Two pictures, two worldviews
How two images show social order and history. How the more recent one shows where cars come in to reset the world. And where glamour fits in.
Read time: about 9 minutes. This week: An eighteenth-century etching and a twentieth-century photograph present two very different worldviews. The later one features the car in all its shiny glamour to transport us to a better world. An exposition of images. (It’s also Seersucker Day today!) Next week: I’m taking a break! I plan to be back on July 7, probably with a post on Grand Prix and 24 Hours of Le Mans (which runs June 11-12). Then I’ll let the car topics rest for a while, I think. Have a great June!
Two of the chapters in my current book project have to do with the central place that “glamour” took in the adoption of the automobile and its remaking of American (and eventually much of the world’s) culture and specifically how glamour shaped the reception of the Jaguar E-type in the 1960s. The glamour part of the book includes a consideration of two pictures that I’ve had hanging in my offices for several years. Though the two images have no direct relationship — that is, the older one doesn’t influence the later — each functions to represent a worldview and a view of history. One of the pictures situates the glamorous car into a world of new hope and a striving for happiness.
Today’s post aligns with some previous ones that I’d invite you to revisit. All of them center around media imagery and how we land on valuing or interpreting things and experiences. Two of them consider early representations of car culture, either through early issues of MoToR, a print magazine founded in the initial years of the “automobile age,” or through some tropes of tire advertisements in the early decades of the twentieth century. One more generally considers the manipulation and the interpretation of a war setting in two photographs from the Crimean War and the fate of photography.
Other than this brief introduction, I plop you in medias res….
Mercantile uses of glamour fit well with some recent scholarly considerations of “fashion” and the whims of taste that overlap glamour and the glamorous. These rather humorless and high-brow assessments label fashion and glamour as tools of post-capitalist society that serve the purpose of ginning up business, so to speak, by reframing desires and creating both dissatisfaction with old stuff and igniting passion for the new. The message: Go out and buy it! Although often useful and insightful, such analysis is hardly complete, perhaps because it is difficult to be a post-modern scholarly sourpuss and still get beyond mere disdain. But does glamour have a use that goes beyond selling? Do glamour and glamorous objects have a use when, say, there is nothing to buy? When the problem is hardly a matter of creating false needs but of meeting actual ones?
The Great Depression of the 1930s serves as an example to test. Although the reasons for the Great Depression could illustrate a failure of capitalism, for matters of studying where glamour fits in we hardly need to be so precise in evaluating the period’s economic causes. Its tragic effects suffice. From the perspective of the millions who suffered from horrific failures of the depression, desires hardly needed to be manufactured and stirred. Yet, even in that harrowingly insecure time, glamour still had a role to play — perhaps a vital role — even though modern critique would seem less compelling, since a problem was not satiated consumption but very much the opposite. For that time glamour nonetheless presented images for hope and longing, and rather than fostering an itch of dissatisfaction of present conditions and a hunger for the new, glamour conveyed a vision of satisfaction and the enchantments of hope and succor. These images inspired action, motivated those who saw them to make it through their days, for better times could still be wished for and sought.
Two large framed pictures hang in my office, one an eighteenth-century Italian etching by Giovanni Battista Piranesi and the other a twentieth-century photograph by Arthur Rothstein, taken as a part of the Depression-era Farm Security Administration. Both in their own ways depict the lowly and the exalted, the common and the glamorous. They reveal quite different visions of futures and their order, and one of them uses glamour as a spur.
My wife and I picked up the Piranesi reproduction etching in a narrow little touristy shop near Rome’s Trevi Fountain. It caught my eye because of its jarring portrait of power and glory contrasted against powerlessness and the quite literal scum and sludge of poverty. In it, St. Peter’s Basilica rises against the sky. To the right and halfway down the scene, stands the Castel Sant’Angelo or Hadrian’s tomb — in Piranesi’s time, as now, a papal property. The building extends the reach of ecclesiastical majesty; Archangel Michael, sheathing (or unsheathing?) his sword, protects the tomb. Together the monuments balance sacred and profane, or, perhaps more accurately, show the adoption of mundane power by the sacred — a victory of the divine over mere worldly empire.
