The Ordinary Sublime: Rudy Burckhardt’s Photography

                            

                When I moved to New York from New Orleans I became a hack tour guide.  True, it’s strange for a new arrival to be guiding New Yorkers down their own streets, but this city is not without its ironies.  I can always identify older natives of the city.  Always the first in line, these older New Yorkers seem to have pithy answers to every question, glib responses to my Midwestern cheer, and need to find a seat whenever limited chairs are presented—quickly stripping even the hope of a chair from sluggish Southerners.  Recently, on my neighborhood tour I abruptly stopped and quietly waited before an abandoned storefront beneath an ancient Zenith sign.  Given a moment of stillness and immobility it will begin, the quick watch-check and hiss: “So whewegoin?”  No one ever looks up.  They’ll more likely look incredulously at one another than look up.  I silently gesture upward with a single digit, indicating a two thousand seat 1920s Loew’s Theatre.  On its etched and sooty face are chiseled phantasmagoric masks, curling vines, and glowering griffins from nearly a century ago.      

 I tried this experiment after becoming acquainted with Rudy Burckhardt’s work, the so called “court photographer” of the New York School.  Burckhardt, too, was an outsider.  And he, too, was able to show New York anew.  He did portraits for his friends, but he also moved photography into a field of near painterly abstraction.  Long before his death in 2001 at the age of 85, the Swiss-born New York photographer had displayed what poet Edwin Denby called a “detective’s eye” talent for discovery.  His work turned Ezra Pound’s modernist dictum “Make it new!” on its head.  Burckhardt would form the new but by using the old, the seemingly pedestrian, and center his audience on ground-level hunts to discover the ordinary sublime.  His works reveal hidden treasures and overlooked fancies beneath the noses and under the feet of rushing urbanites.  During the 1930s and 1940s Burckhardt’s modernist photographs reveal the extent of his collaboration and close connection to the New York School artists.  Characterizing himself as “never really political,” he was a photographer who reflected his epoch.  It was a Romantic time of artistic expression where artists, caught between the dueling fires of capitalism and communism, turned inward and discovered new abstractions on the canvas while eschewing the ease of unity and (what these few argued) the constraints of objective clarity.  Burckhardt was one of a series of artists who, according to painter Mark Rothko, attempted to show the “miraculous” and unveil “revelations” through transcendental discoveries, not in the manner of 19^th century Romantic exoticism—a cult of the strange and unfamiliar—but instead through using careful framing to show normal things and places anew.

            Burckhardt, according to Vincent Katz was “renowned for not being famous.”  And whenever a review or collection of his work is discussed, inevitably John Ashberry’s quote will be unearthed: “Rudy Burckhardt is a subterranean monument…he is the insider tip.”  Burckhardt’s work was created within a thematic matrix of New York art.  He learned from and was inspired by other contemporary artists and moved his own medium, photography, into new realms.  One simply cannot discuss the Romanticism of Burckhardt’s work without first describing the arc of New York photography before and leading up to the 1940s.  Mentioning the prevailing moods and trends of his contemporaries is as crucial as seeing his own works in totality.  Discussing Alfred Stieglitz and Bernice Abbott’s work—slightly before and concurrent with Burckhardt’s photos—will illustrate a Romantic theme in the modern period (and its individual manifestation in art) and demonstrate the dramatic contrasts in style and message. 

It is said that Modern Man’s struggle can be characterized as “Romantic.”  Why?  In the pre-WWI years urban artists and thinkers entwined Man’s progress to artistic modernism.  This was a time of modernist rebellion in the form of Futurists and Dadaists.  Weren’t all of these movements, at bottom, Romantic reactions to and from Modern times?  With chartered sidewalks, nation-states, tentacle corporations, income taxes, and public media, it is difficult to argue that an individual struggling against such faceless “controls” is not, in large part, Romantic.  Burckhardt was a Romantic but so were photographers before and after him.  And I hope to tease out what was unique and enduring about Burckhardt through contrasts with those contemporaries.  Meyer Shapiro captures this feeling well in “On the Humanity of Abstract Painting,” writing, “This art is deeply rooted, I believe, in the self and its relation to the surrounding world…a culture that becomes increasingly organized through industry, economy and the state intensifies the desire of the artist to create forms that will manifest his liberty in this striking way—a liberty that…is associated with harmony and achieves stability.” 

