“The Living Impression”
- Isaac Cui
- Oct 8, 2020
- 8 min read
What do you take pictures of?
I had a recent conversation with a flatmate about this topic, and I realized I had never meaningfully considered the question. Moreover, thinking about what pictures I have, I realized my implicit answer was, as the Brits say, absolutely rubbish.
The pictures I have are of things that feel like they “ought to be recorded.” In other words, when taking pictures, I think I was “shooting from the hip,” and the result was that my Google Photos is almost exclusively pictures of either art in a museum or quotes from random books/articles.
I think there’s some logic to those categories. Art in a museum is, by nature, meant to be displayed and preserved. Someone thought this thing in front of me (even Duchamp’s Fountain) ought to be kept for posterity’s sake. Set in a fancy building, guarded by security, cocooned in carefully controlled cubicles of glass, hermetically sealed to protect it from observers — in some sense, art in a museum is the archetype of what one “ought to preserve.” And if so, it seems logical for me to take a picture of it — to preserve an image of it for my own sake.
Preserving quotes is a bit more of a peculiarity for me. In legal or academic writing, attribution is important — the lineage of your ideas lends them authority. Moreover, attribution needs to be precise; citing an entire book for a single factual statement is, in my mind, one of the great heresies of academic writing. So, I tend to take lots of pictures of pages with insightful ideas or well-written quotes.
It turns out, though, that a photo album of hundreds of pictures of museum art and legal quotes does not a good memory evoke. It’s a rather lifeless form of picture-taking. It is, in Frederick Douglass’s words, merely “dead fact” — “nothing without the living impression.”
To guide my answer to the question at the beginning of this post, I figured I’d use Douglass’s 1861 lecture, aptly named “Lecture on Pictures.” In that lecture, Douglass discussed what he called the “thought picture”: “the element out of which our pictures spring.” Thought pictures, for him, evoke “the quality of pictures and affect us accordingly”: they are the “outstanding headlands of the meandering shores of life, and are points to steer by on the broad sea of thought and experience. They body forth in living forms and colors the ever varying lights and shadows of the soul.”
Thought pictures are fragments of who we are. Douglass thought of humans as “a picture-making animal[,]” for “[t]he power to make and to appreciate pictures belongs to man exclusively.” And as pictures set us apart, so, too, do they help us live a more fulfilled life. At their core, pictures render our subjective experience objective: “The process by which man is able to invent his own subject consciousness into the objective form, considered in all its range, is in truth the highest attribute of man’s nature. All that is really peculiar to humanity, in contradistinction from all other animals, proceeds from this one faculty or power.” To think in Aristotelian terms, we fulfill our purpose as we find truth — and among our foremost ways of capturing and expressing truth is in taking pictures, which allow us to momentarily invest in ourselves “the dignity of a creator.”
Pictures capture who we are and what we feel, but they also help us understand ourselves. With widespread pictures, “[m]en of all conditions may see themselves as others see them.” Our confrontation with those truths — of our own, and of others’, essential humanity — would necessitate moral progress, in Douglass’s eyes. Remember that Douglass delivered this lecture half a year into the American Civil War as part of a meeting around the anniversary of the abolitionist John Brown’s execution. Douglass thought of photography as a tool that would bring racial justice, for to see his likeness would force those who thought Black people subhuman to recognize his essential humanity. Douglass was optimistic in the march of progress, imagining that technology would “bring[ ] together the knowledge, the skill, and the mental power of the world” and thus “dispel prejudice, dissolve the granite barriers of arbitrary power, bring the world into peace and unity, and at last crown the world with justice, liberty, and brotherly kindness.” Central to that optimism was a belief in the enduring capacity of truth to overcome prejudice and wrong.
It seems like a fad to remark that we live, today, in a “post-truth” society, characterized by such deep polarization that we cannot agree on fundamental truths. Reading Douglass today — who was also living in a time where polarization was so deep that people could not agree on fundamental truths — feels not altogether reassuring. Moreover, our era of polarization has coincided with the proliferation of phones with ever-higher-definition cameras. We are saturated by videos — clips of truth taken by “citizen journalists” — of the likes Douglass could never have imagined. Yet we do not seem to have found truth — or, at least, agreement.
I think there’s a different way of thinking about Douglass’s analysis, though. I think Douglass was right that we ought to think of ourselves as picture-making animals and that the power of pictures inheres in their ability to express a truth. But Douglass was clear-eyed that not all truths are the same: “Niagara is not fitly described when it is said to be a river of this or that volume falling over a ledge of rocks two hundred feet, nor is thunder when simply called a jarring noise. This is truth, but truth disrobed of its sublimity and glory. A kind of frozen truth, destitute of motion itself—it is incapable of producing emotion in others.”
Perhaps, then, there is something to Kellyanne Conway’s infamous “alternative facts.” (I’m kidding. There isn’t — at least, not how she meant it.) The truths we articulate with pictures are our subjective experiences rendered into an objective medium. Properly taken, a thought picture captures a fragment of who you are, in that moment, and records your memory for posterity; it captures “the living impression.” In encapsulating our lives, they necessarily mean different things for different people. Their concreteness, their physicality, cannot ensure that we all understand the same truths, even as we see the same picture. Such, perhaps, is the magic of pictures, even as it ensures that pictures, alone, cannot save a democracy or render a people moral.
