Black And White Photographs Quotes

When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in Black and white, you photograph their souls!

I see the whole episode in my memory as if it were a very crisply photographed black and white movie. Directed by Bergman perhaps.We are playing ourselves in the movie version. If only we could escape from always having to play ourselves !

Over my desk, I’ve got this enormous bulletin board, and on it I’ve tacked black-and-white photographs of writers at work.

What you write down sometimes leaves you forever, like old photographs left in the bright sun, fading to nothing but white. I pray for that sort of release.

We both disliked rude rickshwalas, shepu bhaji in any form, group photographs at weddings, lizards, tea that has gone cold, the habit of taking newspaper to the toilet, kissing a boy who'd just smoked a cigarette et cetra. Another list. The things we loved: strong coffee, Matisse, Rumi, summer rain, bathing together, Tom Hanks, rice pancakes, Cafe Sunrise, black-and-white photographs, the first quiet moments after you wake up in the morning.

The two dozen commonplace childhood photographs - snowsuit, pony, tennis racket, looming fender of a Dodge - were an inexhaustible source of wonder for him, at her having existed before he met her, and of sadness for his possessing nothing of the ten million minutes of that black-and-white scallop-edged existence save these few proofs.

Genealogy becomes a mania, an obsessive struggle to penetrate the past and snatch meaning from an infinity of names. At some point the search becomes futile – there is nothing left to find, no meaning to be dredged out of old receipts, newspaper articles, letters, accounts of events that seemed so important fifty or seventy years ago. All that remains is the insane urge to keep looking, insane because the searcher has no idea what he seeks. What will it be? A photograph? A will? A fragment of a letter? The only way to find out is to look at everything, because it is often when the searcher has gone far beyond the border of futility that he finds the object he never knew he was looking for.

Photographs are a bridge to the past. Black and white reminders of the way things used to be. Links to those who are no longer with us. Priceless treasures.

There is a famous black-and-white photograph from the era of the Third Reich. It is a picture taken in Hamburg, Germany, in 1936, of shipyard workers, a hundred or more, facing the same direction in the light of the sun. They are heiling in unison, their right arms rigid in outstretched allegiance to the Führer. If you look closely, you can see a man in the upper right who is different from the others. His face is gentle but unyielding. Modern-day displays of the photograph will often add a helpful red circle around the man or an arrow pointing to him. He is surrounded by fellow citizens caught under the spell of the Nazis. He keeps his arms folded to his chest, as the stiff palms of the others hover just inches from him. He alone is refusing to salute. He is the one man standing against the tide. Looking back from our vantage point, he is the only person in the entire scene who is on the right side of history. Everyone around him is tragically, fatefully, categorically wrong. In that moment, only he could see it. His name is believed to have been August Landmesser. At the time, he could not have known the murderous path the hysteria around him would lead to. But he had already seen enough to reject it.

You will know recycling has been picked up because your recycling bags will be gone and there will be a large, reddish brown smear across your front door roughly in the shape of an X. Or maybe it’s a cross. It’s not clear in the brochure I’ve been handed, which has no words, only dark black-and-white photographs of angled shadows along brick walls. I mean, municipal one-sheets are kind of useless, but this one is at least haunting.

We are not going to get the racism out of us until we start thinking about racism like we think about misogyny. Until we consider racism as not just a personal moral failing but as the air we’ve been breathing. How many images of black bodies being thrown to the ground have I ingested? How many photographs of jails filled with black bodies have I seen? How many racist jokes have I swallowed? We have been deluged by stories and images meant to convince us that black men are dangerous, black women are dispensable, and black bodies are worth less than white bodies. These messages are in the air and we’ve just been breathing. We must decide that admitting to being poisoned by racism is not a moral failing—but denying we have poison in us certainly is.

In this fleeting life, there is nothing stronger than a visual idea or moment stopped in time forever. And nothing does this better than a black-and-white photograph.

There had never been a funeral in our town before, at least not during our lifetimes. The majority of dying had happened during the Second World War when we didn't exist and our fathers were impossibly skinny young men in black-and-white photographs—dads on jungle airstrips, dads with pimples and tattoos, dads with pinups, dads who wrote love letters to the girls who would become our mothers, dads inspired by K rations, loneliness and glandular riot in malarial air into poetic reveries that ceased entirely once they got back home.

Extremist individuals live inside every single group on the planet. Devout followers from Christian to Muslim who kill in the name of God, down to people who perpetuate a cycle of abuse from parent to child. And do you know at what point they’re labeled as terrorists?” Martini said, “When the government—” “When the news reports it. The news can take a starving refugee and make them into an invading migrant. One of my Black ancestors was photographed carrying diapers over his head after a flood. They called him a ‘looter.’ A white man was photographed doing the same thing. They called him a ‘survivor.

Gray February skies, misty white sands, black rocks, and the sea seemed black too, like a monochrome photograph, with only the girl in the yellow raincoat adding any color to the world.

When they left, I saw four or five black-and-white photographs I had taken of you, peeping from the file. They'd faded a little over time and were stuck to each other. Delicately, i separated them.

Deeze says that most things in life aren't right or wrong. He says there's not too much black or white. To his eyes most stuff is like pencil shading. Lots of shades of gray. Mama says it's different. She believes it's either right or wrong. Me? I think they're both wrong. For me it's like a photograph. You have to look close. It looks like shades of gray, but it's really lots and lots of tiny dots of inky black on a perfect page of white,

He was twenty years old, and he had fallen in love with Rosa Saks, in the wild scholastic manner of twenty-year-old men, seeing, in the tiniest minutiae, evidence of the systematic perfection of the whole and proof of a benign creation.... The two dozen commonplace childhood photographs -- snowsuit, pony, tennis racket, looming fender of a Dodge -- were an inexhaustible source of wonder for him, at her having existed before he met her, and of sadness for his possessing nothing of the ten million minutes of that black-and-white scallop-edged existence save these few proofs.

When he reached the desk he handed Caroline a photograph in a dark blue cardboard frame. It was a portrait, black and white, faintly tinted. The woman looking out wore a pale peach sweater. Her hair was gently waved, her eyes a deep shade of blue. Rupert Dean's wife, Emelda, dead now for twenty years. "She was te love of my life," he announced to Caroline, his voice so loud that people looked up.

Levi was a black-and-white photograph in the dark. All pale skin, gray eyes, streaky hair...

American photographer Nicholas Nixon has been taking a black-and-white portrait of his wife, Bebe Brown, and her three sisters, Heather, Mimi and Laurie, annually since 1975.

Miss Warrender's 'selfish' inner quest was to find a 'purpose in life and give it all I have got'. This instructive, amusing, dramatic and bravely candid account is an answer in itself. She also took the photographs, reproduced in black and white, that adorn an already pleasing book. All together, this is an essential addition to the canon. -John McEwen book critic

One of my Black ancestors was photographed carrying diapers over his head after a flood. They called him a ‘looter.’ A white man was photographed doing the same thing. They called him a ‘survivor.

Like most people, I acquired my initial sense of the era from books and photographs that left me with the impression that the world of then had no color, only gradients of gray and black. My two main protagonists, however, encountered the fl esh-and-blood reality, while also managing the routine obligations of daily life. Every morning they moved through a city hung with immense banners of red, white, and black; they sat at the same outdoor cafés as did the lean, black-suited members of Hitler’s SS, and now and then they caught sight of Hitler himself, a smallish man in a large, open Mer-cedes. But they also walked each day past homes with balconies lush with red geraniums; they shopped in the city’s vast department stores, held tea parties, and breathed deep the spring fragrances of the Tier-garten, Berlin’s main park. They knew Goebbels and Göring as social acquaintances with whom they dined, danced, and joked—until, as their fi rst year reached its end, an event occurred that proved to be one of the most signifi cant in revealing the true character of Hitler and that laid the keystone for the decade to come. For both father and daughter it changed everything.

Nora, biting her lip, pointed at the small end table on my right, where there was a black-and-white photograph in an antique silver frame. It was Olivia standing with her husband, Knightly, probably some twenty years ago. They had their arms around each other, posing beside an antique Bentley in front of a colossal country manor. They looked happy, but, of course, that didn't say much. Everyone smiles for a photograph.

It is a black-and-white photograph showing a naked young man in fetal position. He has entitled it "No Tail!" The fantastic fingerwork of his wings is outspread on the bed like a black lace map of South America.

He was really quite addicted to her face, and yet for the longest time he could not remember it at all, it being so much brighter than sunlight on a pool of water that he could only recall that blinding brightness; then after awhile, since she refused to give him her photograph, he began to practice looking away for a moment when he was still with her, striving to uphold in his inner vision what he had just seen (her pale, serious, smooth and slender face, oh, her dark hair, her dark hair), so that after immense effort he began to retain something of her likeness although the likeness was necessarily softened by his fallibility into a grainy, washed-out photograph of some bygone court beauty, the hair a solid mass of black except for parallel streaks of sunlight as distinct as the tines of a comb, the hand-tinted costume sweetly faded, the eyes looking sadly, gently through him, the entire image cob-webbed by a sheet of semitranslucent Thai paper whose white fibers twisted in the lacquered space between her and him like gorgeous worms; in other words, she remained eternally elsewhere.

in the summer, it's short greens and tall greens and sometimes a smudge of other colors. In winter, it's squinty white,and sometimes deep when it looks flat. In early spring and late fall, the town gets brown and black, like an old photograph.

I had seen a photograph of Emmett Till's body just after it was pulled from the river. I had seen photographs of white folks standing in a circle roasting something that had talked to them in their own language before they tore out its tongue.

This photograph, this swipe of grain, so briefly glimpsed: I could tell it contained extraordinary information. It was black and white. It was about power. Twelve men were depicted there, in unmistakable configuration. Twelve men, but two distinct human types, equally represented, six of one type, half a dozen of the other. The first type had power, and safety in numbers. The second type had no power-had numbers, but no safety: numbers conferred only grief and weakness. The first type was silently saying something to the second type. Six men were saying to the other six: Whatever else divides us, whatever else is between us, only one thing matters. We belong to the living, you to the dead. We are the living and you are the dead. The dead.

