Photographs that failed to live up to the photographer’s hopes are the unrealized scraps from a manufacturing process: a running dog, blurred to an unending streak, someone’s shoes on a wet pavement, a chance passerby in the frame. All this waste was filtered out and destroyed in the age of printing on paper. But now these very pictures have a special attraction because they were not intended for us (or for anyone). They belong to no one and so they belong to me — these moments that survived by accident and are freed from all obligation, stolen from life by life itself. These images of people are utterly impersonal and this is their advantage: they relieve the viewer of the burden of succession, historical memory, bad conscience, and a sense of indebtedness toward the dead. In return they offer a sequence of images of the past and future, the more random the better. These pictures are not of Ivan and Mary, they are of contingent beings, him and her, her and her, light and no one. Freedom from meaning gives us the opportunity to add in our own meaning, freedom from interpretation makes a mirror of the image, a square pool in which we can immerse any version of events we please. “Photos trouvées,” little foundlings, useful in their very readiness to become an object and abandon their past as someone else’s subjectivity. To bury their dead: both the photographer and the photographed. They have no wish to look us in the eyes.
Not-A-Chapter
Leonid Gurevich, 1942 or 1943
My grandfather’s letter can be dated by its content to 1942–3. He is thirty and has been sent back from the rear guard to a Moscow hospital for an urgent operation, as a special expert, essential to the war effort. His wife, mother, and baby daughter are all in evacuation in the Siberian town of Yalutorovsk.
On coarse buff paper, in violet ink that has seeped through to the back of the paper:
Dearest Lyolechka,
I received your letter (and you know I’m not sentimental), and once I’d read it through a few times I put it in my notebook where I keep Baby Natasha and your photographs, I haven’t been parted from them since I left, and now I can add a second photo of Natasha. Your letter touched me very deeply and left me thinking on a great many things.
Now the doctors have told me that I am well on the way to recovery, and since I do honestly feel this to be the case, I can tell you some things about myself I didn’t want to write before.
At one point I was very sick. I hardly thought I would survive.
The doctors wouldn’t confirm this, however… they allowed me visitors at any time of the day (and they only do that for the most serious of cases). And when they found out I had no relatives in Moscow at the time they noted down your address in Yalutorovsk. I knew what all that meant, of course.
But I fought back. In the hardest moments, please forgive me my honesty, I thought only about Natasha, and I felt better.
When it had passed I was so weak, and I know you know this, the worst thing for me is helplessness.
I got slowly stronger, I kept going. But I put up with a great deal (you can’t imagine what terrible headaches I had, my darling, the worst thing was how they never let up), and then suddenly I couldn’t bear it any longer and I gave in to my emotions.
So many thoughts came rushing into my head and (I had plenty of time to indulge them) I saw my unhappy life pass before my eyes, and… well, I indulged in the writing of some pretty bad poetry. I sought oblivion, wanted to drown out this storm of emotions.
I wrote an awful lot of drivel (I can’t even explain how now, but it all came easily and freely to me), and even a long poem, on a very difficult subject matter, but I didn’t finish it.
But something had a very strong effect on me (my nerves were extremely strained and even the tiniest inconvenience made me suffer terribly). There was a patient in the ward with me, an accountant from the Moscow Meat Processing Plant, his name was Teselko and he was 54. He had a brain tumor and he’d undergone a complicated operation, but it had been a success, and he was in recovery. His wife was four years younger than him, such a gentle woman.
You just can’t imagine how she cared for him, the love and the tenderness of her touch during her daily visits. There was so much love, intimacy, and friendship between them (everyone in the ward, even the most curmudgeonly patient, felt it). After his illness he had become anxious, fickle, querulous, at times coarse and cruel, even toward his wife. But she understood this and forgave him and he felt her forgiveness and appreciated it.
She’s a good wife to you, I said once, and he answered, yes, and said nothing more. Then we both retreated into our own thoughts.
I was thinking how they were older than us, but that they were still living and feeling far more fully than us, the younger generation. And how we could be living, if only we loved life and knew how to love as devotedly and boundlessly as they did, as our parents did.
[two lines crossed out with thick marks]
I’ve been thinking a lot, Lyolya. I’ve been analyzing my life, my past actions. I’ve been trying to understand things from your point of view and I’ve decided to change. I don’t mean in terms of my love for you, not that. I love you now just as I loved you before, with a strong devotion. But considering the flaws in your character, your tricky personality, I want to try to understand you in all your actions, and to yield to you. When you think about it, all our arguments grew out of silly misunderstandings, and it was only because neither of us would give way that they turned into nasty rows.
Making this decision has forced me to grow up, to pull myself together and get a hold of myself, in a way I never have before. These last few weeks, I’ve felt quite different, I’ve felt sure that I have the strength to claim my proper place in life, to fight for it, to live and to be happy! [crossings out] I know now that life and happiness are in our hands and when we find happiness for ourselves we find it for those around us.
And then I received your letter. It seemed like a continuation of my own thoughts and hopes.
I answered you in my head. I said: forgive me. And at that moment I was desperate to be with you, if only for a minute, so I could take you by the hand, take the hand of my wife and my friend.
This letter is clumsy, poorly expressed, I know it is, but I mean it, I mean it with all my heart. I know you’ll understand what I am going through.
I took all my driveling poetry and ceremonially, without an ounce of self-pity, burned it all in the stove on the ward, along with those dreadful poems I got rid of some very unhealthy urges.
Your letter taught me a great deal, it gave me so much hope and love. Thank you for it.