Photography and the Contemporary

Cultural Condition Commemorating the

Present Peter D. Osborne
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://textbookfull.com/product/photography-and-the-contemporary-cultural-condition
-commemorating-the-present-peter-d-osborne/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

The Selfie Temporality and Contemporary Photography 1st

Edition Claire Raymond

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-selfie-temporality-and-
contemporary-photography-1st-edition-claire-raymond/

Photography and the Non-Place: The Cultural Erasure of

the City Jim Brogden

https://textbookfull.com/product/photography-and-the-non-place-
the-cultural-erasure-of-the-city-jim-brogden/

The Coming 1st Edition Osborne

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-coming-1st-edition-osborne/

Wolf of the Present Spirit of the Wolf 2 1st Edition A

D Mclain Mclain A D

https://textbookfull.com/product/wolf-of-the-present-spirit-of-
the-wolf-2-1st-edition-a-d-mclain-mclain-a-d/
The Performing Observer Essays on Contemporary Art
Performance and Photography 1st Edition Martin Patrick

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-performing-observer-essays-
on-contemporary-art-performance-and-photography-1st-edition-
martin-patrick/

Internationalism, Imperialism and the Formation of the

Contemporary World: The Pasts of the Present 1st
Edition Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo

https://textbookfull.com/product/internationalism-imperialism-
and-the-formation-of-the-contemporary-world-the-pasts-of-the-
present-1st-edition-miguel-bandeira-jeronimo/

Contemporary Photography and Theory Concepts and

Debates 1st Edition Sally Miller

https://textbookfull.com/product/contemporary-photography-and-
theory-concepts-and-debates-1st-edition-sally-miller/

The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War

II to the Present Gavriel D. Rosenfeld

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-fourth-reich-the-specter-of-
nazism-from-world-war-ii-to-the-present-gavriel-d-rosenfeld/

Responsibility : the epistemic condition First Edition

Philip Robichaud

https://textbookfull.com/product/responsibility-the-epistemic-
condition-first-edition-philip-robichaud/
Photography and the Contemporary
Cultural Condition

In this book, Osborne demonstrates why and how photography as

photography has survived and flourished since the rise of digital processes,
when many anticipated its dissolution into a generalised system of audio-
visual representations or its collapse under the relentless overload of digital
imagery. He examines how photography embodies, contributes to, and even
in effect critiques how the contemporary social world is now imagined, how
it is made present and how the concept and the experience of the Present
itself is produced. Osborne bases his discussions primarily in cultural studies
and visual cultural studies. Through an analysis of different kinds of
photographic work in distinct contexts, he demonstrates how aspects of
photography that once appeared to make it vulnerable to redundancy turn
out to be the basis of its survival and have been utilised by much important
photographic work of the last three decades.

Peter D. Osborne is Senior Lecturer in the Media Faculty of the London

College of Communication, University of the Arts London, UK. He is the
author of several essays on photography and culture. His book, Travelling
Light—Photography, Travel and Visual Culture, was published in 2000.

Cover Image Caption: © Peter D. Osborne 2017

Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies

This series is our home for innovative research in the fields of art and visual
studies. It includes monographs and targeted edited collections that provide
new insights into visual culture and art practice, theory, and research.

Artistic Visions of the Anthropocene North

Edited by Gry Hedin and Ann-Sofie N. Gremaud

Contemporary Artists Working Outside the City

Creative Retreat
Sarah Lowndes

Design and Visual Culture from the Bauhaus to Contemporary Art

Optical Deconstructions
Edit Tóth

Changing Representations of Nature and the City

The 1960s-1970s and Their Legacies
Edited by Gabriel Gee and Alison Vogelaar

The Artist-Philosopher and New Philosophy

George Smith

Photography and the Contemporary Cultural Condition

Commemorating the Present
Peter D. Osborne

Digital Art, Aesthetic Creation

The Birth of a Medium
Paul Crowther

Geneses of Postmodern Art

Technology as Iconology
Paul Crowther

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit

www.routledge.com/Routledge-Advances-in-Art-and-Visual-Studies/book-
series/RAVS
Photography and the
Contemporary Cultural Condition
Commemorating the Present

Peter D. Osborne
First published 2019
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2019 Taylor & Francis

The right of Peter D. Osborne to be identified as the author of this work has
been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Osborne, Peter D. (Peter Desmond), 1947– editor.
Title: Photography and the contemporary cultural condition :
commemorating the present / edited by Peter D. Osborne.
Description: New York : Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018. | Series:
Routledge advances in art and visual studies | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018004272 (print) | LCCN 2018006784 (ebook) | ISBN
9781315818573 (E-book) | ISBN 9780415736251 (hardback : alk. paper) |
 ISBN 9781315818573 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Photography—Philosophy. | Photography—Social aspects. |
Photography, Artistic.
Classification: LCC TR183 (ebook) | LCC TR183 .P4835 2018 (print) | DDC
770.1—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018004272

ISBN: 978-0-415-73625-1 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-81857-3 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
To Bethany and Marion
And to the memory of all those who worked at 10 Rue
Nicolas-Appert, 11th arrondissement, Paris in January
2015
Contents

Acknowledgements
List of Figures
Contributors

1 Commemorating the Present: Introductory Thoughts

2 The Accelerating Eye: Photographic Mobilities

3 Relocated Visions: Some Themes in the Photography of Landscape in

England 1990–2007

4 The Unapproachable Light: Photography and the Sacred, Part 1

5 “Life’s Redemption”: Photography and the Sacred, Part 2

6 anredoM acitpO or Aztec Cameras: Cultural Hybridity and Latin

American Photography

7 The Accidental Theorist: Three Views on the Work of Edgar Martins

8 The Damage: Photography and the Aesthetics of Fragility

Index
Acknowledgements

My gratitude goes to:

The University of the Arts London for the research leave.
Steve Cross of the University of the Arts London for making some of the
research possible.
Andrew Moye for the photography conversations.
Dr Philip Derbyshire for the philosophy conversations.
Alvaro Henao teacher and photographer, for his help with the Colombia
connection.
Bill Schwarz for his encouragement and perennial intellectual enthusiasm.
And to my students of the last few years in Photography and in Media
and Cultural Studies at the London College of Communication, University of
the Arts London for allowing me to test drive many of the ideas encountered
in this study.
Above all, my thanks for the generosity of the photographers whose work
features in the chapters that follow. I only hope I have done justice to their
creativity and to their insights.
Figures

