Old Fields: Photography, Glamour, and Fantasy Landscape

4: Brownies

 Brownies Portable cameras figured in many outdoor adventure stories published before World War I: the wilderness offered surprises , as did the cameras. [@ EXCITED BUT DETERMINED TO STAY CALM, THE BOY Scouts hurry to develop the film just removed from one of their cameras . Huddled in a tent atop a West Virginia mountain, they unpack their small developing tank, decide to speed the processing of the film, and mix in double the amount of developer. A few minutes later they shi" the large negatives to the printing frame, and begin contact printing, placing each negative atop a piece of sensitized paper. “The developer had worked perfectly, notwithstanding the haste, and the printing was well advanced in the so" light of the tent,” writes the author of the thriller. “Directly he had the picture taken in the cave under view—the snapshot of the wall showing the entrance to the secret passage.” The Scouts gather around their processing expert and his print, determined to con- firm or scrap a hunch. The still-wet image reveals a face accidentally caught spying on the subterranean photographic effort made hours earlier. All the while the Scouts explored and photographed the small cave, a whiskered man had watched through a small crevice. But while the Scouts had sensed and laughed off an eerie presence underground, later they realized that their photographs might offer some verification about something one Scout had half-noticed. Developing and printing the image reshapes their attitude toward their surroundings and predicament. “The camera see things the human eye does not see,” asserts one solemnly, before suggesting that they develop and print other negatives to learn if they had been observed at other times. Eventually they print a negative revealing fragments of a face and legs hidden by trees and shrubs. One Scout thinks the face “may be caused by some odd arrangement of the leaves” because it is “very indistinct ,” but another contradicts him. “Sure, because it is in the shade. It is almost a miracle that we see it at all. I’ll get a better print of it soon and enlarge it.” When they examine the next printed negative they find what may be a coat shoved between rocks; another on the roll, a"er the closest scrutiny, reveals a boulder wedged in place by small stones placed against its bottom, and what might be the booted feet of a standing man. The Scouts compare prints, especially those made from the compact “baby camera” one prefers to use for candid photographs, and agree that the boots in two photographs might be identical. “The camera caught the same man twice,” one exclaims. The Scouts had never noticed him. A"er a few more moments of scrutiny, they realize that one negative shows a young boy riding on a man’s shoulders, both boy and man [Q old fields carefully hidden in vegetation and spying on the picture-taking Scouts. “All this means,” one concludes, is “that we were watched when we were taking the pictures that a"ernoon. Those people were looking at us! We might as well have been walking through an open street.”¹ G. Harvey Ralphson’s The Boy Scout Camera Club, or, The Confessions of a Photograph, appeared in , two years a"er the Boy Scouts of America issued what subsequently became known as the first edition of the merit-badge booklet entitled Photography. Despite its improbable plot, Ralphson’s juvenile thriller taught readers that spies easily observe even the most vigilant unless the subjects of observation consciously seek out the voyeurs. More importantly, it taught readers not only that photography offered ways of honing already acute observational skills but also that now and then cameras seemed possessed of jarring willfulness. Cameras sometimes record what photographers never noticed. Very rarely photography might be near-magical, the camera well-nigh haunted, if not by demons, perhaps by brownies. Haunted machinery informs much American fiction—for example, that of Nathaniel Hawthorne. In his notebooks he outlined a tale in which a machine rips off a man’s arm, drags another by his coattails “and almost grapples him bodily,” snares a girl by her hair and scalps her, and finally “draws in a man and crushes him to death.”² He speculated that while some objects might behave as if possessed, similar behavior might originate in the essence of particular devices. He scrutinized mirrors, knowing...