What’s the practical take away from this rambling? I think it’s that I want pictures to capture emotional memories. I am reminded of one of my favorite lyrics by Taylor Swift: “And though I can’t recall your face / I still got love for you.” Important memories often leave an ethereal, emotional imprint, one that we remember long after we can recall the source of those emotions. A picture, I think, ought to serve as the anchor in those circumstances, to capture those moments that will leave you feeling love without memory of a face. Taking a good picture is a contingent act, one that can’t be predetermined (and indeed shouldn’t be). I hope to take pictures when something is compelling, when it is affecting and will one day make me yearn to remember what, specifically, made me feel so strongly.
This is, admittedly, a high bar for taking a picture. But I figured I’d give a few examples from this last week.
Last Wednesday (September 30), I went to the British Museum. Intellectually, I knew what would be there: treasures from all over the world, representing some of the heights of humanity’s accomplishments. And I also knew that much of it was stolen, the loot of conquest, colonies, and empire. But it was a very different experience to be there, to be confronted with all of that material. The odd thing is that I’ve been to plenty of big museums in the United States (e.g., the Met or the Smithsonians), but (perhaps due to lack of reflection) they didn’t have nearly the visceral effect on me. With COVID restrictions, the museum had a one-way path, and the first thing you see is the Rosetta Stone and various Egyptian treasures — sarcophagi, sphinx, paintings, and everything else you can imagine. You walk through and find winged lions from Assyria and a full room of reliefs from the Parthenon: some of the great treasures of the ancient world, in other words, all on this island, thousands of miles from where they once stood. It was a bizarre mixture of awe-inspiring and saddening.
On Saturday (October 3), my flatmate got out of quarantine, and the three of us took a trip to Abney Park, one of the Magnificent Seven cemeteries in London. It was indeed a magnificent graveyard, although it, too, felt a bit off. I am used to thinking of graveyards as quiet places which ought to be afforded some reverence. But many people were there biking or running, and it seemed like a tourist attraction. (The irony isn’t lost on me that we went as tourists as well, although I think we were a bit more respectful.) I’m not sure how to think about the experience, except to say that it was a beautiful place that gave me a more concrete sense of the honor in heritage. I didn’t take many pictures, although I did get one of the chapel at the center of the park.
As we walked back from Abney Park (a few miles away from where we live), it started raining — a light drizzle reminiscent of Oregon rain. We got some fries (“chips”), which was both my flatmate’s and my first time experiencing British chips. To be honest, as fries, they weren’t that good; it’s clear that America has the lead in fried foods. But they were warm and soul-enriching after a long walk outside in the rain.
The next day, my flatmate walked me through how to make palak paneer, a spinach-based Indian curry with cheese in it. I’ve been crying a lot from cutting so many onions (it turns out basically everything we eat in this flat has onions), but other than that, the cooking was really fun and rewarding.
On Monday (October 5), I got the treat of meeting one of my old friends from high school. She went to the UK for college, and the last time I got to see her was two years ago. We went to the Tate Modern together, which was filled with confusing art. But it did bring back a funny memory. We took AP Art History together in our senior year, and the final project was to create a piece of art that blended two artist’s work together. Being seniors and having finished the AP test at that point in the year, our group decided to do the easiest thing we could think of: we took two abstract artists (Mondrian, whose art looks like this, and Kandinsky, whose art looks like this) and essentially painted one person’s style over the other’s. Here’s a picture of the two of us, four years later, with a Kandinsky:
* * * * *
Rose: I had my first seminars this week and, more specifically, my first law class seminar. I’m taking a global competition (antitrust) law class, which compares U.S. and E.U. competition law regimes. The professor is absolutely amazing. It’s delightful to think through these cases, arguing about when apparently unilateral conduct looks like coordinated conduct or whether a wholly-owned subsidiary enterprise can “coordinate” with its parent company in a way that violates antitrust law. But it, and my other classes, are also taking a lot of time with all the readings (hence my lateness with this week’s blog!).
Bud: Meeting up with my old LASA friend and knowing she’s in the area, as well as meeting new people in my LSE program and other Marshalls. It’s just exciting to feel like I’m starting to build a network of friends in this place, especially since COVID restrictions look like they might be ratcheting up again (and it’s just not nearly as fun to meet people through Zoom!).
Thorn: The sun is out fairly late (around 6:30pm sunset), but it’s setting earlier and earlier each day. I somehow ended up with two seminars that end at 6:30pm/6pm, and it’s just less fun to walk home in the dark. But overall, it’s been a good week if my thorn has to do with the time of sunset. (A secondary mini-thorn is that I didn’t make it to Stonehenge. Soon, I hope!)
Potential future topics:
Writing personal statements — how I hate them, and how my flatmate loves them (??)
The LSE campus
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