25 You keep returning to how we read images.
Images deserve to be read closely. The failure to read closely condemns us to not seeing each other and missing what is human in the act of seeing—itself. Recognizing an Other depends on noticing what is unsaid as well as who does the saying.
Jan van Eyck painted The Arnolfini Portrait (also referred to as the Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife) in oil on oak. The full-length double portrait is taken to depict Italian merchant Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini and his wife in their residence in the Flemish city of Bruges.
Signed and dated by van Eyck in 1434, the portrait stands alongside van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece (which he painted with his brother) as “the oldest very famous panel painting to have been executed in oils rather than in tempera.”[1] Erwin Panofsky and other art historians read this portrait as “a unique form of marriage contract, recorded as a painting.”[2] But it is Hungarian essayist and critic László F. Földényi who conducts an excruciating close reading of the portrait.
In Melancholy, Földényi focuses on a handwritten note above the mirror that reads: “Jan van Eyck was here in 1434.” As a form, this “signature” distinguishes itself from the claim made by a usual artist’s signature. Van Eyck’s inscription asserts the artist’s presence within the frame. It ruptures the claim to representation by making a different sort of claim. “To what specifically does the writing refer?” Földényi wonders. The painting is not an allegory, or it doesn’t seem that the artist intended this wedding portrait to be an allegory.
Van Eyck’s inscription steps into what Földényi calls “one of the paradoxes of painting in the modern age: the nature of the relationship between the reality of the painting, and so-called external reality.” While the colors depict the couple in relation to each other as partaking of the same space, there is a solitude that hovers between their rotund homogeneity. The peace is not definitive; it fragments upon closer inspection. The window is open, but we cannot see outside the room – it only feels open.
Autonomy is precarious. The “melancholic bewilderment” of the subject—and the viewer’s response to this—challenges the perspective’s “exclusivity.” Things could be otherwise. One feels, when looking closely, that things could be otherwise. There is a conditional within this frame. There is the eerie writing on the mirror and the presence of the painter’s absence inside it. When Földényi refers to van Eyck’s mirror as “the question mark,” I think again of the surveillance file images.
But I also think of the artist’s invisible collaborator, as recently revealed by the discovery of a box of photos belonging to W. G. Sebald. The box produced Sebald’s silent partner, a photographer named Michael Brandon-Jones, who developed the film negatives Sebald used as focal points for the meditations in his books.[3] What is distinct about Sebald’s writing is how he incorporated photographs as silent interlocutors within the text.
Sebald relied on photos to pull out something invisible and metaphysical that erased time and place to create a coincidence of perception. A new book has revealed that these photographs were often subjected to “rephotography” by Brandon-Jones, who produced copy negatives of the photographed images used in Sebald’s books.
In a sense, the consistency of time and saturation depended on Sebald’s invisible partner, the ghost-doctor of images responsible for what Sebald called the “leaden” texture spanning both words and images in the temporality of the page, where the dead coexist with the living, and each is legible and illegible to the other in different ways.
Who is the author of Sebald’s images? Why did Sebald die without acknowledging his partner’s contribution? What does it mean to create alongside the invisible?
The box also includes photos Sebald took but didn’t use in his books. Clive Scott suggests this is because these photos reveal surfaces that lack a deeper resonance or texture. They don’t present the viewer with a threshold for encountering the contingent.
In John Berger’s words: “They work together, the written lines and the pictures, and they never say the same thing. They don’t know the same things, and this is the secret of living together.”[4]
They don’t know the same things, and this is the secret of living together. The photos destabilize the solidity of the text. They do not evidence the text as much as gesture towards its silences and recusals. The photo, like the text, is haunted by what it does not say. And the reader who feels this unsaid cannot discount the power and presence of unsayability.
The image is also a manipulation of reality, but this manipulation aims to render the image more surreal, more amenable to its haunting. At one point, Brandon-Jones experimented with varying exposures and depth in order to make a photograph of a painting by William Wyld (found in Mark Girowerd’s architectural and social history from 1985) amenable to use in Sebald’s The Emigrants. The fold in the image caused by the book’s spine was removed.
For Sebald, the invisible partners resemble the named interlocutors. We are always speaking to each other and trying to see what sight withholds.
- Image is taken from Wikipedia, as is quotation. See Arnolfini Portrait - Wikipedia. ↵
- Harbison, Craig. "Sexuality and Social Standing in Arnolfini's Double Portrait". Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Summer, 1990), pp. 249–291. ↵
- Scott Schomberg. "The Collaborative Alchemy of W. G. Sebald’s Photographs." The Millions. 15 February 2024. ↵
- John Berger, preface to I Could Read the Sky by Steve Pyke and Timothy O’Gray. ↵