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Wednesday, July 02, 2008
Pinkerton
We Valve drones are overjoyed to obey the orders of our New Glorious Leader, telegraphed down from his mountainpeak eyrie: namely that all Valve posts from now on must conform to one or other of the Supreme One’s blogstyles: either sex-in-office/festivus, or alternatively antique-photographs-of-the-American-West. In this spirit I offer up: Pinkerton.
Isn’t that one of the loveliest photos you have ever seen? It’s a picture of Allan Pinkerton on horseback, taken on the Antietam Battlefield in 1862.
I was briefly checking Pinkerton by way of following up something else, and was intrigued to discover (a) that he didn’t leave Scotland for America until his 20s (I didn’t know that); (b) that he died because he slipped and bit his tongue, which is an ... unusual way to die; and (c) he was as assiduous a union-buster as I had always heard. But then I saw this photo of him, and I could not help but fall in love with the image.
I’ve been trying to put my finger on why I think it so beautiful. In part, it’s because I’m a sucker for that bokeh-style of short depth-of-field photography that is so popular at the minute: making real cities or real crowds of people look like models with creative use of defocussed elements. In this case I assume the background trees are out of focus because they moved, and the figures behind the horse are out of focus because they’re too far away, but it gives the whole a delightfully dinky model-like quality. Then there’s the tripartite crack. Clearly this was originally an image on glass and the glass got broken, but the serendipity of it is superb: dividing the composition into three sections that incorporate, respectively, Pinkerton’s head; Pinkerton’s horse’s head; Pinkerton’s and his horse’s bodies. It’s formally very pleasing, and made more pleasing by the way the lines of those cracks run-into and mimic the other sprawling fracture-like lines of the composition: the guyrope and pole of the tent, the slender trunks and branches of the trees.
I suppose one effect of the image is to impart a peculiar, statuesque solidity to the horse-and-rider at its centre, because everything else in the composition (even, oddly, those things which are clearly static) seem to be in motion. But I also like the way the three crack-lines join in a star of whiteness just in front of Pinkerton’s chest; and the dynamism of those arches, like electrical discharge (from the star going left the discharge seems to plunge into Pinkerton’s breast, but leave from a slightly different trajectory out of his back). I like the way each of the three segments has its own specific formal attractiveness, and yet all three combine so well together into the single image. Lovely.
Comments
Adam, it is indeed a lovely photograph and I think you’ve nailed it, especially the unintentional bokeh aspect, but for me an element of the joy it elicits is down to the archetype of a gumshoe that so much Hammett, Chandler et al has left me with. No matter the realities of the Agency’s beginnings as a private security guard, the aesthetic overlap of the nineteenth century with the twentieth or even that Pinkerton died before Hammett was born, it’s beguilingly disconcerting to see a PI playing at cowboys. Ignorance, or a stubborn unwillingness to acknowledge the facts, is, in this case, bliss. Mix in Pinkerton being, as per Tarantino, about as soft-boiled as surnames get, and it’s all great fun.
(Or maybe I mean “barrel distortion”? Apparently I’ve forgotten most of my photography, too.)
I feel like a curmudgeon, but I’d like the photo better without the cracks. I’m not crazy about the tent rope going behind the horse’s nose, either. Compositionally, I don’t think it is a particularly good photograph, so I guess it’s good that Pinkerton himself is inherently interesting ;)
Not much to add, but the gorgeous camera work in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford could have been cribbed from this photo, in almost every sense you describe it. There’s even a cracked glass picture frame at a key moment in the movie.
This looks like an old (cracked!) wet-plate photo, which was probably an 18x22 inch negative (!). This huge negative area is the main reason the the depth-of-field is so slight (in addition to the long exposure times too, of course) and stands out like a stereoscopic photo.
Also note that “bokeh” is not a style or a movement, but refers to the texture and feel of out-of-focus elements in various lenses.
Anthony, have you read “Corkscrew,” the story in which The Continental Op plays cowboy? May be the silliest thing Hammett ever wrote, but (like the man said) all great fun.
(Footnote for non-Hammetters, the Op(erative) worked for the Continental, a large detective agency modeled after the Pinkertons.)
Ray, I haven’t, to my shame, but a little Googling tells me it’s in a collection called The Big Knockover. I’ll be ordering it within the hour. If it’s half as silly as I expect, I’ll be a happy man and, for my money, The Continental Op over Sam Spade any day. Thanks for the suggestion.
When you get it, I’d love to hear your opinion on “Tulip”—me, I think it’s grand, but if you agree that’ll make two of us.
This suggests that the effect is now being called ‘tilt shift’ rather than bokeh. And now that I’ve finally, very belatedly, seen The Assassination of Jesse James by The Coward Robert Ford Mondeo I can, very belatedly, endorse what Aaron says. Some exquisitely beautiful visual images in that film. Although I found the fact that Brad Pitt played James surrounded by various never-heard-of-thems (deliberately, I guess, to communicate James’s celebrity glamour) distracting. He doesn’t do badly, although I found myself thinking, ‘hey, look, it’s half of Brangelina, on a horse!‘