            Alfred Steiglitz was such a liberated artist.  His aim was to legitimate modern photography as a serious art form and free it from the constraints imposed by “old world views.”  It was Alfred Stieglitz.  Called “the father of modern photography” Stieglitz’s Romantic views regarding the individuality of the artist would later endure and adapt within the New York School.  He planned to “redeem the world with his camera,” by shocking America into the 20^th century and offering the viewer a new way of seeing.  Stieglitz written recollections of capturing his most famous picture, “Winter on Fifth Avenue,” demonstrates both Stieglitz’s Romantic aims and the consternation such photography received.   Stieglitz writes:

On Washington’s birthday in 1893 a great blizzard raged in NY.  I stood on a corner on 5^th avenue watching the lumbering stagecoaches appear through the blinding snow and move northward on the avenue.  The question formed itself:  Could what I was experiencing, seeing, be put down with the slow plates and lenses available. The light was dim, knowing that where there is light one can photograph, I decided to make an exposure.  After three hours of standing in the blinding snow I saw the stage coach come struggling up the street with the driver lashing his horses onward.  At that point I was nearly out of my head but I got the exposure I wanted. 

            Later, when Stieglitz arrived at the New York Society for Amateur Photographers he was met with consternation by his cohorts, “Before my negative was dry I showed everyone with great excitement.  They told me to throw it away.  It was blurred, it wasn’t sharp.  I told them the negative is exactly what I wanted it to be.  What I was driving at was not about blurred or sharp.”  The picture captures the wild race of modernity—the restless movement, the gnashing urgency, and the fast-paced urban shock that would bring New York City into the center of the art world.  Stieglitz was feverish with ambitions for this new medium.  He tersely declared, “I was born in Hoboken.  I am an American.  Photography is my passion.” But he also helped to foment the famed and influential “Armory show” which was an overview of Cezanne, Gougin, Picasso, Van Gogh, and others, introducing Americans to Modernism. Photographing as well as editing and publishing The American Amateur Photographer, Camera Notes, and Camera Work, Stieglitz nearly worked himself to death in his efforts to realize his creative visions.   

Earlier, Stieglitz’s aim was to legitimate photography as an individual art and later, having comported to a new Post-Pictorialist form, to capture the city in its frantic becoming—a new Cubist-derived style for, one could argue, a Cubist derived modern city.  His work was a fantastic documentation of the changes the “old New York” was undergoing at the century’s turning.  In his image “Old and New New York,” Stieglitz eerily captures corniced Victorian row houses surrounded on all sides by new structures of steel and glass.  One must ask, looking at such a picture, which buildings are “real”?  The top-heavy rooftops and stout chimneys of row houses look so fixed, ossified, regal.  But the viewer is looking at ghosts.  On the image’s right, for scale, a man stands alone gazing over a crowded street near a narrow brick structure.  Between this edifice on the far right and the skinless spectral structure towering above the rear, sits a New York long since disappeared.  In the background, there are steel ghosts to come and in the foreground, brick ghosts of a bygone era.  Stieglitz deftly captures a struggle between anachronism and modernity, a conflagration where in Marx’s term “all that is solid melts into air.”  From his black room, this early master created the photographic vocabulary and Romantic tenacity later shutterbugs “searching for the city” could use.  His modernist disposition and his individualism would make Stieglitz “the guy to beat” for anyone hoping to look at New York anew. 

Stieglitz’s picture of Chelsea’s Flatiron building is one of his more renowned New York works and illustrates a building that Rudy Burckhardt would later capture.  The lonely, crooked timber of a snowy tree stands in the foreground while in the background (he writes) “a building moved toward me like the bow of a monster ocean-steamer—a picture of the new America that was still in the making.”  Notice how a static building “moves” to an early modernist like Stieglitz.  Around his Flatiron is only sky—like Caspar David Freidrich’s Wanderer.  Its emergence from a snow-dusted park, starkly alone, is an irrepressibly modern scene.  A radically different view of the Flatiron building became Rudy Burckhardt’s most famous—or at least most reproduced photograph.  Both Stieglitz and Burckhardt shoot the building in black and white but the use of the building, its framing, and the narrative one might attach to it greatly differ.

