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- Herausgeber: SMOwnPublishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Trough different perspectives, this publication is aimed at outlining how the concepts of place and inhabiting have changed in an age marked by migrations and multiculturalism. In doing that, it collects critical contributions focusing on the architectural spaces generated by new nomadic practices, with the final purpose of describing how the idea and praxis of architectural interiors can be redefined between globalism and localism.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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Luca Basso Peressut, Marco Borsotti, Imma Forino, Pierluigi Salvadeo
NOMADIC INTERIORS
Contents
Foreword
Nomadic Interiors: Living and Inhabiting in an Age of Migrations - Luca Basso Peressut, Politecnico di Milano
Figures of Displacement
Pessoa and the Bare Intimacy of Desire - Daniel Cid Moragas, ELISAVA Barcelona
Visualising Migrant Interiors: George Sims and Jacob Epstein - Peter Leese, University of Copenhagen
The Interior Migrations of Roberto Bolaño - Andrew Martino, Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester
The Snail’s Strategy: Shifting Architectural Interiors and Potemkinization as Urban Resistance Tactics - Jorge Alberto Mejía Hernández, TU Delft
Heterotopic Interiors
Nomadic Interiors or the Ambiguity of (In)habiting - Fátima Pombo, Hilde Heynen, Universiteit Leuven
Learning through Nomadic Interiors: Villa Rotonda through the Lenses of Heterotopia - Marie Frier Hvejsel, Anna Marie Fisker, Aalborg University
Glitch Interiors: Forms of Inner Nomadism in the Culture of Interior Design - Davide Fabio Colaci, Chiara Lionello, Politecnico di Milano
Inside/Outside: On the Hybridization of Real and Virtual Spaces for Resistant Bodies - Marta López-Marcos, University of Seville
Ephemeral Environments
Mobile Processes, Transient Productions: Nomadic Spatial Practices - Clay Odom, The University of Texas School of Architecture, Austin
The Space Between: How People Use Space Efficiently - Obioma Oji, University of Edinburgh
Reversible Solutions for Temporary Hospitality - Tiziano Aglieri Rinella, IULM University, Milano
Hybrid Domesticities
Nor House, not Home: Temporary, Hospitable, Cross-cultural - Elena E. Giunta, Agnese Rebaglio, Politecnico di Milano
At Home in Work - Sally Stone, Manchester School of Architecture
Temporary Appropriation in Transit Interiors: Inhabitation of Shared Spaces in Student Hostels - Eva Storgaard, University of Antwerp
Interior Landscapes
Disquieting Interiorscapes: Two Houses by Katsuhiro Miyamoto - Graeme Brooker, Middlesex University, London
Rhythmic Scaling in Architecture: A Case Study of Fashion Boutiques - Olgierd Andrzej Nitka, Hong Kong University
"Une ville intérieure": The Case of Montréal - Mark Pimlott, TU Delft
Contemporary Public Spaces as Expression of Conceptual Nomadism - Francesco Lenzini, Politecnico di Milano
Interstate Migrations: Obsolescence, Adaptation, and the Globalization of the Dead Mall - Gregory Marinic, University of Houston
Authors’ Profiles
SMownPublishing
© Copyright 2015
by StudioMarinoni OwnPublishing
Corso Sempione 36
20154 Milano
www.smownpublishing.com
www.studiomarinoni.comUNIVERSITY PRESS Series
Editor Giuseppe Marinoni
Cover Vilma Cernikyte
ISBN 9788899165109
IFW2015 | Interiors Forum World 2015
3rd International Conference
May 21-22, 2015
Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Steering Committee
Luca Basso Peressut, Marco Borsotti, Imma Forino, Gennaro Postiglione, Pierluigi Salvadeo
Scientific Committee
Suzie Attiwill, Luca Basso Peressut, Shashi Caan, Daniel Cid Moragas, Arturo Dell’Acqua Bellavitis, Anna Marie Fisker, Christoph Grafe, Hilde Heynen, Gianni Ottolini, Julieanna Preston, Santiago Garcia Quesada, Penny Sparke, Marco Vaudetti, Lois Weinthal
Organizing Committee
Barabara Calvi, Stephanie Carminati, Francesca Danesi, Jacopo Leveratto, Tomaso Longo
Acknowledgements
Politecnico di Milano
Dipartimento di Architettura e Studi Urbani
Scuola di Architettura e società
Scuola di Dottorato del Politecnico di Milano
Dottorato di Ricerca in Architettura degli Interni e Allestimento
Dottorato di Ricerca in Progettazione Architettonica Urbana e degli Interni
Foreword
The editors
Identity and diversity – whether cultural, ethnic, religious or political – mark our contemporary global context on a daily basis. We live in an age that might be defined by migration, of population flow, by the movement of people, of information, of knowledge. From continent to continent, from nation to nation, from region to region, from city to city, individuals or groups of people overcome geographic borders and cultural or linguistic barriers in search of an economic comfort zone, for a new lease on life for their children, as well as for study purposes, for tourism or to experience new lifestyles and social relations.