The first time I visited the famed Tavistock Clinic in London I noticed a collection of black-and-white photographs of these great twentieth-century psychiatrists hanging on the wall going up the main staircase: John Bowlby, Wilfred Bion, Harry Guntrip, Ronald Fairbairn, and Donald Winnicott. Each of them, in his own way, had explored how our early experiences become prototypes for all our later connections with others, and how our most intimate sense of self is created in our minute-to-minute exchanges with our caregivers.

In silent agreement we squeeze into the window to study our valley. Unlovely in the early spring, crusted with think rime of muddy snow, the river still choked with ice, a single dark thread of water at it’s centre. Sleeping tangle of grey saplings, dead shrubs of sepia or amber or faded dogwood red. Brown sparrows and dust-colored pigeons. The only real color is magpipes, repeated shouts of iridescence, irritatingly clean in their black and white suits. Like photographs of actor or spies. How do they stay so clean in this crap, I always wonder.

I did not pay much attention, and since it seemed to prolong itself I began to meditate upon the writer’s life. It is full of tribulation. First he must endure poverty and the world’s indifference; then, having achieved a measure of success, he must submit with a good grace to its hazards. He depends upon a fickle public. He is at the mercy of journalists who want to interview him and photographers who want to take his picture, of editors who harry him for copy and tax gatherers who harry him for income tax, of persons of quality who ask him to lunch and secretaries of institutes who ask him to lecture, of women who want to marry him and women who want to divorce him, of youths who want his autograph, actors who want parts and strangers who want a loan, of gushing ladies who want advice on their matrimonial affairs and earnest young men who want advice on their compositions, of agents, publishers, managers, bores, admirers, critics, and his own conscience. But he has one compensation. Whenever he has anything on his mind, whether it be a harassing reflection, grief at the death of a friend, unrequited love, wounded pride, anger at the treachery of someone to whom he has shown kindness, in short any emotion or any perplexing thought, he has only to put it down in black and white, using it as the theme of a story or the decoration of an essay, to forget all about it. He is the only free man.

She climbed down the cliffs after tying her sweater loosely around her waist. Down below she could see nothing but jagged rocks and waves. She was creful, but I watched her feet more than the view she saw- I worried about her slipping. My mother's desire to reach those waves, touch her feet to another ocean on the other side of the country, was all she was thinking of- the pure baptismal goal of it. Whoosh and you can start over again. Or was life more like the horrible game in gym that has you running from one side of an enclosed space to another, picking up and setting down wooden blocks without end? She was thinking reach the waves, the waves, the waves, and I was watching her navigate the rocks, and when we heard her we did so together- looking up in shock. It was a baby on the beach. In among the rocks was a sandy cove, my mother now saw, and crawling across the sand on a blanket was a baby in knitted pink cap and singlet and boots. She was alone on the blanket with a stuffed white toy- my mother thought a lamb. With their backs to my mother as she descended were a group of adults-very official and frantic-looking- wearing black and navy with cool slants to their hats and boots. Then my wildlife photographer's eye saw the tripods and silver circles rimmed by wire, which, when a young man moved them left or right, bounced light off or on the baby on her blanket. My mother started laughing, but only one assistant turned to notice her up among the rocks; everyone else was too busy. This was an ad for something. I imagined, but what? New fresh infant girls to replace your own? As my mother laughed and I watched her face light up, I also saw it fall into strange lines. She saw the waves behind the girl child and how both beautiful and intoxicating they were- they could sweep up so softly and remove this gril from the beach. All the stylish people could chase after her, but she would drown in a moment- no one, not even a mother who had every nerve attuned to anticipate disaster, could have saved her if the waves leapt up, if life went on as usual and freak accidents peppered a calm shore.

While white mob violence against African Americans was an obsession in the South, it was not limited to that region. White supremacy was and is an American reality. Whites lynched blacks in nearly every state, including New York, Minnesota, and California. Wherever blacks were present in significant numbers, the threat of being lynched was always real. Blacks had to “watch their step,” no matter where they were in America. A black man could be walking down the road, minding his business, and his life could suddenly change by meeting a white man or a group of white men or boys who on a whim decided to have some fun with a Negro; and this could happen in Mississippi or New York, Arkansas, or Illinois. By the 1890s, lynching fever gripped the South, spreading like cholera, as white communities made blacks their primary target, and torture their focus. Burning the black victim slowly for hours was the chief method of torture. Lynching became a white media spectacle, in which prominent newspapers, like the Atlanta Constitution, announced to the public the place, date, and time of the expected hanging and burning of black victims. Often as many as ten to twenty thousand men, women, and children attended the event. It was a family affair, a ritual celebration of white supremacy, where women and children were often given the first opportunity to torture black victims—burning black flesh and cutting off genitals, fingers, toes, and ears as souvenirs. Postcards were made from the photographs taken of black victims with white lynchers and onlookers smiling as they struck a pose for the camera. They were sold for ten to twenty-five cents to members of the crowd, who then mailed them to relatives and friends, often with a note saying something like this: “This is the barbeque we had last night.”[17]

Now, obviously, all old people seem cool whenever we see black-and-white images of their younger selves. It's human nature to inject every old picture with positive abstractions. We can't help ourselves. We all do it. We want those things to be true, because we all hope future generations will have the same thoughts when they come across forgotten photographs of us.

Science uses the Red Shift to measure deep cosmic distances. But how to measure deep historic time? How about—the Saffron Shift. If history itself had a color, it is . . . like wood or bark, or living forest floor. Assigning hues to time periods, the sum total of history is saffron-brown—but the chromatic arc starts from blinding white (prehistory) to sun-yellow (Ancient Greece), then deepening to pale wood tones (Dark Ages) and finally exploding like an infinite chord into a full brown palette that includes mahoganies, siennas (Middle Ages), oak, sandalwood (the Renaissance), cherry, maple (Age of Reason), and near-black old woods (Industrial Revolution) for which there may not be names. As time approaches our own, the wood-brown palette fades to a weird glassy colorlessness, goes black-and-white for a brief span as you think of photographs of your grandparents, and then again fades until we get a clear medium that is the color of the world. And the present moment is perfectly transparent. It's only as you start looking into the future, that the colors start returning. The glass is turning silvery with a murky haze, and there is blue somewhere in the distance . . .

It seems so simple, even with the black and white taking away even more of what we’d see normally. But in the simplicity, there’s so much more there that speaks to a raw side of your soul like you can feel what the photographer feels, or any artist by focusing on an object that would have such little meaning if you saw it in passing. In the art, it begs to tell you a story and you can already feel what the story is about.

Around that time, just when I needed it, Leonard Nimoy’s Full Body Project came to me like a gift. The photographs are in black and white, and they feature a group of fat, naked women laughing, smiling, embracing, gazing fearlessly into the camera. In one, they sway indolently like the Three Graces; in another they re-create Herb Ritts’s iconic pile of supermodels. It was the first time I’d ever seen fat women presented without scorn. I

Not long ago, a whale biologist named Phillip Clapham sent me a photograph that illustrates the consequences of life without a doorman. Like most creatures that swallow their food whole, sperm whales have a limited-to-nonexistent sense of taste. The photo is a black-and-white still life of twenty-five objects recovered from sperm whale stomachs. It’s like Jonah set up housekeeping: a pitcher, a cup, a tube of toothpaste, a strainer, a wastebasket, a shoe, a decorative figurine.

Woman lost (skin deep) like a damn fine thread in the fire Woman of the world caught up in your black machinations I was a woman who cried alone at night, who gave it all away when she saw the good heart of the man inside Woman caught standing up; her open parts are broken - Someone's armour broke right through, it was you, you For some reason I've been thinking about you, your light Today, you poured out all the tension, the ego underground Hibernating inside my heart. I was so close to it, to the flicker Of love in a lonely street and I turned my head and walked Away from the flame in your arms. As I put away the fun in A house of fight I came across you and a mechanism in My brain shifted chemically, walls caved in like the cadence In your words and I was lost in the darkness. Even now in Middle age I remember when desire was a popular drug And everyone was selling it but I don't live to explore to be Able to illuminate the proof of my existence, live to burn Vicariously though the diamond mouth of sleeping stars. From so much love, pictures of death arrived in black and White photographs and you're perfect, you always were - Illusions have no flaws; they're dangerous beings, smoke. Could I take the moon back and still live with my great Expectations of nostalgia, laughter, tears and suffering - But they are all a part of me not the people of the stars, Long dead videotape, the past has stained the symphony Of my soul (like the wind through the trees) throughout Me finding myself, my two left feet as a female poet The warning was there of the noise of eternity, signs That said, don't anger the sea, you have an ally in her. When men grow cold listen to their stories and bask in The glory of their genuine deaths, their winters, put Them away so you can read them like the newspaper. Once in a while you can go back to where you stood In youth with your afternoon tea, the sun of God in our Eyes - I am that kind of woman who lives in the past

When a fine old carpet is eaten by mice, the colors and patterns of what's left behind do not change,' wrote my neighbor and friend, the poet Jane Hirschfield, after she visited an old friend suffering from Alzheimer's disease in a nursing home. And so it was with my father. His mind did not melt evenly into undistinguishable lumps, like a dissolving sand castle. It was ravaged selectively, like Tintern Abbey, the Cistercian monastery in northern Wales suppressed in 1531 by King Henry VIII in his split with the Church of Rome. Tintern was turned over to a nobleman, its stained-glass windows smashed, its roof tiles taken up and relaid in village houses. Holy artifacts were sold to passing tourists. Religious statues turned up in nearby gardens. At least one interior wall was dismantled to build a pigsty. I've seen photographs of the remains that inspired Wordsworth: a Gothic skeleton, soaring and roofless, in a green hilly landscape. Grass grows in the transept. The vanished roof lets in light. The delicate stone tracery of its slim, arched quatrefoil windows opens onto green pastures where black-and-white cows graze. Its shape is beautiful, formal, and mysterious. After he developed dementia, my father was no longer useful to anybody. But in the shelter of his broken walls, my mother learned to balance her checkbook, and my heart melted and opened. Never would I wish upon my father the misery of his final years. But he was sacred in his ruin, and I took from it the shards that still sustain me.

