Delayed Star-Rays: Photography and Intimacy in Times of Distance

By Susanna Newbury, Lauren Paljusaj, and Anne Savage

Photographs showcase history through the art of images. As objects, they represent shifting cultural styles and attitudes of times (and mediums) that no longer exist in the flickering novelty of the present. As Oliver Wendell Holmes warned in 1859, their invention trained us to hunt and collect images as glimmering appearances, in his words, like the skin and hide of trophy hunters. Photographs carry with them the possibility of leaving lives formerly lived to dissolve, mirage-like, in history’s distant viewfinder.

But, to whom is the past’s dissolution irrelevant? Certainly not to places like archives, designed to collect and preserve what otherwise might be forgotten. Many of the objects at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas' (UNLV) Special Collections & Archives are like this: family photos, portraits and snapshots of Southern Nevada’s landscape. They contain depths in their details, illuminating how we relate to others. As objects of memory, they have the power to transcend time and distance, establishing connections, revealing mutual beliefs, and giving new insights to lapsed existence. ¹

As a 181-year-old medium of visual expression, photography changed how we comprehend and remember experiences.² A powerful illustration of this is a photograph of a man lying in bed, casually reading in his sunlit room in Goldfield, Nevada in the early 1900s. Head resting on a folded over pillow, stretched out on a floral comforter, a newspaper lies discarded to his side. He is a man alone, absorbed in contemplation. He has his back to the viewer, his unavailability a demonstration that this photograph is not of the man himself, but of the activity in which he is engaged, of being engaged at a distance.³ This is a glimpse of a stolen moment, a short pause in this man’s life—any life—now open to the contemporary viewer in the print’s reflective surface.

Photographs have a close-up, private language that communicates depth through gesture.⁴ Late 19th- and early 20th-century critics suspected interacting with the world through a lens would degrade human experience, sacrificing complex lived experience for the sake of the quick take. Philosopher Roland Barthes, writing in the 1980s, thought otherwise, writing “the photograph of the missing being […] will always touch me like the delayed rays of a star.”⁵ When today’s personal photos and random snaps become memes, tweets, Snapchats and Instagram posts, they illustrate the continuity of emotion that connects an unquantifiable audience of potential intimates. This way of participating in our social lives—famously “alone together” in virtual contact—casts a wide net. Rather than being a definite link to a known fact, photography bridges the distance between then and now, an extension of living memory. The words of Barthes carry us on:

[a] sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed. ⁶

Photograph of a man reading in bed, Goldfield (Nev.), early 1900’s, 0350 Album I, 20, C. A. Earle Rinker Collection: Image/UNLV Special Collections and Archives

Susanna Newbury, PhD is Associate Professor of Art History at UNLV. Lauren Paljusaj will graduate UNLV this May with a BA in English. Anne Savage recently returned to her hometown of Las Vegas to pursue her BA in UNLV’s Art Department. This essay is drawn from their (postponed) exhibition Intimate Nevada, which was set to open at UNLV’s Special Collections & Archives in April 2020.

¹Jennifer Tucker, “Entwined Practices: Engagements With Photography In Historical Inquiry” History and Theory, Vol.48, No. 4 (December 2009): Footnote 6.
²Anne Wilkes Tucker, “Lyons, Szarkowski, and the Perception of Photography” American Art Vol. 48, No. 4 (December 2009): 25–29.
³Shirley Jordan, “Chronicles of Intimacy: Photography in Autobiographical Projects” in Textual and Visual Styles: Photography, Film, and Comic Art in French Autobiography (Lincoln: University Nebraska Press, 2011), 63.
⁴Ibid., 58
⁵Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981), 80-1.
⁶Ibid.