Old and new nomads, inscribe traces, invisible or real, on the places they cross and where they stop, generating linguistic, cultural and lifestyle contaminations. They remark, delete or reconfigure their identity, absorbing or rejecting differences. By travelling and stopping – temporarily or permanently – they retrace paths followed by others or design new ones. It is a movement of global intensification that configures ways of living, inhabiting, and being in the world.
On the other hand, the concept of architectural interior has profoundly changed. It is no longer tied to the domestic and work sphere only – a dichotomy that Walter Benjamin used to tie to the capitalist society of the end of Nineteenth century– as it now includes all the places of associated and collective life. The metropolitan environment, specifically, is characterized by a succession of “internities” ‒ sometimes with transient or mutating borders ‒ that everyone re-appropriate in a more or less permanent way. “The nomadic space, a pure interior”, writes George Teyssot, underlining how the movement – of people as well as information – has also changed the original meaning of interior architecture.
Proximity, hybridization, multiculturalism, mobility, identity and diversity seem to characterize spaces for contemporary life, culture, training, hospitality, leisure, work, commerce and social relations.
Trough different perspectives and points of view, this publication is aimed at outlining how the concepts of place and inhabiting have changed in an age marked by migrations, multiculturalism and global forms of nomadism. In doing that, it collects critical contributions focusing on the new spaces and architectures generated by innovative nomadic practices, with a particular interest in evaluating the impact that the intensification of mobility and the individualized dimension of new technologies actually have on the construction of contemporary social spaces. With the final purpose of describing how the idea of architectural interiors has changed and how contemporary interiors praxis can be redefined between globalism and localism.
Nomadic Interiors: Living and Inhabiting in an Age of Migrations - Luca Basso Peressut, Politecnico di Milano
In the definition of the contemporary architectural space, the ongoing debate and research about interiors are increasingly deeply involved with issues related to the spaces for social and collective life, which are leading to a profound re-evaluation of the concepts of “interiority”, “interior space”, interior design and architecture.
As George Teyssot stated that “the paradox of social public spaces is they appear as interiors”(Teyssot 2008, 26), we actually confront with an interior space that is drawn out of the domestic realm, and is expanding within the city and the metropolitan system of relational spaces. The urban interior is no longer based on the homogeneity of a typological cluster of buildings, but rather it takes place where a network of sufficiently stable relations appears – it does not imply the need for geographic permanence, but is rather based on mobility and physical interchange. This new conception ensues from the present age of movement and mobility.
According to Martin Heidegger’s well-known philosophical concept of Unheimlichkeit – that
is the true existential condition of Sein – “being” means “to be in the world”; this definition seems particularly effective for depicting the condition of being in the contemporary world, which is strictly linked to the unceasing movement across different places and with different purposes. In the present state of social kinesis we deal with more and more complex interactions, which are progressively dissolving the customs and practices related to stable inhabiting models. Stasis is being overshadowed by life in motion – a transiency and an inability (or impossibility) to stand still.
Increased mobility is constantly redrawing contemporary urban and territorial landscapes, not only in terms of infrastructures, but also in relation to the way of living. Today the act of moving from one place to another has the same value that stable dwelling customs had in the pre-modern city; meanwhile, social structures are no longer mainly based on positional values, but rather on the individual practices of everyday life (De Certeau 1984).