opportunity. The bizarre codes on the pages she’d sorted for Randy suddenly made sense. They must have been the files that kept track of where the bank had stashed millions of dollars. Jim wanted the money out, and so did the Covellis. The Mob was somehow involved with the bank’s dealings, and Carmichael worked for them. Being a bartender was just a facade. Beatrice hadn’t known him at all. But Tony and Max had known him, she realized. Tony was a police detective; he was the one who told her about the Covellis in the first place. He must have known. Every word Carmichael might have overheard at the bar replayed in her mind—her conversations with Tony about snooping around the bank, the missing safe deposits, the missing master key. Maybe Tony had wanted Carmichael to hear. The old man pointed the gun at Teddy in her head. Maybe the Covellis would bring down the bank if law enforcement failed. No one, not even Tony, suspected that she and Max had the power to do anything but run. Max was right. They all underestimated women like them. Beatrice stepped out from behind the curtain with the keys in her hand and crept toward the vault. CHAPTER 72 Friday, August 28, 1998 A black-and-white photograph of two women looked up from Box 547 in the yellow glow of the detective’s flashlight. They were smiling. The glass in the silver picture frame was cracked. Iris picked it up and handed it to Detective McDonnell. Underneath it she found a brown leather book and a candle. That was it. “What the hell is this?” Iris

Frederick Douglass, an early convert, became a theorist of photography. “Negroes can never have impartial portraits at the hands of white artists,” he said. “It seems to us next to impossible for white men to take likenesses of black men, without most grossly exaggerating their distinctive features.” But a photograph was no caricature. Douglass therefore sat, again and again, in a portraitist’s studio: he became the most photographed man in nineteenth-century America, his likeness taken more often than Twain or even Lincoln.

He had one room above a thrift store. He had a trunk of books by Ayn Rand. He was short-sighted and reclusive, resisting pleas to take his photograph. He drew a super-hero comic. He saw the world in terms of black and white. He said 'A day's work for a day's pay. That is our one and only right.' He takes a card and shades one half of it in dark So he can demonstrate to you just what he means. He says, 'There’s black and there is white, And there is wrong, and there is right, And there is nothing, nothing in between.' That’s what Mr. A says.

From the window, we saw a group of two dozen men in white-and-blue sweatshirts with garden hoes methodically rising in their hands and then falling to the earth. Their bodies were set against a backdrop of trees that had tumbled into autumn, draping them in a volcanic sea of red and orange. It had been one thing to see Black men laboring in the fields of Angola in photographs but it was quite different to see it in person. The parallel with chattel slavery made it feel as if time was bending in on itself. There was no need for metaphor; the land made it literal.

There was a little sketch pad with a pink paper cover, a packet of handwritten notes in what looked like my grandmother's handwriting, a silk scarf of water lilies on a blue background, a black fountain pen with an ornate silver hand on it, a book of poems by American poets with a number of pages dog-eared (I made a mental note to see if "Mending Wall" was in there), a magnifying glass with a carved wooden handle, a book called 'Native Flowers of New England' with a ragged cloth binding, another clothbound book called the 'Berry Farmer's Companion', and a stack of twenty faded black-and-white photographs.

The café smelled—not unpleasantly—of grease and beans and frying meat. Neil Diamond was on the jukebox, singing “I Am, I Said” in Spanish. The specials (which weren’t very) were posted behind the counter. Above the kitchen pass-through was a defaced photograph of Donald Trump. His blond hair had been colored black; he had been given a forelock and a mustache. Below it someone had printed Yanqui vete a casa: Yankee go home. At first Ralph was surprised—Texas was a red state, after all, as red as they came—but then he remembered that if whites weren’t the actual minority this near to the border, it was a close-run thing.

September 10, 1965 Dear Francesca, Enclosed are two photographs. One is the shot I took of you in the pasture at sunrise. I hope you like it as much as I do. The other is of Roseman Bridge before I removed your note tacked to it. I sit here trolling the gray areas of my mind for every detail, every moment, of our time together. I ask myself over and over, “What happened to me in Madison County, Iowa?” And I struggle to bring it together. That’s why I wrote the little piece, “Falling from Dimension Z,” I have enclosed, as a way of trying to sift through my confusion. I look down the barrel of a lens, and you’re at the end of it. I begin work on an article, and I’m writing about you. I’m not even sure how I got back here from Iowa. Somehow the old truck brought me home, yet I barely remember the miles going by. A few weeks ago, I felt self-contained, reasonably content. Maybe not profoundly happy, maybe a little lonely, but at least content. All of that has changed. It’s clear to me now that I have been moving toward you and you toward me for a long time. Though neither of us was aware of the other before we met, there was a kind of mindless certainty humming blithely along beneath our ignorance that ensured we would come together. Like two solitary birds flying the great prairies by celestial reckoning, all of these years and lifetimes we have been moving toward one another. The road is a strange place. Shuffling along, I looked up and you were there walking across the grass toward my truck on an August day. In retrospect, it seems inevitable—it could not have been any other way—a case of what I call the high probability of the improbable. So here I am walking around with another person inside of me. Though I think I put it better the day we parted when I said there is a third person we have created from the two of us. And I am stalked now by that other entity. Somehow, we must see each other again. Any place, anytime. Call me if you ever need anything or simply want to see me. I’ll be there, pronto. Let me know if you can come out here sometime—anytime. I can arrange plane fare, if that’s a problem. I’m off to southeast India next week, but I’ll be back in late October. I Love You, Robert P. S., The photo project in Madison County turned out fine. Look for it in NG next year. Or tell me if you want me to send a copy of the issue when it’s published. Francesca Johnson set her brandy glass on the wide oak windowsill and stared at an eight-by-ten black-and-white photograph of herself.

It’s a long story,” he said, taking a sip of Mr. Braeburn’s whiskey, “so I will tell only a very condensed version of it. “Mrs. Marsden and I grew up on adjacent properties in the Cotswold. But the Cotswold, as fair as it is, plays almost no part in this tale. Because it was not in the green, unpolluted countryside that we fell in love, but in gray, sooty London. Love at first sight, of course, a hunger of the soul that could not be denied.” Bryony trembled somewhere inside. This was not their story, but her story, the determined spinster felled by the magnificence and charm of the gorgeous young thing. He glanced at her. “You were the moon of my existence; your moods dictated the tides of my heart.” The tides of her own heart surged at his words, even though his words were nothing but lies. “I don’t believe I had moods,” she said severely. “No, of course not. ‘Thou art more lovely and more temperate’—and the tides of my heart only rose ever higher to crash against the levee of my self-possession. For I loved you most intemperately, my dear Mrs. Marsden.” Beside her Mrs. Braeburn blushed, her eyes bright. Bryony was furious at Leo, for his facile words, and even more so at herself, for the painful pleasure that trickled into her drop by drop. “Our wedding was the happiest hour of my life, that we would belong to each other always. The church was filled with hyacinths and camellias, and the crowd overflowed to the steps, for the whole world wanted to see who had at last captured your lofty heart. “But alas, I had not truly captured your lofty heart, had I? I but held it for a moment. And soon there was trouble in Paradise. One day, you said to me, ‘My hair has turned white. It is a sign I must wander far and away. Find me then, if you can. Then and only then will I be yours again.’” Her heart pounded again. How did he know that she had indeed taken her hair turning white as a sign that the time had come for her to leave? No, he did not know. He’d made it up out of whole cloth. But even Mr. Braeburn was spellbound by this ridiculous tale. She had forgotten how hypnotic Leo could be, when he wished to beguile a crowd. “And so I have searched. From the poles to the tropics, from the shores of China to the shores of Nova Scotia. Our wedding photograph in hand, I have asked crowds pale, red, brown, and black, ‘I seek an English lady doctor, my lost beloved. Have you seen her?’” He looked into her eyes, and she could not look away, as mesmerized as the hapless Braeburns. “And now I have found you at last.” He raised his glass. “To the beginning of the rest of our lives.

I began to meditate upon the writer’s life. It is full of tribulation. First he must endure poverty and the world’s indifference; then, having achieved a measure of success, he must submit with a good grace to its hazards. He depends upon a fickle public. He is at the mercy of journalists who want to interview him and photographers who want to take his picture, of editors who harry him for copy and tax gatherers who harry him for income tax, of persons of quality who ask him to lunch and secretaries of institutes who ask him to lecture, of women who want to marry him and women who want to divorce him, of youths who want his autograph, actors who want parts and strangers who want a loan, of gushing ladies who want advice on their matrimonial affairs and earnest young men who want advice on their compositions, of agents, publishers, managers, bores, admirers, critics, and his own conscience. But he has one compensation. Whenever he has anything on his mind, whether it be a harassing reflection, grief at the death of a friend, unrequited love, wounded pride, anger at the treachery of someone to whom he has shown kindness, in short any emotion or any perplexing thought, he has only to put it down in black and white, using it as the theme of a story or the decoration of an essay, to forget all about it. He is the only free man.

You can wear a variety of clothing. But you should have one designer you favor. I suggest Amano." "Ooh," Noriko hums. "I love him." Ichiko taps out something on her tablet and hands me photographs of his latest runway show. "I see it now. You are a small-town girl who supports the local artist. An up-and-comer like you. That's your brand." She winks at me. "Amano's pieces are flattering with a nod to classical elements, but with a certain modern flair." Women strut down a white runway. One wears a black silk furisode with flowing kimono sleeves and a lotus flower motif. Another sports a red evening gown with a matching capelet. Another, a turquoise fitted dress with a square neckline and beaded belt. All so pretty. I like.

Sometimes, when I'm having a sort-through or a clear-out, I find photos of my youth, and it's a shock to see everything on black and white. I think my granddaughter believes we were actually grey-skinned, with dull hair, always posing in a shadowed landscape. But I remember the town as being almost too bright to look at when I was a girl. I remember the deep blue of the sky and the dark green of the pines cutting through it, the bright red of the local brick houses and the orange carpet of pine needles under our feet. Nowadays - though I'm not sure the sky is still occasionally blue and most of the houses are still there, and the trees still drop their needles - nowadays, the colours seem faded, as if I live in an old photograph.

