September and October's Passage From The Three-Person Picture

Even the most authored of photographic images is part of this world, one of the “visibles.” I borrow this neologism from Alfonso Lingis, the translator of Merleau-Ponty's The Visible and the Invisible. He coined it, I believe, in order to resolve an otherwise insurmountable problem: the problem of bridging the gap between the French word "visible," which can function both as an abstract and a concrete noun, and its English counterpart, which can only be an abstract noun. The dual status of the French word permits Merleau-Ponty to do something that the English word prevents, and that is as important to me as it is to him: to conceive of "the visible" as what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri would call a "multitude," rather than an individual, a collectivity, or “the masses.” All of the people, all of the time.

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July and August's Passage From The Three-Person Picture

Objective intelligence can perhaps best be described as the way a body “stylizes” its being—the formalizations through which it presents itself to us. It serves no biological function, generates no meaning, and has no higher authorization. It is the formal pattern or design through which an object presents itself—the “composition” that it might be said to “perform,” for the “beholding eye” of the viewer who is “presupposed” by its pattern or form. This intelligence is what inspired Eugene Delacroix to call the human body an “admirable poem,” prompted the French Surrealist writer Roger Caillois to say that there must be “an autonomous aesthetic force in the world of biology,” motivated the American photographer Edward Steichen to curate an exhibition of delphiniums at MoMA in 1936, and impelled me to devote a chapter of World Spectators (2000) to the “language of things.”

Objective intelligence also informs every aspect of Aby Warburg’s historiography, and it inspired the German sculptor and photographer Karl Blossfeldt to describe a plant as an “architectural structure, that has been shaped and designed ornamentally and objectively,” and to posit these structures as the source of human art-making—to argue that the “fluttering delicacy of a Rococo ornament, the heroic severity of a Renaissance candelabrum, the mystically entangled tendrils of the Gothic flamboyant style,” and the shapes of wrought-iron railings, all “trace their original design back to the plant world.”

Edward Steichen, Delphiniums, 1940. Dye imbibition print. Digital image courtesy of the George Eastman Museum. © 2019 The Estate of Edward Steichen/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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May and June's Passage From The Three-Person Picture

“In the middle of the journey of our life,” Dante writes in the opening sentence of The Inferno, “I came to myself in a dark forest, where the direct way was lost.” The comma separating the first clause of this sentence from the second is the placeholder for a momentous “event,” the one that reduced the two worlds of classical metaphysics to the one world of modern metaphysics. This ”event,” which I will be calling the Great Metaphysical Transfer, is man’s (wishful) arrogation to himself of the attributes that he has previously imputed to an otherworldly demiurge: a sovereign intentionality, the capacity to create ex nihilo, singularity and an utter self-coincidence.

But Dante cannot even utter the words “come to myself” without imagining himself falling off a precipice akin to the one provided by Gustave Doré in his illustrated version of The Inferno (link). After taking one bite from the apple of individuality, he casts it away, and rushes back to the Great Chain of Being, to which the imaginary geography of The Divine Comedy closely adheres. I would like to think that he returns to it because he isn’t willing to replace the plural version of the first person possessive pronoun for the singular, or the new places to which the remainder of the “journey of our life” might lead for the dead-end of the self. I know, however, that these deviations from the standard narrative were probably made possible by Dante’s Neoplatonism, which—by introducing Platonism into medieval Christianity--tempered its severity, allowing the chain to function as the ladder through which his narrator ascends to the lower reaches of the Paradiso.

The opening sentence of The Inferno is also exceptional because it acknowledges the social cost of the Cartesian turn. This makes the “our” in the opening line of The Inferno the first footprint left in the sand of western history by “all of the people.”

(The question, “Where are all of the people?,” which was posed to Silverman by a reader of World Spectators, serves as the point of departure for The Three-Person Picture. Please cite kajasilverman.com when reproducing this passage.)

April's Passage From The Three-Person Picture

As we can see from Charles Thurston Thompson‘s photograph of the 1858 Exhibition of the Photographic Society of London, no one knew how to hang a photograph on a museum or gallery wall at this point in the nineteenth century, or how to look at such a photograph. The exhibition took place in a room where refreshments were served, rather than in an official gallery, and the chairs lined up in the middle of the room appear to be those normally used for this purpose. It is also organized more like a bazaar than an exhibition hall [and the room in which it was staged] is very decorative—so much so that it must have deflected attention away from the photographs on its walls…     

And this isn’t the only distraction. The man sitting behind the covered table on the right side of the room is doing business with the hard-to-see man on the other side of the table, who is apparently purchasing—or thinking of purchasing—one of the photographs in the exhibition. Ornate stereoscopes are arranged on tables, encouraging visitors to peer through them, instead of standing in front of the photographs on the walls. Stereoscopes, framed photographs, a decorative room, a financial transaction: each calls for a different kind of looking. Is it any wonder, given all of these competing spectatorial demands, that the only trace of a viewer in this photograph is the hat left on an oddly-angled chair, stranded midway between the stereoscopes and a wall of photos?

