my picture

There's a person on my picture –

now how's that for an opening sentence to turn off readers? But bear with me for a second, because, first of all, it is not 'my' picture; rather, when I say 'my picture' I mean a picture that I randomly stumbled upon - on a facebook scroll of all places. It illustrated a post from a group I wasn't a member of, and the content of the post had nothing to do with the picture.

The picture is a black and white photograph and it shows a person I identify as a woman lying on a bed. The person is fully dressed in a magnificently tailored suit, and from the looks of the bed and the bedroom and the suit and the person, I have deduced, in a private and maybe somewhat arbitrary kind of way, that the photograph was taken some time in the 1940s. That is, if I remember the suit correctly, and the looks of the bed and the bedroom.

If I continue to remember correctly, it would mean that the person had a coffee cup and some papers placed on the bed as well. I say 'if' because all of that is not guaranteed. But I am sure to remember correctly that this person had the most incredible of looks on their face.

Imagine, for brevity, a woman lying on a bed, photographed. Chances are through the bedroom roof that she would bear, willingly or not, an 'expression' in the lame sense of this word. She would be alluring, or defiant, happy, or sad, or tired; communicating, that is, something beyond herself, something about the bed-ness of her placement: She would allude, in her bearing, to the fact that beds are places where people find themselves when (1) sleeping, (2) having sex, (3) suffering, or (4) dead. But the person on my picture is not doing that. They're not even alluding to 'reading in bed'. They're not reading the papers around them – maybe, at most, they're distractedly scanning the looks of the page. They're not drinking the coffee (and 'drinking coffee' would already be something on the rather far end of 'bed habits'). They're not looking directly at the camera either, but definitely in its direction, and they have this beautiful, abstract and thoroughly personal look on their face. That is the one thing I'm very sure about; even if it turned out that I misremembered everything else, I am certain to recall the extraordinary quality of the look.

Well, have you not done any research about the picture, you might ask. And yes, I'd answer, I have – twice. A primary tour when I first stumbled upon the picture. I reverse-image-searched it, found its page on a New York City photo museum website. It ascribed the picture to a male photographer whose name I forgot, and whose only other picture in the museum collection was another picture of the same person, this time standing by a window, smoking.

The fact that there were only two pictures of said photographer in the collection gave me the impression of being let in on – not a secret, but an intimacy. The photographer had created two images that posterity considered worth preserving, and both images featured the same person, maybe in the same New York City flat, maybe taken on the same occasion. Maybe not. That there were only two photographies, and that the photographer was virtually unknown (to me, which isn't saying much, but his biography given by the museum was of the ultra-short kind, which is maybe saying a bit more), gave that air of intimacy: the surrounding facts gave nothing away about the relation of photographer and subject – this was not a picture from a series of pictures, or a picture by a famous photographer with a well-known aesthetic, principles, ideas, etc. It was a picture by somebody with a camera, of whom we know two pictures. Maybe more. Maybe not. More importantly still, the picture gave nothing away about the relation of photographer and subject. It wasn't a horny picture, it wasn't a bragging picture, etc. But neither was it a documentary, off-handed snapshot of ostentatiously little individualized connection to the photographed subject. It was a careful, staged picture, which added to the mystery. Yes, it could have been the photographer's sexual partner. But also his sister, or his flatmate, or someone whose suit he thought looked cool on the street. Just like the person didn't behave like an instance of bed-behavior, they also didn't behave like an instance of relationship-behavior. In fact, this person looked completely relationless, and I say this as a structuralist (who's argued elsewhere that all expression is an expression of relation).

If I continue to continue to remember correctly, the title of the picture didn't give anything away, either.

But why do you say "remember correctly" now still, you might ask, we thought you looked it up.

And yeah, I did, but see: I looked at it, nodded to myself, closed the browser tab, moved on with my life.

And this is why I wrote above that yes, I did research about this picture, twice. Because a few days after closing that tab I realized that I was haunted by a look whose very quality seemed to defy what I hold true: by a relationless expression.

So I embarked on a second round of research, this time with the goal to find the picture again. And let me tell you what you already know: Finding a black and white picture of a woman lying on a bed somewhere on the internet is no easy feat, and not being sure whether you remember any part of the picture except that diaphanous 'expression' correctly doesn't exactly help. Thus, when I wrote "my picture" all the way on top of this page, I say this the way Ahab says "my whale".

My second tour of research, then, was a sham-Pequod whose planks consisted of inane search queries such as:

black and white photograph of woman reading in bed
photograph of woman in bed 1940s
photograph of woman with newspapers in bed new york city photographer
portrait of woman relaxing on bed black and white 1940s
photograph of woman drinking coffee in bed 1940s

And, of course, variations of them with the decade changed from anything between 1920s and 1960s, although I'm pretty sure it is not earlier than 1930s and not later than 1940s. And, also of course, search queries infused with proxy stupidity: image descriptions I know to be false, but that I assume could have been associated, and if wrongly, with my picture. And finally, queries that were formulated in ways that I thought would exclude the onslaught of completely wrong results.

