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Topless Nastasia Filippovna, Wearing Thongs

Alina Andrei

published in "Idei in Dialog" at 01 August 2008

Once in a winter, a winter out of mind because I don’t remember almost anything except maybe the way my ears chapped of frost under a thick woolen cap, I bought a photograph-post card, in an antique shop. I’d have preferred an antique shop smelling like cinnamon, like that of Bruno Schultz, but no way, it seemed more like a room where the lord of the house had gathered all the worn out things feeling sorry to throw them out as trash. The black and white cardboard turned yellow shows me today an endless beach, with gentleman and ladies who most certainly find themselves in their perpetual sleep – unless they live today, being very old, as I’d like to believe, being about 135-150 years old. Sober suits, walking sticks, long fluttering dresses, hats with flowers and scarves, two small tents made of stripped canvas, stripes that were once blue, I assume. Some of them got ready to leave the beach – maybe it was getting cold or it was lunch time. The children were playing in the sand, their knees bended, the men were talking, gesticulating with their walking sticks and a small group let itself photographed, somewhere in a distance, so that you could only imagine their appearance. Two young girls had noticed the presence of the photographer. They smiled at him while walking. Leaving the store, in the snow, under a blind street lamp, I started to count the people from the photograph. They must be at least 63 souls there. I am saying at least because at each reckoning the result was always one in addition or I was missing a couple. I am still afraid I’ve omitted someone, a microscopic silhouette walking in the horizon or that of a child, bigger than two ants put one above another. The photograph is not really a big deal – a simple snapshot, took most likely in a Sunday afternoon, on a beach from Cayeux, France. I know that because it is written on the post card, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to guess. It was sent to the Petit Chateau 4, Avenne M address (I can’t understand the handwriting), with the following message: “Mille baisers a tous”. A thin pen, black ink. I imagine a Proust whispering into my ears a few things about each person from the photograph. Of course, in the absence of something better I made up my own stories. One of them was an apothecary – he poisoned his wife then he buried her right there, on the beach. He used to visit her every Sunday. Another one – piano teacher (bumbling and shy, always suffering of cold), a lady was a silk shop girl (at Zola’s “Au Bonheur des Dames” store), the young lady smiling at the photographer would die of consumption, another one had just lost her bracelet on the beach, there to the left there is a hussar’s wife – and so on, until the characters’ stories tangled in such a manner that I wasn’t able any longer to figure out who’s who and what were the meanings I found for them. I wonder how did the post card get to Brasov.

Through the eyes of some mocking teenagers, the ladies who used to go to the seaside before the world wars and let themselves photographed in large suits, covering even their knees, are more than old-fashioned. They seem so very hilarious. I mean, standing there on the beach dressed up in some colored pants, wringing wet laces and out of shape draperies on the hips, boots with embroidered stockings plus bonnets with bows – there you are, unheard-of buffoonery nowadays even referring to old women.

A white haired gentleman told me that in his first youth he used to fall in love in another woman each week. And that woman wasn’t even made by flesh and bones, because he fell in love with Proust’s countesses, Maupassant’s, Balzac’s and Anatole France’s tarts, once in a while proving romantic feelings towards Henry James’s and Turgenieff’s ladies. To these last ones he scarcely dared to pour a cup of tea and kiss their hands, alas, only in dream, certainly, while with Maupassant’s wenches he used to lead a dissolute life, kissing them on their necks, ears, mouth and chin. His first real fight, a “between men” fight was with a desk mate of his. During a break, this mate had confessed him what and how he would have done to Grushenka and Nastasia Filippovna, finding out that they are rivals, as if they would have met in Dostoevsky’s ladies closet, punching each other until their eyes turned blue. They would have preferred a duel, no doubt about that, but the garbage behind the school, the safest place, did not make you think about such kind of bravery, plus the pistols were missing. He didn’t know anymore who has won the battle (ages have passed since then), yet he still perfectly remembers that in his self he didn’t want Grushenka at all, he would have ceded her to his rival from all his heart, considering that she wasn’t distinguished enough.

During a mathematics class she imagined her lying on the teacher’s desk, her naked arms wreathed around her nape, as he had saw in the famous pictures, but because she blinked at him he became terribly disappointed – a tramp, for sure, that’s what he was thinking at that point. He started to get rid of all those bookish love stories when he saw the first ancient photographs with ladies in their bath suits, on the beach.

