On a scale of 1 to 10, pink

Our fantasies are conservative. They have to be, because they originate in the master fantasy of infancy: the fantasy that we and our world are unchanging. In infancy we aren't capable of thinking otherwise. Changing moment by moment, we live our way into the changing world, but all we know of our changing selves is what we were before the latest version of the world caught us up and changed us again.

Of course that way of knowing is irrational, and every once in a while some rational person tries to help us notice what we actually are. "Where id was, there shall ego be," said Sigmund Freud, and in 1957 the manufacturer of Lionel electric trains made a generous attempt to expand its market by liberating parents from the enslaving infantile fantasy of boy toys for boys, girl toys for girls. Lionel reset its injection molders to bring forth a girl train --

Click to enlarge.

and comedy promptly undid the result. By girls and boys and fathers and mothers, unanimously, the Lady Lionel was laughed right into rarity. According to one collector, "There are stories of hardware stores actually painting these ugly pink trains black just to try to get part of their money back on them" (http://www.ibuyoldtrains.com/Lionel%201587s%20Pink%20Girls%20Train.htm). Comedy assures us that trains always have been black and always will be, and under the protection of that comforting promise we continue growing from unconsciousness into more unconsciousness.

The same oblivion was protecting adults in 1955 and 1956, when the Chrysler Corporation made its own effort to market a boy toy as if it could become a girl toy. The Dodge La Femme made its entrance in pink (for 1955) or lavender (for 1956), and in its first year it came accessorized with a matching pink purse, pink raincoat, and pink umbrella.

Of course the fashion didn't take. For women the pink remained on the car's surface, changing nothing because for most women a car has little presence in fantasy, where color works its infantile magic. For men, on the other hand, the pink penetrated into fantasy all too deep. Nineteen fifty-five wasn't only the year of La Femme; it was also the year of Rebel Without a Cause and The Shrike: a movie about a failed father who wears a frilly apron to wash the dishes, and a movie about a psychiatrist who liberates a failed husband by exorcising his wife with the magic word "castration." If the father of a one-car family were on his way to work in 1955, he wouldn't be driving a car marked with this bleeding stigma.

So La Femme is now a collector's item even rarer than the Lady Lionel train. Except under extraordinary circumstances, it is as vanished from consciousness now as last night's bad dream.

But now consider this even older image as it blazons its still living threat and promise across the page.

The image was seen in 1951 by Weegee, who added the title and the button some fifteen years later. According to Holland Cotter's article in the New York Times,
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/09/arts/design/09weeg.html

the photograph's factual history denotes only a couple waiting in line to attend a movie called Colt .45, and the picture of the weapon is nothing but a pass promising free admission to the entertainment. Nineteen fifty-one, we think when our eyes are closed and we're receptive to fantasy: a more innocent time, a happier time. History, sad dead grownup history, would only spoil the dream if it reminded us of what's called real life during the Truman-McCarthy era, three years before Brown v. Board of Education. History would make that sad story even sadder if it were to go still deeper into memory and remind us of what this particular boy toy was actually used for. And so, generally, we don't listen to history.

But Weegee looked at it. After a while he noticed that the color of this particular history was black, and that that color changed everything -- at least for the palette of the future's dreams. This particular artwork was never seen by a viewership until 2006: long after Weegee's own death, long after the slogan "Black power" itself had become history. Nevertheless, the blackness that Weegee saw is still with us. It floods the whole visual field, blurring the distinction between who in this fantasy picture is faceless boy and who is faceless girl. All that remains now of what they once were is the black: a single-color theme designed by the couturier Jude for what he called (in verse 13, King James version) "wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever."

"Forever": now there’s a collectible that will never go rare, turn pink, and disappear.

Two skies

Sky 1

 

Jacob van Ruisdael, Winter Scene with Mill. Click to enlarge.

