flurry of perforations strafes an entire family of Arkansas sharecroppers as the mother tends to her youngest. The void slates houses for destruction, theaters, water pumps, a cotton bale straining at the corset of its ties. It hangs aloft and lightless over a Chocowinity field like a sun negated. The same person is killed and killed again, from one picture to the next. When one views these photos as a series, the holes begin to feel like a vengeful god too terrible to figure. Once capturing social history, these images now seem to conjure that moment just prior to disaster: before the hole shatters the glass, pops the tire, forces the horse to give one final whinny, kick out uselessly, and fall to the earth.
Punning on the pinhole history of early photographic technologies like the camera obscura, Roland Barthes used the word punctum (literally, “sting, speck, cut, little hole”) to name the disarming effect of certain images. “A photograph’s punctum”, he wrote, “is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)”.13 In the killed negatives, we find Barthes’ dictum literalized: it is the little hole or holes themselves that arrest our eyes and imagination. The strange contradiction at the heart of the killed negatives — as the very existence of this essay attests — is that in an important sense they weren’t killed: the hole-punched photos remain in the Library of Congress, preserved by Stryker himself, and the Pittsburgh Photography Library images deemed unfit for the archives have instead come to comprise their own separate archive in the same building, a sort of Salon des Refusés. Allen Benson writes that the “entombment” of these images “produces a contradictory effect, a desire to look, to open the killed storage boxes and inspect the remains”.14 When we do look, we find that, whatever the organic center of the original photo’s gravity may be, the void has usurped it and become, suddenly, the focal point. In the subtle but unmistakable way that Stryker’s puncture marks reveal the three-dimensional negative from which each two-dimensional image is printed, they call our attention to the fact that a photograph is a physical object and a fragile one at that. And yet at the same time it’s difficult not to feel a visceral reel as a hole slices through the head of a child, the face of a young mother. Stryker’s rejects present us with a push-pull of mimesis: the scenes become less real even as they become more emotionally immediate.
If we wish to examine what images Stryker thought ultimately worthy of keeping, we must also consider the question of what images he thought were worth taking in the first place. Groups like Latinos and Native Americans, for instance, are underrepresented in the File.15 In a 1937 letter to Lange while she was on assignment photographing tenant farmers in Texas, Stryker advised her to “take both black and white, but place the emphasis on the white tenants, since we know that these will receive much wider use”.16 That latter part was indeed borne out by the fact that exhibitions and newspapers more readily selected white images from the File than non-white.17 More broadly, the FSA’s focus on the madonna, the stoic striver, elevated a certain class of “deserving poor” above those who were beyond the bounds both of being photographed and receiving material aid.18 For the government, of course, these two things were tightly interwoven: the purpose of the FSA’s photography program, after all, was to drum up support for the New Deal among an American public that had long viewed poverty as a moral stain. In the course of resettling white tenant farmers in the Mississippi Delta, the FSA forcibly uprooted Black families throughout the region — families whose suffering, it appears, did not rate high enough to make it into the File.19 When I viewed Stryker’s negatives together, they seemed to be posing questions not just about the work of the FSA but about the future of the country they sought to document: both “who should get a farm loan?” and “who cuts a heroic enough figure to advertise them?” Not only “whose grief do we recognize?”, but also “whose grief is deserving of succor?” Who will be kept and who will be killed? Who will survive in America — and what image of this land will these survivors bear into the future?
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: January 26, 2022

author: Erica X Eisen


text:
Precedents of the Unprecedented
Black Squares Before Malevich
By Andrew Spira
June 23, 2022

Described by Kasimir Malevich as the “first step of pure creation in art”, his Black Square of 1915 has been cast as a total break from all that came before it. Yet searching across more than five hundred years of images related to mourning, humour, politics, and philosophy, Andrew Spira uncovers a slew of unlikely foreshadows to Malevich's radical abstraction.