1.1 Vos Pellicules Déposées ici. Dieppe, 2015.

1.2 Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre. Boulevard du Temple, Paris 1838.
1.3 “Private James Crozier, 07.05 / 27.2.1916”, Le Domaine des Cordeliers,
Mailly-Maillet, Picardie. From the series Shot at Dawn, 2014.
1.4 Walter Schels. “Maria Hai-Anh Cao; Portrait 5th December 2003”. From
Life Before Death/Noch Mal Leben vor dem Tod, 2004.
1.5 “Maria Hai-Anh Cao; Died 15th February”. From Life Before Death/Noch
Mal Leben vor dem Tod, 2004.
1.6 Solargraphy project, Helsinki/Peter D. Osborne. “Solarphotograph, from
a window in North East London”, 2007.
2.1 Chuck Forsman. “Vanishing Point, Morenci, Arizona”. From Western
Rider, 2003.
2.2 Chuck Forsman. “Intruders near Roundup, Montana”. From Western
Rider, 2003.
2.3 Rudy Vanderlans. From Supermarket, 2001.
2.4 Naglaa Walker. “Untitled” (Salvador, Brazil). From series Views from
Transport, 1999.
2.5 Naglaa Walker. “Untitled” (London). From series Views from Transport,
1999.
2.6 Doug Aitken/Dean Kuipers. I Am a Bullet, 2000.
2.7 Doug Aitken/Dean Kuipers. I Am a Bullet, 2000.
2.8 Doug Aitken/Dean Kuipers. I Am a Bullet, 2000.
2.9 Edgar Martins. From Airports, 2008.
2.10 John Holden. From Interference, 1994.
2.11 John Holden. From Interference, 1994.
2.12 John Holden. From Interference, 1994.
2.13 Nina Berman. From Hedge, 2010.
2.14 Trevor Paglen. Untitled (Sentinel Drone), 2014.
3.1 David Spero. “The Longhouse communal space and new kitchen,
Steward Community Woodland, Devon, November 2004”. From
Settlements, 2004–2005.
4.1 Tiago Santana. “O Chão de Graciliano Chã Preta, Alagoas—Brasil”, 2003.
5.1 John O’Reilly. With Felipe Prospero, 1986.
5.2 John O’Reilly. S/SGT Killed Over Germany 1944 Age 24, 1991.
5.3 John Dugdale. Psalm 42 Morton Street NYC, 1996. Cyanotype.
5.4 Rut Blees Luxemburg. Liebeslied, 1997.
5.5 Rut Blees Luxemburg. Nach Innen/In Deeper, 1999.
5.6 Maeve Berry. Incandescence, 2008.
5.7 Michael Shanks. From Ghosts in the Mirror, 2013.
5.8 Joanna Kane. “Unknown Woman, Cautious Type”. From The
Somnambulists Photographic Portraits from before Photography, 2008.
6.1 Manuel Alvarez Bravo. Parábola Optica, 1931.
6.2 Bauer Sá. “White Shoe”. From series Nós Por Exemplo, 1993.
6.3 Bauer Sá. “Dando”. From series Nós Por Exemplo, 1993.
6.4 Luis González Palma. La Lotería, 1990.
6.5 Gerardo Suter. Coatlicue, 1990.
6.6 Allan de Souza. Los Extranjeros, 2017.
7.1 Edgar Martins. The Diminishing Present, 2006.
7.2 Edgar Martins. The Diminishing Present, 2006.
7.3 Edgar Martins. The Diminishing Present, 2006.
7.4 Edgar Martins. This Is Not a House, 2011.
7.5 Edgar Martins. This Is Not a House, 2011.
7.6 Edgar Martins. “Production Line BMW Group Plant Munich
(Germany)”. From 00.00.00, 2016.
7.7 Edgar Martins. “Paint Shop BMW Group Plant Munich (Germany)”.
From 00:00.00, 2016.
8.1 Venice: photograph damaged by water. 1961.
8.2 Jenny Nordquist. “Untitled”. From Leaving No Shadow in the Mirror,
2014.
8.3 Stephen Gill. From Buried, 2006.
8.4 Fernell Franco. From Demoliciones, 1995.
8.5 Fernell Franco. c1985 “Autorretrato”, 1985.
8.6 Fernell Franco. Autorretrato De Los Ochenta, 1990.
8.7 Alejandro Chaskielberg. Otsuchi Future Memories, 2015.
8.8 Allan de Souza. “Arbor”. From series The Lost Pictures, 1962–2005.
Digital print.
8.9 Sam Ivin/Fabrica. “Nigeria 2015. Time waiting for asylum 10 years”.
From Lingering Ghosts, 2016.
8.10 Laurel Nakadate. “Lucky Tiger 142”. From Lucky Tiger, 2009.
Contributors

Doug Aitken, USA, is a highly influential artist working in almost all

mediums including photography as well as sculpture, installation and
video. Much of his work reflects on the changes in the nature and
experience of contemporary (mediated) space including the built
environment and mobilised spatiality; a recipient of many awards and
object of numerous studies. His work has been widely published.

Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Mexico d.2002, was one of the founders of modern
Mexican photography active from the 1930s to the 1990s. Influenced by
Surrealism and pre-Columbian cosmologies his imagery of the everyday
world often invokes older meanings still alive in the modernity of the
present in a language we might call allegorical documentary.

Nina Berman, USA, focuses her documentary work in photography and

film on political and social issues including the militarisations of
American life and domestic violence. Her work has been exhibited at,
among other places, the Whitney and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts
and many other venues across the United States, Canada, Great Britain
and Europe. She teaches at Duke and Columbia Universities.

Maeve Berry, Ireland, lives and works in Great Britain. Her work has been
exhibited across Europe and in Asia. Essentially documentary, in
approach it covers the human body, mortality, memory and landscapes
 and places transformed by use and consumption and subjective nature of
objects. Her work has been published in a range of books and catalogues.

Rut Blees Luxemburg, Germany, lives and works in Great Britain. A

photographer, artist and tutor at the Royal College of Art in London,
much of her work is devoted to the depiction of urban spaces and forms.
Some of her most renowned images are unsettling and atmospheric
depictions of urban night streets, spaces and objects normally devoid of
human figures. She has exhibited widely including as the Rencontres
d’Arles Discovery Award laureate in 2011. She has published several
books.

Alejandro Chaskielberg, Argentina, is based in Buenos Aires. He works in

photography and film and also teaches photography in Tokyo, Barcelona
and Mexico City. His vivid and manipulated colour photography is based
on a heightening or intensification but not abandoning of reality. He has
worked in Japan, Africa, Surinam as well as Argentina and has received
numerous prestigious honours, including awards from SONY and
Magnum.

Allan De Souza, Kenya/Great Britain, lives and works in the United States.
He is Associate Professor in Art Practice at UC Berkley. He works in still
photography, video, installation and text. Much of his work is concerned
with the issue of migration, misrecognition, memory and visibility, with
the fading of vision/memory as people relocate and with the effective
invisibility of minorities and migrants in the established gaze. His work
has been the subject of numerous studies and has been exhibited in the
USA, Europe, China and India.

John Dugdale, USA, is a one-time fashion photographer and is becoming a

fine art photographer with a strong focus on nineteenth-century
photographic processes including the cyanotype and albumen prints
following his increasing blindness brought on by HIV/Aids. His highly
refined often model-based work has appeared in numerous exhibitions
 across the United States and Europe and featured in many collections
including those of the Whitney Museum and the Royal Photographic
Society, England.

Chuck Forsman, USA, is a Colorado-based photographer, painter and fine

art tutor at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Much of his work is
devoted to the landscape of the Southwest and Northwest United States
and to the experience of motorised movement in and across the landscape.
His work has been published in a number of volumes and a selection of
his painting and photography have been exhibited at, among other
venues, the Denver Art Museum.

Fernell Franco, Colombia d.2006, was based in Cali, Colombia. Franco

devoted much of his work to the depiction of his city as it was undergoing
relentless state and corporate-driven transformations from the 1980s
onwards, much of it involving the loss of rooted, local spaces and cultures.
It includes the use of serial and fragmentation of the image reflecting
these forces and effects. His work has been exhibited and published
internationally. In 2016–2017 there was a major retrospective exhibition at
the Museo La Tertulia in Cali.

Stephen Gill, Great Britain, is a widely exhibited photographer whose work

utilises the places it depicts at times by incorporating the objects,
substances, and organisms located there into the photographic process
itself, thereby extending the photographic medium beyond itself. The
photobook is central to Gill’s practice. Held in numerous public and
private collections his work has been exhibited in Europe, the United
States, Canada, Japan and Korea.

Luis Gonzalez Palma, Guatemala. His work can be seen as the search for a
visual language that embodies the hybrid nature of Central America’s
culture. It mixes a direct portraiture of actual Guatemalans with a
foregrounded theatricality and symbolism representing the histories and
beliefs in which they are immersed. His work has been exhibited globally
 and has been widely published. Many of his images have appeared as
covers for Latin American novels.