In Texas in May 1916, a black farm worker named Jesse Washington, accused of murdering the white woman he worked for, was lynched in front of the Waco city hall. Washington was not hanged. First he was castrated, then his fingers were cut off, then he was raised and lowered over a bonfire for two hours, until he finally died. His charred body was then dismembered, the torso dragged through the streets, and other parts of his body sold as souvenirs. It happened in broad daylight, in the middle of the day, as some 10,000 spectators watched, including local officials, police officers and children on their school lunch break. Photographs were taken of Washington’s carbonised body hanging above grinning white people and turned into postcards. That’s the reality of what being ‘one hundred per cent American’ and for ‘America first’ meant to a great many citizens of the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Time for a break.” He thrusts the newspaper into my line of vision. “Have a look.” Setting aside my brush and wiping my hands on a clean rag, I take it from him and unfurl it. Staring back at me from the front page is a black-and-white photograph of Will. He’s laughing at something past the camera. No blood. No bits of brain matter or shards of bone. Wilburt Harris Jr., Son of Governor Wilburt Harris, Dies of Influenza at Eighteen. The headline is bold and stark, and I have to read it three times before the words register. “I always love to see headlines like that,” Vincent says. I look up at him in horror. When he catches sight of my face, his eyebrows shoot upward. “No, I don’t mean that I love to see it when people die of influenza. Heavens no.” He shakes his head brusquely. “I only meant that the headline is proof is my autopsy reports were well done. People believed them. That’s all.” He rubs the back of his neck, clearly ruffled. “Would you like a drink? I’ll get us a bottle of wine.” He rushes away.

I lift the lid of the chest. Inside, the air is musty and stale, held hostage for years in its three-foot-by-four-foot tomb. I lean in to survey the contents cautiously, then pull out a stack of old photos tied with twine. On top is a photo of a couple on their wedding day. She's a young bride, wearing one of those 1950's netted veils. He looks older, distinguished- sort of like Cary Grant or Gregory Peck in the old black-and-white movies I used to watch with my grandmother. I set the stack down and turn back to the chest, where I find a notebook, filled with handwritten recipes. The page for Cinnamon Rolls is labeled "Dex's Favorite." 'Dex.' I wonder if he's the man in the photo. There are two ticket stubs from 1959, one to a Frank Sinatra concert, another to the movie 'An Affair to Remember.' A single shriveled rosebud rests on a white handkerchief. A corsage? When I lift it into my hand, it disintegrates; the petals crinkle into tiny pieces that fall onto the living room carpet. At the bottom of the chest is what looks like a wedding dress. It's yellowed and moth-eaten, but I imagine it was once stark white and beautiful. As I lift it, I can hear the lace swishing as if to say, "Ahh." Whoever wore it was very petite. The waist circumference is tiny. A pair of long white gloves falls to the floor. They must have been tucked inside the dress. I refold the finery and set the ensemble back inside. Whose things are these? And why have they been left here? I thumb through the recipe book. All cookies, cakes, desserts. She must have loved to bake. I tuck the book back inside the chest, along with the photographs after I've retied the twine, which is when I notice a book tucked into the corner. It's an old paperback copy of Ernest Hemingway's 'The Sun Also Rises.' I've read a little of Hemingway over the years- 'A Moveable Feast' and some of his later work- but not this one. I flip through the book and notice that one page is dog-eared. I open to it and see a line that has been underscored. "You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another." I look out to the lake, letting the words sink in. 'Is that what I'm trying to do? Get away from myself?' I stare at the line in the book again and wonder if it resonated with the woman who underlined it so many years ago. Did she have her own secret pain? 'Was she trying to escape it just like me?

I’ll go myself,” the sergeant said tersely. He was getting annoyed. The stairway went down underneath the ground floor to a depth of about eight feet. A short paved corridor ran in front of the boiler room at right angles to the stairs, where each end was closed off by unpainted panelled doors. Both the stairs and the corridor felt like loose gravel underfoot, but otherwise they were clean. Splotches of blood were more in evidence in the corridor and a bloody hand mark showed clearly on the unpainted door to the rear. “Let’s not touch anything,” the sergeant cautioned, taking out a clean white handkerchief to handle the doorknob. “I better call the fingerprint crew,” the photographer said. “No, Joe will call them; I’ll need you. And you local fellows better wait outside, we’re so crowded in here we’ll destroy the evidence.” “Ed and I won’t move,” Grave Digger said. Coffin Ed grunted. Taking no further notice of them, the sergeant pushed open the door. It was black and dark inside. First he shone his light over the wall alongside the door and all over the corridor looking for electric light switches. One was located to the right of each door. Taking care to avoid stepping in any of the blood splotches, the sergeant moved from one switch to another, but none worked. “Blown fuse,” he muttered, picking his way back to the open room. Without having to move, Grave Digger and Coffin Ed could see all they wanted through the open door. Originally made to accommodate a part-time janitor or any type of laborer who would fire the boiler for a place to sleep, the room had been converted into a pad. All that remained of the original was a partitioned-off toilet in one corner and a washbasin in the other. An opening enclosed by heavy wire mesh opened into the boiler room, serving for both ventilation and heat. Otherwise the room was furnished like a boudoir. There was a dressing-table with a triple mirror, three-quarter bed with chenille spread, numerous foam-rubber pillows in a variety of shapes, three round yellow scatter rugs. On the whitewashed walls an obscene mural had been painted in watercolors depicting black and white silhouettes in a variety of perverted sex acts, some of which could only be performed by male contortionists. And everything was splattered with blood, the walls, the bed, the rugs. The furnishings were not so much disarrayed, as though a violent struggle had taken place, but just bloodied. “Mother-raper stood still and let his throat be cut,” Grave Digger observed. “Wasn’t that,” Coffin Ed corrected. “He just didn’t believe it is all.

None were particularly interesting, although I got a kick out of a note from the Philadelphia Zoo suggesting that since the tiger was not entirely reliable around humans, perhaps Mr. Willing would consider a leopard for his painting instead. It had been a pet until the demise (natural) of its owner and would, if not firmly admonished, climb into a person's lap, purring, and drool copiously. I pulled a sheet of scrap paper (the Stars spent a lot of time sending all-school e-mails about recycling) out of my bag and made a note on the blank side: "Leopard in The Lady in DeNile?" It wasn't my favorite, Cleopatra Awaiting the Return of Anthony. It was a little OTT, loaded with gold and snake imagery and, of course, the leopard. Diana hadn't liked the painting,either, apparently; she was the one who'd given it the Lady in DeNile nickname.I wondered if the leopard had drooled on her. None of the papers were personal, but they were Edward's and some were special, if you knew about his life. There was a bill from the Hotel Ritz in Paris in April 1890, and one from Cartier two months later for a pair of Tahitian pearl drop earrings. Diana was wearing them in my favorite photograph of the two of them: happy and visibly tanned, even in black and white, holding lobsters on a beach in Maine. "I insisted we let them go," Diana wrote in a letter to her niece. "Edward had a snit.He wanted a lobster dinner, but I could not countenance eating a fellow model.

Trust in the familiar seems to be matched by wariness of the unfamiliar. Jennifer Richeson of Northwestern University has conducted experiments in which white subjects had to interact in some way with a white or a black man before taking a mental test. Those who dealt with the black man got lower scores on the test, and their brain scans showed what Prof. Richeson called “heightened activity in areas of the brain associated with regulating our thoughts and emotions.” She interpreted this to mean that white subjects were struggling with the “awkwardness” or “exhaustion” of dealing with a black man, and that this interfered with their ability to take the mental test. Researchers at Harvard and New York University had white and black subjects look repeatedly at a series of photographs of black and white faces, all with neutral expressions. Every time the subjects looked at one particular black face and one particular white face they got a mild electric shock. Lie detector-type devices showed that subjects would sweat—a typical stress reaction—when they saw the two faces they associated with the shocks. The researchers showed the photo series several times again, but without the shocks. White subjects quickly stopped sweating when they saw the white face formerly associated with the shock, but continued to sweat when they saw the black face. Black subjects had the opposite reaction, continuing to sweat when they saw the white but not the black face. Mahzarin Banaji, the study’s leader, concluded that this was a sign of natural human wariness of unfamiliar groups.

The Memory Business Steven Sasson is a tall man with a lantern jaw. In 1973, he was a freshly minted graduate of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His degree in electrical engineering led to a job with Kodak’s Apparatus Division research lab, where, a few months into his employment, Sasson’s supervisor, Gareth Lloyd, approached him with a “small” request. Fairchild Semiconductor had just invented the first “charge-coupled device” (or CCD)—an easy way to move an electronic charge around a transistor—and Kodak needed to know if these devices could be used for imaging.4 Could they ever. By 1975, working with a small team of talented technicians, Sasson used CCDs to create the world’s first digital still camera and digital recording device. Looking, as Fast Company once explained, “like a ’70s Polaroid crossed with a Speak-and-Spell,”5 the camera was the size of a toaster, weighed in at 8.5 pounds, had a resolution of 0.01 megapixel, and took up to thirty black-and-white digital images—a number chosen because it fell between twenty-four and thirty-six and was thus in alignment with the exposures available in Kodak’s roll film. It also stored shots on the only permanent storage device available back then—a cassette tape. Still, it was an astounding achievement and an incredible learning experience. Portrait of Steven Sasson with first digital camera, 2009 Source: Harvey Wang, From Darkroom to Daylight “When you demonstrate such a system,” Sasson later said, “that is, taking pictures without film and showing them on an electronic screen without printing them on paper, inside a company like Kodak in 1976, you have to get ready for a lot of questions. I thought people would ask me questions about the technology: How’d you do this? How’d you make that work? I didn’t get any of that. They asked me when it was going to be ready for prime time? When is it going to be realistic to use this? Why would anybody want to look at their pictures on an electronic screen?”6 In 1996, twenty years after this meeting took place, Kodak had 140,000 employees and a $28 billion market cap. They were effectively a category monopoly. In the United States, they controlled 90 percent of the film market and 85 percent of the camera market.7 But they had forgotten their business model. Kodak had started out in the chemistry and paper goods business, for sure, but they came to dominance by being in the convenience business. Even that doesn’t go far enough. There is still the question of what exactly Kodak was making more convenient. Was it just photography? Not even close. Photography was simply the medium of expression—but what was being expressed? The “Kodak Moment,” of course—our desire to document our lives, to capture the fleeting, to record the ephemeral. Kodak was in the business of recording memories. And what made recording memories more convenient than a digital camera? But that wasn’t how the Kodak Corporation of the late twentieth century saw it. They thought that the digital camera would undercut their chemical business and photographic paper business, essentially forcing the company into competing against itself. So they buried the technology. Nor did the executives understand how a low-resolution 0.01 megapixel image camera could hop on an exponential growth curve and eventually provide high-resolution images. So they ignored it. Instead of using their weighty position to corner the market, they were instead cornered by the market.