Kasimir Malevich’s 1915 Black Square is surely one of the most extraordinary paintings ever produced. On the one hand, Malevich considered the picture to be the ultimate work, taking the practice of art as far as it could possibly go. As an unremitting expanse of the darkest colour, it offered the maximum possible visual experience; there was no work of art that was not somehow implicitly present in it. Hence his name for the style: Suprematism. On the other hand, Black Square seemed to bring the history of art to a conclusive end. It consummated a process that was started by the Impressionists in the 1870s — the dismantling of art’s visual language into its component parts. Following centuries of naturalistic representation, during which the visual arts had revolved around their subject matter, artists now became interested in the language of art itself, eventually reducing it to its bare essentials — colours and forms — at the expense of subject matter. The result was abstract art. Malevich took this process a step further by claiming that not only should “pure art” be free of any dependence on subject matter for its expressive effect, but that creativity no longer needed art through which to manifest. Eventually even the convention of art could be dispensed with: creative consciousness would stand free — immediately, or unmediated. Black Square was a sign that this philosophical task had been accomplished. It was the “final” work of art; but it was also an iconic and magical object, intended to propel viewers beyond themselves, and beyond all difference in the world, into a state of undifferentiated non-objectivity.
Given its role, as envisaged by the artist, in the spiritual advancement of mankind, it was important to Malevich that Black Square should seem unprecedented. And there is indeed nothing remotely like it in the earlier history of fine art. But strangely, the painting did have precedents in other fields. In fact, although a black square (or rectangle) would seem — at first glance — to be a laconic, and even terse, sign, it has, over the centuries, proven itself to be extraordinarily elastic in its potential as a conveyor of meaning. The contexts in which it appeared are remarkably diverse, ranging from mourning and comedy, to metaphysics and politics. Although Malevich is unlikely to have known many, if any, of these precedents, they throw an uncanny light on his work, reflecting its own polyvalence.
Some of these precedents are reasonably well known — for instance, the astrologer-physician Robert Fludd used a black square to represent the universe before the world was created, in his 1617 Utriusque Cosmi (or History of Two Worlds). And in 1759, Laurence Sterne inserted an entirely black page into his rambling novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman as a self-consciously exaggerated acknowledgement of the death of the parson Yorick. In fact, Tristram Shandy represents something of a turning point in the history of Malevich’s precursors. As a memorial, its black page stands at the tail end of a tradition of “mourning pages”, which were occasionally included in books from the fifteenth century onwards as signs of abject grief. For instance, a book of devotions in the British Library from around 1500 includes several hand-painted black pages, suggesting the utterly desolate state of the world following the crucifixion and death of Christ. Each page is overlaid with an evenly spread web of red beads, depicting the drops of blood that fell from his wounds. While concentrating the painter’s infinite anguish at the suffering of Christ into a moment of unyielding blackness, the image also serves as a trigger for the viewer. The image is not simply symbolic; the totality of its bleakness, contained only by the edges of the page, has a positively traumatic effect, albeit a miniaturised one.
In the seventeenth century, this mourning tradition was perpetuated in a secular context. Books of elegies, commiserating the deaths of eminent persons, sometimes had several pages — one facing each page of text — on which nothing but a black rectangle was printed. One example — A kingly bed of miserie in which is contained, a dreame with an elegie upon the martyrdome of Charls, late King of England — was produced to lament the execution of Charles I in 1649. Its text is characteristically intense, though not without a certain vain artistry. On one page, the author of the verses, John Quarles, bewails, in a positively Shakespearean manner: “My shivering body, oh what stormy weather / was that, which violently tost me hither;  / where am I now? What rubicundious light / is this? that bloodyes my amazed sight?” One must suppose that while poring over the words, a reader would, from time to time, plunge his mind into the dark wordless oblivion that also presented itself to him on the facing page. The funerary implications of a black square were clearly evident to Malevich. Apart from using the image to herald the “death of art”, one of his later Black Square paintings (painted for an exhibition in the 1920s) was hung over his bed when he died in 1935, acting both as an expression of grief and as a portal into the beyond.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, the fervent sophistication of black pages had passed out of fashion, in favour of a more genteel and modest style of mourning. In fact, black pages had come to seem mannered and slightly ridiculous. Thus although Sterne was subscribing to the tradition of using them as a sign of respectful grieving, he was also lampooning it as an absurd artifice — there are several other transgressions of literary conventions in Tristram Shandy which contribute to its overall status as a quirky, comedic work.
It is not inconceivable that Malevich knew of Tristram Shandy. In the early 1920s, the literary critic Viktor Shklovsky regarded the novel as a precedent for some of the a-logical futurist “zaum” poetry that was being written in Russia when Malevich was working on Black Square. Its innovations were not only amusing; they also interrupted people’s thought patterns — a process which, taken to an extreme, could alter the reader’s state of consciousness. Malevich also related to absurdity in this way. The paintings he produced immediately before developing Suprematism (for instance, An Englishman in Moscow, 1914) incorporate elements of cut-up pictures and words, giving rise to a thoroughly irrational image. Some of them include flat shapes of a single colour that we now know, with the benefit of hindsight, would eventually rise to the surface and completely eclipse the paintings’ incongruous details, in favour of Suprematist abstraction. In fact, X-rays reveal that Black Square was itself painted over an a-logical work, indicating that it is a continuation of the absurdist journey rather than a brusque replacement of it. Thus, not un-like the black page in Tristram Shandy, Malevich’s Black Square is both reverent and subversive.