John Holden, Great Britain, is a photographer and artist. Much of his work
is in a variety of book, magazine and online formats and integrated with
innovative typographic design and page layout. It engages with the
experience of new contemporary urban cultures and environments and
mediations.

Sam Ivin, Great Britain, is already the winner of several awards including
two from Magnum Photos and awards from the British Journal of
Photography and Renaissance Photography, among others. His first
publication, Lingering Ghosts (2016) was the product of an undergraduate
project at the University of South Wales. Its images of the damaged
portraits of asylum seekers has been shown in England, France and Italy.
Since then Ivin has been involved in the creation of a community
photography archive in Stoke-on-Trent in England called Settling which
returns to the theme of migration into the locality since the Second World
War.

Joanna Kane, Great Britain, is a photographer and art college tutor based in
Edinburgh. Her work combines an interest in the history of photography
with the application of new visual technologies. Her work has been
engaged with the invocation of presence as an effect of nineteenth-
century life and death masks and the comparable effects of the
photograph. It has been shown in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery
and during the Month of Photography in Bratislava, Slovakia, as well as
in publications.

Dean Kuipers, USA, is an author and journalist. He was an editor on the

Los Angeles Times and writes on art, politics and environmental
movements (see Doug Aitken).
Edgar Martins, was born in Portugal and partly raised in Macao, China. He
lives and works in Great Britain. His work approaches the landscapes of
high modernity in a style that mixes remote visual grandeur with an eye
for metaphysics. It has been exhibited widely and published in a numbers
of books. Martins is the recipient of numerous awards including the
Inaugural New York Photography Award, the SONY World Photography
Award, and has been nominated for the Prix Pictel.

Chloe Dewe Matthews, Great Britain, is a widely exhibited and published

photographer; recipient of a number of awards, including the British
Journal of Photography International Photography Award and The Royal
Photographic Society Vic Odden Award and nominated for the Deutsche
Börse Photography Prize and the Prix Pictet. Shot at Dawn is her first
monograph. She is a Robert Gardender Fellow in Photography at the
Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University.

Laurel Nakadate, USA, works in film as a well as photography. Her

photographic work explores relations—whether the imaginary and
manipulative relations of the voyeur or those of the distantly related
(shown by the artist photographing people she is related to via DNA
testing). She has been described as the artist of the “chance encounter”.
Her work reflects on the photographic image as a form that brings things
or people close and at the same time confirms their remoteness. She has
been the subject of many reviews and analyses and has been exhibited
across the United States, Canada, Europe and Japan.

John O’Reilly, USA, is a photographer, an artist and an art therapist. He is

best known for his photo-montages juxtaposing fragments from classical
art with erotica and historical references often expressing male gay
themes and concerns. He has had numerous exhibitions across the United
States, Canada and France and is published in a number of books.

Trevor Paglen, USA, is a photographer whose background lies in fine art

and geography, his work is frequently preoccupied by the often covert use
 of remote landscape and places by state and military power. It aims to
bring visibility to what is normally hidden. Recent work has recorded the
presence of surveillance drones in the skies above the United States. He
collaborates with scientists, human rights activists and writers.
Internationally exhibited and published, Paglen is a recipient of the
Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize and the MacArthur Genius
Grant.

Bauer Sá, Brazil, is based mostly in and around Salvador, Bahia, in

Northeast Brazil. His work engages with the presence and beliefs of the
country’s African-Brazilian communities. It is characterised by a studio-
based concentration on the body and the performance of identity and
history. He has exhibited many times in Brazil, the United States, Europe
and Japan and is widely published.

Tiago Santana, Brazil, is an independent documentary photographer and

editor of Tempo d’Imagem. Much of his photographic work is devoted to
the depiction of Brazil’s Northeastern regions, above all the presence of
the sacred in the local cultures. He has received many awards inside and
outside of Brazil and has been published and exhibited in Brazil and
France.

Walter Schels, Germany, has come to specialise in facial portraits,

observing, above all, “the human existence in extreme conditions”
(www.walterschels.com/en/about/). Schels’s work has featured in
numerous exhibitions and publications. He is a member of Hamburg’s
Frei Akademie der Künste, and the Association of Freelance Photo
Designers.

Michael Shanks, Great Britain, lives and works in the United States. He is
an archaeologist and Professor of Classics at Stanford University
California. His work ranges from traditional and innovative
archaeological research and theory to the archaeology of contemporary
design and digital, visual and aural cultures and is widely published.
 Recent work has engaged with the “disinterring” of lost figures/presences
in damaged nineteenth-century Daguerrotypes by means of photographic
scanning.

Solargraphy (Tara Trygg) is a mass participation project organised by Tara

Trygg at the University of Art and Design in Helsinki around 2006 which
featured the gathering of the imagery made by many pinhole cameras
across the globe which traced the passages of the sun across the sky over a
3-month period.

David Spero, Great Britain, has exhibited in Europe and the United States.
His work brings about a convergence of conceptualism and the
photographic representation of often normally unregarded spaces, places,
lived in landscapes and artefacts. It is widely published in books and
journals. His work is held in the collections of the British Council and the
Victoria and Albert Museum. In 2009 he was awarded a Photoworks
Fellowship at the British School in Rome.

Gerardo Suter, Argentina, lives and works in Mexico City. Beginning in

dance and theatre photography, his work tends to be studio-based
working in photography, video, and sound design often using performing
models with direct or indirect citations and embodiments of pre-
Colombian entities and forms engaging with questions of time, the body
and cultural memory and, more recently, with border culture. His work is
renowned for its high quality imagery and use of diverse techniques. It is
the subject of numerous accounts and studies and has been exhibited
across the globe. Suter represented Mexico in the 23rd Biennial in Sao
Paolo in 1996.

Rudy Van Der Lans, Holland, lives and works in the United States. He is a
graphic designer, trained in Holland and studied photography at Berkley,
California. With Zuzna Licko he founded and edited the highly influential
visual communication magazine Emigre and was an early utiliser of
 digital layouts and typefaces. This background is evident in his work with
photography.

Naglaa Walker, Great Britain, has a background in both science and

photography. Her work has been exhibited in around 30 venues in Europe
and the United States. She won the Jerwood Prize in 2003. Combining
photography and her background in physics her widely praised show, On
Physics, was accompanied by a book of the same title in 2006.
1 Commemorating the Present
Introductory Thoughts

Cuanto miren los ojos creado sea

Let all the eye sees be created.
Vincente Huidobro, Arte Poética

Photography does not belong to history as one

of its already-surpassed moments. In fact it is
photography (and increasingly so) that
becomes ones of those ‘productive forces’ that
drive both the production of history and its
reproduction, here ‘imaged’.
Francois Laruelle, The Concept of Non-Photography

… forever, flowing and drawn, and since

our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
Elizabeth Bishop, At the Fishouses

… Substitution
of the immutable
for the shifting, the evolving.
Louise Glück, “Nostos”, excerpt from Meadowlands by Louise Glück
©1996. Reprinted by Courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers and Carcanet
Press Ltd.

… does what we have available to us now

 deserve the name of photography?
Jacques Derrida

le réel, éternal vainqueur aux points [reality always wins on points].

Gilles Ortlieb, from Stephen Romer (Ed.) Into the Deep Street ©2009.
Reprinted by courtesy of Carcanet Press Ltd.

