[this little essay is a work in progress, so please don’t think it the finished masterpiece I hope it to be. Your comments and insights may help me revise it, and steer me in directions I have not, as yet, contemplated.]
I’ve been wanting to write about this photograph for awhile, and I don’t know what to say about it, not really. The problem is, I know who this young woman is.
I mean I know her first name. Maybe somewhere there’s a photo with her last name on it, but if there is, I don’t remember seeing it.
My guess is, and it’s only a guess, that this girl’s mother took the photo. I have hundreds of photos of her, from the time she was a new born (or maybe six months old) to the time when she was herself a mother, with her own child, or maybe her own children. Every time she’s in one of those photos, her mother wrote her name, and the names of the other people in the photo, on the back.
She had an avocation, a hobby that she seemed to pursue obsessively, passionately, and joyously, from the time she was three or four up into her teens. And her mother documented her daughter pursuing her hobby as obsessively as her daughter pursued the hobby. I mean, sometimes it seems like there were only five or ten seconds from one photo to the next. And everyone of those photos has the young girl’s name written on the back. It didn’t seem to matter if this girl, this smiling-with-braces girl, was close to her mother when she snapped the picture, or far away, so you almost need a magnifying glass to pick her out, still the mother snapped a photograph. And then she printed everything. And wrote the names on the back.
I didn’t buy this photograph—it was given to me, along with maybe ten thousand other color photographs. Those photos probably represent 15, 20, maybe more close outs or storage locker auction sales. So this collection was just one of many that I was given. From a photo dealer’s perspective, color photos are not nearly as valuable as old black & white photos. So the person who gave me these photos kept the black and white photos, where the money was, and gave me the color photos, where maybe one out of every 500 had any real value, that je ne sais quoi that might make some collector want to buy it. If I were to sell this photo (I’m not, unless someone offers to buy the whole collection, and gives me a convincing story about what they intend to do with the trove), I could maybe get $3 for it. People who buy out storage units, or people who do close-outs, oftentimes throw these photos away. Some people throw these photos away on purpose—one woman at a thrift store told me, quite indignantly, that she would never sell a family’s photos. The idea seemed morally abhorrent to her. I do know that had I not accepted the gift of these photos, this trove, they would have gone to the dump. I know that for a certainty. Probably 99 times out of a 100, a photo like this is indeed going to end up in a landfill.
Well, I should say I had all the photos in this group. It’s possible that some of them have gone off to California, or somewhere. I sold two boxes full of color photos to some fellow out that way, and some of the ones from this collection might have been in one of the boxes I sent to him. I just wasn’t thinking when I did that. I could have filled those boxes with plenty of other photos not from this grouping. I counted the photos in the first box (a USPS medium-sized flat rate box) and there were like 1300, just in that one box. So maybe 2500 color photos, probably more, have gone out west of the Mississippi. The fellow that bought them sold them somewhere, individually, at a flea market maybe, and he said the ones he didn’t sell he took to the dump. So some of her photos, I mean photos of this girl, may still have gone to the dump.
What I hope this photograph gives you is a sense of this young girl’s joie de vivre. But here’s the thing: in everyone of the hundreds of photos I have of her, her joie de vivre is always there. I honestly think that I have never encountered, at least in the photo realm, a happier person, a person happy on a consistent basis, day after day after day. Her happiness never seems phony; it always seems real, like happiness was, perhaps still is, the very core, the very fiber of her being.
On the one hand, I feel like I am invading her privacy, by posting just this one image. And yet the photo brings me joy. I hope it brings you joy. I think I deserve to have some joy in my life, some delight, as Dr. Ben Kimpel, the smartest person I ever met, would say. And I give you joy, and in doing so, I invade this young girl’s privacy. She might still be alive. I fervently hope she is still alive. She might not want you to see this photograph (I imagine she wouldn’t mind you seeing this one, though there are a few others she probably wouldn’t want on public display, though there are no photos that cast her in a bad light).
This whole issue of who owns a photo, who really owns it, has become a huge big deal in the photo collecting world recently. There have been recent articles in The New Yorker and The New York Times about the question of ownership. I know the people who are pushing this narrative—that the rightful owners of a trove of photographs are the relatives of the person who had made the work and had possession of them when he or she died. The whole question is complicated by the fact that these relatives, who might be third or fourth cousins of the person who took the photographs (or in the case of Harry Darger, who was the subject of The New York Times article, and whose estate is now in litigation, made the art) these relatives did not even know of the existence of the photographs, or the artworks. Many of them did not even know of the existence of their relative. Collectors and dealers, like me, found the works. If the people who rented Harry Darger’s apartment hadn’t seen some merit in the scrap books he left behind, that record would have undoubtedly gone in a dumpster. But now that Darger’s art is worth millions, and the people I know (we are no longer friends, and much of the photo dealing community disdains them, as do I) are combing the woods to find the relatives to sue the people who rescued the artworks, now the relatives are coming out of the woodwork and acting like they really care (my former friends, who posture as mere altruistic bystanders, will undoubtedly get their cut, should their side win in court (which seems likely)).
I guess the question is, who owns a life, and who should get access to it, and how should it be preserved. Here, the case is, somebody died, or somebody couldn’t be bothered, or just couldn’t pay the rent on a storage unit, so the trove was lost, abandoned, and now I have it.
I’m not going to go looking for this girl’s family. For one thing, and I’ll be frank, there are things I wouldn’t want to know about her. I wouldn’t want to know that she died, for instance. I want her to live forever, and in not knowing, she does live forever, at least for me. I don’t feel any obligation to invest my time into finding the family, without the promise of some compensation for that time spent. I’m not a charity, but I do see myself as soldier on the frontlines of the preservation of humanity. My humanness, above all, I seek to preserve. But I’ve got bills to pay/ I’m mired in debt. I can’t make the return of these photos into a nostalgia project.
And if the family did show up, and they said "those are our photos. Give them back to us," what then? My personal belief is that if I did just give them back to the family, that that would be the value they would place on them: very little. The photos would be just as likely to disappear into the next storage unit as to be preserved, and handed down, and valued by the next generation. And before you point at me and say "that’s your ego talking, you believing that you are the primary knower of the value of these photos," before you say that, I’ll tell you, well, I know that. I know I am egotistical. I think I get inside a photo and inhabit it, and intuit the essence of that photo, better than anybody else does. And why shouldn’t I think that? If there isn’t something you do that you think you do better than anybody else, even if it’s just to balance a thumbtack on your nose, I feel sorry for you.
And then there’s this one particular photograph, the stuffed animals stuffed behind the brass bed frame, spilling out onto the bed, and this happy joyous delightful young girl, her head popping up into the picture frame. I feel more than a little guilty sharing it with you. I’m sharing it with you.