X-rays have also revealed traces of a vanished inscription on the border of Black Square that seems to link the picture with another early black page. The words of the inscription (which is only partly decipherable) are “battle of negroes”. This brief reference relates the work to an absurdist booklet, published in Paris in 1897. The booklet — Alphonse Allais’ Album Primo-Avrilesque (April Fool’s Day Album) — features seven monochromatic pages, in seven different colours.  The pages’ captions reveal that, in each case, the objects depicted in the foreground are (supposedly) the same colour as the background and therefore cannot be distinguished from it: for red, “Apoplectic cardinals harvesting tomatoes on the shore of the Red Sea (an effect of Aurora Borealis)”; for yellow, “Jaundiced cuckolds handling ochre”. The caption for the black page reads “Combat de nègres dans une cave, pendant la nuit” (Negroes fighting in a cellar, at night). The humour was not Allais’ alone, but a refashioning of Paul Bilhaud’s all-black 1882 painting for the Salon des Incohérents, which came with a similar title. The treatment of race, here, undermines Bilhaud and Allais’ playful tone: without illumination, Black bodies appear to become seamlessly undifferentiated from darkness and violence. But what was Malevich’s relationship to these absurdist images? The Album Primo-Avrilesque was certainly known in Russia before 1915. In 1911, Malevich’s colleague Mikhail Larionov organised an exhibition in which pride of place went to a black ink poster with white spots called A Battle of Negroes at Night. But how the inscription found its way on to Malevich’s painting, and whether he was even responsible for its writing or erasure, is unclear. The message bears little relationship to Malevich’s other reflections on the work, though its presence is perhaps consistent with the fact that Black Square was not intended to represent a purist architectural ideal; the painting was pervaded by provocation and complexity.
There were in fact several occasions in the nineteenth century when black rectangles were used on account of their absurdity. They can be divided into a number of thematic groups. Some were presented as framed pictures, ridiculing paintings in public exhibitions that were deemed incomprehensible, usually because they were more atmospheric than descriptive. Première Impression du Salon de 1843, a satirical supplement produced by Raymond Pelez for the Parisian magazine Le Charivari in 1843 is a case in point. In that work, a painting of a “night effect” is so dark that it has become an expanse of pure blackness. In a German work of 1867, an “effect painting” is rendered in the same way, with scribble marks to reflect the confusion of its viewers. In other works, blackness simply signifies the absence of light.
A book of songs and stories by the German theatre director Franz Graf von Pocci, dating to 1845, used the device to illustrate a tale about a theatrical performance that descends into chaos when the lights fail. L’Histoire de Monsieur Lajaunisse, the story of a hapless Mr Bean-like character, published in 1839 by CHAM (“father of the strip cartoon”) includes two adjacent black rectangles to cover episodes in the story which took place in total darkness: having blown out his candle, and ready for sleep, Monsieur Lajaunisse climbs into his bed only to be confused by its hardness. It transpires that he had climbed into a chest of drawers by mistake.
The “darkness” joke eventually crossed the Channel. In exactly the year that Malevich was painting Black Square, one G. L. Hanger was producing postcards of British towns “at night” that were entirely black, but for the white border, the words “[name of town] at Night”, and his own name.
Confusion and ignorance were frequently represented by fields of blackness. In 1848, the mental state of the muddled Monsieur Reac, a conman whose antics were narrated by the photographer Nadar in comic strip style, was depicted as a chaotic tangle of black lines. But the blackness of ignorance was not always comic. In his historical atlas of 1830, Edward Quin attempted to convey the history of the world through a series of maps — not as it was at any given time, but only as it was known (by European historians). Those parts of the world that were not known were overlaid by the darkness of ignorance. The author explained how the same scale was used throughout the work to give an accurate impression of the relative state of human knowledge of the world at different periods. Given the limits of man’s knowledge at the earliest stages of human history, it is not surprising that most of the earliest maps in the sequence are covered in black. Malevich’s Black Square resonates with each of these precedents. Both empty and full, it preceded and succeeded the certainty of rational knowing.