MRI testing again shows what may be the underlying brain mechanism. The amygdalae are two small lobes in the brain associated with fear, arousal, and emotions. When they are active, it is thought to be a sign of vigilance, meaning that the brain is wary and wants more information. A study at Massachusetts General Hospital found that when subjects looked at photographs of faces—half were white, half were black—MRI scans found high amygdala activity. This was considered to be a normal reaction to unfamiliar faces. When the subjects looked at the photographs a second time the faces were more familiar; only the other-race faces continued to provoke high amygdala activity. This was true for both blacks and whites, suggesting that encounters with people of different races keep the brain at a higher level of watchfulness. Amygdalae notice race even when a person does not. William A. Cunningham of Ohio State University showed white subjects pictures of faces for only 30 milliseconds—not long enough for the subjects to be conscious of them—but black faces triggered greater amygdala activity than white faces. When he showed faces for a half a second—long enough for people to notice race—he found that black faces prompted greater activity in the pre-frontal areas, a part of the brain associated with detecting internal conflicts and controlling conscious behavior. This suggested the subjects were trying to suppress certain feelings about blacks. Steven Neuberg of Arizona State University attributes instinctive bias to evolution during our hunter-gatherer past. “By nature, people are group-living animals—a strategy that enhances individual survival and leads to what we might call a ‘tribal psychology’, ” he says. “It was adaptive for our ancestors to be attuned to those outside the group who posed threats such as to physical security, health or economic resources.

Only with Clara did she allow herself the luxury of giving in to her overwhelming desire to serve and be loved; with her, however slyly, she was able to express the secret, most delicate yearnings of her soul. The long years of solitude and unhappiness had distilled her emotions and purified her feelings down to a few terrible, magnificent passions, which possessed her totally. She had no gift for small perturbations, mean-spirited resentments, concealed envies, works of charity, faded endearments, ordinary friendly politeness, or day-to-day acts of kindness. She was one of those people who are born for the greatness of a single love, for exaggerated hatred, for apocalyptic vengeance, and for the most sublime forms of heroism, but she was unable to shape her fate to the dimensions of her amorous vocation, so it was lived out as something flat and gray trapped between her mother’s sickroom walls, wretched tenements, and the tortured confessions with which this large, opulent, hot-blooded woman—made for maternity, abundance, action, and ardor—was consuming herself She was about forty-five years old then, and her splendid breeding and distant Moorish ancestors kept her looking fit and polished, with black, silky hair and a single white lock on her forehead, a strong and slender body and the resolute step of the healthy. Still, the emptiness of her life made her look far older than she was. I have a photograph of Ferula taken around that time, on one of Blanca’s birthdays. It is an old sepiatoned picture, discolored with age, but you can still see how she looked. She was a regal matron, but with a bitter smile on her face that revealed her inner tragedy. Those years with Clara were probably the only happy period in her life, because only with Clara could she be herself Clara was the one in whom she confided her most subtle feelings, and to her she consecrated her enormous capacity for sacrifice and veneration.

If anything- learn from me. Try to do the virtuous things I did and not the mistakes I made. Though it is up to you to decide what was great or immoral, it is what you feel and believe is morally right in your mind.' 'Yes, it would be right in saying- I never really establish any thought into what was going to happen to me someday and the others that are part of my surroundings.' 'However, life goes on, and the existence of what was stands for nothing but- a memory of what you can and cannot have. If you are someone like me, but all I ever wanted to have is someone that appreciates me.' 'Everybody around here would say life is free, yet or is it?' 'Like, do I even want it?' 'No- not anymore!' 'The existence of life…! Is what I mean.' 'This belief is what I do not want, to have anymore.' 'There must be a way out of all this misery, suffering, pain, agony, and distress, that I relish in the day today?' 'They say dying, departing, and falling is easy, as well as lasting, and living is difficult, uncertain, ambiguous, and unpredictable.' 'While with a wild carless heart and reduction of insight I am going to find out!' 'I presume life is all about what you want, need, love, desire, respect, and love.' 'Furthermore, existing in life comes down to what you cannot have in it. All I have to say is don't let anyone or anything pin you down and make you less than who you are. Always be who you were meant to be, regardless of what they say… because who in the hell are, they!' 'This is a warning to my story, I will only say this once, this is my life, and others I have loved and lost, and it is graphic at times.' 'Just like looking into a book of Sh-h, of deep dark girlie secrets, photographs in the mind like black and white still frames of the past developed, or like a painting of time last just at the moment- a picture with my words of how I will be remembered, the story will come to be perceived sharply and with much clarity.

Three-and-a-half-month-old infants already seem to exhibit the other-race effect. In a study at the University of Kentucky, white babies were very good at distinguishing faces with 100 percent Caucasian features from faces that had been graphically morphed to include features that were 70 percent white and 30 percent Asian. They couldn’t do the reverse: They could not tell 100 percent Asian faces from those that were morphed to include 30 percent white features. In other words, they could detect small differences between white and not-quite-white faces, but not the same kinds of differences between Asian and not-quite-Asian faces. Lawrence A. Hirschfeld of the University of Michigan did some of the pioneering work on how early in life children begin to understand race. He showed children of ages three, four, and seven, a picture of “Johnny:” a chubby black boy in a police uniform, complete with whistle and toy gun. He then showed them pictures of adults who shared two of Johnny’s three main traits of race, body build, and uniform. Prof. Hirschfeld prepared all combinations—policemen who were fat but were white, thin black policemen, etc.—and asked the children which was Johnny’s daddy or which was Johnny all grown up. Even the three-year-olds were significantly more likely to choose the black man rather than the fat man or the policeman. They knew that weight and occupation can change but race is permanent. In 1996, after 15 years of studying children and race, Prof. Hirschfeld concluded: “Our minds seem to be organized in a way that makes thinking racially—thinking that the human world can be segmented into discrete racial populations—an almost automatic part of our mental repertoire.” When white preschoolers are shown racially ambiguous faces that look angry, they tend to say they are faces of blacks, but categorize happy faces as white. “These filters through which people see the world are present very early,” explained Andrew Baron of Harvard. Phyllis Katz, then a professor at the University of Colorado, studied young children for their first six years. At age three, she showed them photographs of other children and asked them whom they would like to have as friends. Eighty-six percent of white children chose photographs of white children. At age five and six, she gave children pictures of people and told them to sort them into two piles by any criteria they liked. Sixty-eight percent sorted by race and only 16 by sex. Of her entire six-year study Prof. Katz said, “I think it is fair to say that at no point in the study did the children exhibit the Rousseau type of color-blindness that many adults expect.

To paint after nature is to transfer three-dimensional corporeality to a two-dimensional surface. This you can do if you are in good health and not colorblind. Oil paint, canvas, and brush are material and tools. It is possible by expedient distribution of oil paint on canvas to copy natural impressions; under favorable conditions you can do it so accurately that the picture cannot be distinguished from the model. You start, let us say, with a white canvas primed for oil painting and sketch in with charcoal the most discernible lines of the natural form you have chosen. Only the first line may be drawn more or less arbitrarily, all the others must form with the first the angle prescribed by the natural model. By constant comparison of the sketch with the model, the lines can be so adjusted that the lines of the sketch will correspond to those of the model. Lines are now drawn by feeling, the accuracy of the feeling is checked and measured by comparison of the estimated angle of the line with the perpendicular in nature and in the sketch. Then, according to the apparent proportions between the parts of the model, you sketch in the proportions between parts on the canvas, preferably by means of broken lines delimiting these parts. The size of the first part is arbitrary, unless your plan is to represent a part, such as the head, in 'life size.' In that case you measure with a compass an imaginary line running parallel to a plane on the natural object conceived as a plane on the picture, and use this measurement in representing the first part. You adjust all the remaining parts to the first through feeling, according to the corresponding parts of the model, and check your feeling by measurement; to do this, you place the picture so far away form you that the first part appears as large in the painting as the model, and then you compare. In order to check a given proportion, you hold out the handle of your paintbrush at arm's length towards this proportion in such a way that the end of the thumbnail on the handle coincides with the other end of the proportion. If then you hold the paintbrush out towards the picture, again at arm's length, you can, by the measurement thus obtained, determine with photographic accuracy whether your feeling has deceived you. If the sketch is correct, you fill in the parts of the picture with color, according to nature. The most expedient method is to begin with a clearly recognizable color of large area, perhaps with a somewhat broken blue. You estimate the degree of matness and break the luminosity with a complimentary color, ultramarine, for example, with light ochre. By addition of white you can make the color light, by addition of black dark. All this can be learned. The best way of checking for accuracy is to place the picture directly beside the projected picture surface in nature, return to your old place and compare the color in your picture with the natural color. By breaking those tones that are too bright and adding those that are still lacking, you will achieve a color tonality as close as possible to that in nature. If one tone is correct, you can put the picture back in its place and adjust the other colors to the first by feeling. You can check your feeling by comparing every tone directly with nature, after setting the picture back beside the model. If you have patience and adjust all large and small lines, all forms and color tones according to nature, you will have an exact reproduction of nature. This can be learned. This can be taught. And in addition, you can avoid making too many mistakes in 'feeling' by studying nature itself through anatomy and perspective and your medium through color theory. That is academy.