Pink with reflected light, the sails of the mill reach into the sky, not very far, and set its winds to work on behalf of Ruisdael's model civilization. On its mound, the mill stands by a road leading to our homes. On ground and slush and ice, people and building materials arrange themselves in an orderly pattern. They and the air and the water and the cold, they and the white and gray and pink, belong to one another. Every substance brought into being here -- flesh and cloth and snow, canvas and pigment and the warm motherly smell of linseed oil -- partakes equally of the sky. Everything that this sky comprehends is either weather or a comforting shelter from weather, and everyone is one flesh. There is no death.

Sky 2
 

Weegee, "Murder on the Roof," August 14, 1941.
International Center of Photography collection (http://icp.org),
accession no. 123.1982

In ancient Athens the people watching from their high roof would have been citizens of the polis, drafted into the chorus to ask what the chorus was created in order to ask: This that is happening before my eyes -- what does it mean? What does it teach me about how to live in relation to the gods and my city?

Here, though, the people on the roof are only an audience. They are separated from the drama of death and understanding by a void like the space in front of a stage which the audience is forbidden to cross. Behind them, too, the sky is blank canvas. Desert and tabula rasa of the air, it is a backdrop never to be marked by evidence of meaning.

Two grammars

I

The early twentieth-century social reformer Lewis W. Hine thought of his photographs as illustrations. He provided them with texts, and he intended those texts to bring another text into existence: a law banning child labor. Because such a law didn't exist at the moment Hine was writing, he wrote in the present tense. There in the present his annotations implied an optative content (May child labor cease!), but they themselves were rigorously indicative: a sequence of noun phrases and verb phrases, ceasing to signify as soon as they reached the frame which held them within each image. Here within the limits of this piece of photosensitized paper, say Hine's words, is what is happening: right here, right now. 

Here is one of the texts, for instance. "John Howell, an Indianapolis newsboy. Makes 75 cents some days. Begins at 6 A.M., Sundays. Lives at 215 W. Michigan St. August 1908." 

And here is the illustration that goes with it.

Library of Congress, via http://shorpy.com.
Click to enlarge.

We'd like to think that the little boy in this picture isn't alone. Within the image, for the fraction of a second that it took for the image to enter history, he had a pair of companions: the shadows of Hine and his camera. The man's shadow, too, is comfortingly bulked by the shapes of an overcoat and a hat. Man, coat, and hat form one prone mass, black and solid on the solid sidewalk. Next to it lies the shadow of the recording instrument, solid and oblong on the tripod that holds it rock-steady. From there it can look down on the boy.

But of course that view of the image is only the literary effect called pathos. Within his image, the boy does not look up at the camera. There's no reason why he should, because there on his sidewalk it's only an extension of its shadow. Farther down the sidewalk, in sunlight, are some adults whose place in the composition fails to indicate that they'll buy the boy's newspapers. So there's no point in the boy's looking down at the newspapers either, or up at the mailbox which holds no news for him. All he has in the way of an idea to stand between him and the world is a cap, lopsided on his head to echo his sidelong posture and downcast eyes, and blazoned with two words which have nothing at all to say to the rest of their picture:

Celery Cola.

II

Hine's picture originates in the first person and extends to the second, bridged from the photographer's "I" to his legislators' "you" by the long double shadow of the man and his camera. Now compare Weegee's "Juvenile delinquent and press photographers."

Ca. 1940. International Center of Photography

collection, http://icp.org, accession no. 14017.1993

A fat little boy is crammed into a corner of an image. It isn't his image; the landlord of its space is that battery of typewriters, primed to accuse to the universe on the other side of the barred window. Behind them stand the photographers, looking down like Lewis Hine but with their faces showing. This time it's only the boy's face that can't, for the moment, be seen. When it is seen, in images illustrating texts written on those typewriters, laws already written will move in and obliterate the boy. Weegee's photograph presents its subject in the third person, historical present tense, but it also has an optative content, just like Hine's first-person image. It says, "May this boy disappear!" and its pathos is that it records the moment just before it effects the disappearance.