‘I often find myself asking: what is photograph? But I do not ask what is a water colour or a pen and ink sketch or even a print from an etched plate or woodblock. What is it that I understand about these latter images that I do not understand about a photograph?’
Christopher Race poses the question in his book The Missing Photograph, a collection of photograph-accompanied stories and essays. In some pieces, the photograph is an enigma, only made sensible by the accompanying text. In others, the photograph is a clear launching point for a story, remaining virtually untouched.
Through depictions of family, friends, fate and identity, Christopher explores how images and words refract off one another, re-framing stories, memories and even our self-perceptions.
We’re pleased to share an extract of one of the essays from his collection: ‘Destiny’.
Destiny
Sometimes the world can be thought of as always changing, as something infinitely mutable, a flux, a foam. Not so much a thing, but an agent of change, a dynamo in an unimaginable machine. Or it can be seen as implacable; obdurate and unyielding, perhaps even indifferent. A place not to be appeased.
There are, seemingly, no concessions we can make or, if they can be made, the experience will empty us, and we will have no longer any sense of ourselves. It remains an implacable world.
Perhaps it is this that gives us the feeling that we do not belong here – that this is not a place for us; we, for whom amelioration, mitigation and compromise come, if not as second nature then at least third or fourth. Deracinated from some centre that may have once claimed us but is now all but forgotten.
Acceptance is always acceptance of the implacability of the world that inhabits us, even if we feel that we do not inhabit it. The sky, the black branches of a winter tree, the hardwood floor below our feet, all this we yield to. ‘Knowledge’ is the word we give to our one-eyed appeasement; our bowing with ill-grace to the hard surface of the world that remains, in the face of all our ‘knowing’ utterly implausible.
I draw great comfort in being an animal, it helps to soften the brittle position that being in the world puts me in. Peculiar, but no exception; arranged in natural order, but then only to be singled out.
But then, I am no animal I recognise. And perhaps I am not recognised by any other animal in this pitiless place. And here, this place, perhaps this place is not recognisable as any place at all.
When I was a child, I used simple blocks of wood to make pretty much anything I wanted, arranging and re-arranging the milled blocks of wood. The small blocks were thrown over the fence into our yard by the builders next door. They were constructing a house from a plan, from detailed drawings: they knew precisely the end result of their endeavours.
My mother had asked the carpenters putting up the wooden frame to toss over any off-cuts for the use of her toddler. There seemed only to be a few kinds of block that came into our yard: rectangles (2″ x 6″, square pieces (4″ x 4″) and, most valued, triangular pieces (6″ x 2½”).
Using my imagination and the properties of the blocks, I made many things; some had names, other constructions had no name but nevertheless played a role in the narrative which guided their use. These stories that governed this block city I have now forgotten.
Like my childhood dwelling place, the universe of the grownups is constructed out of a few simple building blocks. I had no names for the individual blocks of solid wood that I combined to make my world. The names for the simple building blocks for the wider universe have been invented to designate particles that are all but invisible.
This pen, this hand, me sitting here, the house around me, the cold winter sky, the planets circling the Sun, one of billions of stars in this slowly rotating spiral galaxy, one in a universe still expanding after 13.8 billion years, is all constructed from four building blocks. Two quarks and two leptons.
The up quark, the down quark, the electron (to do all the chemistry) and the electron neutrino. These four bits are all that is needed to build a universe. The mixing, combining, separating and cooking is governed by four fundamental forces which include gravity and electromagnetism. There are not many recipes that specify just four ingredients, and precisely name the whisks and oven temperature to be used.
And you and I are even simpler, we and all other living things are comprised of just three blocks, the two quarks and the electron; three invisible things, whose place in time and space is merely the sum of probabilities.
In the world of the Walrus and the Carpenter where we can walk upon the beach and talk of shoes and ships and sealing wax, we are enveloped by the is-ness of the world around us. The moment is just as it is, and not any other way.
It is only when suddenly something unexpected or terrible occurs that we consider that the moment could be otherwise, and we might not be tricked into becoming someone else’s dinner. In fact some moments are so terrible we wish to undo a succession of moments, one after the other, going back in time. So far back that we might no longer be baby oysters with feet in shoes clean and neat; that the terrible absurdity of our current predicament be unstitched knit by purl.
This understanding that the moment could be other is the invocation of contingency, that other moments are possible but didn’t occur for one reason or another; that this is-ness comes from a vast chain of occurrences linked by happenstance and was not preordained.
Contingency: if this, then that, and each this-and-that a function of decisions, choices, actions by us and the universe around us.
Though we have a Law of Gravity and rules governing the creation of the elements in nuclear fusion, there was no rule that required that our sun should come into existence some six billion year ago. But it did coalesce out of interstellar gas and from there a cascade of contingency resulted in this combination of quarks and electrons that is today able to write these words.
It is now time on our walk along the sand to speak of Fate, or Fates, for once there were three of them. The first spun the thread of life, another measured the thread out, and the third Fate chose the manner of death and cut the thread off. These are the three Greek Fates and, importantly, they were independent – both man and the gods had to submit to the good and bad moments predetermined by the unravelling thread controlled by the Fates.