The core proposition of this study understands that photography, considered

either as a unified or dispersed set of related practices, remains one of the
most effective and instrumental representational forms constituting
contemporary culture. It maintains that photography continues to shape
both the exteriority and the interiority of social existence taking its place as
part of the evolving modernity characterised by Jean-Luc Nancy as “the
epoch of representation” and present in the formation of the contemporary
human subject described by Hubertus V Amelunxen as “homo
photographicus” (Nancy 1993: 1; Amelunxen 1996b: 117; see also Richter
2010: xxviii). It argues that photography’s claim to having a distinctive
referential effectivity can still be defended. But it is a proposition aware that,
since even before the digital revolution, it rests on shifting foundations and
is haunted by the possibility it might resemble Wile E Coyote having run off
a cliff keeps on going over empty space for while until, hit by the realisation
there is no ground beneath his paws and plummets to earth far below. Of art
in general Terry Smith posed the question can it still “constitute the stuff of
existence?” (Smith 2001: 8). Applying the question to photography, my
answer is a “yes”—but a yes with complications.
Figure 1.1 Vos Pellicules Déposées ici. Dieppe, 2015.

Source: Author’s collection © Peter D Osborne 2015.

Photography is obvious. It is obvious in the original senses of the word

meaning “being in the way” or something “frequently encountered”. It is
obvious because it is ubiquitous and constant. From smart phone cameras
stage—managing and networking our performances, through the medium’s
numberless pragmatic, forensic, ideological, promotional, hobbyist and
aesthetic applications, to surveillance cameras observing from wall or sky
monitoring our presences, owning our public spaces, photography remains
an unavoidable facilitator and mediator of knowledge, identity, pleasure,
social relations and of the arrangements of power. The medium has shown
an evolutionary ability to adapt and absorb other forms. As Sontag
observed, it is phagic, it devours other forms of visual culture. It is the Dr
Who of visual media. It appears then that photography, at least photographic
effects, remain inherent within our lives and worlds, constituting a kind of
immanence.
Photography still articulates the contemporary because certain of its own
characteristics mirror those of contemporary modernity itself. In other
words, photography remains constitutive of the cultural spaces we inhabit
being in a way, a creature of them. An example is modern culture’s
obsession with the present on one hand and its constant flight from it on the
other. It is a contradiction which finds an equivalence in the ceaseless
modulation of presence and absence at the heart of photographic
representation—whose imagery is both indexical and spectral. Similarly, the
double nature of the photograph as both a capturing or fixing of a fleeting
reality and as an all too fragile or erasable material artifact echoes how
modernity is at once defined by its own productions and systems and yet
haunted by their destruction, pulled down by the same forces that brought
them into being. As often it was Baudelaire who understood the deeply
contradictory and conflicted nature of a then emerging modernity. He
writes: “De la vaporization et de la centralization du Moi. Tout est là”
(Baudelaire 1961: 1271)/“Of the vapourization and centralization of the Ego.
Everything depends on that” (Baudelaire 1969: 49).
Societies institute themselves, writes Cornelius Castoriadis, by “instituting
a world of significations” (Castoriadis 1987: 360). Charles Taylor, in a similar
vein, utilises the term “social imaginary”, which he defines as:

the ways in which (people) imagine their social existence, how they fit
together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows,
 the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative
notions and images that underlie these expectations.
(Taylor 2004: 23)

Taylor underlines his use of the term ‘imaginary’ as his focus is “on the way
ordinary people “imagine” their social surroundings”. More often than being
expressed theoretically, he notes, they are “carried in images, stories and
legends” (Taylor 2004: 23).
Photography is one of many processes through which the social
imaginary is represented, confirmed and distributed. It is a crucial medium
in the “culture of generalised communication” or “mediatized culture”
(Vattimo 1992; Hepp 2013). Its emphatic if only apparent realism, that is, its
ostensibly non-linguistic essence, becomes a form of enforcement or
naturalisation of the values of the social imaginary, as though putting them
beyond discussion. No debate over photography’s social functions or its
claims to evidential authenticity can exclude a discussion of how it is
implicated in the politics of presence where visibility is linked to power,
establishing what Gary Shapiro has called, a visual régime. With
acknowledged echoes of Foucault Shapiro identifies a major characteristic of
a visual régime as lying in

what it allows to be seen, by whom, and under what circumstances. But

it is also a question of a more general structuring of the visible: not just
display or prohibition, but what goes without saying, not what is seen
but the arrangement that renders certain ways of seeing obvious while
it excludes others.
(Shapiro 2003: 2–3)

As we shall see in a later chapter, the restriction of visibility has been

utilised as a weapon of political repression.
A visual régime organises what Jacques Rancière calls the “distribution of
the sensible”. The concept widens the meaning of the term “aesthetics” to
describe how “ forms of visibility” are arranged in a more generalised social
space than those of exclusively art practices. They are, he writes, a system

of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience. It

is delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of
speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the
stakes of politics as a form of experience.
(Rancière 2004: 13)

What he calls “primary aesthetics”, are not the exclusive domain of art. They
are forms actively present in shaping how experience and understanding are
articulated and presented across the whole of social life. Art practices are
aesthetic interventions into social and cultural practices already formed by
“primary aesthetics”. They are, writes Rancière,

“ways of doing and making” that intervene in the general distribution

of ways of doing and making as well as in the relationships they
maintain to modes of being and forms of visibility.
(Rancière 2004: 13)

A work titled Where We Come From (If I Could Do Something for You in
Palestine What Would It Be?) 2001–2003 by the Palestinian artist Emily Jacir
contests a certain visual régime, or rather it side-steps through what is as
much an act of kindness as it the production of an aesthetic statement. In
possession of a United States passport and therefore able to visit Israel Jacir
asked Palestinians prevented from doing so by the Israeli authorities, what
she might do for them while in Israel/Palestine. One asked her to visit his
Mother’s grave. The image shows the gravestone with Jacir’s shadow
passing over it, a mark of her presence, her gift of the presence disallowed
the son, her presence standing in for his.
My aim in subsequent chapters is to illustrate how photographic practices
have been engaged in the formation but also in the investigation or
contestation of the visual orders theorised by Shapiro and Rancière among
others. Their engagements are not always radically antithetical, not
necessarily desiring the thorough disruption of dominant visual régimes.
Some do. For the most part, while they are critical in all senses of the
imposed languages of representation, their aim is to complicate or, rather to,
recomplicate how we see and how it conditions what we see and the
meanings we can draw from it. Much of contemporary photography now
represents a resolute uncertainty about the veracity of its statements. Yet, as
the conveyor of provisional truths it represents a powerful opponent of
certainties which so often charge the armories of oppressive power
structures and their rigid imaginaries.
Photography, then, can be a means of imposing a visual régime. It is more
than that, being itself what Castoriadis calls a materialisation of “imaginary
significations” central to the contemporary order (Castoriadis 1987: 361). The
medium embodies certain of the necessary myths of modernity such as the
link between science and technology, the link between its realist claims and
positivism. It exemplifies the synthesis of culture and technology and the
production of symbolic goods. Through mass ownership of cameras it is
associated with the idea of mass cultural democracy. It is mass produced,
immediate and globalised. It progresses: able to re-invent itself as modern,
and at each change to transform what is meant by the term photographic.
Finally, on behalf of the modern, photography has heroically usurped the
powerful spell of traditional society’s mythical or sacred time. Traditionally,
sacred time, described by Mircea Eliade as a “succession of eternities”, might
be made present through ritual (Eliade 1987: 88). In the ritual of the
photographic image the passing moment becomes an unchanging eternity—
an “eternal present” the sacralisation of the everyday (Eliade 1987: 88).
Photography states the obvious. Yet in doing so it can destroy its
obviousness: outstare it; reveal the strangeness of things and the
complexities of seeing; look into the overlooked; unsettle the self-evident;
introduce the precise uncertainty of the poetic, thereby proclaiming what
Geoff Dyer calls the “the poetry of comprehensive contingency” (Dyer 2005:
4). Much of photography is a simple celebration of what exists, an activity
that places it at the heart of an evolving modern condition described by the
Polish poet Czesław Miłosz. Miłosz traces a passage from a religious to a
post-religious culture in terms of the shift from a view of the world as filled
with symbols and allegories to one made of things as themselves devoid of
resident gods. He writes,