Because what I got first, and what I had to get rid of first, were, of course: numerous hipster black and white portraits of women in bed ("drinking coffee" was like catnip to the hipster algorithm); a glimpse of the stock photograph through the ages, from women happily waking up to sunshine falling on linen in the 1920s to women happily waking up to sunshine falling on linen in the 2020s; and, of course, the Ava Gardners and Marilyn Monroes of this world endlessly cavorting on a very, very long bedsheet whose folds begin somewhere near the Rokeby Venus (in fact, the oldest picture of this kind was a Rubens reclining nude falsely ascribed to Titian) and lead all the way to today; and, of course, hundreds of photographs of women, on beds, dressed, but sleeping.

In short, I got the memes again, the bed-memes, the relations, the habits, the expectations, the algorithms (what else?); I got the array of what women and people in general and usually do in and around beds, at least, funnily enough, the safe-for-work-part of it. I sailed the seas of "pictures of women in bed" fully knowing that there were about 20'o00 gigantobytes of pornography below me. But my sea surface was complicated and cluttered enough as it was.

Of course I was aware that when I typed in "black and white photograph of woman on bed 1940s" I was booking a VIP ticket to the male gaze festival, but the directly sexualized stuff was only part of it. I saw, thanks to the quickly-reached limits of algorithmic reason, then-scandalous photographs of interracial couples not actually in bed, but in a bedroom or near a bedroom ("black and white"); women at the bedside of sick or starving children in Victorian London, in Lebanon 1991, in Darfur 2004, or being sick and/or starving themselves, with children and/or men at their bedside in turn; female WWII soldiers preparing their hammock; Susan Sontag on a sofa, smoking; women in psychiatric institutions of 1950's france; women from at least four different epochs on chaiselongues and in hospital beds; and of course, on such a run through various image websources, and driven by the intense fury of my wish, everything began to run into each other like wet colours:

Magnificent Steichen photographs of draped Dietrichs morphed seamlessly into 1990s Bosnia grieving bedside widows, which, in turn seemed to have something to do with the violent sadness of a few Diane Arbus portraits of bedded subjects, and with female Covid-19 patients divided from their relatives with a transparent curtain, which, in turn, seemed to be linked directly to an image of the first person to sing Isolde in Wagner's tearjerker evanescing recliningly on a quasi-antique, well, recliner, I guess, and thus directly to that massive deluge of nuclear-family-propaganda, women happily waking up next to their already-dressed ('I was born in a suit') men, women getting a few loving phone calls to the office or to their lovers in while still in a morning-damp, clean white bed; and that, in turn, led directly to a close-up of Frances Farmer on a bed, a flattened exclamation mark of a person; between it all, an army of film stills, sixteen Claudia Cardinales waking up in sixteen Spaghetti Western kingsize beds, cinecittà morning winds disheveling blonde strands; photographs that all seemed to have something to do with each other maybe just and only because they all happened next to each other on the absurdly long photo scroll, and nothing with my picture. I sat in front of the computer and stared at the ebb and flow of the shifting vibes in front of me, resultlessly.

I felt an inch of a dream – stumbling, in some way, onto the ur-image, the picture-egg from which all pictures of women-bed-relations emerged, or which depicted the ur-women-bed-relation, all the chauvinism, the misogyny, the freedom, the repose, the sadness. I vaguely entertained the day-dream of suddenly seeing it soar from between its many, many adumbrations, like the "parakeet of parakeets" prevailing "above the forest of the parakeets" in Stevens' poem. And I had inches of thoughts, about being able to watch the biases of the algorithms compete with the biases within the data. But it was but an inch of a dream and they were but inches of thoughts, because I didn't entertain either of them truly. I wasn't really interested in them; my dream and my thought remained fixed on my picture, the one I didn't see, that I imagined held no biases, and that had precisely nothing to do with all the pictures I saw.

I also felt a fragment of a hatred for all pictures, not really because they didn't give me what I was looking for, but really for the absolute dearth of variation they offered, even though they ostentatiously came from a wide array of sources, times, artistic levels, purposes, and places. I knew that they mostly transported the dearth of variety society offers to women and beds, but they added to that the dearth of variety photographers have chosen to bring to women and beds.

When it comes to this second tour of research, the past tense is a bit of a lie. Rather, it is a recurrent phenomenon that I am re-gripped, randomly, by a desire to see my picture, and so I plunge myself back into the great picture scroll or tunnel, in pursuit of what is simultaneously my white whale and my white rabbit. Adding minimal variations to the search queries quoted above, I sometimes get a slightly different set of pictures, sometimes I only get the same one with the pictures in a different order.

And seeing how far down in my memory the shreds of my picture are buried, I am absolutely aware of the high likeliness that my picture looks almost nothing like my recollection of it. Maybe there is no coffee, maybe there are no papers. Maybe it isn't even in black and white. And maybe the look of the portrayed will express a relation after all.