Divine Presence in Spain and Western Europe 1500–1960: Visions, Religious Images and Photographs

Chapter 3. Presence, Absence and the Supernatural in Postcard and Family Photographs, Europe 1895–19201

97 Chapter 3 Presence, Absence and the Supernatural in Postcard and Family Photographs, Europe 1895–19201 Illustrating the two previous chapters about visits by pilgrim strangers and images that seemed to come alive were statues, paintings, engravings, and photographs . This chapter deals with the passage of art to photography in the representation of visions. Its brief text is a guide to what is essentially a visual argument for the transposition of medieval and early modern representations of the relations between humans and the divine to the art of photography, and the profound change in the nature of the self that photography facilitated . The chapter is arranged in pools of images connected by introductions. “Painting possesses a truly divine power in that not only does it make the absent present (as they say of friendship), but it also represents the dead to the living many centuries later, so they are recognized by spectators with pleasure and deep admiration for the artist.” Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, 14352 98 When preparing these essays, I participated in a seminar on collecting. The fundamental act in collecting , it was pointed out, is the decision to include and exclude—the assignment of value to some things and not to others,3 thereby establishing a kind of membrane between things rejected and things accorded added value and special status.4 One participant cited Joan Kron: “By being part of a collection each piece is transformed from its original function of toy, icon, bowl, picture, whatever, into an object with new meaning—a member of an assemblage that is greater than the sum of its parts.”5 All of these essays involved choices of inclusion and exclusion, but the procedures differed. The first chapter grew organically and somewhat surprisingly from the story of Toribia del Val. An examination of the immediate context and antecedents and successors found the notion of the mysterious wayfarer to be like an unusual kind of mushroom. Fed by the rains of catechism, the sunshine of iconography, and seasonal showers of pilgrims, it occasionally emerged in visions or the stories of visions of angels or Christ. The second is based on documented episodes of activation I had collected over four decades. Here inclusion was relatively simple: those instances of liquids on images which had a public impact, with reflections on why they had impact, and how they changed over 99 time. The mushroom in question was less rare and easier to find, and, apparently for systematic reasons, widely consumed in certain places and periods. Whereas the first two chapters involved collecting everything or the more salient items in a class, for this last one, given a field of millions of postcards and photographic images between 1895 and 1920, there was no way to establish a population or even a taxonomy. Out of the seemingly limitless abundance of images available in shops, flea markets, and then online, certain ones attracted me more than others, this one yes, those no—an experience common to all shoppers . The reasons, while undeniably instinctual and aesthetic, also seemed to be thematic in a manner of which I was only partly unaware, aside from the general idea of depiction of the invisible. Over time, ideas and analogies became clearer and the choices more compelling, leading to “an assemblage that seemed to be greater than the sum of its parts.” The result is a path of meaning necessarily personal, one way of regarding the impact of the great revolution of photography on visions, self-awareness, and vision itself. For photography (and subsequently moving pictures ) shouldered its way into the discernment process for visions, with pictures and films cited as evidence for and against the activation of statues. As photography took hold on the imagination and became an 100 anchor for visual memory, its conventions and its iconography in turn affected what people experienced. For any period in history we cannot fully understand what happened in visions without knowing the visual “field,” the common repertory, of “invisibles.” The years from 1895 to 1920, because of the fad for picture postcards, comprise a special period for the consolidation of a visible field that now is exceptionally accessible. Fanning out from Berlin and Vienna, photo, photo /art, and art postcards spread a craze of images from great cities to remote villages. Millions of cards circulated , many of them in numbered sets, and many consumers sent each other, one by one...