Untranslatable into words, I chose my home in what is now In things of

this world, which exist and for that reason delight us.
(Milosz, 1993)

However, as we shall see, the visual expressions of secular modernity have

not remained unchallenged; the metaphysics of the image have not departed.
Photography in this moment is also elusive: easy to find, but hard to
recognise—and definable in multiple ways. While it remains, in John
Tomlinson’s words, “one of the great emblematic artefacts of modernity”,
digitalisation, speeds of image transmission, global mass usage and changes
in economic and social formations accompanied by the rise of more sceptical
takes on representation, have together transformed the ways in which
photography is understood (Tomlinson 2007: 72). For much of the last 30
years, as the digital epoch advanced, the very idea of a single distinctive
entity called photography has become seriously questioned. Numerous
jeremiads have prophesied its effective demise. These assertions and
anxieties are now, like the medium itself, also obvious. Nevertheless they
need some re-describing.
In his essay “Ectoplasm”, a piece written mostly in the 1990s, Geoffrey
Batchen itemises a number of important descriptions of photography’s
uncertain condition following the advent of digital technologies. The status
of the photographic document itself was challenged (Tim Druckery). Its
claim to truthfulness was being undermined (Fred Ritchin). Its very medium
specificity may have disappeared (Anne-Marie Willis); and if it was not
already a corpse, then photography was certainly “radically and
permanently displaced” (William J. Mitchell in Batchen 2005: 129). These
descriptions are echoed elsewhere. Terry Smith wonders if given the excess
of images in the world photography has become enervated (Smith 2001: 1–
7). John Roberts links the loss of reliance on photography’s indexical power
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 She realised my advantage, but she wouldn’t retreat. The Cortelyou
women never do. Yet she knew enough to allow the honours of war to
a hard-driven enemy. “The Cortelyou men are gentlemen,” she said.
Wasn’t that a neat way of telling me that I would never fail a woman
in distress? I felt pleased that she understood the family so well as to
have no fear for the conduct of even her bitterest enemy. “Besides,”
she continued, “I like the Cortelyou temper.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“Yes,” she persisted, “it’s an absolutely reliable factor. Now, papa
—” Then she hesitated, realising the slip.
With an older girl I should have let her flounder, and enjoyed it;
but she was so young, and blushed so charmingly that I had to help
her out. “Don’t keep me in suspense about your father,” I said, in my
most interested of tones, as if I truly wished to know something of
that blot on the ‘scutcheon. This was my second mistake, and a bad
one.
“We’ll leave Mr. Dabney Cortelyou out of the conversation, please,”
she retorted, looking me in the eyes. Was there ever a meaner return
for an act of pure charity than that?
By the way, Kate’s eyes are not Cortelyou. I wondered from where
she got them. When we are angry we contract ours, which is ugly.
She opens hers, which is—I tried to make her do it again by saying,
“You should set a better example, then.” No good: she had got back
to her form, and was smiling sweetly.
“They are furiously disappointed so far,” she remarked.
“What an old curiosity shop the world is about other people’s
affairs! It’s no concern of theirs that my grandfather and your”—I
faltered, and went on—“that my grandfather had a row in his family.
We don’t talk of it.” When I said “we” I meant the present company,
but unfortunately Kate took it to mean our faction, and knowing of
her father’s idle blabbing, she didn’t like it.
“Your side has always dodged publicity,” she affirmed viciously,
though smiling winsomely. Kate’s smile must be her strong card.
“We have maintained a dignified silence,” I responded calmly; but
I knew that a dagger thrust below that beautifully modelled throat
would be less cruel.
 She tried to carry the wound bravely. “My father is quite justified
in letting the truth be known,” she insisted.
“Then why don’t you, too, give public house-warmings in the
family-skeleton closet?” I inquired blandly. That was really a
triumph, for Kate had never talked to outsiders about the wretched
business. She couldn’t even respond with what she thought; for if she
said that it was always the side in the wrong which talked, she was no
better off, because we, like her, had kept silence, but her father had
chattered it all over town. She looked down, and I gloated over her
silence, till suddenly I thought I saw a suggestion of moisture on her
down-turned lashes. What I said to myself was not flattering, and
moreover is not fit for publication. What I said aloud I still glow over
with pride when it recurs to memory.
“Beware of the croquette!” I exclaimed hastily. “I’ve just burned
my tongue horribly.” And I reached for the ice-water.
She was as quick as I had been. The Cortelyou girls are quick, but
she—well, I think the ancestress who gave her those eyes must have
been a little quicker.
“You spoke a moment too late,” she replied, looking up at me. “I
had just done the same, and feel like weeping.” I wonder what the
recording angel wrote against those two speeches?
Then suddenly Kate began to laugh.
“What is it?” I queried.
“Taste your croquette,” she suggested.
It was as cool as it should have been hot!
We both laughed so heartily that Mr. Baxter called, “Come; don’t
keep such a good story to yourselves.”
“Pretend you are so engrossed that you didn’t hear,” advised Kate,
simulating the utmost interest. “Aren’t we doing well?”
“Thanks to you,” was my gallant reply.
“Thanks to the Cortelyous,” she declared.
“They might have known,” said I, “that we’d never have a public
circus to please them.”
“Isn’t it nice,” she responded, “since we had to have a fracas, that it
should be between ladies and gentlemen?”
 “Isn’t it?” I acceded. “Just supposing there had been some cad
concerned, who would have written to the papers and talked to
reporters!”
“That was impossible, because we are all Cortelyous,” explained
Kate. I like a girl who stands up for her stock.
“Yes,” I assented. “And that’s the one advantage of family rows.”
“I want to tell you,” she went on, “that you do my father a great
injustice. Some natures are silent in grief or pain, and some must cry
out. Because he talks, merely means that he suffers.”
I longed to quote her remark about leaving her father out of the
conversation, but having told her there were no cads in the family,
the quotation was unavailable. So I merely observed, “Not knowing
Mr. Dabney Cortelyou, I have had no chance to do him justice.”
“But what you hear—” she began, with the proudest of looks; and it
really hurt me to have to interrupt her by saying,—
“Since I only get word of him from his dearest friends I am forced
to take a somewhat jaundiced view of him.”
“I suppose you are surrounded by toadies who pretend to know
him,” she said contemptuously.
I was not to be made angry. I was enjoying the dinner too much.
“It would be a very terrible thing for our mutual friends,” I
continued, “if the breach were ever healed, and we exchanged notes
as to their tattling.”
“Fortunately they are in no danger,” she answered, more cheerfully
—indeed I might say, more gleefully—than it seemed to me the
occasion required.
“Fortunately,” I agreed, out of self-respect. Then I weakened a
little by adding, “But what a pity it is you and I didn’t have the
settling of that farm-line!”
“My father could not have acted otherwise,” she challenged back.
“And the courts decided that my grandfather was right.”
“I should have done just as he did,” she replied.
“Then you acknowledge my grandfather was right?”
“I!”—indignantly.
 “You just assured me you should have done as he did!” I teased,
laughing. “No. Of course both of them were justified in everything
but in their making a legal matter a family quarrel. If we had had it to
do, it would have been done amicably, I think.”
“What makes you so sure?” she asked.
“Because I am sweet-tempered, and you—”
She wouldn’t accept a compliment from an enemy, so interrupted
me with, “My father has one of the finest natures I have ever known.”
“‘Physician, know thyself,’” I quoted, getting in the compliment in
spite of her.
“That’s more than you do,” she replied merrily.
This could be taken in two ways, but I preferred to make it
applicable to her rather than to myself. I said, “Our acquaintance has
been short.”
“But we know all about the stock,” she corrected.
