A basement, somewhere in the 1970s or early 80s, after dinner. An old couch and metal folding chairs. A Kodak carousel slide projector on a small table in the middle of the room. An Aurora Conqueror screen against a far wall, slightly atilt.
Guests slip into their seats, children sit on the floor, and someone turns off the lights. Because someone else is smoking, the rays from the projector take hazy shape in the air. Almost cinematic. The husband/father stands behind the projector, a wire leading to a remote in his hand, and the projector drops a color slide into the light, then ejects it, rotating the carousel by one unit to drop another slide.
The slide shows are often about a trip somewhere. The father speaks a caption to each picture. “Here we are at the hotel near Niagara Falls.” The mother then adds a comment. “This is where Suzy had that terrible encounter with a spider and Billy didn’t like his peas.” The images are unremarkable if not outright bad. But that isn’t the point. Decades before Instagram and TikTok, showing these images is an act of revelation and evidence.
The carousel may be extinct, but every Facebook or Instagram “Like” is its grandchild. Storytelling, the articulation of complicated and connected memoirs, the causes and effects of behavior and emotions, are the real goal here.
I am thinking about these old basement gatherings because I have on my desk an engrossing new book by Janet Malcolm (1934-2021). Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory is a collection of memories, most of them prompted by a single old photograph, that unpack a complicated and nuanced history with the confident intimacy of stories told among friends. Stories of her family escaping Czechoslovakia and the Nazis just before World War II. Stories of growing up in New York, of Jewish identity, of family members and neighbors and friends. Each story is intriguing, revealing the seen and unseen currents of those days.
Each image is a starting point. For example, the chapter titled “Camp Happyacres” begins this way:
“This barely readable, two-by-three-inch black-and-white photograph of my sister and me along with three people I don’t recognize posed in front of an automobile is typical of the photographs we find in boxes of old papers. It has no artistic merit and summons no memories. Occasionally, however, like memory itself, one of these inert pictures will suddenly stir and come to life. As I peer more closely at the snapshot, I recognize someone in it — the woman who is leaning against the open car door and looking through the window — and am taken back to Camp Happyacres, a girls’ camp in New Hampshire where our parents sent us during the nineteen-forties, and to the lake with the Nabokovian name of Pleasant Lake in which we swam every day.”
But the real power of Still Lives doesn’t issue only from the short narratives that, over the course of the book, become a type of autobiography. The real power here is the curiosity, the wisdom and insight Malcolm brings to the anecdotes and vignettes.
At the beginning of an entry called “Lovesick,” she writes, “There is a box in my apartment labeled ‘Old Not Good Photos.’ This is an understatement. Most of the photos are two-and-a-half-inch squares, showing little blurred black-and-white images, taken from too far away, of people whose features one can barely make out, standing or sitting alone or in groups, against dull, grey backgrounds. They are like the barely flickering dream that dissipates as one awakens, rather than the self-important ones that follow us into the day and seem to be crying out for interpretation. However, as psychoanalysis has taught us, it is the least prepossessing dreams, disguised as such to put us off the scent, that sometimes bear the most important messages from inner life. So, too, some of the drab little photographs, if stared at long enough, begin to speak to us.”
Long time New Yorker contributor Ian Frazier writes, in his introduction to Still Pictures, “She [Malcolm] wrote these pieces at a level of wisdom that took a lifetime to attain, and that almost nobody reaches at any age.”
Malcolm is a brilliant explorer of the reasons behind what we see and do. Her focus in this book is her own past and, from the vantage point of age, she regards her own history as a prompt for deep curiosity. As she tries to explain herself, we follow along, insight to insight, question to question.
In the chapter titled “Mother,” she writes, “She had an enormous amount of what used to be called ‘European charm.’ My sister and I, each in our way, acquired some of it from her. What is it? From the point of view of feminism, it seems kind of awful, not ‘enabling’ or enabling in the wrong way, the way the first wife in a harem might establish her firstness. By being charming, you are lowering yourself. You are asking for something. I admire the deadpan young women of today who want nothing from you. I like their toughness and self-containment. Of course, beneath the surface, they are as pathetic as everyone else. But the pose has something to be said for it. My mother wasn’t charming in a fluttering feminine way. She was sturdily built and had an affect of enthusiasm and vitality …”
Always suspicious of her own responses but confident in her questions, Malcolm writes, “The past is a country that issues no visas. We can only enter it illegally.”
Ruminating on the past through preserved images, Still Lives appears just 18 months after Malcolm’s death in 2021 and adds another remarkable volume to her oeuvres. Her first book, Diana and Nikon: Essays on the Aesthetic of Photography, was followed by Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. Two Lives: Alice and Gertrude won the 2008 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, and Forty-One False Starts was a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. She wrote often for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. In 2017 she received the Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Still Lives is not a narrative autobiography that traces the arc of a life or a career. It is, instead, very much like those basement moments with the slide show when the conversation begins with an image and then travels toward more complicated truths. Finishing Still Lives, readers will have an evocative picture of one of our time’s significant authors and, more importantly, a new way to ask questions about the evidence we create and keep. Still Lives: On Photography and Memory is an essential, necessary book.
[Publishedf by Farrar, Straus & Giroux on January 10, 2023, 155 pages, $26.00 hardcover]
Janet Malcolm with camera, date unknown.
