Writings | Stranger Passing

The first time I went to a foreign country as a grown-up, a great calm came over me. Before, I had traveled almost always in America, where I feel it is my obligation to eavesdrop on my fellow citizens whenever I can. I don't go out of my way to snoop, but any conversation or other word spoken within my hearing in the normal course of events I believe I must eavesdrop on and pay close attention to, in case they hold a clue - to what? I'm not sure, exactly, but it's important, whatever it is. Constant eavesdropping is a demanding chore. When I was first in a country where I didn't speak the language and couldn't eavesdrop even if I wanted to, I felt a sudden sense of happy relief, as if school had been called off for the day.

The nosiness of eavesdropping is punished by how boring it is, often. A lot of what you overhear is not very interesting. Once you start, though, it's hard to stop. You're following conversations, despite yourself, and there's nothing you can do. During countless hours I've groaned inwardly at the tedium of what I was overhearing, hoping for some loud industrial noise or police action to blot it out and rescue me. Usually the only way out is to suffer through. At a Christmas program at my son's school I find myself in front of two moms with camcorders. The program is so rigorously non-religious, such a miscellany of generic holiday-ness, that the only tension keeping the audience involved is waiting for one's own kid to come on. On the long stretches in between, the moms behind me talk, and I listen helplessly to every word. Where their camcorders were purchased and how much they cost and what they do, and the problems encountered in looking for various video games in various stores, and when the next shipment of a prized video game is expected at which store, and - you get the idea.

I used to eavesdrop a lot during bus rides. In my twenties I rode the Greyhound for thousands of miles around the country, and it seemed to me that I heard people in buses say anything and everything. Maybe you remember that Allman Brothers song, "Ramblin' Man," where the guy says that he was born in the backseat of the Greyhound bus rollin' down highway 41. Well, I'm not positive, but I think I was sitting just a few seats away when that occurred. It sounded like it, anyway. In the twilight tinted bus windows, to the background noise of empty soda cans rolling around on the floor, I listened in on one crazed, sad, discursive, endless personal drama after another. Once I heard a woman catalogue the sins of a man sitting next to her, enumerating his many infidelities and lies and cheapnesses and betrayals. I could not fathom why the woman had continued to put up with such mistreatment; when the bus got into the station I finally glanced at the offender, and recognized him as a semi-famous former rock star. Sometimes people I listened to got wackier and louder and louder and wackier until they drove the whole bus nuts and the driver had to stop and call the highway patrol.

Some people I overheard are more prominent in my memory than acquaintances I've known for years. One guy in particular stays with me - a Vietnam vet who I sat just behind on a long nighttime bus ride in the South. This guy would not shut up. He talked about fast cars, big black snakes, guns, ammo, rock 'n' roll, marijuana, women, hunting dogs. Late at night when most people on the bus were asleep he began to talk about a person he had killed in Vietnam, and how he hadn't wanted to kill her, and how bad he felt about the killing. Everything he said was kind of a question, a wondering what his hearer made of it. The man sitting beside him listened, murmuring, noncommittal, kind. I am ashamed now to think of how unsympathetic in my heart I was to the guy, as I silently condemned him for intruding on the general peace with his frantic monologue. At the Miami bus station, at the end of the ride, I took a good look at him for the first time. He was short, knobby, skinny, with a hollow chest. His light brown hair, soft as in a shampoo ad, hung to his shoulders, and his eyes were large, hound-like, and watery. He caught my look, and no doubt saw the irritation - the witless, ignorant, irritation - in my eyes. He looked back at me without anger, straightforwardly, beseechingly.

Portraits are different from other kinds of images, and photographic portraits are more exceptional still. As social animals, we seem to have latent within us a primal response–half fear, half attraction–to the presence of another in our midst, and a trace of such instinct is brought to the viewing of the representations we make of ourselves. This vestige distinguishes the portrait from, say, a landscape or still life: the infant chimp will favor a makeshift wire replica of its mother over food or water, to its physical detriment, in a display no other kind of object can evoke. In fifteenth-century Tuscany, certain enemies of the state were tried and punished through use of the pittura infamante; rather than jailing or flogging the culprit’s person, his portrait was ordered painted, the likeness hoisted outside the town hall, and a mob would pelt, burn, or crucify it. Iconoclasm, voodoo dolls, and political leaders hanged in effigy all share this order of irrational response, turning on what the anthropologist James George Frazer once called “imitative magic.” At some subterranean level of awareness, a sympathetic reflex confuses the image and subject, accepting the effect as a surrogate for the cause.

If the traditional portrait derives potency from resemblance, photography's invention in the nineteenth century gave imitative magic unimagined new capacities. Traditional portraiture concentrated on the highest and (sometimes) lowest levels of society. Photography, with all its relative affordability and ease, now allow the middle classes to fill themselves in. The bourgeois multitude took to the rite of self representation eagerly, though not without its own form of supernatural hangover. The novelist Balzac feared sitting for his photographic portrait, lest something of his spirit be removed in the process; the sculptor Thorvaldsen is seen in early daguerreotype furtively making the sign of the “evil eye” to ward off mischief in the spectral sort. Moreover, the world learned that the very same image demonstrating your success upon the barricades could later be used to identify and convict you of insurrection. Photography duly assumes its place as the medium of the middle class, but it's revelatory descriptiveness suffered the fate of working too well: poolside Polaroids, dental X rays, and our high school yearbooks have only amplified a congenital anxiety that photography is capable of revealing more than we want to know about ourselves, and not enough of who we think we are.

So when Joel Sternfeld has America sit for its portrait, the operation might well be expected to prompt in its intended subjects a measure of curiosity, or even exhibitionism— the modern appetite for celebrity, no matter how minor or ambiguous. But it might also engender a natural and proper reserve, a formality bred of previous confrontations with census takers, pamphleteers, and other snake-oil salesman. Off and on for a period of nearly fifteen years, Sternfeld drove around the country, setting up his big view camera and negotiating weather and other obstacles in order to produce this intelligent, unscientific, interpretive sampling of what Americans looked like at the century’s end. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the project is that so many lent their mortal souls so gamely to some perfect stranger from New York City.

Sternfeld's pictures are different from other people’s. They are easy to underestimate. They invite speculation, giving us the misleading sense we know exactly what the photographer is up to. They appear simple, each one approximating the look of chance encounter by hiding the many deliberate elements that secure fort them their seamlessness. They are unabashedly of their time, in their display of body markings, consumer electronics, leisure attire, and vehicle styles. Depending on where you stand, they can be taken as critical, ironic, and political, or earnest, straight-faced, and illustrative. They are often humorous, but in that Freudian, nervous way that hides some deeper truth.