I am speaking of the evenings when the sun sets early, of the fathers under the streetlamps in the back streets returning home carrying plastic bags. Of the old Bosphorus ferries moored to deserted stations in the middle of winter, where sleepy sailors scrub the decks, pail in hand and one eye on the black-and-white television in the distance; of the old booksellers who lurch from one ϧnancial crisis to the next and then wait shivering all day for a customer to appear; of the barbers who complain that men don’t shave as much after an economic crisis; of the children who play ball between the cars on cobblestoned streets; of the covered women who stand at remote bus stops clutching plastic shopping bags and speak to no one as they wait for the bus that never arrives; of the empty boathouses of the old Bosphorus villas; of the teahouses packed to the rafters with unemployed men; of the patient pimps striding up and down the city’s greatest square on summer evenings in search of one last drunken tourist; of the broken seesaws in empty parks; of ship horns booming through the fog; of the wooden buildings whose every board creaked even when they were pashas’ mansions, all the more now that they have become municipal headquarters; of the women peeking through their curtains as they wait for husbands who never manage to come home in the evening; of the old men selling thin religious treatises, prayer beads, and pilgrimage oils in the courtyards of mosques; of the tens of thousands of identical apartment house entrances, their facades discolored by dirt, rust, soot, and dust; of the crowds rushing to catch ferries on winter evenings; of the city walls, ruins since the end of the Byzantine Empire; of the markets that empty in the evenings; of the dervish lodges, the tekkes, that have crumbled; of the seagulls perched on rusty barges caked with moss and mussels, unϩinching under the pelting rain; of the tiny ribbons of smoke rising from the single chimney of a hundred-yearold mansion on the coldest day of the year; of the crowds of men ϧshing from the sides of the Galata Bridge; of the cold reading rooms of libraries; of the street photographers; of the smell of exhaled breath in the movie theaters, once glittering aϱairs with gilded ceilings, now porn cinemas frequented by shamefaced men; of the avenues where you never see a woman alone after sunset; of the crowds gathering around the doors of the state-controlled brothels on one of those hot blustery days when the wind is coming from the south; of the young girls who queue at the doors of establishments selling cut-rate meat; of the holy messages spelled out in lights between the minarets of mosques on holidays that are missing letters where the bulbs have burned out; of the walls covered with frayed and blackened posters; of the tired old dolmuşes, ϧfties Chevrolets that would be museum pieces in any western city but serve here as shared taxis, huϫng and puϫng up the city’s narrow alleys and dirty thoroughfares; of the buses packed with passengers; of the mosques whose lead plates and rain gutters are forever being stolen; of the city cemeteries, which seem like gateways to a second world, and of their cypress trees; of the dim lights that you see of an evening on the boats crossing from Kadıköy to Karaköy; of the little children in the streets who try to sell the same packet of tissues to every passerby; of the clock towers no one ever notices; of the history books in which children read about the victories of the Ottoman Empire and of the beatings these same children receive at home; of the days when everyone has to stay home so the electoral roll can be compiled or the census can be taken; of the days when a sudden curfew is announced to facilitate the search for terrorists and everyone sits at home fearfully awaiting “the oϫcials”; CONTINUED IN SECOND PART OF THE QUOTE

A child’s why led to the development of the Polaroid camera. On a family vacation in the 1940s, Edwin Land’s three-year-old daughter asked why she couldn’t immediately see the photograph her father had just taken. Land knew that producing an instant photograph was impossible: You had to develop film in a darkroom. But instead of relying on what he knew, he continued to think about her question. Four years later, his first black-and-white instant camera hit the market.

Someday Tatiana must tell Alexander how glad she is that her sister Dasha did not die without once feeling what it was like to love. Alexander. Here he is, before he was Tatiana’s, at the age of twenty, getting his medal of valor for bringing back Yuri Stepanov during the 1940 Winter War. Alexander is in his dress Soviet uniform, snug against his body, his stance at-ease and his hand up to his temple in teasing salute. There is a gleaming smile on his face, his eyes are carefree, his whole man-self full of breathtaking, aching youth. And yet, the war was on, and his men had already died and frozen and starved... and his mother and father were gone... and he was far away from home, and getting farther and farther, and every day was his last—one way or another, every day was his last. And yet, he smiles, he shines, he is happy. Anthony is gone so long that his daughters say something must have happened to him. But then he appears. Like his father, he has learned well the poker face and outwardly remains imperturbable. Just as a man should be, thinks Tatiana. A man doesn’t get to be on the President’s National Security Council without steeling himself to some of life’s little adversities. A man doesn’t go through what Anthony went through without steeling himself to some of life’s little adversities. In this hand Anthony carries two faded photographs, flattened by the pages of the book, grayed by the passing years. The kitchen falls quiet, even Rachel and Rebecca are breathless in anticipation. “Let’s see...” they murmur, gingerly picking up the fragile, sepia pictures with their long fingers. Tatiana is far away from them. “Do you want to see them with us, Grammy? Grandpa?” “We know them well,” Tatiana says, her voice catching on something. “You kids go ahead.” The grandchildren, the daughter, the son, the guests circle their heads, gaping. “Washington, look! Just look at them! What did we tell you?” Shura and Tania, 23 and 18, just married. In full bloom, on the steps of the church near Lazarevo, he in his Red Army dress uniform, she in her white dress with red roses, roses that are black in the monochrome photo. She is standing next to him, holding his arm. He is looking into the camera, a wide grin on his face. She is gazing up at him, her small body pressed into him, her light hair at her shoulders, her arms bare, her mouth slightly parted. “Grammy!” Rebecca exclaims. “I’m positively blushing. Look at the way you’re coming the spoon on Grandpa!” She turns to Alexander from the island. “Grandpa, did you catch the way she is looking at you?” “Once or twice,” replies Alexander. The other colorless photo. Tania and Shura, 18 and 23. He lifts her in the air, his arms wrapped around her body, her arms wrapped around his neck, their fresh faces tilted, their enraptured lips in a breathless open kiss. Her feet are off the ground. “Wow, Grammy,” murmurs Rebecca. “Wow, Grandpa.” Tatiana is busily wiping the granite island. “You want to know what my Washington said about you two?” Rebecca says, not looking away from the photograph. “He called you an adjacent Fibonacci pair!” She giggles. “Isn’t that sexy?” Tatiana shakes her head, despite herself glancing at Washington with reluctant affection. “Just what we need, another math expert. I don’t know what you all think math will give you.” And Janie comes over to her father who is sitting at the kitchen table, holding her baby son, bends over Alexander, leans over him, kisses him, her arm around him, and murmurs into his ear, “Daddy, I’ve figured out what I’m going to call my baby. It’s so simple.” “Fibonacci?” She laughs. “Why, Shannon, of course. Shannon.” The

The ceilings soared up fifteen feet at least, holding nothing but stale air and the faded echoes of hard-soled shoes and clacking keys. The whole place was a lost black-and-white photograph.

The black-and-white figures of the photographs have had to stand in place of my memory and yet I have always felt that their unmarked graves became a part of me. What was unwritten then is inscribed into what I call myself.

Happiness is photographing female statuary, for, unlike the human female, they are most cooperative, not prone to hissy fits, nor do they suffer from PDS (Prima Donna Syndrome).

In less than three human life spans, we went from a world in which a single expensive, blurry, black-and-white photograph astonished people to one in which cheap color video made instantly available all over the planet does not. For the advance of humanity, this is a wondrous thing. For the promise it offers each individual to learn and grow, it is magnificent. And yet. And yet the humans living amid this deluge of information have brains that believe, somewhere in their deepest recesses, that an image of our children is our children, that a piece of fudge shaped like dog poo is dog poo, and that a daydream about winning the lottery makes it more likely we will win the lottery. We have brains that, in line with the Anchoring Rule, use the first available number as the basis for making an estimate about something that has absolutely nothing to do with the number. This is not helpful at a time when we are pelted with numbers like raindrops in a monsoon.

His eyes widened and he rapidly scanned page after page. There were many photographs, each followed by detailed diagrams of the internal structure of the various neutron stars. They ranged the gamut from very dense stars that were almost black holes to large bloated neutron stars that had a neutron core and a white-dwarf-star exterior. Some of the names were unfamiliar, but others, like the Vela pulsar and the Crab Nebula pulsar, were neutron stars known to the humans. “But the Crab Nebula pulsar is over 3000 light-years away!” Pierre exclaimed to himself. “They would have had to travel faster than the speed of light to have gone there to take those photographs in the past eight hours!” A quick search through the index found the answer. FASTER-THAN-LIGHT PROPULSION—THE CRYPTO-KEY TO THIS SECTION IS ENGRAVED ON A PYRAMID ON THE THIRD MOON OF THE SECOND PLANET OF EPSILON ERIDANI.

I have wondered that even in the era of colour the black and white photographs are so appealing? I feel that as per saying - in black and white -they speak the truth.

Although earlier computers existed in isolation from the world, requiring their visuals and sound to be generated and live only within their memory, the Amiga was of the world, able to interface with it in all its rich analog glory. It was the first PC with a sufficient screen resolution and color palette as well as memory and processing power to practically store and display full-color photographic representations of the real world, whether they be scanned in from photographs, captured from film or video, or snapped live by a digitizer connected to the machine. It could be used to manipulate video, adding titles, special effects, or other postproduction tricks. And it was also among the first to make practical use of recordings of real-world sound. The seeds of the digital-media future, of digital cameras and Photoshop and MP3 players, are here. The Amiga was the first aesthetically satisfying PC. Although the generation of machines that preceded it were made to do many remarkable things, works produced on them always carried an implied asterisk; “Remarkable,” we say, “. . . for existing on such an absurdly limited platform.” Even the Macintosh, a dramatic leap forward in many ways, nevertheless remained sharply limited by its black-and-white display and its lack of fast animation capabilities. Visuals produced on the Amiga, however, were in full color and could often stand on their own terms, not as art produced under huge technological constraints, but simply as art. And in allowing game programmers to move beyond blocky, garish graphics and crude sound, the Amiga redefined the medium of interactive entertainment as being capable of adult sophistication and artistry. The seeds of the aesthetic future, of computers as everyday artistic tools, ever more attractive computer desktops, and audiovisually rich virtual worlds, are here. The Amiga empowered amateur creators by giving them access to tools heretofore available only to the professional. The platform’s most successful and sustained professional niche was as a video-production workstation, where an Amiga, accompanied by some relatively inexpensive software and hardware peripherals, could give the hobbyist amateur or the frugal professional editing and postproduction capabilities equivalent to equipment costing tens or hundreds of thousands. And much of the graphical and musical creation software available for the machine was truly remarkable. The seeds of the participatory-culture future, of YouTube and Flickr and even the blogosphere, are here. The

February 8: Marilyn does her “black sitting” session with Milton Greene. Marilyn poses in black hat and fishnet stockings, her face partially in shadow. She also appears in a shot where she lies down, her left leg extended in the air, as she covers part of her face with her hands. She also kneels, drink in hand, smiling. She props herself up with her arms and draws her knees into her body, with half her face in the dark—a study in moody bifurcation. Greene’s photographs will eventually punctuate the text of Norman Mailer’s Of Women and Their Elegance. In the evening Marilyn, wearing a white fur coat over a low-cut dress, long black gloves, and jeweled earrings that stretch all the way down her neck, attends the premiere of Middle of the Night, a Paddy Chayefsky play directed by Josh Logan.