“I’m proud of the family,” I acknowledged; “but don’t let’s be
Ibsenish.”
“I knew you didn’t like him,” said Kate, confidentially. “I don’t
either.”
“He’s rather rough on us old families,” I intimated.
“Sour grapes,” explained Kate. “The wouldn’t-because-I-can’t-be
people always stir up the sediments of my Cortelyou temper.”
“I thought you liked the family temper,” I suggested.
“In anybody but myself,” she told me. “With others it’s really a
great help. Now, with my brothers, I know just how far I can go
safely, and it’s easy to manage them.”
“I suppose that accounts for the ease with which you manage me.”
She laughed, and replied demurely, “I think we are both on our
good behaviour.”
“I’m afraid our respective and respected parents won’t think so.”
This made her look serious, and I wondered if her father could be
brute enough ever to lose that awful temper of his at such a charming
daughter. The thought almost made me lose mine. “They can’t blame
you,” I assured her. “Your father—”
 “Is sure that everything I do is right,” she interjected, “but Mrs.
Pellew?”
“We will not make Mrs. Pellew—”
Kate saw I was going to use her own speech, and she interrupted in
turn. “Of course you are over twenty-one,” she continued, “but the
Cortelyou women always have their way. I hope she won’t be very
bad to you.”
She certainly had paid me off, and to boot, for my earlier speech.
And the nasty thing about it was that any attempt to answer her
would look as if I felt there was truth in her speech, which was really
ridiculous. Though I live with my mother, my friends know who is
the real master of the house.
“Any one living with a Cortelyou woman must confess her
superiority,” I responded, bowing deferentially.
“Yes,” she said, nodding her head knowingly. “People say that she
spoils you. Now I see how you compass it.”
“We have only exchanged Ibsen for Mrs. Grundy,” I complained.
“‘Excelsior’ is a good rule,” announced Kate.
“That’s what you’ll be doing in a moment,” said I, trying to look
doleful, for we were eating the game course.
“How well you act it!” replied Kate. “You ought to go on the stage.
What a pity that you should waste your time on clubs and afternoon
teas!”
“Look here,” I protested, “I’ve done my best all through dinner,
considering my Cortelyou temper, and now, just because it’s so
nearly over that you don’t need me any longer is no reason for
making such speeches. I don’t go to my club once a week, and I
despise afternoon teas.”
“That sampler has become positively threadbare,” retorted Kate. “I
really think it must be worked in worsted, and hung up in all the New
York clubs, like ‘God bless our home!’ and ‘Merry Christmas!’”
“I much prefer hearts to clubs, for a steady trump,” I remarked.
“You play billiards, I presume?”
“Yes,” I innocently replied.
“What’s your average run?”
 It was a tempting bait she shoved under my nose, but I realised the
trap; and was too wary to be caught. “Oh, four, when I’m in good
form.”
“Really?”
“Really.” I did not choose to add that I was talking of the balk-line
game, not caring to be too technical with a woman.
“That’s very curious!” she exclaimed.
“I suppose some devoted friend of mine has told you I’m only a
billiard-marker?” I inquired.
“No—but—”
“But?”
“Nothing.”
“George Washington became President by always telling the
truth.”
“That’s the advantage of being a woman,” replied Kate. “We don’t
have to scheme and plot and crawl for the Presidency.”
“How about spring bonnets?” I mildly insinuated.
“Does your mother have a very bad time persuading you to pay for
hers?” laughed Kate, mischievously.
I didn’t like the question, though I knew she was only teasing, so I
recurred to my question. “You haven’t told me what that ‘nothing’
was,” I persisted.
“I oughtn’t,” urged Kate.
“Then I know you will,” I said confidently.
“Well, Seymour Halsey said to Weedon the other night, ‘I wish you
could play with Jack Pellew, so as to knock some of his airs out of
him!’”
“Why,” I ejaculated, “I could play cushion caroms against your
brother’s straight game and beat him then!”
“I never did believe that story about George Washington,” asserted
Kate, with a singular want of relevance.
“No woman could,” I answered, squaring accounts promptly.
Here I saw the little preliminary flutter among the ladies, and
knowing that I should never speak to Kate again, I said:
 “Miss Cortelyou, I’m afraid an unkind remark of mine a little while
ago gave you pain. You’ve probably forgotten it already, but I never
shall cease to regret I made it.”
“Don’t think of it again,” she replied, kindly, as she rose. “And
thank you for a pleasant evening.”
“Don’t blame me for that,” I pleaded hastily. “It was your own
fault.”
“Not entirely,” denied Kate. “We did it so well that I’m prouder
than ever of the family.”
“I decline to share this honour with my grandfather,” I protested
indignantly. “He couldn’t keep his temper, bother him!”
We were at the door now, and Kate gave me the prettiest of parting
nods and smiles.
“Wasn’t it a pity?” she sighed. That was distinctly nice of her. Just
like a Cortelyou woman.
“Whew! Jack,” whistled Ferdie Gallaudet. “I thought I should die,
and expected to sit on your body at the postmortem.” Ferdie thinks
he’s clever!
“Oh, shut up, Ferdie,” I growled, dropping back into my seat.
“Don’t wonder your temper’s queered,” persisted the little ass.
“‘Wotinell’ did you talk about?”
“Family matters,” I muttered.
“Oh, I say, that’s a bit shiny at the joints. It was too well done to
have verged on that subject.”
“We talked family matters, and enjoyed it,” I insisted.
“Ever hear of George Washington?” inquired Ferdie.
“Kate mentioned him to me to-night, and I promised to put him up
at the Knickerbocker for a month.”
“Kate!” exclaimed Ferdie.
I lighted my cigar.
“Kate!” he repeated, with a rising inflection. “Now look here, I
wasn’t born yesterday.”
“Where’s your family Bible?” I inquired blandly.
 “You’ll be saying next that to-night’s arrangement was by ‘special
request.’”
“You were across the table,” I retorted. “Draw your own
conclusions.”
“I suppose you’ll join her later,” suggested Ferdie, in an irritating
manner.
I wouldn’t be bluffed by him, so I replied pointedly, “I may, to save
her from worse.”
“Give you odds on it,” offered Ferdie.
“I don’t make bets where women are concerned,” I crushingly
responded.
“Sorry the strain has left you so bad-tempered,” said Ferdie, rising.
“There’s Caldwell beckoning to me. Ta, ta!”
I have liked Caldwell ever since.
When we joined the ladies I went over to Kate.
“This is persecution,” she smilingly protested, as she made room
for me on the sofa.
“I know it,” I cheerfully groaned, as I sat down beside her. “But I
had to for the sake of the family.”
“A family is a terrible thing to live up to!” sighed Kate.
“Terrible!” I ejaculated.
“Fortunately it will only be for a moment,” she assured me.
“If you go at once,” I urged, “they’ll all think it’s the feud.”
“What a nuisance!” cried Kate. “I ought to be on my way to a
musical this very minute.”
“On the principle that music hath charms?” I queried.
“Good-night!” she said, holding out her hand. I had already
noticed what pretty hands Kate had.
“Forgive me!” I begged.
“Never!” she replied.
“You are serious?” I questioned, and she understood what I meant
as if I had said it. I do like people who can read between the lines!
She amended her “never” to, “Well, not till I have had my chance
to even the score.”
 “Take it now.”
“I haven’t time.”
“I will submit to anything.”
“My revenge must be deep.”
“I will do the thing I most hate.”
“Even afternoon teas?” laughed Kate, archly.
I faltered in voice while promising, “Even afternoon teas!”
“Then I’ll send you a card for mine,” she ended, and left me,
crushed and hopeless.
⁂
No. That didn’t end the feud. It only led to a truce. For a time
things went very well, but then the quarrel broke out with renewed
force. You see, Kate claimed I spoiled the boy, and I claimed she did
the spoiling. So we submitted it to arbitration. My mother said Kate
was very judicious, and her father declared I was a model parent.
Then we called in his godmother, and she decided we all four spoiled
him. It’s been open war ever since, with an occasional brief cessation
of hostilities whenever Kate kisses me. After the boy’s grown up, I
suppose, peace will come again.
His godmother? Oh! Mrs. Baxter. You see, we couldn’t do less, for
she had talked it all over town that the match was of her making. Her
making! In ten cases out of nine she would have had a disrupted
dinner. It’s lucky for her that Kate was a Cortelyou woman!
 “THE BEST LAID PLANS”

AS ENACTED
IN

Two Social Cups of Tea,

Two Social Jokes, and
One Social Agony.

