when chairs appear in different cities...

yesterday at the flea market, i picked up these two cabinet cards, because of the chair. as you can see it appears in both photographs. even though it's kind of an interesting chair, it wouldn't have been necessary to procure the photographs until i noticed that one image was taken in chicago, and the other in st. louis.

as difficult as travel must've been around 1870, i would imagine it being even tougher for a chair. i'm not sure if there's more to the story, other than the fact that face of the boy in the solo image, and the girl on the left in the other image have incredibly similar facial features.

like the photograph of the woman and the victrola i posted last week, the chair here does begin to feel like a surrogate for a missing person; and perhaps, because no one is actually sitting on it in either picture, there is a family spirit taking up the chair-sitting-space invisibly.

perhaps this invisible presence was felt by the others in the photographs; and that the subjects, along with the photographer, attempted to photographically capture this ghost, by travelling to different cities, and posing with different family members. it would seem that every time they, and the chair, had their photograph taken, they would be filled with hope that the phantom would somehow appear, sitting on the chair comfortably, within the photographic image that eventually appeared upon the paper...

if that was the case, then what we see here, is simply a failed attempt to make the invisible, visible.