278. Unequivocal Magic - Alex Bertram
Portrait of Sarah Bernhardt by H. Walter Barnett (1910)
The process of sorting through picture archives became second nature, automatic, but it also trained my eye. Often my reason for selecting a picture was instinctual: I trusted my first impressions.
There is something about old photographs that I have always found intriguing. In my early twenties, I worked as a picture researcher for a book publisher. Evenings and weekdays merged as I flipped through albums at the state library. I was drawn by what Susan Sontag calls the “equivocal magic” of photographs—“the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern.”
The process of sorting through picture archives became second nature, automatic, but it also trained my eye. Often my reason for selecting a picture was instinctual: I trusted my first impressions. I remember playing around with the images for one book, setting them out on the archival desk as if on the gallery wall, as I tried to work out which two worked together, how much space they needed on either side, if they could carry a double-paged spread, and so on, all the time wondering: If I could find one single thread that united these choices, what would it be? It was, of course, my own game, but a difficult question to answer, nonetheless.
Then, on a more recent visit to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, I saw a 1910 portrait of Sarah Bernhardt, the famous French actress whose career by then had spanned half a century. We exchanged glances; I was lured in. Her face is pale with the texture of powder. The deep shadows in the backdrop, and small hand-drawn dabs of light, all work hard to hold you there. She sits, dead center, resting her forearms on the chair. Her left index finger, with its band of silver, curls inwards, controlling the tension in the shot.
I found myself beset with questions about this unidealized representation of the actress in her older age, questions that multiplied in the months that followed. They began to bother me, blurring my memory of the library itself. I can’t tell you where I was sitting when I saw it, or how far I could see across the gardens in the courtyard below. My mind was lost in the portrait, and the layers embedded in it. What could it tell me about her? Or about the photographer, H. Walter Barnett, who’d slipped from cultural memory? About the circumstances surrounding the making of the portrait—the before, during, and after?
As I explored its story, I saw that I was drawn to the creativity that’s inherent in all the things we interact with in our day-to-day lives but that we do not see. The portrait’s visual tension, insights, and trickery were all part of the same thing: my enduring interest in the hidden creativity of ordinary things. The revelation helped me to arrange my materials and begin to tell the story of the portrait’s life.
- Alex Bertram
