The Autobiographic Assemblage of ‘Still Pictures’
I am looking at a photograph I took on my city walk in search of Janet Malcolm. It shows the entrance to the apartment building on East 72nd Street where Malcolm grew up in what used to be a working-class neighborhood with a large Czech population in Manhattan. Her family moved into a ground-floor unit in 1940, one year after barely escaping the Nazis in Prague. I stare at the picture, hoping it will help me understand the scenes in Malcolm’s new book, Still Pictures, a series of essays based on old photographs. I try to imagine her father, “the gentlest of men,” coming home from an opera, making notes and reading novels, telling his daughters of the bestsellers he expected them to write, and I try to imagine her mother walking out of the building at night “with a coat thrown over her nightgown,” waiting for her daughters to come home—an iron grip that dashed Malcolm’s girlhood chances, on at least one occasion, at love.
But of course I can’t see any of this in my picture. Like Malcolm in her 2001 book, I am the literary pilgrim who left “the magical pages of a work of genius,” then traveled to an “original scene” that cancome from a box in Malcolm’s apartment labeled “Old Not Good Photos.” My picture is a “New Not Good Photo,” which had nothing to say to me. Malcolm’s old photos go deep; they are like dreams, she says, but not the ones we remember. These dreams flicker, then dissipate into the recesses of our minds. “However, as psychoanalysis has taught us,” she writes in , “it is the least prepossessing dreams, disguised as such to put us off the scent, that sometimes bear the most important messages from inner life. So, too, some of the drab little photographs, if stared at long enough, begin to speak to us.” Pictures give us words, which give us hidden pictures. Is this what meant when she called a photograph “a secret about a secret”?
