“If the plastic arts were put under psychoanalysis, the practice of embalming the dead might turn out to be the fundamental factor in their creation … providing a defense against the passage of time it satisfied a basic psychological need in man, for death is but the victory of time.”

André Bazin — from The Ontology of the Photographic Image

 

An unidentified photographer made this image of my parents on their wedding day eighty years ago. In André Bazin’s psychological sense, though deceased, they still live. I never knew these two young people bold enough to stage an elopement. Becoming a self-conscious, remembering person waited for me fifteen years in the future: age five; and even then I had not much knowledge of these folks. My mother and father are long gone from the Earth, yet their actuality here seems vivid and meaningful — less like the mummifications in our author’s figure — more like real presences.

I see a quality I completely missed in my time living and growing up under their care. I can now perceive the remarkable kinship between these two persons, who a year prior to this were unknown to each other.  It is stunning for me right now to recognize this deep similitude between them. It was always — to the end — the two of them against the world.

Notice the alignment of vertical elements in our picture — my dad’s tie centered at the vertices of upside-down, plunging triangles; that one point connects to a descending line of buttons, opening into a triangle, then falling straight down in shadow beyond the bottom of our frame. Mom is softer; still the pleats of her dress conform to the geometry of up-and-down, parallel lines. Notice their right arms and hands, how they hang beautifully synchronized, how each partner mirrors the other in a classical way. My father has his left arm around his bride’s waist. Mom’s open palm curls back toward Dad’s almost-closed fist as if to soften it. The pocket-motif created by their hands entwined suggests to me a neolithic carving, condensed meaning in a hieroglyph chiselled from stone.

My mother gave up a room-and-board, tuition-free scholarship in pre-medicine at a prestigious university to marry my father, a laborer in a steel mill. He was alone without parents or connections in the world, had no higher education. World War Two threatened his near future.  Mother’s parents were dubious and feared their eldest, smartest and most-accomplished child would marry down the social scale; hence the running-off by the lovers to Nevada for a quick, inexpensive wedding.

Nothing in their demeanor in this photo reveals those family conflicts, nor do I see any doubt shared between them — only their combined optimism comes through.

If I were to title our wedding-photographer’s vintage image, I would call it: “A Portrait of Innocent Solidarity.”