February 26: Picture Week features a smiling Marilyn in black-and-white, dressed casually in a loose blouse, resting the right side of her face on her hands and her upper body on her elbows. “A Glimpse into Marilyn’s Future” is the promising headline. Joe DiMaggio takes Marilyn to a birthday party for Jackie Gleason at Toots Shor’s restaurant. Marilyn is photographed signing autographs, laughing with Gleason and DiMaggio, and with a very satisfied looking Milton Berle. She gets a splinter when she sits on a wooden chair, and actress Audrey Meadows removes the splinter with a straight needle sterilized with a cigarette lighter.

I thought of one of these moments as I sat there waiting for the hawk to eat from my hand. It was a black-and-white photograph my father had taken many years ago of an elderly street-cleaner with a white goatee beard, wrinkled socks and down-at-heel shoes. Crumpled work trousers, work gloves, a woollen beret. The camera is low, on the pavement: Dad must have crouched in the road to take it. The man is bending down, his besom of birch twigs propped against his side. He has taken off one of his gloves, and between the thumb and first finger of his bare right hand he is offering a crumb of bread to a sparrow on the kerbstone. The sparrow is caught midhop at exactly at the moment it takes the crumb from his fingers. And the expression on the man’s face is suffused with joy. He is wearing the face of an angel.

Then something caught her eye as she came around the back of the desk, something pinned under Harry’s shoulder. It was the corner of a photograph. Black and white. Catherine reached down and carefully pinched the edge the pictures between her fingers, dragging them out from underneath Harry.

Following graduation, and after three years of working with General Electric in New York, I took a job in their office in Stamford, Connecticut. And though I was sad leaving a city where there seemed to be a cinema on every corner, I was happy to learn about a newly opened theater near Stamford specializing in experimental, independent, and classic films. One week an unusual advertisement in the theater’s schedule caught my attention. It was a haunting black-and-white photograph of a woman’s face floating above a single word: Thérèse. Though I wasn’t sure what the film was about—something about the ad seemed vaguely religious—I convinced a coworker to accompany me to the screening. The film, directed by Alain Cavalier, was a bold, spare look at the life of Thérèse of Lisieux, the nineteenth-century French saint, about whom I knew absolutely nothing. The almost complete absence of physical scenery meant that the film focused on the quiet interactions of the few characters.

Life is a photo album. Loaded with some black and white memories, some colorful dreams, some abstract expressionism and some out of focus images.

Life is a photo album half black and white half color.

The individual most responsible for the triumph of the documentary style was probably Roy Stryker of the government’s Farm Security Administration (FSA), who sent a platoon of famous photographers out to record the lives of impoverished farmers and thus “introduce America to Americans.” Stryker was the son of a Kansas Populist, and, according to a recent study of his work, “agrarian populism” was the “first basic assumption” of the distinctive FSA style. Other agencies pursued the same aesthetic goal from different directions. Federal workers transcribed folklore, interviewed surviving ex-slaves, and recorded the music of the common man. Federally employed artists painted murals illustrating local legends and the daily work of ordinary people on the walls of public buildings. Unknowns contributed to this work, and great artists did too—Thomas Hart Benton, for example, painted a mural that was actually titled A Social History of the State of Missouri in the capitol building in Jefferson City.16 There was a mania for documentary books, photos of ordinary people in their homes and workplaces that were collected and narrated by some renowned prose stylist. James Agee wrote the most enduring of these, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, in cooperation with photographer Walker Evans, but there were many others. The novelist Erskine Caldwell and the photographer Margaret Bourke-White published You Have Seen Their Faces in 1937, while Richard Wright, fresh from the success of his novel Native Son, published Twelve Million Black Voices in 1941, with depictions of African American life chosen from the populist photographic output of the FSA.

Max had once read in one of his father's books that some childhood images become engraved in the mind like photographs, like scenes you can return to again and again and will always remember, no matter how much time goes by. He understood the meaning of those words the first time he saw the sea. The family had been traveling on the train for over three hours when, all of a sudden, they emerged from a dark tunnel and Max found himself gazing at an endless expanse of ethereal light, the electric blue of the sea shimmering beneath the midday sun, imprinting itself on his retina like a supernatural apparition. The ashen light that perpetually drowned the old city already seemed like a distant memory. He felt as if he had spent his entire life looking at the world through a black-and-white lens and suddenly it had sprung into life in full, luminous color he could almost touch. As the train continued its journey only a few meters from the shore, Max leaned out the window and, for the first time ever, felt the touch of salty wind on his skin. He turned to look at his father, who was watching him from the other end of the compartment with his mysterious smile, nodding in reply to a question Max hadn't even asked. At that moment, Max promised himself that whatever their destination, whatever the name of the station this train was taking them to, from that day on he would never live anywhere where he couldn't wake up every morning to see that same dazzling blue light that rose toward heaven like some magical essence.

I'd seen pictures of the wall online, but nothing prepared me fr seeing it in person. It was a deep scar in the earth and looked like a long black mirror reflecting the puffy white clouds, the blue sky, the trees and grass. It reflected the things people left at its base -- small flags and stuffed animals and photographs. And it reflected the faces of the people who stood in front of it, looking, pointing, weeping. It reflected me.

became a blurry swirl of shapes and colors narrowing into a luminous spot of white light at the end of a black anoxic tunnel and dissolving into a rapid series of bright sharp images that I recognized at once from my childhood: long forgotten memories of important moments flashing by faster than anything I’d ever experienced, twenty to thirty frames a second, each one of them original, like perfect photographic slides from the archives of my young life, every scene compressed into a complete story with sights and sounds and smells and feelings from the time. Each image was euphoric, rapturous. The smiling face of my beautiful young mother / a gentle touch from her hand on my face / absorbing her love / playing in the sand at the seashore with my father / waves washing up on the beach / feeling the strength and security of his presence / soothing, kind-hearted praise from a teacher at school / faces and voices of adoring aunts and uncles / steam trains coming in at the local railroad station / hearing myself say “choo-choo” / the excitement of shared discovery with my brother on Christmas morning / running free through a familiar forest with a happy dog / hitting a baseball hard and hearing encouraging cries from my parents behind me in the bleachers / shooting baskets in a backyard court with a buddy from high school / a tender kiss from the soft warm lips of a lovely teenage girl / the encouraging thrust of her stomach and thighs against mine.

The artist in Hansberry saw in the photograph of a black woman being manhandled by white cops all the suffering, all the injustice, all the offense to black life. The brutality was grave enough; the spread of the image transmitted trauma and reinforced the vulnerability of black women and, indeed, the race.

There was a framed photograph hung on the wall in front of me, and when I said your name I saw you in the picture. Well, I saw your back, and your ling, bright ponytail fluttering. The image is black and white, and you're running, and you cast a number of shadows that cluster about you like a bouquet. There's a figure running a little ahead of you and at first that figure seems to be a shadow too, except that it casts a backward glance that establishes an entirely separate personality. The figure's features are wooden, but mobile-some sort of sprite moves within, not gently, but convulsively. A beauty that rattles you until you're in tears, that was my introduction to Rowan Wayland. You and the puppet-I decided it was a puppet- were leaping through an open door, and in the corner of that distant room was a cupboard, fallen onto its side There was a sign on the cupboard door. (I tilted my head: The sign read TOYS.) It's a photo in which lines abruptly draw back from each other and the ceilings and floors spin off in different directions, but for all the world that's pictured doesn't seem to be ending. You were both running in place, you blurred around the edges, and the puppet hardly blurred at all, and the puppet was looking back, not at you, but at me. It felt like the two of you were running for your lives, for fear I'd take them Or you could've been racing eaxh other home. TOYS, the sign reads, but signs aren't guarantees. Either way I wanted to go too, and wished the puppet would hold out its hand to me, or beckon me, or do something more than return my gaze with that strange tolerance