Scene

Parlour in country house of Mrs. Wycherly.

Characters

Mrs. Wycherly,
Miss Helen Wycherly,
Miss Rose Newcome,
Miss Amy Sherman,
Lord Ferrol,
George Harold,
Steven Harold,
Dennis Grant.

Syllabus

ACT I
A cup of tea and two social jokes.
5.30 P. M. Friday.

ACT II

A cup of tea and one social agony.

5.30 P. M. Tuesday.
 ACT I
Scene.—Parlour in country house with doors r. and l. At back, a
fireplace with open fire. Down centre l., a small table, with
white blotting-pad, large paper-knife, and writing
paraphernalia; and two chairs r. and l. Down centre r., a small
table with tea-service, and chair r. At extreme r. two easy-
chairs.
Mrs. Wycherly sits at writing-desk r. with teacup on table,
reading a letter in her hand. Amy sits at desk l. Helen at tea-
table, making tea. Steven at mantel. George and Dennis seated
at r. with teacups.

Helen. Another cup, mama?

Steven. She doesn’t hear you, Helen.
George. Thanks to his precious letter.
Helen (louder). More tea, mama!
Rose (outside l., calling). Are you having tea, Helen?
Helen. Yes, Rose.
Amy. And something very exciting as well.
George. More exciting even than your novel, I’ll be bound.
Dennis (calling). Bring the chocolates with you, if you haven’t
eaten them all.
Enter Rose, l., with box of chocolates and book.
Rose. What is it?
Dennis. Ask Mrs. Wycherly.
Rose. What is the excitement, Mrs. Wycherly?
George. Louder.
Amy (loudly). Mrs. Wycherly!
Mrs. W. (starting). Oh! What?
George. That is just the problem. Is he a what, or isn’t he?
Dennis (bitterly). I don’t believe it will make the least difference
even if he proves a “What is it.”
 Steven (more bitterly). No, we fellows see how it will be! The
moment “me lud” arrives, we shall be nowhere with you girls.
George. George Augustus Guelph Dunstan, Earl of Ferrol and
Staunton! His very letter of acceptance has made Helen forget that it
is cream—not sugar—that I “omit for want of space.”
Helen. Not at all! If you had been polite you would have given that
cup to Rose. As for his lordling, do you for an instant suppose that I
intend to compete as long as Rose and Amy are here? No, sir—I leave
him to my betters, D. V.
Mrs. W. Well, really, I don’t think that either his titles or his being
in the hands of an oculist is any excuse for making his time so
indefinite (looks at letter). He will be charmed to pay me a visit, “by
next Friday, or perhaps even sooner.” Now isn’t that a nice position
to leave a hostess who wishes to make his stay quite as pleasant as
his papa made mine when I was at the “Towers.” Imagine this
betitled being getting into the Junction by the evening train and then
having to walk over to Beechcroft.
Rose. Oh, wouldn’t it be lovely to see him coming in at the gate, so
wet and muddy that Tiger would make the same mistake that he did
with that poor minister?
Dennis. I hope, if he does have to foot it, he will not bring the usual
number of parcels that the swells on the other side consider as
necessary as those books which Charlie Lamb said “no gentleman
should be without.”
Amy. Mrs. Wycherly, how can this man be two earls at once?
Steven. The English aristocracy finds it convenient to have an alias
now and again.
Mrs. W. I’m not sure, Amy, but I believe it has something to do
with his mother. I never could understand the peerage.
George. Ye gods! to think of a mother with a marriageable
daughter not understanding the peerage!
Helen. I won’t be slandered by you. Marriageable daughter,
indeed!
Rose (scornfully). Yes, isn’t that a regular man’s view of it?
Dennis. Well, I think it’s very creditable to be without a peer.
Amy. That depends on how you appear.
 Rose. And that depends on your appear age.
George (pityingly). Don’t notice them; they’re quite harmless.
Speaking of the peerage, though, did any of you see Labouchere’s
screed in “Truth”?
Mrs. W. I haven’t, for one—what was it?
George. Bass, the proprietor of the pale ale, has just been made a
baron, and this was an editorial on the “Last Addition to the
Beerage.”
Amy. Mrs. Wycherly, do let me have the letter: I want to see what
kind of a hand he writes.

[Mrs. W. passes letter to Amy.

Dennis. There! That’s the way in this life. I’ll be bound you never
wanted to see what my writing was like.
Rose. Well, did you ever want to see Amy’s hand?
Steven. Hers is too small to make it worth while.
Amy (sweetly). Is your tea sweet enough, Steven?
Dennis. Why waste your sweetness on the desert air?
Steven. Thank you, Dennis, but I am not a deserted heir, and don’t
suppose I shall be, till The Right Honourable George Augustus
Guelph Dunstan, Earl of Ferrol and Staunton, puts in his
appearance. Till then, Mrs. Amy Sherman Micawber will never desert
her Steven.
Helen. Really, I think it is very unkind to say all these things before
Lord Ferrol arrives. If you begin like this over the “cheerful and
uninebriating teacup,” with a good dinner not far distant, what will
you say when you have just dragged yourself out of bed to breakfast?
Dennis (fiercely). The talking point will be passed. We shall act!
Bul-lud!!!
George (rising and setting teacup on tea-table). So let it be
understood, if you girls give us the cold shoulder when his lordship
arrives, we will not be responsible for the consequences.
Steven. But don’t say we didn’t warn you.
Helen. Well, you deserve to have the cold shoulder for talking to us
so.
 Rose. Yes, just as if we had all turned tuft-hunters.
Mrs. W. At least it shows modesty. The boys all take for granted
they cannot stand up against the new-comer.
Rose. Oh, Mrs. Wycherly, what nice, honest, guileless men you
must have known when you were a girl! To think that these should
gain the reputation of modesty by their grumbling!
Helen. Yes, dear, they are delusions and snares, having fully
mastered Talleyrand’s aphorism “that words were meant to conceal
ideas.”
Amy. “Put not your trust in kings and princes.”
George. That’s just what we want, only please extend it to the
aristocracy.
Rose. You all deserve to have us leave you to your own devices, as
soon as we can get a decent substitute.
Mrs. W. Well, if Lord Ferrol is anything like his father, I can
promise you no unworthy one, even compared to my boys here.
Steven (crossing down stage to Mrs. W. and bowing). Mrs.
Wycherly, the race does not improve. Why are the daughters no
longer as their mothers were?
Helen. }
Amy. } Oh!!!
Rose. }
Helen (springing to her feet). Mr. Chairman, or Mrs. Chairwoman,
is not the honourable gentleman’s language unparliamentary?
Rose. It’s uncomplimentary, and I believe that is what
unparliamentary generally means.
Amy (rising). I move the expulsion of the honourable gentleman.
Helen (rising). Second the motion.
Omnes. Question! Question! Question!
Mrs. W. (rising with mock solemnity and leaning on desk).
Gentlemen, after the most mature deliberation the speaker must
announce three decisions. First, the language was not
uncomplimentary, and—
 Rose } } Bribery!
Helen } together. } Treachery, treachery!
Amy } } Oh! Oh! Oh!!
Mrs. W. (pounding on table with paper-knife). Order! Order!—
And ergo, not unparliamentary. Secondly, that in consequence the
motion of expulsion is not in order. Thirdly, even if it were in order,
the question could not be taken without debate.
Rose. I appeal to the House.
Dennis (rising). All right! Three to three. Speaker throws casting
vote with us. How do you do—minority?
[Bows.
Helen (rising). Excuse me. We three decline to vote, so there is no
quorum. The question is before the House still, and can be spoken to.
Dennis. How badly the question must feel.
Amy. Not half so badly as you ought to.
Mrs. W. (pounding). Order! The dignity of the chair must be
upheld!
Rose. Then why don’t you hold it up? We’ve no objection.
Amy (rising). Mr. Speaker—
Mrs. W. The honourable member from—from—
George. Philadelphia?

