The Face of the Past

There is nothing that confronts us with the reality of the past as directly as the human faces preserved for us in photographs. There are intimate painted portraits that come close to this immediacy, as with the Egyptian tomb portraits of late antiquity (known as the Fayum mummy portraits), but in painted or sculpted images the artist intervenes between ourselves and the image. In a photograph, there is nothing but ourselves and the other human being. The other is removed from us in time, but there are moments when this distance is obliterated by the immediacy of the other face staring back at us.

I have made it a habit to study faces in old photographs as though they were the faces in old paintings, where one has expected the artist to have imbued these images with something of himself as well as the spirit of the individual he was attempting to portray. In a photograph, however, the artist is the individual spirit manifested on the face and in the expression of photographed individual, and not an imposition by an artist. I did not always look at photographs in this way, and it has changed the way I see them.

Some faces uniquely fit their time, and dressed in contemporary clothes they would look a bit out of place, as though they did not quite fit; other faces work equally well in any age, and I can imagine some of these faces that I have see in hundred year old photographs passing me on the street, indistinguishable from anyone else alive today.

Conrad Heyer, 1852

Conrad Heyer posed for a photograph in 1852 at the age of 103, becoming the earliest person born to be photographed. Heyer was in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War and participated in Washington’s crossing of the Delaware River.

In the face of Conrad Heyer we see that generation of men who were described by a British soldier who fought in the Revolutionary War as, “a new race of men.” He looks every inch the part of a Revolutionary War hero, and so his is a face that uniquely fits his time. Like the Roman general Cincinattus, he returned to his plow after the war, spending his life as a farmer. Heyer not only looks the part, he lived the part of the yeoman farmer who answered the call of his country, to return to the rural life once the emergency had passed.

Robert Cornelius, 1839

With the current craze for technologically-enabled selfies, universally shared over social media, it is not surprising that the earliest of all selfies has been making the rounds of the internet (cf. Robert Cornelius’ Self-Portrait: The First Ever “Selfie”). The young Robert Cornelius set up a camera in 1839 and then posed in front of it for about twenty minutes in order to produce the image above.

Unlike Heyer, Cornelius has one of those faces that would fit perfectly in the twenty-first century, and probably in any age — he even looks like a hipster, and he wouldn’t even need to change his clothes to fit in today. Goethe said of the characters in Shakespeare’s Roman plays, “It is said that he has delineated the Romans with wonderful skill. I cannot see it. They are Englishmen to the bone; but they are human, thoroughly human, and thus the Roman toga presumably fits them.” Presumably the Roman toga would also fit Robert Cornelius, whose face would be at home in any age.

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, 1909

The first time I saw the book Photographs for the Tsar I was utterly fascinated by these early color photographs by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. Here we not only have the face of the past, but even the colors of the past, vividly preserved. The truth of the image to life both serves to remind us of that the past was once as alive as we are now, and that it is forever beyond our reach — both like us and unlike us.

Tsarist Russia at the beginning of twentieth century was a sprawling empire that crossed several time zones and included peoples from across Eurasia. Prokudin-Gorskii’s opportunity to travel through this empire taking color photographs for posterity (that is to say, for us), shortly before this empire collapsed, captured vivid images of a lost world, much as if someone had had the opportunity to travel the length and breadth of the Roman empire before it succumbed.

Marguerite Mespoulet and Madeleine Mignon-Alba, 1913

Albert Kahn was a highly successful businessman who made a fortune in banking early in the twentieth century. Kahn used his fortune to fund many projects, including Archives of the Planet (Les Archives de la Planète). Many of the photographs that were part of Kahn’s project have been collected in The Dawn of the Color Photograph: Albert Kahn’s Archives of the Planet by David Okuefuna. Later in life, Kahn was ruined by the Great Depression, ending his grand photography project, and he died while France was occupied by the Nazis. It must have been a devastating come-down for Kahn, but the photographic record he financed is now a permanent part of the history of civilization.

Kahn hired photographers who traveled the world, documenting a remarkable breadth of humanity more than a hundred years ago. Among these photographers were Marguerite Mespoulet and Madeleine Mignon-Alba, who took the picture of the Irish woman above (cf. First color photos of Ireland taken by two French women in 1913).

Buzz Aldrin, 1966

It is strangely appropriate that I found out about the first Space Age selfie of Buzz Aldrin, above, on Twitter (also cf. Buzz Aldrin and the first space selfie), marking a confluence of modern technologies that have made possible, and will continue to make possible, new symbolic “firsts.” Robert Cornelius’ photograph was a “first” and has become iconic because it is a first; Buzz Aldrin’s selfie in space was a first, and there will continue to firsts for as long as human civilization produces new circumstances for human activity. For example, there will be a first selfie in Mars, and so on.

Unlike many photographs of astronauts in space, with silvered-over glass on their helmets hiding the faces of the astronauts within behind an impassive mirror, this picture of Buzz Aldrin shows the human face of the man himself, as well as catching the curve of Earth in the background and a piece of technology that was integral is getting a human being into orbit and thus making the picture possible. It is, then, not merely a portrait photo, but a picture that literally reveals an entire world, as well as some of the circumstances that brought the image into being.

“Girls deliver ice,” 1918, colorized by Dana Keller

Another way to recover the immediacy of the past is through the colorization of old black and white photographs. There are a number of remarkable colorized photographs that are faithful to life to a degree I would never have suspected. There are the famous, such as a colorized photograph of Darwin widely circulated on the internet, but it is the moments of ordinary life like that above, captured spontaneously, and brought to life again by color, that makes it possible for us to appreciate the past in a new way. (The image above was colorized by Dana Keller; you can view a number of colorized photographs in These 53 Colorized Photos From The Past Will Blow You Away.)

The black and white photographs that document the past are wonderful, of course, and I am not suggesting that there is anything inadequate about them, but colorization makes them more like us, and increases our sympathy. I can think of another example of this to illustrate what I mean. When we watch early films, we have become accustomed to the jerky, unnatural movements of the people in them, and while we still appreciate this record, the unnaturalness of the movement is an unintentional barrier between the past and ourselves. The jerky movements are an artifact of the different frame rates of the original filming and its later projection. It has been common to put old film into later projectors without adjusting for the change in frame rate. If the adjustment is made, the figures in the film suddenly become more natural and there is a shock of recognition in seeing those in the film as human beings like ourselves for the first time.