Abrams voice cut in over the comm. “My God, this place is breath-taking!” “It is a palace for the gods,” added Brock. The group stood gawking at the magnificence of the hall surrounding them. Delanda went to the table, placed her helmet and pack on it, and began pulling tablets, scanners, and other accessories out. She wrestled off her gloves, but had trouble with the suit torso so Wilson had to intervene and help. Without a thought to the revealing fit of the white stretch suit liner, she escaped the spacesuit bottom and placed it on the table. Then, with still no self-consciousness at all, she stripped the suit liner off down to athletic bra and slim panties and pulled her pink, rolled up vacuum-packed flight coveralls and cloth boots from the suit pack. After excitedly dressing, she hurriedly grabbed a scanner from her pack and began investigating the hall. Show over, one by one we all removed our suits and became visitors in white suit liners. Wilson gave his fatherly warning. “Everyone be very careful removing and folding those liners. If you tear or damage the thermal control system in any way you could have an unpleasant trip back to the ship. Also, be careful to tuck in your suit communicator since we’ll all be using wrist coms from now on. That is if they actually work here.” Delanda ignored his comments and headed for the far end of the hall. Wilson pulled on black coveralls, R.J.’s were farmhouse blue, Brock and Wen light green, Abrams in hospital scrubs green, and Sharma’s and Ansara’s in tan. Mine were captain’s blue. As we studied our celestial surroundings, Delanda returned and spoke in a commanding voice. “Gentlemen, if you would grab your tablets and gather around me here at this magnificent table we should get started.” For the first time there was a unanimous look of annoyance, although everyone quickly complied. R.J. and I stood opposite her feeling like two school kids being ushered around on a field trip. Delanda checked to be sure everyone was paying attention. “Okay, I’m assuming our intranet will work in here even though we’re out of contact with the ship. Let’s try it. All of you use your tablets to access mine and copy the file titled: Translations. Let me know if anyone has trouble.” Delanda’s tablet appeared on our screens. As she had guessed, there were no problems getting in. Once copied, I opened the file and found dozens of Altair symbols, some highlighted, most grayed-out. “Okay, everyone got in? Right? Okay, the symbols you see highlighted are the ones I believe I have a rudimentary translation for. Those that are in gray, your guess is as good as mine.” “How do you propose we proceed?” asked Brock. “Speaking as an experienced field researcher, I would suggest one of us photographs and documents this first chamber thoroughly while the rest of us split up and do the same with other chambers, periodically reporting back here after each excursion. We should have one central person remain here to monitor the progress of everyone in the event they get into trouble. I would think that would be you, Commander Mirtos, since you are the best at rescue. Does anyone have any objections?” R.J. leaned over. “I believe this is a non-hostile takeover. Are you going to step in?” “Not until she says something I disagree with.” Delanda continued. “So, if no one has any objections the first order of business will be to photograph every wall symbol we find along with any artifacts possibly associated

The whole place was a lost black-and-white photograph.

It was the closeness of the two women that got to her - and their different attitudes towards the camera, the young woman looking straight at the lens, while the older one gazed to the side as if a third person in the distance held her eye. As if she no longer needed to demand the attention of the world because her love for the young woman was greater. Mother and daughter? Not quite. But Freya could feel their devotion, even if a black and white photograph.

Chocolate is a girl's best friend.' 'Consequently, I am going to polish off this entire chocolate pie, as well as sit here and cry, yes just sitting in my white tank top, and light pink comfy old short shorts, with the black drawstring in the fronts, tied, into a big floppy bow.' 'I sit looking at the TV, hugging my teddy bear. Tonight's movie lineup is 'Shawshank,' 'Misery,' 'The Notebook,' and 'A Walk to Remember.' While my black mascara from the day runs down my cheeks.' 'Life is not a fairytale, so maybe I can go next year. I know the prom is not going to happen either, yet I want to go at least once in my life. Yet, some get to go to prom, and dance for five years running. They go all four high school years.' 'Plus, they get asked for their date, which is still in school after they're out, even though they have gone many times before.' 'Then someone like me never gets the chance; that is not fair! I am not jealous; I just want to have the same opportunities, the photos, and the involvements.' 'I could envision in my mind the couples swaying to the music.' 'I could picture the bodies pressed against one another. With their hands laced with desire, all the girls having their poofy dresses pushed down by their partner's closeness, as they look so in love.' 'I know is just dumb dances, but I want to go. Why am I such a hopeless romantic? I could visualize the passionate kissing.' 'I can see the room and how it would be decorated, but all I have is the vision of it. That is all I have! Yeah, I think I know how Carrie White feels too, well maybe not like that, but close. I might get through that one tonight too because I am not going to sleep anywise.' 'So why not be scared shitless! Ha, that reminds me of another one, he- he.' 'I am sure that this night, which they had, would never be forgotten about! I will not forget it either. It must have- been an amazing night which is shared, with that one special person.' 'That singular someone, who only wants to be with you! I think about all the photographs I will never have. All the memories that can never be completed and all the time lost that can never be regained.' 'The next morning, I have to go through the same repetition over again. Something's changed slightly but not much; I must ride on the yellow wagon of pain and misery. Yet do I want to today?' 'I do not want to go after the night that I put in. I was feeling vulnerable, moody, and a little twitchy.' 'I do not feel like listening to the ramblings of my educators. Yet knowing if I do not show up at the hellhole doors, I would be asked a million questions, like why I did not show up, the next day I arrived there.

Dorothy Counts, wearing a new red-and-yellow dress made by her grandmother, with a long bow that flowed beyond her waist, waded into a sea of white rage. She was only fifteen years old, one of four black students chosen to integrate the schools in Charlotte. The other three didn’t face much resistance, because the White Citizens’ Council had chosen Harding as the place to make their stand. And stand they did. Dot Counts confronted a wave of hatred that morning, all captured by the camera of Don Sturkey, a photographer for The Charlotte Observer. As she walked toward the school, white students, their faces contorted with hatred and unmistakable glee, screamed, “Nigger go back home” and “Go back to Africa, burrhead!” They threw sticks and chunks of ice. They spat on her new dress. The police refused to protect her, staying at the other end of the street and watching the spectacle from a distance. No school officials or teachers were present to calm the crowd or escort Dorothy to class. Instead

With a sigh of disappointment, I leafed through the pages and found some black-and-white plates depicting a tiny woman in theatrical costume, dressed as a country peasant. Below the plate, it read, ‘Anna Landvik som Solveig, September 1876’. I studied the photographs intently, and realised that whoever Anna Landvik was, she’d been very young when the photograph had been taken. Underneath the heavy stage make-up, the girl looked barely older than a child. I leafed through the other plates and saw her as she grew older, and then did a double take as I stared at the familiar features of Edvard Grieg himself. Anna Landvik was standing by a grand piano and Grieg was behind it, applauding her

Nietzsche asked in 1882: 'What is the point of all the art of our works of art if we lose that higher art, the art of festivals?' The brief moment of intoxication lures us off the via dolorosa. Such spectacles also asserted the underlying continuity of European society since the Renaissance, despite steam engine, trainm and telegraph. Such was the confidence in the homology between the present day and a supposedly integrated and self-assured sixteenth century that people were still willing, in donning costumes, to turn themselves into living works of art. (This was the bourgeois response to the fantasy of the socialist Fourier, who thought people could become living artworks if they disrobed.) The contrast between the costumes and the black-and-white everyday garb of 1879, a way of dressing as if designed to be photographed, was sharp. Fourteen thousand citizens took part in Makart's extravaganza, 300,000 more looked on.

Sometimes I almost believe her soul looks out of the photograph, almost clears the sill Of the eyes & comes near; though it does not ever Move, it holds me while I look at it. But even today, I can’t conceive of a soul Without seeing a woman’s body. Specifically, Yours, undoing the straps of an evening dress In a convertible, & then lying back, your breasts Holding that hint of dusk mixed with mint And the emptiness of dusk. Someone put it Crudely: to fuck is to know. If that is true, There’s a corollary: the soul is a canary sent Into the mines. The convertible is white, & parked Beneath the black trees shading the river, Mile after mile. Your dress is off by now, And when you come, both above & below me, When you vanish into that one cry which means Your body is no longer quite your own And when your face looks like a face stricken From this world, a saint’s face, your eyes closing On some final city made entirely Of light, & only to be unmade by light Again—at that moment I’m still watching You—half out of reverence & half because The scene is distant, like a landscape, & has Nothing to do with me. Beneath the quiet Of those trees, & that sky, I imagine I’m simply a miner in a cave; I imagine the soul Is something lighter than a girl’s ribbon I witnessed, one afternoon, as it fell—blue, Tossed, withered somehow, & singular, at A friend’s wedding—& then into the river And swirled away. Do I chip away with my hammer? Do I, sometimes, sing or recite? Even though I have to know, in such a darkness, all The words by heart, I sing. And when I come, My eyes are closed fast. I smile, under The earth. They loved fast horses. And someone else Will have to watch them, grazing on short tufts Of spring grass beside the riverbank, When we are gone, when we are light, & grass. . — Larry Levis, from “A Letter,” Winter Stars (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985)

But then when I bring up racism, the same women say, “But I’m not racist. I am not prejudiced. I was raised better than that.” We are not going to get the racism out of us until we start thinking about racism like we think about misogyny. Until we consider racism as not just a personal moral failing but as the air we’ve been breathing. How many images of black bodies being thrown to the ground have I ingested? How many photographs of jails filled with black bodies have I seen? How many racist jokes have I swallowed? We have been deluged by stories and images meant to convince us that black men are dangerous, black women are dispensable, and black bodies are worth less than white bodies. These messages are in the air and we’ve just been breathing. We must decide that admitting to being poisoned by racism is not a moral failing—but denying we have poison in us certainly is.

The theme of this exhibition is folk art, and the building, which is usually a typical white-cube space, has been dressed up to look like a circus. The walls are covered in strange murals; level with my head are alligators eating trapeze artists who are, in turn, eating small alligators. In large display cases are arrangements by the famous Victorian taxidermist and artist, Walter Potter. There's a feast being had by little ginger kittens that look like they were once---before dying and being stuffed with hay and then seated on miniature dining chairs and put in front of tiny cakes, pots of tea, and samovars---from the same litter. Their eyes are beautiful, black, glistening marbles. Next to the cat feast is another Walter Potter---rabbits diligently working at desks in a miniature classroom. It's thrilling seeing these works. I've known them for years; I studied them for my A-levels. In photographs, they seem clean and unreal. Up close, I can see the little dimples in the animals' skin where their muscles used to attach; I can smell the tiny, microscopic traces of hundred-year-old-blood inside them.

The Federal Writers’ Project plays a significant role at the Whitney, enhancing its ability to center the voices of enslaved people. Created as part of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, the project included an initiative to document the experience of slavery. In the late 1930s, staff collected more than 2,300 firsthand accounts of formerly enslaved people, including 500 black-and-white photographs. The material was edited into seventeen volumes.

A Thought: Can we stop showing Black and White pictures of the entire decade of the 1960s so people stop thinking it was 1000 years ago. I'm two years younger than the Civil Rights movement. And Ruby Bridges lives down the street from me and is on Instagram. (8/1/2020 on Twitter)