On an oppressive summer day in 1947 Burckhardt snapped a picture of Chelsea’s Flatiron building, whose long shadow plunges downward bifurcating the streets into two crowded bright throngs of traffic and pedestrians.  Not only does the addition of the shadow to the building create a simulacrum of Manhattan’s island geography, it also bears witness to “an innocent jaunty New York, comfortably settled into its own skin” (Katz 22).  Where Stieglitz was excited about the new buildings that seem to slice through the city—his Flatiron almost resembles a razor cutting through snowy woods—Burckhardt has a more subtle and ironic view of the city.  His Flatiron is undoubtedly a locus but it is surrounded by numerous other sights:  shadows, buses, flags, roads.  It is a New York scene captured in a new way. Stieglitz titled one image of a smoking locomotive “The Hand of Man” and one of stretched skyscrapers “City of Ambition.”  These are titles of an early modernist’s hope and expectation for a glorious twentieth century.  Decades later, in a century blighted by chaos and dashed dreams, Burckhardt’s work was devoid of such confident declarations in both title and content.

A critic of Stieglitz’s early soft-focused Pictorial work and his cheerleading for “the new” was a contemporary of Rudy Burckhardt, Berenice Abbot.  She was a Midwesterner known for her “straight photography” and her desire to “empower” her viewers.  Her book “Changing New York” offered unmolested images of New York’s mid-century germination and created a catalogue of the city’s magisterial architecture.  The awing photographs give rooftop and pedestrian views of the city, diversifying the viewer’s perspective but always highlighting New York’s imperious scale.  In a work like “Murray Hill Hotel,” the viewer feels like a dust bunny on the floor of a Gothic nave.  Foreground balconies wend crookedly while limestone towers in the background fly titanically upward.  Other photographs like the “Daily News Building, 1935” portray an eagle’s nest view of the buildings below.

The asymmetrical figures of buildings, as in others, soar skyward with a shining skin of windows glittering above rows of ramshackle tenements—those simple, unimpressive boxes nearly lost in the shadows below.   Abbott like other photographers in the 1930s hoped to give a comprehensive if not exhaustive view of New York—to capture, to show, and to interpret it all.  Even her view of a newsstand portrays scale.  In her 1935 photograph “Newsstand” a single man, looking like something out of Swift’s Lilliput and Blefuscu, is whelmed by a collage of dozens of dailies, magazines, best sellers, mysteries, sodas, posters, cigars, and comics.  The figure of a girlie poster, her arms outstretched, seems as tall as the shrunken consumer.  This is a New York of scale, of business, and of their dark social consequence:  a desire for escape.  No more humorous contrast could be made of Abbott’s style than Burckhardt’s newsstands. 

Burckhardt and the artists in the New York School understood or at least recognized the primacy of the commonplace in modern America.  While withdrawing inward the New York School artists also ambushed the dustbin of history:  surveying the cracks, telescoping the splatters, and memorizing the paint smears for inspiration.  Perl writes in New Art City, “there was a shared sense of the quotidian as defying any pattern that a person might imagine…a great city was an open-ended demonstration of the paradoxical nature of the modern dialectic” (84-5).  Poet Edwin Denby wrote about the street philosophy of the New York School artists, men like Burckhardt and de Kooning who developed a “Sherlock Holmes” way of looking: “Sometimes while we (de Kooning and Denby) were walking through our part of town (Chelsea), Burckhardt pointed out details to me—a gesture, a crack, some rubbish, a glimmer—in which for an instant nature revealed that mystery which we can otherwise recognize in masterpieces.  I could not see it in the details he pointed out to me, but I knew, like anyone else, the kind of perception he was referring to, the flash we call beauty which is happening just then.  He looked quite precisely in order to record exactly what was going on there.”  This way of seeing is what was exciting about these artists.  For painters, the work unveiled itself as painters painted.  They were taking a second glance at the world and reclaiming capitalism’s leftovers and discards as their own—they were in Perl’s words, “Connoisseurs of modern instability.” 