In the twentieth century it was not just mental states and knowledge that were represented by fields of blackness; it was the very experience of life. In 1912, the American architect and writer Claude Bragdon compared human consciousness to the way in which a two-dimensional plane would register a three-dimensional cube passing through it — as a sequence of shapes, rather than as a solid. In their essential natures, Bragdon surmised, human beings were like cubes, but in the plane of life, we only get to experience ourselves as a series of cross-sections. If we pass through the plane of life perpendicular to it, with consistency and rectitude, we will experience ourselves as squares; but if we pass through it semi-randomly and obliquely, we will experience ourselves as an erratic sequence of irregular shapes. Bragdon’s ideas were known in Russia and Malevich may have been influenced by them. Black Square was not simply a two-dimensional surface, parallel to a single wall and projecting outwards from it in one direction. Judging from the way it was displayed when first exhibited in 1915 — across the corner of the room (like a Russian icon) and as high up as possible — it was required to project from two walls and the ceiling, i.e. in three dimensions, embracing the room over which it presided as a cubic space.
Although Black Square is above all a metaphysical painting, Malevich did expect it to have political resonance. His association of the sign with anarchism may have been prompted by an anarchist group called “The Black Banner”, which had established itself in Russia in 1903 and which used a black flag as its emblem. Indeed Malevich sometimes used the Black Square as a banner for his own cause, as can be seen in a celebrated photograph of him with students travelling by train from Vitebsk to Moscow in 1920. Blackness was also projected on to Russia from abroad, sometimes with political overtones. In Gustave Doré’s L’Histoire de la Sainte Russie (1854), the origins of Russia are represented as an area of black nothingness. The frame is captioned “The origins of Russia are lost in the darkness of antiquity”. Malevich may have agreed with these words, but he would not have agreed with Doré’s interpretation of them. For Malevich, the dark origins of Russia were natural, pure and energetic, unspoiled by western pretensions to civilisation; for Doré, they signified the country’s barbarism and lack of culture. Given that the book was written by a Frenchman during the Crimean War (1853–56), which pitted Russia against France, Great Britain, and the Ottoman Empire, the patronising and mocking tone of the work is perhaps not surprising.
Another work in which Russia is associated, albeit coincidentally, with a framed black square is a supplement from a British journal, The Graphic, published in 1875. The sheet documents the War Strength of the European Powers in 1874 in a series of diagrams. At the top, the areas of the territory of Great Britain, Germany, Italy, France, Austro-Hungary, and Russia are represented as squares, with their colonies and dependencies (where the countries had them) shown as borders. As the caption clarifies: “SOLID BLACK represents Russia”. The extended territory of the Russian Empire, which then included parts of Poland, Ukraine, and Belorussia, is represented by the pale shaded area around it; the relative sizes of Great Britain and Ireland, and their colonies, are shown to the left, in solid red and pink respectively.
One can only wonder whether the designer of this page chose black for Russia and red for Great Britain purposefully — as if to signify that Britain’s colonial agendas were more sympathetic and less harsh than those of Russia; it is not inconceivable. Whatever the case, the decision raises questions regarding the physiological effect that a square or rectangle of blackness can have on its viewers. Each of the examples referenced here is deeply situated in a highly specific context that determines its meaning. Indeed, these contexts are so integral to the overall significance of the motif that they can completely alter it, ranging from one extreme (for instance, misery) to its opposite (slapstick humour) with ease. Remarkably, Malevich’s Black Square functions in all of these contexts: mourning, comedy, epistemology, politics, etc. But while these contexts are able to throw light on his great painting, what they are unable to account for is its sheer guttural force. It evades the ultimate rationalisation, which is exactly what it was conceived to do. Maybe there is something fundamental about this. Human beings attempt to understand the world by identifying objects — assessing their degrees of similarity and difference, their consistency, their rates of change and repetition. The patterns that emerge from this reduction of the indeterminate totality of experience to a web of infinite relationships between things enable people to cohere as subjects. For a moment, Black Square frustrates this impulse to understand the world by simplifying it to a system of relationships, for it offers no relationships. Consequently, the coherence of the subject is momentarily undermined; consciousness stands free and unafraid. Black Square is tragic; it’s absurd; it can be bewildering or funny; it’s certainly metaphysical; and now it serves as a precursor for works and projects yet to be imagined.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Andrew Spira