It is the age of the console television, that piece of furniture on casters that arrived in the American living room and began performing to it around the clock. Here one plays to an empty carpet: on the rounded screen, a bare-chested wrestler throws up a triumphant arm inside the ropes, mid-spectacle, working a crowd we cannot hear. The room he is broadcasting into has wall-to-wall carpet, a mahogany secretary desk, a shelf of matched book spines, and not a single spectator.
For the audience has stepped out. Through the glass door behind the set, on a patio lounger half-hidden by floral curtains, someone reclines with bare crossed legs and slippered feet, reading, indifferent to the drama flexing indoors. The comedy is exquisite and Winter plays it deadpan. Two performances run at once: the wrestler’s grandstanding pantomime and the reader’s private absorption, and the medium built to command a room finds itself upstaged by a paperback. The cord trailing across the carpet to its outlet looks, suddenly, like a leash on something nobody is walking.
Winter, an American with an eye for the vernacular interior, prints it in gelatin silver, whose grey scale turns the glowing screen into a lit stage in a dim house and the carpet into an empty auditorium. What he has caught is a whole postwar arrangement of attention — the television installed as the hearth, promising everyone and reaching no one in particular. The wrestler salutes his invisible fans. Down the hall of the afternoon, the only person home turns a page.
It is the age of the console television, that piece of furniture on casters that arrived in the American living room and began performing to it around the clock. Here one plays to an empty carpet: on the rounded screen, a bare-chested wrestler throws up a triumphant arm inside the ropes, mid-spectacle, working a crowd we cannot hear. The room he is broadcasting into has wall-to-wall carpet, a mahogany secretary desk, a shelf of matched book spines, and not a single spectator.
For the audience has stepped out. Through the glass door behind the set, on a patio lounger half-hidden by floral curtains, someone reclines with bare crossed legs and slippered feet, reading, indifferent to the drama flexing indoors. The comedy is exquisite and Winter plays it deadpan. Two performances run at once: the wrestler’s grandstanding pantomime and the reader’s private absorption, and the medium built to command a room finds itself upstaged by a paperback. The cord trailing across the carpet to its outlet looks, suddenly, like a leash on something nobody is walking.
Winter, an American with an eye for the vernacular interior, prints it in gelatin silver, whose grey scale turns the glowing screen into a lit stage in a dim house and the carpet into an empty auditorium. What he has caught is a whole postwar arrangement of attention — the television installed as the hearth, promising everyone and reaching no one in particular. The wrestler salutes his invisible fans. Down the hall of the afternoon, the only person home turns a page.