The buildings in Burckhardt’s frames are not meant to overwhelm (like Abbott) or stress the power of the age (like Stieglitz) but to empathize with the viewer, for he is seeing what a New Yorker would (or could) see.  Phillip Lopate said that Burckhardt’s photograph was “more playful, tender, less melodramatic, more true to the spirit of the everyday…” and achieved a “closeness.”  Close, especially for an urban viewer who would recognize the quick flicks of beauty one sees in a crowd, but also “close” in a humanistic sense—a certain warmth in his execution.  Burckhardt’s images often lack aesthetic precision.  In a way, his work is not always about the “total image.”  Whereas other photographers may seek out and later tailor images for their dramatic or beautiful entirety, Burckhardt’s work stands defiantly within the matrix of its own vocabulary.  His works are often quick, visually imbalanced, and unemotional.  Their importance redirects the viewer’s glance towards both fixed and ephermeral fancies of shape, light, and pattern.  The quotidian objects (fire hydrants, marble, tiling, etc.) may be overlooked in a single viewing which is why, once you start, it is indeed necessary to see Burckhardt’s entire body of work. 

Vincent Katz wrote, “When Burckhardt is shooting at eye-level from the window or roof of another skyscraper, his rooftops are serenely dispersed like castle turrets; and one is made especially aware of the odd, homey constructions—water towers, roof gardens, attics, skylights, and so on—by which the skyline is tamed and humanized” (RB 22).  Many of the New York School were immigrants and it is those unfed eyes of the foreigner, not the bleary eyes of the local, which gaze hungrily at the subtle beauties of the street.  Mix together an age of ~isms, economic collapse, and Cubist fascinations, and you will get individuals looking inward for answers and finding it in any common day’s stroll.  On one visit to William de Kooning’s apartment (he was a neighbor) Burckhardt spoke about the difficulty of photography.  De Kooning, rarely one to give advice crumpled up a piece of paper and suggested Burckhardt photograph it.  Though he wasn’t “interested” at the time, Burckhardt never forgave himself for not immediately taking de Kooning’s advice.  Edwin Denby’s essay about walks with William de Kooning and Burckhardt speaks to this approach of seeing.  He writes,

…Rudy Burckhardt was taking photographs of New York that keep open the moment its transient buildings spread their unknown and unequalled harmonies of scale.  I could watch the scale like a magnanimous motion on these undistorted photographs; but in everyday looking about, it kept spreading the field of sight.  At the time we all talked a great deal about scale in new York , and about the difference of instinctive scale in signs, painted color, clothes, gestures, everyday expressions between Europe and America.  We were happy to be in a city the beauty of which was unknown, uncozy, and not small scale. (Lopate 11)

             Jed Perl writes in New Art City that Burckhardt had the eye of a “dialectical comedian” and the “ironist’s sense of poking fun…”(Perl 68).  In Burckhardt and Denby’s handmade book New York, N. Why? the viewer is introduced to New York newsstands but they are Burckhardt stands.  While Abbott’s style stresses the immensity of the city and consequently the smallness of its people, Burckhardt’s image decapitates the stand and allows the viewer to probe the small nest of papers.  The wondrous variety of papers is stimulating but it is their shapes and repeated patterns that catch the viewer’s eye.  And in between dime cigars or spy drivel sits the bald and once formidable spud skull of Mussolini.  All is objectively equal in this image.  It’s as if Burckhardt is winking, encouraging the viewer to smile and to recognize this captured reality for what is framed, not what it really is.  “Look closer,” he seems to insinuate.  Look at the wildly different fonts, the bubbly rush of font and haze of numbers and letters.  The adornments and patterns were Burckhardt’s secret discovery, they were “his own private New York” (RB 22). 

The gestures of Burckhardt’s newsstand though “realistic” are not didactic.  Anita Haldermann argued this point somewhat excessively writing, “The details Burckhardt puts into his picture have no narrative potential, but serve as formal elements in a picture that is comparable to a collage” (NYM 11).  They aren’t a shrill cry against capital—Burckhardt was “neither interested in politics nor did he have a critical view of society” (11).  Instead, his work is a blithe recognition of collage-like shapes, irregular forms, and subtle compositions that are “ready-made” about the streets.  His newsstands highlight the unintended patterns of stacked parallelograms and, by framing them with his lens, direct the viewer toward quiet activity along the rush of the street.  Moreover, he was making a strong statement against a prevailing view of the age.  In American Photographs in 1938, the front cover stated:  “The use of the visual arts to show us our own moral and economic situation has today fallen almost completely into the hands of the photographer.  It is for him to fix and to reveal the whole aspect of our society:  to record for the future our disasters and our claims to divinity.”    Burckhardt simply rejected the role of fixer, and consequently made a very strong argument—namely, that an artist did not need to provide a soothing elixir or cure to society’s ills.  However, what he could do is identify beauty and demonstrate that its existence was still possible.  Could an idea have been more radical in an age exemplified by Walker Evans portraits?  Perhaps one could label Burckhardt a “purist” because his photographs, in sum, were about “pure photography.”

