I don’t know who Charlotte Spaulding is. Strike that: I didn’t know who Charlotte Spaulding was, until this autochrome by Edward Steichen. It’s a relatively recent discovery, one of two autochromes he made of Spaulding. Neither had been seen for a hundred years.
That sounds like the start of something important. A journalist’s payday. Actually, I have nothing to say about this charming woman. It’s the autochrome itself, my favorite of the color processes, that wants all my attention.
Nevermind its gilded nostalgia, its BookTok romantasies. I’m all for the autochrome’s dining room daffodils and, as Wordsworth put it, the “flash upon that inward eye” that so easily leads astray—not by Beauty (capital B), nothing so showy as that, but by a simpler loveliness, a thing that’s (merely?) pretty.
So you’re saying you’d rather not face facts? You’d rather yellow castles in the air? You’d rather the figment than the REALLY real?
I don’t know if that’s what I’m saying. In a way, it must be.
When I look at Helen Murdoch’s autochrome of Taj Mahal or any of those developed by Jacques Henri Lartigue, I see meaningful unmaking, as if the veneer of history had been slightly rubbed away, leaving something softer, only partially interpreted. Maybe that’s what I want, not Truth but what’s just behind it.
What makes you think there’s anything sweeter behind that face?
Nothing. I also wear that face. I also know how sharp the teeth inside it are. What do you want me to say? That I renounce sentimentality, all artifice, all golden boughs? I’ll say it then: I do.
But before you leave, watch this. It’s a trick I learned a long time ago. With this same autochrome on my screen, I can forget you were ever here. I can invent my foolish happiness anew. It’s the easiest trick I know. I call it being human.
