Movement

A couple days ago I came across this photograph (Miss Grace, 1898 Clarence H. White) and its peculiarity has intrigued me ever since. The slight tilt, the flattening of dimensionality (with the exception of the legs), and the blurring of the face makes the photograph at once captivating and disorientating.

While the floor and wall appear to be a continuous plane, a tension arises between the askew carpet and the dark baseboard band so that our perception alternates between the two dimensions. Against this restless motion of the background, the languid young girl is suspended diagonally across the photograph. She appears cradled within the nook of the sofa and yet mirroring the continuous planar effect of the floor and wall, her body seems to be on the same dimension as the sofa. And while this similarly tense movement between the background layer and the girl/sofa layer is occurring, the girl’s legs, positioned just below and to the right of the center, arrests all movement. Arnheim explains that “a moving framework imparts action to the whole setting and the objects it contains, and it can translate timelessness into active resistance to motion.” And so the girl’s legs are perceived not as outside the dimensions of motion, but appear as resistant, petrified against motion.

Aside from the disorientating movement, the girl’s unfocused face is puzzling. Compared to the defined gilt edges of the sofa, the girl’s head hovers, seemingly separate from her body, in an almost transparent haze. Her head is lowered and she appears wholly absorbed in her book. But even though she is distant, we are drawn to her face seeking within it any signs that we may connect with. Rather, the sofa offers up its own clarity. Stafford asks a key question, “How do we make sense of the fact that subjectivity emerges when the brain-mind simultaneously produces not just self-images and the organisms response to its surroundings but…an organism in the act of perceiving and responding to some external object?” In Miss Grace we seek out her face so as to reflect upon her state of mind and ultimately upon our own. However, this “natural impulse to stimulate the figure’s expression and so comprehend the situation” is suspended. We could say that her awkward age, suspended between girl and woman, or simply a girl lost in the realm of novels accounts for the rather distancing effect. But that is on the whole, largely unsatisfying and does not even begin to indulge my curiosity with the image.