Writing about a backlash to this purist sensibility in abstract paintings Shapiro writes, “In recent work, puzzled and annoyed observers have found an artless spontaneity which they are happy to compare with the daubing of the monkey in the zoo.  When the artist represented the world around him, he was called the ape of nature; when he paints abstractly, he is likened to the monkey who smears and splatters.  It seems that the artist cannot escape his animal nature.”  Maybe the bravest thing, after Hiroshima, Kolyma, and Belsen was to keep on producing art and, despite Man’s diminished state, continue as one of Faulkner’s dark visions of the last man “at the ding dong of doom” still enduring, still reaching for the sublime.  Shapiro spoke about the fear of removing representation in art which would inevitably damage communication.  He writes, “You cannot extract a message from a painting by ordinary means; the usual rules of communication do not hold here, there is no clear code or fixed vocabulary…”  The viewer, like the artist, was on his own.  The New York School was ominously saying:  Sink or swim in those swirls of paint, those checkered advertisements bespattered across marble.  It was the viewer’s task to individuate a meaning from beauty, perhaps even leaning to a nearby patron and inquiring, “So, what do you think?”  The art was a radical means of connection. 

 Rudy Burckhardt was an admirer of Mondrian.  In an interview he said, “I always enjoyed painters more than photographers.  Most photographers are kind of illiterate and even now most writing about photography is kind of unreadable.”  This love of painters, particularly Mondrian, can be seen in images like “New York, 1939” where tiles are placed in geometric patterns according to color.  A narrow black series of tiles ring a large patch of white tiles.  Within this patch are two interior “X” shape cubes staring out like dice.  A clear nod to Mondrian’s labored pattern-making in seminal works like “Broadway Boogie Woogie.”  If Mondrian begat Burckhardt, Delacroix was Mondrian’s progenitor.  The French Romantic famously said the he was “Passionately in love with passion but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible.”  Mondrian, like Burckhardt, had such a passion and it arose in the form of a watchtower-like ability of identifying the new as well as a panther’s patience for the numinous.  Burckhardt would wait all morning for just the right shot often returning home lamenting “There was nothing to see.”  How long did he have to wait to discover “Circles”?  This image, one of his most playful, captures a woman’s feet as she crosses a sewer drain.  What she doesn’t realize is that the sickles and swirls of her dress match the circles under her feet.  “Circles” like “Midtwon, New York” are of women’s dress designs which allude to Kandinsky-like spheres.  And there is also a touch of Barnett Newman in his work.  In a 1940 shot called “Wood Fence” Burckhardt identified a spiking series of painted fence posts strangely bisected by two unpainted posts.  And in “Jumbo Malted” Burckhardt ignored the loopy figures of the advertisements and instead focused on a Newman-like zip which balanced the spatial structure. Mondrian and Rothko both agonized endlessly over their works despite its minimal quality.   These men viewed a work’s sublime expression as a portal to “the eternal.”   Katz says of Burckhardt’s work, “It is the attention paid to a scene to which most people would have given only a passing glance that creates an atmosphere of great emotional focus.” Mondrian zoomed out while Burckhardt zoomed in.  He was the first to employ Mondrian’s minimalism to street photography (Katz 12).  Denby later put into words much of what Burckhardt put on film, “The sidewalk cracks, gumspots, the water, the bits of refuse,/They reach out and bloom under arclight, neonlight---…/These pictures, sat on by the cats that watch the slums,/Are a bouquet luck has dropped here suitable to mortals” (Perl 97). 

Burckhardt’s photographs were more abstracted and plainspoken then some of the heavier works by other contemporary photographers like Walker Evans, Lisette Model, and Robert Frank.  Evans toured the rural South exposing the hidden economic gulf between rich and poor.  And similarly, Robert Frank later contributed his 1950s series Americans which highlighted the social divisions and racial inequities in America.  These works showed dark visions of America and portrayed Americans scrabbling on the lower slopes of an “American Dream” illusion, a myth, a set-up forged by the fur-wrapped rich. 

