The White House is nowhere in this photograph, though its lawn is named; what I am given instead is a run of iron palings, a hedge gone soft with shade, and a black telephone set down on the ground as if abandoned mid-call. Whatever mattered here has been withdrawn to the far side of the fence. I keep waiting for a hand, a face, the seat of power the caption invokes, and I am handed only its perimeter.
So my attention falls to the phone, because there is nothing else to hold it. The receiver lies off its cradle; the coiled cord loops and doubles across the grass like something emptied from a body. Its keypad still catches a little light, the small square buttons pale against the black. A telephone is an instrument of nearness, of a voice arriving from elsewhere, and here it is muted, grounded, laid in the dirt behind bars — the very image of a connection cut. I feel the small indignity of it more than any monument could give me.
Winter, whose black-and-white eye favors the still, unattended object, prints this on gelatin silver, and the process rewards him: the stone cap glows, the leaves recede into a granular dark, the phone reads matte and used. A single dead leaf has caught on the ledge, and nothing is staged into significance. What stays with me is the withholding itself, an American symbol kept out of frame, and in its place a hushed apparatus for talking, left where anyone could step over it.
The White House is nowhere in this photograph, though its lawn is named; what I am given instead is a run of iron palings, a hedge gone soft with shade, and a black telephone set down on the ground as if abandoned mid-call. Whatever mattered here has been withdrawn to the far side of the fence. I keep waiting for a hand, a face, the seat of power the caption invokes, and I am handed only its perimeter.
So my attention falls to the phone, because there is nothing else to hold it. The receiver lies off its cradle; the coiled cord loops and doubles across the grass like something emptied from a body. Its keypad still catches a little light, the small square buttons pale against the black. A telephone is an instrument of nearness, of a voice arriving from elsewhere, and here it is muted, grounded, laid in the dirt behind bars — the very image of a connection cut. I feel the small indignity of it more than any monument could give me.
Winter, whose black-and-white eye favors the still, unattended object, prints this on gelatin silver, and the process rewards him: the stone cap glows, the leaves recede into a granular dark, the phone reads matte and used. A single dead leaf has caught on the ledge, and nothing is staged into significance. What stays with me is the withholding itself, an American symbol kept out of frame, and in its place a hushed apparatus for talking, left where anyone could step over it.