These days the dictionary is somewhat vague, referring to an ‘agency’ or ‘power’ rather than the trio of ancient spinners. But the key thing is that our moments, all of them, marked out on the finite strand, are predetermined and as such are not part of an individual’s life – agency in one’s own life has been taken away. The moments are fixed, we just have to walk through them: as the oysters walk along the night shore of Lewis Carroll’s terrible poem.
There can be no choice in a fated life – one’s destiny (the actual living out of what has been preordained), rules out any exercise of choice. There is nothing contingent here: no possibility that the plump young oysters might heed the warnings of their elders. (Nor any chance that Lewis Carroll did not write his poem at all.)
These two photos are of two twenty-year-olds who happen to meet in their late thirties and stay together, then marry years later when they were in their mid-fifties. Retired now, the couple live in a small inland town. Both pursued professional careers in the capital city before moving out to the country. They have become members of the local community and have made new friends through local work and social groups.
They have a small vegetable patch where they grow tomatoes and herbs. They cultivate a few fruit trees including a fig tree which give them produce in the autumn. The woman has retired and the man still works part-time locally.
The photographs here are now over forty-five years old.
When this strip of photos was taken, the woman worked for a government department as a civil servant. Her office was in a building situated on a grand boulevard that travels from the city to the southern suburbs. It was originally an army barracks, and several cannons sit on the lawn, pointing their spiked barrels out across the tree-lined thoroughfare.
On the day of the photo the young woman used her lunch hour to take a tram into the city to get her picture taken at a photo booth.
These booths once stood on street corners and were used to take basic black and white pictures at the cost of a few coins. Once inside the curtained booth the young woman puts money into the slot and sits down. She pushes a button and the camera takes four quick photos.
Outside the booth she retrieves the strip from a slot in the side of the booth.
She is wearing a knee-length camel coloured double-breasted woollen coat with a loose knit white woollen scarf around her neck. She holds a folded note book. In it she is writing a letter to her partner who lives on the other side of the country. He has asked her to send him a picture of herself. Perhaps this is why the strip we see now only contains three images from an original set of four. The missing one she has sent to him with her letter.
She had recently visited him and he had not wanted her to go back east, but she only had her annual leave and had already paid for the return airline ticket.
She is not destined, years in the future, to meet the man she is now married to; the Greek spinners are long gone, so too the gods, there is just history now, the long line of happenstance. No thread connects this young woman getting her photo taken to the young man crouched down beside a dog in a park.
Just quarks and electrons linking atoms, making molecules, cells, and all heated by nuclear fusion, with entropy to point the way to a future time and place.
No necessity binds the two young people in these photos together; no predetermined chain compels the woman to meet the man with his hair tied back, there is nothing ‘inevitable’ here. There is no destiny they need to fulfil, just the unforseen casual links of contingency that give rise to the moment of their accidental meeting some years after the photos were taken. They were not meant to be.
The young man squats on the grass next to a Labrador-Alsation. Her tongue hangs out, panting, perhaps after a run across the park. Another cold day by the look of it.
He wears something dark under his shirt then a jumper on top of that and finally a doublebreasted pinstripe suit coat. He rests his hand on the back of the dog, who looks at him eye-to-eye. But the young man is not looking at anything; perhaps musing on some of the difficulties he is faced with in his current circumstances. The dog meanwhile is perhaps waiting for the young man to pick up the stout stick and run with it again.
In the photographs neither person is looking at anyone. They are not looking at us. Both wear a double-breasted coat. That’s it.
At any point it may have been different. It is not random – contingency, one might say, is constrained. One cannot foretell the future and yet, when the future arrives, the experienced is-ness of the moment makes us want to say: ‘it was meant to be’, ‘they have found each other’, or, ‘he is the one for her’ or, more generally: ‘everything happens for a reason’.
The vacuity of such a statement is maybe a little misleading. ‘Everything happens for a reason’ suggests all events are purposed and that the final outcome is the fulfilment of an originating purpose. This is a teleological explanation, the cause and the reason for a particular outcome is in its final purpose: the outcome we experience.
So rather than a trivially true statement that events are the result of chains of proximate causes (contingent events), ‘it was meant to happen’ becomes akin to an invocation of a fate, a foreordained destiny, in which the outcome is proof of its ‘reasonableness’ or, more strongly, the outcome is the result of necessity.
For those who evince such thinking these phrases may serve as antidotes to fears that a terrible randomness governs their life – a fear that no-one and nothing is in control, that nothing oversees the events and the consequences of their life. But if everything happens for a reason their life has a rationality within which they have a place, perhaps foreordained and necessary, but a place nevertheless.
There are laws that exist everywhere and for everyone but they are obscured by contingency and are indifferent to anything we might care about. These laws and scientific theories are reasoned but do not generate a narrative, but merely specify the quarks and leptons required to make a universe and, in this particular universe, specify the building blocks that make living things who can make stories up in the yard as they play.