At the same time, in the contemporary urban areas the centre and the periphery are losing their dichotomous nature. Territories are organized according to nodes, intersection of mobility flows, temporariness and flexibility. These structures are key concepts for human relations, economic enterprises, cultural organization and cultural management. As “places of global culture and identity” (King 2004), cities and metropolitan areas are resonant stages for migrants’ and nomads’ acting (and being) as generators of energy within a social framework of variable geometry.
In this sense the terms “migration” and “nomadism” are not only referred to diasporic events, as they also represent the complex social conditions of contemporaneity. Migration, itinerancy and nomadism have become significant terms for thinking through planetary processes, that reveal not only new global economic dynamics, but also the profound refashioning of the cultural and political spheres resulting from the accelerated mobility of goods, people, ideas and knowledge.
As the reduction of time and costs in the transportation systems turns mass tourism into an almost universal ritual, the accelerated flows of information together with the possibility for direct participation and customization offered by the Internet could completely change the very idea of travelling. Furthermore, since changes in the socio-cultural contexts produce a structural impact,the possible raise of new behaviours related to social mobility could firmly establish new figures of contemporary itinerancy.
Not only peoples migrate as a whole, but also individuals act nomadically for work, study, research or tourism. All the “new nomads” – families, students, professionals, commuters, tourists, and various city users – leave lasting traces throughout the territories, and thus they contaminate the way people use public spaces and institutions. They may emphasize or erase identities absorb or reject differences. In this erratic way of life, the nomad is a space voyager who perceives the world as a possible field of action; through an act of “appropriation” of space (i.e. inhabiting) he/she builds and dismantles interpersonal relationships and social behaviours. In the life of travellers, and especially at stopping points (permanent or temporary), metropolitan and cosmopolitan passengers sometimes retrace paths that were plotted by others. Sometimes nomads find new paths, and sometimes they affirm their identity by listening to others and modifying their ways. By changing the way they live in space, nomads can recover the pluralism and the multiplicity of cultural “roots and routes” (Clifford 1997).
The scenario outlined here intends to provide a synthetic overview of the framework which generated the programme of the conference “Nomadic Interiors,” aimed at investigating the implications and the impact of the contemporary socio-cultural context on architecture and its design. A comprehensive analysis of this context, its essential mechanisms and its consequences is fundamental to identify and understanding the actors and the practices that are giving shape to the spaces of the so called “global nomadism”. This context raises complex issues concerning the relationship between identities (both collective and individual) and their environment, as well as between the inhabitant and the possibility of appropriation and conformation of the space. These new dynamics are embodied by such figures as the flâneur, the tourist, the traveller, the moving worker, the new nomad and the migrant (voluntary or not), who represent different kinds of contemporary mobilities and different types of connections with the territory.
The characters of the contemporary itinerancy draw a heterogeneous picture of actors related to mobility. Some of them refer to new practices – which may be related to the latest technological development, or the ongoing changes in the labour market and the geopolitical order – while some others have solid roots in the sociological or in the literary archetypes of the past. These actors seem to orient the global society towards new forms of migrations.
Even though throughout the centuries sedentariness has always represented the common factor in the foundation of each settlement in any cultural context, today new nomads embody the errant, metamorphic and multi-identity features of new models of inhabiting. Nevertheless, if we consider the nomadic character as a metaphor for a social behaviour, the nomadic subjectivity can be referred to the simultaneity of complex and multi-layered identities which is present in every person, regardless of his/her degree of physical mobility. Despite the nomad, generally speaking, is often confused with the exile or the immigrant, his/her figuration is “something akin to what Foucault has described as counter-memory, a form of resistance to the assimilation to a dominant mode of self-representation” (Braidotti 1997, 52) ‒ a form of rejection of top-down identity patterns.In this sense the nomadic state is determined not only by the act of physical travelling, but also by thesubversion of such established conventions as ethnicity or nationality, in defining individual and group identities.