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March’s Passage From The Three-Person Picture…

Like the calotype and the daguerreotype, the three-person picture appeared in 1839, but unlike them it did not come of age until 1905. Although it was so tiny at its official unveiling that it would have fit comfortably inside the empty and haphazardly-placed frame on a wall in Edward Steichen’s 1898 Self-Portrait, it had already staked a claim to a position on another kind of wall : one in a museum. When this claim was finally redeemed, it was a matted and framed picture of Alfred Stieglitz and his daughter, Kitty, hung at eye level on one of the walls of The Little Galleries, a step away in each direction from a similarly scaled, matted, framed and mounted print. This may not seem very large to those accustomed to Andreas Gursky’s gigantism, but a picture by Steichen can’t be measured the way Gursky wants us to measure his. Although Ocean III is enormous—13’ x 13’—there is no room it, as Peter Galassi observes, for us. Steichen’s Alfred Steiglitz and his Daughter Katherine is only 18” x 16”, yet big enough not only for an author, a sitter and a beholder, but for all of the people.

Photograph by Eileen Neff

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February's Passage From The Three-Person Picture…

As soon as  World Spectators was safely launched, I exchanged my New Look dress for jeans and a flannel shirt, my high heels for rugged hiking boots, and  my elegant walking stick for a shepherd’s staff,  but I had a crise de conscience à la mode when it came to hats. I tried to reconcile myself to a plinth hat or a sou’wester, but a UV Explorer Hat in Bluish Teal with a 7” legionnaire flap and a 3.5” front and side brim was as far as I was prepared to go. After a quick look in the mirror, I grabbed my rations and camping gear, and headed off for the land of Photography.

It was tough going. The terrain was uneven and densely overgrown and the few pathways into what I assumed to be its interior ended abruptly, leaving me stranded. And since there were no road signs indicating where Photography begins, and where it ends, I never knew for certain if I was actually “there.” After a few days of looking for a place that I could not describe in a land that I would not even have been able to locate on a map, I abandoned my search. I comforted myself during my  return journey, which was as long and full of mishaps as my outward journey, by reciting a mid-nineteenth century doggerel poem describing the directional difficulties of early plein air photography:

“When’er the wind is in the East,/Use twice the seconds at the least,” its author wrote, “And if the East incline to the North,/Take not the wretched sitter forth./Come cloud electric, or of hail,/Then every picture’s sure to fail./But with light zephyrs from the West,/In scarce five seconds ‘t is imprest”/And if the West incline to South,/In three you have eyes, nose and mouth” (Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, The History of Photography).

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January’s passage from The Three-Person Picture…

Leonardo compared the camera obscura’s image-stream to a painting not only because it, too, was a picture, but also because photography and painting were pictorialized at the same time: in the quattrocento, and the first part of the cinquecento. They were also pictorialized in a similar way. The camera obscura’s image-stream, which had until then served as the transparent medium through which to watch a solar eclipse without injuring one’s eyes, became visible in and of itself. And painting gradually liberated itself from the ritual, pedagogical and illustrative uses to which it had until then been put, and the pre-given spaces on walls and ceilings that it had been expected to fill, and descended to the ground. It found its way onto an easel, and then onto a different kind of wall. It continued to be a site where other things appear, but it also became visible in a new way: as a thing-in-the-world, like other things and among other things. 

This visibility became even more evident after it migrated to the second wall--so much so that it extended outward, to include the beholder that its Being required. Since this space was one into which anyone could step, the somebody became everybody, and the process by means of which a painting becomes a picture was finally complete. It became what photography had always been: double-sided. But it also achieved something that would not be possible within photography for another three centuries: it became a two-person picture.

Photograph of Silverman by Carrie Schneider, later amended by Eileen Neff to include Bobby and Freyja (2019/2021)

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Blue World Gallery

"Virtual stone by virtual stone, this project builds something that does not yet exist: a venue for looking at art together and in so doing, remembering what it means to be together."

Blue World Gallery is a free, digital educational platform conceptualized by Kaja Silverman and realized from Philadelphia, PA by the Blue World Studio. For a description of the project, see the Blue World Gallery Slideshow PDF. Blue World Gallery has been made possible through the generous support of the Mellon Foundation. To stay up to date on all things Blue World please follow us on Instagram.

Sketch for the making of Blue World Gallery.

Hello World,

Stay tuned for exciting updates from The Three-Personed Picture and Kaja’s new online art venue, Blue World Gallery!