Of course, the Roman landmarks are tourist trap images, but in the foreground of the etching, unmistakably emphasized by the artist, impoverished Romans pick through filthy refuse and sewage of the city as it flows into the Tiber. As if to highlight the scene, Piranesi labeled it as he did the landmarks. The scene is item six, Espurgo delle immondezze della cittá, “the flushed waste of the city.” And so, the etching draws a not-so-subtle critique. Its hierarchy of power fits the vertical presentation: St. Peter’s divine power looms above the powers of the earth. The impoverished deal with the left-overs and the effluent and occupy the lowest position of the scene. The picture shows a state that is securely set; no upheavals will turn things upside down.
Separated by a corner of my office, a couple of feet away from that etching, the second image hangs. It is a lesser known picture from American photographer Arthur Rothstein. Taken in the depths of the Great Depression, the picture also contrasts power and powerlessness. But this one is different from Piranesi’s. It anticipates transformation and change. Where Piranesi’s etching showed a tragically stable state of things, Rothstein’s photograph presents a vision of change and improvement. He used a modern and an automotive iconography to convey a message that contrasts with the hierarchical framing of Piranesi’s picture.
The photograph shows a makeshift bed crammed against a wall, a migrant’s sleeping place in rural America of the 1930s. In the unmade bed, padded with straw, lie newspapers — leisurely reading, perhaps, in otherwise stark surroundings. Glued on a flimsy pressed-wood wall behind the bed are photographs of cars, neatly cut from magazines and newspapers and carefully aligned. They radiate from the head of the bed. No pope keeps order and a constancy in this meager bedroom. The sleeper follows a path with these cars to images of a better life. He expected a change. He would be transported in these cars not just to another field on another farm, but to a better this worldly life. St. Peter’s approval wouldn’t be required for entry.
One picture shows the way things are – the established order in Piranesi’s picture. Rothstein’s photograph shows transport in a shiny car to a brighter future, visually present in an arc of luxury automobiles. Shiny cut-outs, happy and rich images attach cars to a migrant worker’s longings for a better world. The glamorous image of the car plays with desires and, in the case of the man occupying the makeshift bed, also orders a world.
Rothstein’s composition also subtly recalls the biblical story of Jacob’s Dream (or Jacob’s Ladder), long depicted by artists, including William Blake. In the dream, Jacob sees “a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angel of God ascending and descending on it” (Genesis 28:12, KJV). In the photo, the migrant’s position in the bed and the triangular shaped procession of cars compose a new dream-image, with the cars mainly ascending in a traffic line, but also, as if in circulation, descending to the migrant’s pillow near the bottom. Jacob was also a migrant. Perhaps the promise that Jacob heard applied also to the absent migrant and his dream of cars: “I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest, and will bring thee again into this land: for I will not leave thee…” (Genesis 28:15 KJV).
Piranesi’s static order of heavenly and terrestrial worlds and Rothstein’s aspirational and progressive vision in this world show “images at work,” to use David Morgan’s phrase, and the place of glamour in their effects. Glamour is not only a tool of the post-capitalist systems that keep consumer urges moving but, probably to post-modernist critics’ surprise, processes of glamour and fashion spur change and even revolutionary upheaval, the reordering and transformation of what people in a society can expect and hope. In the end, glamour may not be a sedative or simply a tool of Madison Avenue agencies. It also prods and transforms — often in ways that are only partially steered. Glamour shapes a rhetoric.
I hope you share this post with your friends.
I hope you’ll give me your thoughts about it in the comments, too!
Tags: car, glamour, glamor, Great Depression, American dream,
Links, cited and not, some just interesting
A very perceptive and useful book on the power of images, published around the time that Virginia Postrel’s book appeared, which echoes many of Morgan’s ideas. The two were unaware of each other’s work, they told me. Morgan, David. Images at Work: The Material Culture of Enchantment. Oxford; New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Piranesi, Giovanni Battista. Veduta Del Ponte e Castello Sant’ Angelo. 1751 1748. Print, etching, 37.7 cm height, 58.5 cm width on sheet 53.5 x 75 cm. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/639b6496-e4e1-e1ae-e040-e00a18061b63.
Wonderfully readable and enjoyable book that points out the powerful and transforming power of glamour. Wonderfully illustrated and presented. Postrel, Virginia. The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013; and an exhibition catalogue: Rosa, Joseph, Phil Patton, Virginia Postrel, and Valerie Steele, eds. Glamour : Fashion + Industrial Design + Architecture. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art ; In association with Yale University Press, n.d. Postrel offers one of the chapters in the art catalogue. pp. 24-35.
Great read as always Mark. The 'disruption' induced by glamour reminds me of Victor Turner's work on rituals, where certain symbolic events rupture the mundane flow of life, fostering, in the process, an impulse for change.