[Passes Amy the chocolates

from tea-table.

Amy (sinking faintly into chair). Oh, not so bad as that!

Mrs. W. Very well—from the slough of despair—
Amy. Mr. Speaker, I rise from my slough of despair to demand,
with a tear in my eye—
Dennis. And a chocolate in your mouth—
Mrs. W. (pounds). Order!—
Amy. To vindicate myself—
George. Well, if you’re going to rise, why don’t you do it?
 Mrs. W. (crossing to tea-table, and seizing hot water pot.) I shall
pour the hot water on the next person who interrupts the honourable
gentleman.
Amy. To vindicate myself and my compeers in the—alas!—
opposition. We have remained silent under the slur of malice—we
have watched the arbitrary and—(I fear corrupt is an
unparliamentary word)—ah—questionable rulings of the presiding
officer. But, so saith the adage, “Even the worm will turn;” and why
not woman? So when we hear the distinguished and courteous
stranger, about to enter our sacred portals, maligned and sneered at
—then—then do we turn upon the “allegators” and declare, that as
soon as the shadow of his “gracious”—no—I mean “early” presence
darkens these halls of misrule, then, with one accord, for better, for
worse, we will cleave to him.
Feminine Omnes. We will.
Rose. Now, boys, you see what you have done! and, as you
remarked a moment ago, “Don’t say we didn’t warn you.”

[Bell rings.

Mrs. W. There, young people,—that is the dressing bell. Now don’t

loiter, for I shall frown on any one who is not in the drawing-room
five minutes before seven. I declare this sitting adjourned.

[All rise. Mrs. W. crosses back

and exits r. d. Rose
comes down c. and
whispers to Amy; they
laugh, put their hands
behind each other’s
waists, and skip up r.

Rose and Amy (singing). “Johnny, get your gun, get your sword,
get your pistol. Johnny, get your gun, get your gun, get your gun.”

[Exit r. d. Men all laugh

heartily.

Helen (rapping on table in imitation of Mrs. W.). Order! Order!

 George. Cash!

[Men all laugh. Helen looks

at them scornfully and
then exits r. d. Dennis
starts to follow.

George. What’s your hurry, Dennis? Lots of time.

[Sits.

Steven (reseating himself). I bless my governing star every night

that it was given to my sex to dress in the time spent by t’otherest in
doing up its back hair.
Dennis (crossing back to fireplace). Oh, yes! But as one girl said to
me, “That time isn’t worth having, for you can’t be with us!”
George. You must both have been pretty far gone, old fellow.
Dennis. Not half so badly as the girls are prospectively on “me
lud.”
Steven. No, we are in for “a bad quarter of an hour” when he shows
up.
Dennis. If he will only prove a show!
Steven (sadly). The only English swells I’ve met were very jolly,
gentlemanly fellows.
Dennis (cheerfully). All the more chance that this one turns out
the delicate little wood violet, such as we occasionally read of in the
papers as ornamenting the “Ouse of Lords.”
George (gloomily). I am afraid we shall be the flower part of this
show.
Dennis. In what respect?
George. Why, wall flowers, of course.
Steven. Really, it’s no joking matter. I don’t know how long the
girls will carry on their intended neglect, but it will be strong while it
lasts.
Dennis (coming down stage indignantly). If I have to put in two
days of life without—without—
 Steven (interrupting). Faith, hope, or charity, which?
George. Why don’t you say Amy, and have done with it?
Dennis (half turning). Very well. If I have to put in a week here,
ten miles from anything, with Amy overflowing with sweetness for
that—that—
[Hesitates.
George. Oh, speak it out, old man! The word will do you good.
Dennis. No, it wouldn’t do justice to the subject.
Steven. Well, Dennis, you needn’t think you’re the only one in this
box.
Dennis. Hope he’ll get here on a rainy night, and no carriage at the
station, as Rose suggested. Do you suppose a fiver would make our
dearly beloved Burgess misunderstand the carriage order?
George. Burgess is a living proof of the saying, that “every man has
his price.”
Steven. How do you know?
George. I found it out when he drove Mrs. Wycherly home, quite
forgetting to say that Rose and I were to be picked up at Oakridge, as
she had specially directed.
Steven (reprovingly).
“You sockin’ old fox!
You pretty white cat—
I sink dear mama
Should be told about dat.”

Dennis (sadly). It might be possible to corrupt the worthy Burgess,

but, unless we could arrange for a rainy day, I don’t see that it would
do us much good. The Anglo-Saxon doesn’t think much of ten miles.
Steven. No; and the Wycherlys would be so hurt at a guest of theirs
having such an accident that they would be doubly sweet to him.
Dennis. What day did he say he would come?
Steven. “Friday, or perhaps sooner.”
George. I suppose the “D. & T.” can’t arrange one of their
numerous accidents for that train?
 Dennis (crossly). Of course not! Whoever heard of a timely
railroad disaster?
George. Oh, for a mishap of some kind!
Steven (springing to his feet and slapping his leg). Fellows, I have
an inspiration!
George. Did you get it by inheritance, or out of a bottle?
Steven. Look here; his ludship does not arrive, probably, till
Friday. My friend, Frank Parker, is to come up here Tuesday. Let’s
make him personate the “Lord high everything else.”

George} together {Well?

Dennis} {What for?

[Both rise and come down

stage to Steven.

Steven. Why, in the first place, we shall fool the girls. That’s one
for us! In the second place, they’ll carry out their tender programme
on him, and so be tired of it when the “only genuine has our name
blown in the bottle” puts in his appearance. That’s two for us! Thirdly
and lastly, we will tell him to be a snob, so that the girls will find it
impossible to carry out their plans on him. That’s three for us!
Dennis. But will Parker dare to play such a trick in his first visit?
Wouldn’t he be like those would-be tragedians whose first and last
appearances are identical?
Steven. Oh, Mrs. Wycherly would forgive him anything, for he is
the son of an old sweetheart of hers. As for Frank, he’s up to
anything, and has lived so long in the West that his highest form of
amusement is a practical joke.
Dennis. But how are you going to fool our hostess?
George. Why, she has never seen Frank, and only heard of his
existence when Steven and I brought word of the jolly fellow we had
met in Colorado.
Steven. And, besides, he’s a winner in disguising his person and
voice. George and I coached all one day, lamenting that he had been
left behind, and there he was, sitting beside the driver all the time.
Now to the act!