when three wrongs make it right...

the top two images are of a tintype i recently found with three wonderful mistakes...

1. it took me awhile to realize it, but the brace that looks to be part of the horn, is in fact a head brace, the kind photographers used to keep a subject's head from moving during a long exposure. because the brace is almost always invisible behind a subject's head, this is a relatively rare example of a head brace with a prominent presence in a composition.

2. when the photo chemicals are wiped onto the plate for a tintype, the cloudy mass of chemical spill, which here can be seen on the bottom edge of the photo is usually trimmed off as waste. because all of the liquid was active enough to absorb the image, it creates a beautiful twisting and folding, giving the image an ethereal feeling, as if the man was an apparition or hallucination. because of its location at the bottom of the frame, the man seems to have had his legs severed just above the knees. he sits in a beggar's position, as the liquid blur becomes a blanket, as he rests his leg stumps beneath. this area of chemical 'looseness' is also a rare thing to be found.

3. when i noticed the deep scratch below the sitter's right eye, i instantly thought of the self portrait painted by victor brauner with his eye damaged or missing, pictured below the tintype and its detail. when i first discovered the surrealists, i was obsessed with brauner's work because of this painting, and brauner's obsession with his eyes and his premonitions of losing one of them as pictured in a series of self portraits made in the early to mid 1930's. in 1938, brauner's prediction finally came true when his eye was damaged severely during a bar fight from broken glass. he essentially then became a cyclops. perhaps when the sitter of this photo gouged the surface of his own image below his right eye, he too was thinking of a loss that would somehow be part of his life as he moved along into the future...

the alphabet is a wellspring...

"have you ever noticed that the letter Y is a picturesque letter open to countless different interpretations? a tree is in the shape of a Y; the fork of two roads forms a Y; two rivers flow together in a Y; the head of a donkey or that of an ox is in the shape of a Y; the stem of a glass is Y-shaped; a lily on its stalk is a Y; a man who prays to the heavens raises his arms in the shape of a Y.

besides, this observation can be applied to all aspects of what constitutes basic human writing. all that is to be found in the demotic language is there because it was put there by hieratic. the hieroglyph is the essential root of the written character. all letters began as signs, and all signs began as images.

human society, the world, and the whole of mankind is to be found in the alphabet. freemasonry, astronomy, philosophy, all the sciences find their true, albeit imperceptible, beginnings there; so it must be. the alphabet is a wellspring.

A is the roof, the gable with its crossbar, the arch; or it is the greeting of two friends who embrace and shake hands; D is the back; B is D upon D, the back on the back, the hump; C is the crescent, the moon; E is the foundations, the pillar, the console, and the architrave, the whole of architecture in a single letter; F is the gallows, the the gibbet, furca; G is the french horn; H is the facade of a building with its two towers; I is a war machine launching its projectile; J is the plowshare and the horn of plenty; K is the angle of reflection equal to the angle of incidence, one of the keys to geometry; L is the leg and the foot; M is a mountain or a camp where the tents are pitched in pairs; N is a gate closed by a diagonal bar; O is the sun; P is the porter standing with a burden on his back; Q is the rump and the tail; R represents rest, the porter leaning his stick; S is the snake; T the hammer; U is the urn; V the vase (hence the two are often confused); i have already discussed Y; X is crossed swords, combat - who will be the victor? we do not know - so the mystics adopted X as the sign of destiny, and algebraists chose it to represent the unknown; Z is lightning, it is god.

so, first man's house and his architecture, then his body, its structure and its weaknesses; then justice, music, the church; war, harvest, and geometry; the mountains, nomadic life, cloistered life; astronomy; work and rest; the horse and the serpent; the hammer and the urn that can be upturned and strung up to make a bell; trees, rivers, roads; and finally destiny and god; that is what the alphabet contains."

victor hugo, travel notebooks, 1839, in writing: the story of alphabets and scripts by george jean, 1992