What Can't Be Seen

What Can’t Be Seen

A Scientific Inquiry into Two Photographs, with Intimations of a Third. 

Before us, we have two black-and-white snapshots, both roughly the same size, and apparently of the same vintage.  As is so often the case with this type of documentation, surface evidence – the images on paper itself – fails to illuminate other crucial elements, which might expand our grasp of what it is that we are, in fact, seeing.  Using verifiable, first hand information in the case of each, we have examined both these documents, and will now lay out the relevant underlying facts, which will make the significance of each image plain.  We believe we have also discerned the necessity of yet a third image, the specifics of which will shortly be made clear.

Let us proceed.

In the first photograph, we see a slightly pudgy, dark-haired woman, perhaps in her 30’s, walking a dog in a park.  She wears a light-colored Chanel-style suit, and has a small hat over her dark hair. The small, fuzzy dog appears to be pulling the woman forward.  The leash is long, slender and taut.  The woman’s inward-looking expression might indicate peevishness, or an effort to remember something.

Many things in this photograph can’t readily be seen.  The park is the Bois de Boulogne.  The grey tone hints that the woman’s suit is most likely a dull pink – her favorite color.  We can’t tell, from the picture, that her hair, freed from her hat, is thick and wavy.  We cannot see, naturally, that as she walks her dog, she leaves behind a faint scent of sweet almond and maraschino cherries.

Also invisible, but impacting this document is the photographer himself – the woman’s burly former lover, now her husband.  A military man.   Unindicated as well, photographically, are the woman’s five children, all alive at the time of the picture.  One child --  her only daughter, age 4 ½, is having lunch in a cramped apartment in an unfashionable arrondissement, while her mother walks the dog.  The other children, four boys, all alive, are far away.

We now consider the second photograph.  We note that it is marginally blurrier than the first, but is still clearly legible, enough for our purposes.  In this quick snapshot, we are presented with a group of nine young boys, all wearing roomy, patterned garments with large buttons down the front.  The darkness beyond the wide sash window behind them indicates this to be a night scene.  Eight of the boys have dark hair, cut short.  One of the smaller boys is serious-looking, brightly blond and has dark eyes.  At the other end of the group a boy, slightly taller than the serious one, presents a broad, stiff, eager grin. He wears glasses, and there is a dollar-bill sized white bandage under his right eye.

The boys stand beside a small, cloth-covered table.  In the center of the table is a cake.  Behind the cake, directly opposite the camera, sits a stout, grinning woman, whose pale hair is piled up on her head in a braided crown.  On a wall behind them, to one side by the dark window, hangs a framed picture.  It is a portrait -- the torso and head of a bearded man with long dark hair. He wears, over his shoulders, loosely layered cloth, and there is a glow around his head.  The dark-haired man is smiling as well.

The photograph does not reveal either the location or the use of the room where the smiling boys, the cake and the grinning woman are gathered.  Simply from looking, the viewer cannot know that this is, in fact, an alcove in one wing of a spacious attic, atop a mansion that itself sits on a low hill, surrounded by cornfields and pastures for dairy cattle.  One does not observe, in this photograph, that the mansion has been converted into use as an orphanage.  It is not instantly clear that these boys (it is safe to assume that their smiles imply eager expectation, with respect to the cake) are for the most part strangers to each other, but that they have lived together, in the various alcoves of this attic, under the watchful eye of the grinning woman, for weeks, or months, or years. 

The photograph has not documented, either, that every Saturday, these boys, in groups of two and three, crowd into a tubful of soapy water, until each one has been scrubbed, and the water is grey.  Nor does the photo tell us that the plump grinning woman has her own small room in that same attic, and that she keeps a wide brown leather razor strap there, with which she beats these boys, from time to time – each beaten boy lying face down and naked on his cot, his bare legs twitching in pain,  unsure whether this beating is for a real offense, or something imaginary. 

The photographic evidence in this particular document fails, too, to show that each one, in this particular group of boys, and also others under her care, is routinely summoned, in no particular order,  one at a time, into the darkened room where the razor strap idles on the door hook, and where the grinning woman requires amusement.  We are unable to discern, using only this cake-centered picture, that after these diversions, most of the boys – the weaker ones -- will go back, one at a time, through the dark hall to his cot, crying.

Only a few imperceptible,  but historically accurate facts remain to be unfolded, for this photograph to be properly understood, as well as for that third image to emerge and resonate.  Three of the cake-focused boys are brothers.  They also have a younger brother, asleep now in another attic wing of the mansion, with the rest of the children too young for school.  We are unable, using only the black-and-white of the photograph, to discern that this youngest boy – who will soon enough find himself in the care of the grinning woman – in fact has a twin sister.  And that, due to the time differences between continents, this twin sister is having lunch, while her mother -- smelling of sweet almond and maraschino cherries – walks a stylish little dog along a sandy path in the Bois de Boulogne.

As stated above, we have reason to expect that there is, in fact, a third photograph.  We can know this to be so, by using a corollary of the same reasoning available to astronomers, by which they can observe and measure faint perturbations in the orbits of distant stars.  By extrapolation, they locate, with appreciable certainty,  another, otherwise invisible body orbiting close by.  Emotional bodies certainly move in a radically different fashion, but the mathematical probabilities tied to the necessities of the individual human heart are no less implacable, we find, than those governing the stars. 

This mathematically necessary photograph, then, has been taken either in the early morning or late evening.   By the light of street lamps along a stone bannister, we see, clearly enough, the figure of a woman, clad in a pale-colored Chanel-style suit.  She is leaning out over the bannister, which is identified, from glimmering reflections in the lower right, to be the railing of a bridge.  The woman has apparently just lost, or dropped, a small puffy bag, or a toy, or perhaps a pair of fur gloves.   Attached to this falling bundle is a long slim belt.  The item, caught while still falling in this photograph, is just beyond the woman’s reach, although from her posture, it seems unlikely that she is reaching for it.  The woman’s face is slightly averted.  We see her thick dark hair.  Even with one arm still extended, she seems already to be moving away from whatever it is that she has lost. 

What can’t be seen, from this statistically necessary photograph – probably snapped by a tourist unable to sleep, one early morning near Notre Dame, in the late 1950’s -- is that the woman on the bridge wears a suit of dull pink, that the falling belt is a leash, and that it smells faintly of sweet almond and maraschino.

© 2011  Walter Zimmerman