In the last decades, the fading of ethnic and national identities due to the growing global economic and political integration has widely been predicted. Today we can affirm that globalization has made the myth of culturally homogenous state even more unrealistic – and has often improved the opportunities for minority groups to preserve their singular identities (Kymlicka 1995). What has really been changing in recent years is the approach to these issues. While the possibility to implement ethnic rooting in the concept of nation has already been discredited, ethnicities are no longer seen as homogeneous islands, but rather as organizational containers characterized by their own variable boundaries, which enhance their cultural difference as the basis for the interdependence or the symbiosis between different groups. Furthermore, the self-representational component of the identity construction process has increasingly evolved over the last century, in particular through the gradual replacement of the “citizen” with the “consumer-person” – a person who is identified only by a contract, no longer social, but determined by his own need to purchase: he/she has the opportunity to express new forms of citizenship through the possession of goods, based on cultural, social or status affiliations, but he/she suffers from a structural weakness, due to the individual nature of the contractual dynamics he/she faces when dealing with the market. The idea of a world made of durable objects has been dissolved by the advancement of consumer goods designed to follow rapid aging processes; in this scenario, even identities may be more easily adopted and discarded. In the past identity was an intrinsic factor, firmly linked to the concept of the nation first, and then to the concept of class; today it is generated by a process of self-identification, which is a responsibility of the individual. This process is developing along with the indifference of the institutions towards the choices regarding identity issues – and thus to the consequent dismantling of direction indicators (Bauman 2010, 59).
Within this fragmented framework, based on an individual construction of meaning, the dynamics concerning the encounter and the exchanges between people and cultures could be difficult to define, especially when it comes to the confrontation with “the Other”. This may entail the acknowledgment of the multicultural dimension of society, characterized by the coexistence of different cultural groups, and the development of intercultural strategies aimed at enabling and fostering the synergy of different viewpoints, and the respectful evaluation of diverse subjectivities and specificities.
The conference aims at reflecting on this scenario. The titles of the sessions which organise the conference programme (as well as the sections of the book) were defined in order to highlight the core topics of the ongoing debate – figures of displacement, heterotopic interiors, ephemeral environments, hybrid domesticities, interior landscapes. These issues allowed for the outlining of the pivotal questions that conference intends to investigate: what kind of spaces can suit the dynamics of contemporary living in motion from the economic, political and social points of view? How has the social space changed in relation to the mobility and multiculturalism which characterize contemporaneity? Is it possible to design a space for the nomadic way of life? How can architectural theories and practices respond to the process of identity construction concerning the “new nomads”? Which could be the role of architecture in the development of the processes related to integration, hybridization and contamination of differences? How can educational institutions manage the encounter between different cultures? How can we prefigure new kind of spaces where differences may take shape without determining their collision?1
Endnotes
1 - I would like to thank Jacopo Leveratto for his contribution to the drafting of this text.
Bibliography
Bauman, Zygmunt. 2010. Intervista sull’identità. Rome-Bari: Laterza.
Braidotti, Rosi. 1997. “Figurazioni del nomadismo.” Acoma 13: 52.
Clifford, James. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley-Los Angeles-London: University of California Press.
King, Anthony D. 2004. Spaces of Global Cultures: Architecture, Urbanism, Identity. London-New York: Routledge.
Kymlicka, Will. 1995. Multicultural Citizenship. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Teyssot, George. 2000. “Sull’interieur e l’interiorità.” Casabella 681: 26.
Figures of Displacement
Pessoa and the Bare Intimacy of Desire - Daniel Cid Moragas, ELISAVA Barcelona
Preliminaries
This essay directly derives from my reading of The Book of Disquiet (Pessoa, 2002) by Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa (1888-1935), with some intromissions from his Journals (2009) and from Escritos autobiográficos, automáticos e de reflexão personal (2005) and other intimate writings. The fictitious author of The Book of Disquiet is Bernardo Soares, assistant bookkeeper in Lisbon. In many aspects, the lonely life led by this clerk reminds us of that of the author himself. Pessoa, however, considered Soares's personality neither his own nor distinct, but rather a mutilation, describing him as a semi-heteronym rather than a heteronym. As Richard Zenith tells us (2003, 474), both were maladjusted in comparison with the practical side of existence, although they didn't feel exasperated because of this.