Burckhardt’s desire to absent himself from the nation’s social history was brave and atypical.  He once mentioned that after his father’s death he was unable to cry saying, “I find that I don’t feel what I’m supposed to be feeling at certain times.  I’ve always been this way…I used to think there was something wrong with me” (Katz 10.)  But it was from this (what could I call it?) stubbornness or his ability to create emotional distance that produced a different form of photography.  It is the apolitical nature, the refusal of what is “topical,” that gives Burckhardt’s work a strange transcendent quality. 

In one eerie image a closed bank’s squarish shapes contrast and compliment brick streets, granite walls, and dark linked boxes resemble a crazed Tetrus game.  You notice the subject:  parallel lines, horizons, shadows, and shade, forgetting entirely the object being identified.  These banks were engines of economic might and individual prosperity but Burckhardt avoided the easy symbol of decline, discovering instead the hidden contours of beauty.   In New York, N. Why? Edwin Denby contributed an illuminating poem.  He writes, “You can have the measurements O.K.ed, mailed,/Talk with the bank, and get the building faced,/Carry it on the books, and when the firm’s failed/Pedestrians still go by the slabs as placed/…The pavement and a standpipe do not move,/As if the mind shifts slower than people do/And keeps widening the span between love and no love./ This widening like a history mystery/Is what Rudi’s camera takes in the city (italics mine).”  He writes of a “disintegrating” city but shows how pedestrians continue as before between “love and no love.”  Within this emotional segment is where Burckhardt’s camera “takes in the city.”  In his art, the shapes and contrasts matter far more than the Depression or its human consequences.  This was photography, he seemed to be saying, not journalism. 

In a photo like “Astor Place, New York 1947” he captures an isosceles patch of neutral ground and two parallel crosswalks overseen by a toothsome fille draining a Coke.  But what socially-oriented photographers like Frank may highlight—the unseen or unacknowledged racial homogeneity, a mass rendered powerless through alienation and consumerism—instead, through Burckhardt’s particularity, becomes a balance between banal objects like an anchoring billboard, a series of street dividers, and the antipodes of craning lamp posts and striped buses.  Its meaning lies within a stolen moment of a playful human dance, an uncoordinated piece of earth locked into a four cornered picture where so much geometric order and so many chartered paths become clear.  Burckhardt need not have captured the socio-political extremes of America in order to capture something new, something worth seeing. 

In the first quatrain from Blake’s poem “London” he writes, “I wander through each chartered street, /Near where the chartered Thames does flow, /And mark in every face I meet, /Marks of weakness, marks of woe.”  In contrast to social photographers, Burckhardt would sense and highlight the former couplet before the latter.  The New York School artists were rejecting the teachings of Europe famously embodied in de Kooning’s “I’m over it” essay where he denies categorization and breaks with the past.  Barnett Newman commented on this point, that Abstract Expressionists “instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or “life,” are making them out of ourselves, our own feelings.  The image we produce is the self evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history.”  The artists, he continues,” free from the weight of European culture…are denying that art has any concern with the problem of beauty and where to find it.  The question that now arises is how, if we are living in a time without a legend or mythos that can be called sublime…and if we refuse to live in the abstract, how can we be creating a sublime art?” (173). 

 Burckhardt’s New York street oeuvre lacks the grandeur and social ambition of other photographers.  But it does, as Blake wrote, “show you all alive the world where every particle of dust breathes forth its joy.”  The works are carefully composed, giving a sense of magic and discovery in everyday life.  The photos did not seek to show all of New York with Miltonian rhapsody, “Family of Man” sentimentality, or Duchampian nihilism.  They are, as Perl rightly points out about similar abstract works, “Romantic” without devolving into Romanticism.  Instead, Burckhardt “captures moments—New York moments,” like a microbiologist searching for patterns in a helix.  Thus his work, lacking the grandiosity of other photographers, presents images that seem more playful, closer, ironic, graspable, and according to critic Phillip Lopate, “warmer.”  Burckhardt said that it took him two or three years before he was ready to photograph New York City commenting, “I still had the idea I had to show the whole thing.”  Perhaps on walks to come, new quotidian connoisseurs will reject such illusions and simply search for the unseen in a new way.