Total disappointment. They didn’t have any mystery scent. He felt the urge to dress them all, hiding them behind a screen, so that he can cover them from head to toes, so that he cannot see them in pants and short skirts underlining thick ankles and hips out of shape. Naked, they reminded him those petty traders in the markets his mother used to buy potatoes and lovage. He thought their looks did not resembled at all with those of the heroines he always fell in love with. It seemed to him that most of them had shameless, cunning eyes and he just couldn’t figure out why they crowded in a group in order to let themselves photographed in those hilarious suits and why nobody stopped them to make full of themselves. At the beginning he thought they were just some ordinary broads, then he realized that it no way all the beaches of England, France and America were invaded only by cabaret dancers and seam-stresses, as they looked like, at least that’s how they seemed to him, in the photographs. The most intriguing for him was a snapshot from the year 1923, in which you can see a policeman, in civil clothes who was measuring with a measuring tape the length of the women’s bathing suits. The guy just touched the chubby leg of some broad who seemed to have the pants half of an inch shorter than the common-sense and town norms of USA used to admit. In another photograph, another policeman was accompanying two ringlet shaped hair ladies towards the cabins where they used to change clothes. Same situation, they weren’t properly covered, and the gentleman telling me the story agreed with that time’s legislators, considering that those women should have been as covered as possible, even in sacks. If he had seen them in long dresses, touching the floor, with gloves, fans and pearls, properly sat on an armchair of some salon or at the piano, he would have taken to them at once. He would have fallen in love with them on the beach as well, only if they had been seen under sun umbrellas, with their corsets well tightened. He would have adored them in silence, being too shy to woo in front of everybody, on the promenade. He would have preferred hear them swallowing their sobs, not more than this, any shameless look coming from them would have offended him and he would have considered them at once lost women, unworthy of his distinguished feelings, especially because he hadn’t entirely learnt from the novels how to act in such passionate situations. He was afraid he would be ridiculous if he didn’t show his feelings. When he was thinking of all these things he was also very puzzled in front of another issue such as how babies are born, though he had already got some information on what had happened in his parents’ bedroom nine months before his mother brought him home from the lying-in hospital a little brother, but such kind of issues made him sick. If he had been able to, he would have become a catholic priest, but in a summer he changed his opinion because of a long hair tailed girl, tails reaching her waist, a classmate of his. Las year, when his nephew asked him how would Nastasia Filippovna have looked like, these days, in strings and no bra, on the beach, in Eforie Sud, he slapped his nape.

Somewhere (no one knows where anymore) Maupassant said that few women managed to pass the “bath examination” and that men could examine them in a critical manner only in summer, on the beach, from their thighs to their chin, choosing them next, like some meat loafs at the butcher’s, the shameless ones being interested only in “the quality of the meat”. On a website with ancient photographs, the comments regarding the photographs taken during the beauty contests after the First World War are closely linked to the advantages of nowadays bathing suits, which uncover everything and do not cover anything, but also to the exceeding flesh of the ladies from the past. Ruth Malcomson aroused real passions, who was 18 in 1924 when she won the title of Miss Philadelphia. Delicate, with long curly hair and a face of silent face actress, she would be crowned as Miss America later. In the photograph made after the contest she is in a simple and long bathing suit, reaching the half of her thighs, she has a silver cup and a sort of huge shell, as shiny as the cup. If I think of the nowadays photographs, with the beaches from America, Great Britain and Ukraine, Martin Parr’s beaches flash automatically upon my mind. Strident, with large bodies in tight suits, wrinkled bodies and funny positions, baldness, fats and gashing bellies, Cola, plastic, lots of plastic. Mocking and too ironical, some say, ludicrous and ironical, as other sustain. In a documentary, Constantine Manos from Magnum Agency says how once he took a picture of a kid on a beach in Florida, some years ago. The child was looking at the sea, his back towards the camera, and a sort of black pelican was sitting next to him, on the white wooden banister. The photographer drew near slowly, not to scare him, he even held his breath while starting the camera. As everything matched wonderfully in the frame – the composition, the light and a single wave that rippled the calm sea -, he was afraid not to ruin everything through an imprudent noise. This remained in my mind since I saw it for the very first time, though I prefer other photographs made by him.

In our country many photographers despise realism. For example a photographer wouldn’t represent under any circumstances a toothless fisherman with his shabby boat full of frog fish, no, the subject isn’t considered artistic enough. The respective person is photographed standing against the rising sun, so that you can see only a romantic silhouette on the reddish gloss of the sea. Another frequently met example: two lovers walking properly along the cliff. The young lovers are fold and they are kissing, she, inevitably, has a leg graciously lifted in the air. Everything composed at millimeter, very well processed on computer and vividly colored, enough to make the tourists buy the post card from the souvenir booths or to be hanged in different photo clubs, on the occasion of different exhibitions. Nothing is left at random. The photographers more sensible by nature delight themselves with seagulls and crows that are not allowed to fly in the sky on their own. By the means of the Photoshop they are “persuaded” to float in an artistic manner wherever the photographer wants them to, so that the birds do not ruin the composition with the fisherman, frog fish or lovers. It is not the birds’ fault that they did not hear of the golden trinity and of the line of the horizon, but the photo club photographer has the power to correct their deviations. And if they completely miss the day the photographer went out to take pictures, it is not a tragedy at all. The seagulls from other older photographs are moved in the new one, by the means of some ordinary commands in Photoshop. These photographs have usually deep, metaphysical titles, only poetical in the worst situation. While seeing them, my friends turn green, they swear to suffer from diabetes and suddenly they feel the urge to breathe some fresh air, in the open, but, what can you do, they cannot appreciate the sensible souls.

A few convincing title examples: “Recapture of the self” “Flirting with the sun” “The Rise of Life” (or “The Decline of Life”, when in the photograph there is a surprised old lady, at nightfall, looking at the horizon), “The Ephemeral Waves of Youth”, “I have one more wish”, “Love and Soul” and other similar. Maybe while he was photographed, the fisherman cursed his frog fish saying obscene words about their mother and father, it is also possible that someone wanted to borrow some money from the fisherman, for a shot of vodka, or maybe he was just scratching his head, but it doesn’t really matter, the photograph is exhibited in a gallery under the “Recapture of the self” title.

The portraits of some mushroom pickers from Japan (in the fifties) look exactly like those from the “Waves Crowd” by Yukio Mishima, or, better said, they look like the faces I had imagined while reading the book. I don’t know if the writer ever saw the photographs made by Iwase Yoshiyuki. Maybe he didn’t – anyway, those strong sinewy, naked but decent women, without clothes, almost always ready to dive into the sea, in my head are taken out of Mishima’s book. Yoshiyuki was born in 1904, at the end of the 20’s we got his first camera (Kodak) and he died in 2001, aged 91. Numbers that wouldn’t have represented for me anything or wouldn’t have mattered if I hadn’t seen his photographs. His best known photographs are the documentary ones, simple, lacking of airs, with the diving women and fishermen on the shore, and the female nudes, made near the sea too. His diver women, with their naked breasts, so that anyone could see them, covered only by salt and sand, seem giggling all the time as if he would have caught them gossiping about their husbands, about the fishermen who were in their boats out at the sea, or bargaining kimonos and purses right there, on the beach, as Mishima described them. The artistic nudes are in exchange thoroughly thought, the women seem stuck in some twisted positions, like some statues on the socle, they give me the sensation that the photographer put them with his hand in the right place, in the manner he wanted, and yes, it also crosses through my mind that before bringing his models on the rock he visited a sculpture exhibition.

The writer and photographer Kobo Abe sent his male character from The Woman of the Dunes in a strange village, with her bones buried between the dunes. The man held captive by the widower in such a fragile hole, ready in any minute to crumble over them, at the end he willingly stays to fight with the millions of tiny rough grains which were getting in his mouth, water and food, scratching his skin unceasingly and above all impeding him to escape. The novel starts by saying that in a summer day, it must have been August, a man disappeared. He went on vacation, to the seaside, and since then nobody heard of him anything. They knew the man was keen on insects (he always carried with him a net, needles and boxes), they knew his wife stayed home, but they didn’t know the train station where he got off and the reason of his disappearance. Consequently he disappeared, nobody knew where and why, and after seven years, as the Civil Code provided, he was declared dead. Long before having read the novel, I had imagined a series of photographs I should have done on the first occasion, moment that was postponed endlessly. Images of different slippers left on a desert beach, near the waves. Stumpy shoes, high heeled sandals, sabots, boots and felt slippers, laced boots and high boots, whatever, all kind of footwear. That’s all. It should have suggested that several unknown persons took off their shoes before walking dressed into the sea, in order to swim in the offing and to not come back anymore. As far as I can remember, in The Woman of the Dunes nobody did such a thing, but reading the novel I thought myself that instead of torturing unceasingly themselves with the sand, in danger to be buried alive, they would have better left (as some villagers practically did) or they would have better walked into “the dirty yellow sea”. At the end the sky was similar.

From Donald Richie’s “Japanese Portraits” I remember some holes in the sand as well, but much smaller, the size of some marine bird nests, those with large wings, where the American had seen the sleeping bodies of the boys from the fishermen village. One in each sand “nest”, squatted, with the knees to their mouths. When the sun rose, the children woke up and worshiped the waves, at least it looked like it, in fact they were greeting their drowned relatives. I can’t remember what feast it was, anyway it was similar to our Meek People’s Easter (Pastele Blajinilor) – the dead came back from the sea on the beach, among the living ones, they ate, drank and party in the village, invited by the boys. This happened right after the war, I don’t know if this tradition goes on anymore.

Another photograph I liked: “A Jumping Boy”, by Stanko Abadzic. Two squatted boys, holding a long stick, horizontally, one on each end of the stick, a third boy being caught jumping over the stick. A beach with many pebbles, you can only guess the sea somewhere in the horizon, far from the playing boys. They are dressed with white undervest, shorts, their members are thin, squatted or strained in the air. If they still live, they must be very old, pensioners suffering from rheumatism, gout or other misfortunes. In another photograph made by Abadzic, a boy is driving his toy scooter on the beach, through the sea water.


 

Ladies from a Remote Past

Alina Andrei

published in "Idei in Dialog" at 01 Feb 2008

Marie Vernet Worth was a shop assistant in the Paris of the 19th century (the middle towards the end) and the first professional model. She used to help her husband, the art designer Charles Frederick Worth, wearing in front of the rich customers dresses that then emptied their pockets. Adolf de Meyer baron (1868 – 1949) is considered by many people the first great fashion photographer. Yet, before he was born, there were other charming photographs in which a famous woman, famous in Europe for her beauty, used to wear all kind of sumptuous dresses. The Countess de Castiglione, her real name Virginia Oldoini, was the mistress of the emperor Napoleon the third of France, and in the same time one of the first models of the photograph history. The honorable lady was born in the year 1837, in Florence. In the very same year came into this world, but in different places, Ion Creanga, Ichikawa Danjuro IX (Kabuki theatre actor), Charles Dickens Jr. (the writer’s son), Theodor Rosetti (writer and politician), Amanda Berry Smith (slave), Cosima Wagner (Franz Liszt’s daughter), John Thomson (Scot photographer and explorer), as well as other illustrious persons, among which my great great grandparents and yours, who read these lines in this moment.

Virginia Oldoini got married very young to a count whom she gave a son. Later, from state reasons, she met Napoleon the third, becoming his mistress – but this isn’t the important aspect here, but another one: at a certain point she began to pose for Mayer and Pierson. She collaborated for four years with the photographer Pierre-Louis Pierson, posing him in all sorts of situations, in extravagant dresses, but also – which was a terrible daring back then- with bear feet. Yes! All naked, from toes and ankles to about 1 inch above the knees. Nobody can say certainly when was the picture in question made – approximately somewhere between 1861 – 1867. The countess is standing her right leg upheld on the entire sole, the left one being bent over it, touching the floor only with the toes, white flesh, plump, shape of a statue. The remainder of her body cannot be seen, only a very small piece of the laced end of her dress, which she is holding, of course, elevated. Another picture where you can see her naked legs was made on August 1st, 1894, by the same French Pierre Louis Pierson. This time, the countess of Castiglione lies down, her knees being covered by the dress; the image has a slightly macabre look. The countess was considered one of the most beautiful women of her time, and the photographs made during her youth reveals her even now in all her splendor.

She spent her last years of life in an apartment in Paris, Place Vendome, where the wall were decorated in black, and the mirrors were banished, so that she cannot see her face and hair, nothing to look at anymore. She used to leave her house only during the night, covered with thick shrouds –so they say-, and I also think that she smelt like ammoniac, powder and sweet savoured, chocking perfume. She died in 1899 and she was buried in Pierre Lachaise cemetery. After her death, the poet Robert de Montesquieu gathered almost all her portraits (some of them got, after many decades, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and he made her biography that would be published in 1913, with the title The Divine Countess. Another gentleman, Pierre la Mazière, had the unfortunate idea to write a book about the Countess de Castiglione, novel I do not recommend to anybody due to its excessive sloppiness.

Another photographer, appreciated by Napoleon the third was A.E. Disderi, who launched the ordinary photographs trend, named “carte-de-visite”. The ladies crowded in his studio to be immortalized in their best dresses. Disderi had studios in Paris, London, Madrid, he had been appointed as Queen Victoria’s and the czar’s photographer. The richest photographer of Europe spent all his fortune making financial speculations. In his last years of life he used to wander with his camera on the beaches of Monaco, making pictures of holiday makers; he died in an asylum of Nice. A sheet of paper with eight portraits (“carte-de-visite style) shows Gabrielle Bonaparte standing by a chair, her large skirt would have certainly covered the edges of the chair if she had sat. Now, when I don’t have his pictures in front of me, I can rather see with the eyes of my mind the Balzac’s, Maupassant’s, Anatole France’s and Proust’s ladies, walking through the luxurious salons in Paris. In my head they are hardly traced, being all covered by fallals. They are all ringlets, frills and absurd hats, big as the wheel of a cart, covered by vividly coloured feathers, beady, violets and velvet bows (attached with long and dangerous needles) with whale bones around the trunk and curved skirts over their lazy hips. With sun umbrellas and fluttering fans, with gossamers they used to lift while kissing their lover boys or while blowing their noses – though, if I think better, I cannot remember any feminine character populating Balzac’s or Proust’s novels, cleaning her nose with a handkerchief in such a prosaic manner. Sometimes they sit in excessively over loaded salons, their necks and arms naked, near some Japanese silk pillows and tall vases from which orchids, gillyflowers, lilies, white campanulas and purple bell flowers pour out. I also sight gentlemen wearing huckaback, rigid hats and walking sticks made of ebony with ivory handles, sitting sober near a marble column décor.

Nadar swore that the men visiting his studio were more careful with their wives so that they appear the most handsome possible in the photographs. As far as I remember, he mentions in his Memories a gentleman who couldn’t sleep all night long, fretting because of a bristling hair thread he saw in the portrait, so, the next morning he went back to be photographed . An Anglican minister, as honorable as the first gentleman, was all greased with ointments and powdered like a cocotte, considering that he would look fresher in front of the camera, but most of them proved to be the worst fault-finders while seeing their portraits, while their wives were pleased to accept their portraits from the start. That’s what Nadar used to say, but I think the coquetry of those ladies was a cunning one, preventing them from showing their discontent in front of the men, waiting to get to the intimacy of the boudoirs in order to examine the portraits with their cruel eyes.

In 1890, Alexander Basano photographed Lady Dunlo (actress), using as background a bear fur. The portrait isn’t deprived of charm. The décors were very important back then. They used marble columns, primped drapery, high backed armchairs or chairs, plywood painted with idyllic landscapes, hardly traced palaces in front of which the quiet gentlemen as well as the handicraftsman or small clerks became still. A background very required by the photographers of that period was that offered by Smedley & Co, representing a palm green house, with entrance towards the palace, a part with an elegant curtain and another one with a gothic window. Curvy melancholic ladies with stiff crinolines, their shoulders covered by fans left to hang are looking now somewhere at the horizon, near rocks and cardboard banisters.

The soldiers photographed themselves right in front of some artificial ramparts. Helmut Gernsheim says in one of his works that in the 60’s of the 20th century the banisters and curtains were modish. During the seventies, the footbridges, the rustic fences and rocks, and during the eighties – the hammocks and swings. At the end of the century, any cabinet considering itself chic, had exotic décors, with palms and parrots, as well as train carriages, bicycles and ordinary cycles. These last ones look delicious: huge wheels in front, bigger than the cart wheels, the small ones behind, just like some toys. Near, serious gentlemen, with sportsman looks. The ladies were posing in those long skirts, probably sweeping the dust on the street, upholding gallantly the bicycles, their back stiffed and their heads stone-still. I often saw in second-hand bookshops and in some collector’s albums, portraits immortalized in such décors. Photographs stuck on thick cardboards, bearing the embroidered signature of the workshop manager, with still good nuances of white, black and gray, slightly paled. Having the savour of a dowry chest got as inheritance from a great grandmother. Mrs. Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864 – 1952) made herself a self-portrait near an ordinary cycle, only – what a courage – she was dressed like a man (meaning that she got rid of the skirt for the favor of the trousers), and so that the disguise becomes perfect, she stuck moustache. The front wheel is so big that it nearly touches her underarms. This Johnston lady is not known only because she posed without skirt, but because she made the portraits of the presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Mckinley, as well as Mark Twain’s. She took a picture of McKinley on 6 September, 1901, shortly before he got shot by an anarchist.

Frances Benjamin Johnston also dared to photograph a young debutante (a young lady who used to take part nicely dressed up in the balls of the high society, in order to find a husband or to be found), only she was nude in the photograph, without the usual corset and silk cover. For this exact reason: because those draperies, buttons and ribbons were missing from his daughter’s body, things that were meant to hide what only a future husband would have had the right to see, the father went crazy and sued the photographer. I really don’t know what they yelled in the court, if they brought the evidence on the judge’s table consisting in cardboards with the naked lady, nor how the entire affair ended.

Henry Peach Robinson (one of the most influent pictorial photographers of the 19th century) used to pay professional models that he dressed in the clothes wore in villages, because he find the genuine country girls too clumsy (according to Helmut Gernsheim). In the no. 15 from December 15, 1863 of The Photographic Journal publication , he was praised for the authenticity of his photographs, because he didn’t embellish his models in a theatrical manner, they even said that: “They are represented in their simple all-day clothes, that seem to match so naturally, as the leaves belong to the trees”. Robinson used to make photomontages, he used to photograph the models and the landscapes separately, and then he used to stick them in his workshop. With glue. After having retouched the new photograph, he used to photograph it again for the final version, so that the cuts and bonds weren’t visible. The country girls in reality could be flower shop girls or seam-stresses, who had never sown the lands or who had never got even close to the udder of a goat.

Julia Margaret Cameron used to pick maidenly models, wearing simple dresses. In all the portraits, these girls have a melancholic look, an almost suffering aspect, but also placid, explicable through the fact that the young girls had to stay still for a few minutes, as long as it was necessary to expose the photographic plate. The light is slipping obliquely on their faces, seeming overripe. Sensible, almond scent and old laces evoking portraits. The women are looking at me from a remote past. Cameron used to inspire from Tennyson’s romantic poems, being his neighbor on the Wright island. At his request, he illustrated his Idylls of the King and other Poems, but these theatrical images are far from my taste. His favorite model was Julia Jackson, one of her sister’s daughter, who later would give birth to Virginia Woolf. He often photographed her with her hair disheveled, partly surrounded by the darkness just as if she wore a mantle, almost always grave, with a stern appearance. She was considered in those times a great beauty – I find her a bit scary, capable of strong crises of a madman. Towards the end of her life, Julia Margaret Cameron moved with her family on a coffee plantation from Ceylon, where she used to photograph the locals.

Max Blecher in his novel entitled “Events in the Immediate Reality” (Intamplari in Realitatea Imediata) narrates about “the photographers’ obscure and humble boats”, those from the circus and wooden horses fair. One day, the main character takes part in a funeral, that of one of the strolling photographer’s child, seeing this way the uncovered coffin put right in front of the background used to photograph the customers. On the canvas: a park with Italian style terraces and impressive marble columns, and the narrator says that the small dead body dressed in feast clothes, with his parents and all the circus at his head and the fanfare singing him a piece from “Intermezzo”, “seemed submerged in an ineffable bliss”. Near the park, painted on the canvas, he looked “extremely happy and calm, in the intimacy of his profound peace”, then, after the dead was lifted and got on a cart in order to be taken to the cemetery, behind him the décor remained “desolated and desert”.

The almond scent mentioned in the first line from “Love in Time of Cholera” by Marquez, is closely linked to the suicidal Jermiah de Saint-Amour, described as a war invalid, at the beginning, a refugee in Antilles, a good chess player, an outstanding children photographer and mostly dead, with cyanide of gold in his rigid body. In the room overcrowded by policemen and the body there was a “big camera, on wheels” as you can often notice in the public parks, and a curtain with a landscape representing a sunset on the sea, painted with artisanal paintings”. That’s pretty much all I can remember about the décor used by Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, in fact I don’t think it is mentioned in the book anymore. But the most sinister is the background with dunes and palms used by Mustafa in the “La Goutte d’Or” by Michel Tournier. The décor itself is not guilty, because it’s inanimate, but in the novel the author says that this Mustafa used to tempt the strangers to pose in the artisanal desert from the studio, on the accords of some languorous melody, though the real Sahara was at a stone’s throw.

John Thomson, the photographer I was talking about in the beginning, was born in the same year as the Countess de Castiglione, he got in Singapore in 1862, helping his brother to arrange clocks, and in his spare time he used to travel and to take pictures in Ceylon and India. Ten years later he would make the portrait of a young richly trimmed bride in Pekin. There is absolutely no similarity between this Chinese woman and the Italian countess, neither regarding the appearance, nor the clothes – I assume that their lives were different too. The only link: the beauty of the photographs preserved until today.