In the spring of 1914, nine American sailors were arrested by the Mexican government for unauthorized entry into a loading area of the oilfields in Tampico, Tamaulipas. They were released with an apology, but without the twenty-one-gun salute also demanded by the United States naval commander. President Woodrow Wilson ordered the fleet to prepare for an occupation of the port of Veracruz. They were to await authorization from Congress, but then news of an arms shipment headed for the port overrode that formality. The weapons, procured by an American arms dealer, were destined for the newly self-appointed president of Mexico, Victoriano Huerta, who had been assisted in his coup d’état by the American ambassador; despite this, the United States sided with his rival. Battleships and cruisers landed a force that would ultimately number some 2,300. In the city they met with fierce resistance from determined but poorly equipped local citizens. The occupation lasted seven months. This picture, taken by Walter P. Hadsell, an American photographer resident in Veracruz, was published as a (silver gelatin) postcard and enjoyed wide circulation, even being bootlegged by other photographers.

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Over the years I’ve accumulated thousands of other people’s photographs. I began buying them in the early eighties, at flea markets and in junk shops. At first, I rarely paid more than a nickel or a dime. I was drawn to those that contained some aesthetic quality or bit of sociohistorical information, or ideally both at once. Often the selection was made rapidly, purely by intuition; only later would I be able to name the qualities that had caught my eye. The pictures were orphans, in several senses. Anonymous photographs had little commercial value. They were considered detritus, as inert as the grocery lists or medical records of the past. And they had all been released into the twilight marketplace by the death of their keepers and the apathy or absence of their heirs. That release often obliterated their context. If you bought two or more pictures out of the same box, it might not be evident that they had a common origin. You might not even recognize that the person in this photo was also the person in that photo, many years later. Found photographs are memories that have gone feral.

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In his biweekly column, Pinakothek, Luc Sante excavates and examines miscellaneous visual strata of the past.

The press photographer’s task is to obtain a likeness of the person who is at the center of the news. This proves difficult when the subject, who is either accused of crimes or tied, however flimsily, to someone who is, wants to avoid being photographed at all costs. Hounded at every step, unable to escape, even in shackles, the subject resorts to makeshift concealments—hat, sleeve, lapel, handkerchief, newspaper—in order to prevent facial capture. The photographer can only pursue, shadow, perhaps verbally goad the subject, waiting for a slip or a stumble that will cause the mask to drop. When that fails to happen, the photographer’s sole option is to photograph the mask. The public, inflamed by press coverage of the case, wants a face it can charge with blame (and, often enough, spread the blame to faces that bear it a superficial resemblance), but is instead offered a metonym: hat, handkerchief, newspaper. The photographer, in quest of a portrait, has delivered in its place an event: the defeat of portraiture by the subject.

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In his biweekly column, Pinakothek, Luc Sante excavates and examines miscellaneous visual strata of the past.

“Maybe it would be better if we stopped seeing one another. Maybe there is no remedy to our solitude because … we don’t love each other enough.”

Fotonovela, fumetti, roman-photo—the terms betray the fact that the form never got much traction in the Anglo-Saxon realm. There is no word for it in English, exactly. You could say “photo-comics,” but you’d risk being misunderstood. These narratives, often but not always romantic, are conveyed by means of photographs arrayed in panels on a page, with running text often in talk balloons. Their impact has been almost entirely restricted to countries that speak Spanish, Italian, or French; their readership is overwhelmingly female, at least in Europe. Their history formally begins in 1947 in Italy, in the magazine Grand Hotel, soon followed by its French sibling, Nous Deux; both magazines still exist. Fotonovelas flourished in the fifties and early sixties (into the eighties in Latin America), then began a slow decline that still refuses to yield to extinction.

Everything was all mixed up. She closed her eyes and thought she heard Daniel. “Your hair is so fine and aromatic!”

The culprit of their near-demise, of course, was television, in combination with social anxiety. Fotonovelas were associated with the poor and unlettered (my mother aspirationally ignored their weekly appearance in Femme d’Aujourd’hui, to which she subscribed for almost fifty years), the naive and sheltered and perhaps delusional. Roland Barthes, having written that “love is obscene precisely in that it puts the sentimental in place of the sexual,” went on to call Nous Deux “more obscene than de Sade.” Some years earlier, in a less militant phase, he noted of the fotonovelas that “their stupidity touches me” and ranked them with other “pictographic” forms, such as stained-glass windows and Carpaccio’s Legend of St. Ursula. There are even more specific antecedents, although no record of actual influence: Nadar’s famous conversation with the centenarian chemist Michel Chevreul was published as sequential captioned photographs in Le Journal Illustré in 1886, and La Folle d’Itteville, the collaborative photo-novel by Germaine Krull and Georges Simenon, was published in 1931. Read More

In his new biweekly column, Pinakothek, Luc Sante excavates and examines miscellaneous visual strata of the past.

People visited the arcade to stage a play for themselves and a select audience of their family and friends. The photographer supplied flats and props and the shallow space between them, and the subjects reserved the option of creating a performance in that setting. Most people did no such thing, of course, but just sat there like stumps, overwhelmed and maybe intimidated by the lights, the camera, the photographer who in those circumstances was likely to be a seasoned carny. The photographer might be spieling at them, three hundred words a minute, while the pikers would be struggling to follow along, finally giving in to whatever that last thing he said was. Which usually meant stuffing an extended family into a prop canoe or charabanc, snap, snap, and outta there. The ideal way to treat drunks was to stick their heads in those holes—in boards that supplied the rest of their pictured body: boxer, beauty queen, infant—effectively immobilizing them. Read More

In his new biweekly column, Pinakothek, Luc Sante excavates and examines miscellaneous visual strata of the past.

The more empty the photograph, the more it implies horror. The void that dominates an empty photograph is the site of past human activity. It presents itself as a hole in the middle of the picture. The beds, tables, chairs, lamps are not the subject; they are the boundary. Some empty images tease the eye, suggesting clues that may dissolve upon closer examination. More often the scene is as near to a blank canvas as it can be without fading into nothingness. But then we, as habituated viewers, tend to brush a dramatic gloss upon such pictures. What we see cannot be as perfectly banal as it seems. The lighting and composition awaken unconscious memories of crime-scene photos; the drama comes from what is missing. It’s a bit like Sherlock Holmes’s dog who did not bark. What is missing is an apparent reason for the picture to have been taken.

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