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| Photograph by Eli Weinberg |
This, for me, has been a Geoff Dyer summer. First, I read
his great new collection, White Sands.
Then I went back and reread his wonderful New
Yorker piece, “Poles Apart.” A few days ago, I started reading his The Missing of the Somme. Yesterday,
perusing the online version of this week’s The
New York Times Magazine, I encountered his “The Mystery at the Heart of Great Photographs.” What an extraordinary essay! It’s a consideration of Eli Weinberg’s
1956 photo “Crowd near Drill Hall on the first day of the Treason Trial,
Johannesburg, December 19, 1956.” It brims with illuminating perceptions and
features at least five bravura analytical moves. First, he views the presence
of the solitary white boy in the front row as a “crucial component.” Second,
after making inquiries, he concludes with reasonable certainty that the boy is
Weinberg’s son, Mark. Third, he compares Weinberg’s photo with one taken less
than a year later by Will Counts in Little Rock, Arkansas. Fourth, he looks at
another photograph of the scene depicted in Weinberg’s picture, which leads to
his realization that Mark is “dressed for completely different weather than
almost everyone else.” And lastly, he reveals two facts he’s discovered about
Mark:
First, it seems that he died in 1965 at 24, so his dad was
the one left to look back with love and pride at the vision of belonging that
he had witnessed and created. Second, that as a result of a car accident, Mark
had been deaf since he was a young child. So there is isolation in the midst of
solidarity. These facts change nothing about the photograph, but they add to
its mystery. A picture of history — a moment in history — and of fate, it is
documentary evidence of the unknowable.
Dyer’s brilliant piece shows how criticism can enrich and amplify a great photograph.
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