(Un)Smiling Faces, in Black-and-White

I’ve always liked black-and-white photographs — especially family snapshots (even of other people’s families) taken in the 1950s and earlier.

It’s not that they satisfy some inner longing for quaintness (I’m not a fan of quaintness in general, and the adjective “whimsical” often makes me want to reach for the X-Acto knife (especially, ha ha, when someone else uses the word)). Nor is it — just — a nostalgia for things which I know are gone, sometimes long gone.

No, it’s not the overall elegiac atmosphere. It’s not the places. It’s the faces of the people.

In candid snapshots, especially, those unguarded glimpses into the souls of their subjects reveal more than their words ever could — or, truth be told, than my own words ever could. But it’s something to aspire to. (Which is one reason why a near-cliché of fiction is the moment when the protagonist glimpses herself in a mirror, or examines the creases and tears in a photograph of himself as a boy. At some level, people’s faces say everything there is to be said about a person — at that very time, even, if photographed or if described in heartbreaking verbal detail.)

I’ve never read any of the Little House on the Prairie books. Didn’t really get the chance when I was a kid (and anyway, back then my response would have been something like “Aren’t they for girls?”). But after encountering Michael Lesy’s 1973 book of old photos and newspaper excerpts, Wisconsin Death Trip, I’ve never even been tempted as an adult, either.

Chapters in the book are organized chronologically, from 1885-6 at the start to 1900 at the end. Opening each chapter are a few pages of excerpts from a couple of small-town newspapermen’s reports at the time, and a contemporary anecdote told at greater length in Lesy’s own words. The photos — all the work of one man, selected from among 30,000 images recorded by the camera of a small-town photographer named Charles Van Schaick [note] — demonstrate that even “posed” photographs can lay the soul bare… if the soul in question is sufficiently distracted by everyday life, and even survival.

The opening and closing words of Lesy’s Introduction to his book:

The pictures you’re about to see are of people who were once actually alive. [None of them] were, when they were made or experienced, considered to be unique, extraordinary, or sensational… The people who looked at the pictures once they were taken weren’t surprised…

…[This book’s] primary intention is to make you experience the pages now before you as a flexible mirror that if turned one way can reflect the odor of the air that surrounded me as I wrote this; if turned another, can project your anticipations of next Monday; if turned again, can transmit the sound of breathing in the deep winter air of a room of eighty years ago [i.e., the 1890s], and if turned once again, this time backward on itself, can fuse all three images, and so can focus on who I once was, what you might yet be, and what may have happened, all upon a single point of your imagination, and transform them like light focused by a lens on paper, from a lower form of energy to a higher.

Look at the faces of the people in the two pictures from the book shown here. Look at their eyes, their lips, the way in which their hair is secured or not. Imagine the shoulders and arms beneath their clothing. Imagine the history — personal, local, national — which brought them to the studio of Charles Van Schaick in the 1890s, out on the windblown and broken-down Wisconsin prairie…

Finally, I thought you might like to see some samples from the opening and closing sections of newspaper accounts gathered in the book:

I desire to express my thanks through the press to Dr. Cole, W.R. O’Hearn, and the other citizens of Black River Falls for aid rendered and sympathy extended for several months past since the amputation of my leg. Eric Peterson.

(1/9/1885, Town News)

Our citizens were shocked last Friday to learn that Amos Kotchell of Sparta who formerly resided in this vicinity had committed suicide by shooting himself with a revolver in Mr. Potts’ harness shop at Sparta. Mr. Kotchell was one of the most enterprising farmers and exemplary citizens when he resided here and it is singular that he should thus take his own life, but… I presume it is best that we not judge harshly.

(3/5/1886, County)

Up the road were Al and Aggie Sermon. They had a great big family, but years before it was different. They’d got married when she was 14 or 15 and gone up to the North Woods of Minnesota, way out alone up there, and she got shack-wacky. That’s why they came back here. She had some kind of nervous breakdown or something from being alone. Not that she was the only one. It happened to an awful lot of women.

(1900, Town Gossip)

Frederick Schultz, an old resident of Two Rivers, cheated his undertaker by suddenly jumping out of the coffin in which, supposed to be dead, he had been placed.

(11/15/1900, State)

Quaint, hmm?

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Note: Images from the book are available for viewing and purchase at the site of the Wisconsin Historical Society. You can also view many other images by (and of) Charles Van Schaick, although I don’t think you can see all 30,000.

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Edit to add (2017/04/16): After a viewing of the film Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, I got thinking about how different the real-world version of that story might have been. (Even director Michael Kidd originally turned the project down, saying, “Here are these slobs living off in the woods. They have no schooling, they are uncouth, there’s manure on the floor, the cows come in and out — and they’re gonna get up and dance? We’d be laughed out of the house.”) I suddenly remembered this book (and this post). While poking about a bit more on the Internet, I discovered that a documentary film based on the book had been made, years before I wrote the above. One kind soul has even posted it on YouTube, apparently in its 76-minute entirety: