So Easy to See (1946)
Photography-and-Text Collaboration with Berenice Abbott
In our time, there has been much talk about the difference between truth and reality.1 We are familiar with contradictions, our society is based on them. And this division, with truth on the one hand and reality on the other, is known to us; it is as clear and obvious as moonrise and morning, or bombing in peacetime. The contradictions around us are not simply contradictions of meaning, but of the whole visible world. In the process of setting barriers between truth and reality, we have gone ahead with barrier-building. And now, all around us, we see the walls: between people and people, between art and science, between idea and idea. Those of us who mean in our lives the unity of people, the unity of nature and knowledge, mean also the unity of imagination. In all the million individual flowerings of imagination and motive, of the human wish, there is the underlying unity. The common spring, the world-born source of power. Acknowledging that, we are drawn to look for those forms and meanings which will bring our reality and our truth together.
We are drawn to look. And the act of seeing opens new contradictions. For these eyes are mostly memory and partly moral, they bring their sentimentality and their traditions for furniture and set every scene for us a little, and then they are easy marks for seductions of color and tricks of light, nonsense of distance, fatigue, illness, age, the compromises of being alive. The eyes accept all of these, often they offer further compromises: weaknesses physical and political, blearing of sharp forms and detail, overlooking of meaning, rejection and censoring and canceling out. This is not a visual fact, this is the life of the eye as most people live it. And the arts called graphic, using paint, print, photography, are not merely visual—they reach us through total experience, experience of which novelty is a part. Whatever gives us the wholeness of experience enters our lives, through act, or sense, or art.
Through sight, powerfully, our lives are entered, all our waking time and even in dream—without our fallible eyes, with the dream-eyes that are so clear a criticism of the way we see. The idea of sight, here, is different from the idea of vision—its science is scarcely begun. It is as listening is to hearing. We hear all the sounds of the daytime, and in a city even deep at night I am full of voices and orchestras and wheels beyond the room; but when we reach a music constructed for some instrument which requires a further act and intensity of us, when the harpsichord gives us an intimate clear music and we make a meeting in ourselves with that sound, we know what listening is. As for vision—the visible world rains in its objects on our eyes, and we allow that fall, looking at our scene in an easy, clouded way, with our seeing full of our remembrance and our mood, and sometimes hardly seeing at all. We look at many things as we listen to jukebox music; but there is another kind of seeing. There is the fresh perception, and powerful and childlike eyes.
Anyone who has ever been threatened by death or blindness knows this flash of purer sight; the anticipation of darkness gives all life its truer, brighter forms, its clear colors. The blind know this, in their dreams; talking to sighted people, they describe sharpness and the hot red, the glad wild yellow. Anyone who, in love, sees with piercing clarity the turn of temple and eyeline, the cadence of cheek, the line of lip and lower lip on any face which has come to signify hope and excitement and all human meaning, sees this. Anyone who has been shaken and delighted by theatre or ballet or painting—by art—so that leaving the hall he sees in the street sharp, moving faces, brilliant and painful men and women and the evocative children, sees this.
These photographs, it seems to me, invite the sight in the way that crucial experience does.2 They offer us the objects, simple and miraculous, and they do more than that: they offer us our own deep sight. Here are pictures of ordinary things, nothing is strange to us: a leaf, grass, a watch, a walnut, this apple . . . the list goes on and makes the book. But the apple, the walnut, the watch are here seen as the human eye almost can see them. Not quite: as Francis Bacon pointed out, spectacles can restore sight, microscopes and telescopes can enlarge a part of what we see, but we need an invention which will give us whole objects clarified beyond what the human eye can do, or can want to do.3
Berenice Abbott has made that invention, and here are the photographs. The apple is here, in its wetness and life, with its many textures, its flesh, its moment of ripeness—and its infinite suggestive correspondence with other textures and other flesh. “It is flesh!” one person said. “It’s the moon!” said a child. I lived for a while in a room of an unfinished house where the carpenters and painters were still at work, and two or three of these pictures were on the walls. The painter came in and stopped short. “What’s that?” he asked. And then he saw what it was. The carpenter had to see that, he said, and he called the carpenter in. “Nothing like that,” said the carpenter of the apple, “has ever been seen in the world.” He went out and got the contractor, brought him to face the apple, and said, “What do you make of that? Tell me what you think it is, don’t tell me what it reminds you of.”
Some have seen wood or a cock in the walnut, leather in the oak leaf, the lines of the eyebrow in the iron filings, fish-eye on butterfly-wing. But it is not only correspondences that are seen here; it is the close familiar thing seen new. One woman protested. “No, I don’t want it,” and she made a gesture, “I’m just now used to modern painting and the atom bomb, and I can’t take another kind of seeing. It’s too disturbing!”
But the housepainter’s disturbance was of a different order. He asked, “Why didn’t I know what they were, when I first saw the apple and the walnut? They’re right in front of me, nothing is arty or faked; these are wonderful pictures. What’s the matter with me, that I didn’t see the things?” And after a while, “I’m a layman—How are you going to be sure the layman can see them? You’ll have to prepare the people somehow.”
Prepare people to look at what they know? Prepare them to see things that are deep in our lives, deep in childhood—a face, a wing, a hand?
Prepare people to see?
It is not simply that these photographs are done in extreme honesty; one need not say that with a first-rate work of art, in which one does not stop short, requiring honesty, or imagination, or the chance that meaning makes. We want all of these. Into creation go all the senses, the old hooded primitive, the intellectual imagination, and morality which is a flowing choice, as a line is a flowing point. And also that novelty which is needed—since we live in time—to let us recognize; to give us the sense of sameness as well as the sense of freshness.
Berenice Abbott has brought these gifts to her pictures. A portrait-photographer of inclusive delicacy and brilliance, artist of New York where she has set down steepness and the day of docks and streets and shops, she has beyond these two lives in photography searched for a meeting-place for art and science. This attempt to break down barriers that are indeed walls between truth and reality, artificial and political in their origins and meaning—this attempt has led her past laboratories and classrooms to photography of scientific process, and recently to the inventions presented in these photographs for the first time here. They are landmarks in the search, I believe; they are the first results of a process whose promise is scientific and commercial, and which will have further possibilities as new steps are taken. Berenice Abbott’s attitude toward this new work, among the limitations of time and equipment, is that of the pure artist and inventor, full of recognition of the forces in our society that work against discovery and realism. “A machine art!” she will protest, in conversation about photography—“if there were a machine! They’ve perfected the bombsight; and we still gauge exposure, and focus, and open the shutter, in three different motions!” And, speaking of her need for stronger lights, that will be concentrated in a narrow ray, “We need a light as good as sunlight. Better than sunlight.”
But these are workshop remarks, made casually, having to do with specific problems. More basic is this photographer’s attitude toward realism. We have little enough reality in our physical life, she believes, and can have none in our spiritual life while this is still true for the people. Her work is part of a wide attempt to bring to spiritual life, and physical and intellectual life, this realism. Braque has said recently, “The true materialist, descending deeper into matter, lifts spirituality further up.”4
At this point the search takes on other meanings. For the obstacles before your “true materialist” are social and political. I know this best in poetry. No matter how far our lives are involved in poetry, it is the fear of poetry that is immediate to all of us, that is part of life today in America. The resistance to these meanings and forms and symbols is a fierce and familiar thing, part of every day. And in poetry, it is to some degree a resistance to the use of symbols. In work like these pictures, nature is used as a symbol of itself; but the realism goes farther than we have yet gone. And there is always the danger of the real, which assumes a mythological character, an aspect of menace in a society that hides and evades and hurries toward compromise, hurries toward self-censorship. These pictures offer another attitude toward reality and toward truth. This attitude has implications that are generous in human and scientific meanings.
There is a morality here, as in all art; it is evident in us as selection. And what has been discarded here will be clear at a glance; what has been selected is the real. The objects have, as Emerson said, their “roots in central nature, and may of course be so exhibited to us as to represent the world . . . Now men do not see nature to be beautiful . . . They reject life as prosaic.”5 This is a new beginning, another acceptance of life. The acceptance does here what it always does; makes gifts, opens other doors, and offers other acceptances. There are these sources of power.
Our time demands this “true materialism.” In many ways, the real is the most foreign to us. These pictures are tokens of foreignness. And at the same time they are brilliant tokens of reality and of the flower of the real, of possibility.
(Unpublished, 1946)
1. In the early 1940s, Rukeyser began to work with photographer Berenice Abbott on a photo-text collaboration based around Abbott’s Supersight photographs. This essay is one version of Rukeyser’s introduction to their still-unpublished project, developed over a decade. Invented, built, and patented by Abbott, Supersight technology became the basis for later scientific photography. “The image of any three-dimensional object, when illuminated inside a closed dark box, in a darkened room, is transmitted or projected via an enlarging lens mounted on the side of that box. When received by a photosensitive surface outside the box that transmission creates an enlarged image of the thing itself, with no intervening ‘noisy’ medium to filter or dilute the image, as does, for example, grain in a negative.” Julia Van Haaften, Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), 249.
2. Rukeyser refers to Abbott’s Supersight photographs of objects, including Rukeyser’s eye and hand. She uses some of the following text in her untitled foreword to Berenice Abbott: Photographs (New York: Horizon Press, 1970), 9–11; and in her poem “An Unborn Poet,” in CP, 591–592.
3. Francis Bacon, sixteenth-century English philosopher who argued for the scientific method. In her biography of his contemporary Thomas Hariot, Rukeyser argues the title figure countered Bacon’s rigid, memory-based scientific approach to knowledge by instead foregrounding imagination and experience. See Muriel Rukeyser, The Traces of Thomas Hariot (New York: Random House, 1971), 61–65.
4. Georges Braque, “Pensées sur l’art,” Confluences 4 (May 1945): 339. Braque was a French cubist painter, collagist, printmaker, and sculptor.
5. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Art” (1851).