Lisbon was the poetic setting of the drama em gente, and of Pessoa's multiplicity embodied in the heteronyms. A melancholy inhabitant of the world and at once many, “plural like the universe”, various actors would appear on Pessoa's bare stage. And they all coexisted in his wooden trunk, where he accumulated a total of 27.543 half-arranged handwritten or typed documents. Written throughout his lifetime, these unpublished texts were written in notebooks, on loose leaves, pamphlets, advertisements or small pieces of paper that featured the heading of the company for which he worked as a clerk. Without a house of his own, in sordid lodgings, his was a secret intimacy. His domestic interiors were characterised by constant changes of address, on account of the provisional quality of the flimsy walls of cheap guest houses. Distanced from himself, like Rilke in his poem Turning Point, he remained seated in hotel rooms – bare, scattered rooms – looking at the inner man. In fact, his inner experience was literature. In The Book of Disquiet and in his diaries he charted the visions of a survivor. He had a private refuge where he constructed an aesthetics in the stark intimacy of desire. And it's in The Book of Disquiet that this promiscuousness between life and literature finds its best expression. Zenith (2008, 12) believes that in these pages, Bernardo Soares's relatively dull life blends into the more sumptuous prose Pessoa ever wrote. So let us begin.
Home is everywhere
Pessoa's house is everywhere but, as he appositely remarks, he finds living difficult. He lives and yet has nowhere to go, no friends to visit. He takes shelter in the house without doors of his self. He is constantly creating characters, who perform on the bare stage of his existence. Fate has granted him (and with this he is contented) the gift of dreaming and accounting books. He works in an office that is somehow a home, in other words, the place devoid of sensation.
He whets his appetite in the mezzanines of popular eateries, open every midday except Sundays. He drinks eau-de-vie and frequents the social gatherings at the Montanha, A Brasileira and the Martinho. He is remembered as a good drinker, kind and attentive. Once the sessions are over he sneaks out without disturbing anyone and goes back to his rented room. “I'm all the naps taken by beggars amidst the trees of the country house belonging to no one” (Pessoa 2002, 287, n. 264).
He spends his days in a room rented by the month, writing. Writing words with no salvation. With no literature other than his own soul. In a peaceful and vulgar chamber, with gloomy walls, he lives alone, as he has always been. Atop the tall chest of drawers on which he writes, he glances at his piece of paper, half filled with words, a cheap cigarette consuming itself on a sheet of blotting paper that is used as an improvised ashtray, and suddenly the universe takes him by storm. He lives on an anonymous and dilapidated fourth floor, questioning life and voicing the feelings of the souls.
He escapes the vulgarity of the home, of domestic rituals, of conventions, of distracting stupidity with the banality of tea. A decisive intimacy, he prefers to stay at home, isolated, not by external circumstances but out of interest. In this way nobody steals time from his dreams. And there he is, on a fourth floor. It has only just stopped raining and he is bronzed by the impossible dusks sneaking in through the window. There, he takes his time preparing to exist. He takes hurried steps along the streets of his room, a city that hasn't left home. With each step the ceiling light flickers and the light of his existence flickers. He looks out of the window. He would wish life to be an eternal standing at the window. Apocryphal and a beggar, on the margins of that which belongs, that is, the intimate awareness of his expressions, sordid and monotonous, he contemplates the multitude of which he forms a part. The sky slowly eases, the last drops of accumulated water slither away, the voices and murmurs of the city are heard once again. “The sound of the wheels bring the cart to life” (Pessoa 2002, 260, n. 243). Something weighs him down, a vague desire. He looks out of the window and feels like one of those dusters hung up outdoors to dry and then easily forgotten. From his fourth-floor window and above infinity, “in the intimate plausibility of the afternoon that slips by” (Pessoa 2002, 430, n. 421), his dreams travel. Above the city, white laundry dances hanging from houses, and within his own isolation he feels the raving devoid of grandeur of his words.
Life plan
In order to devote himself to the craft of a writer he will have to sacrifice everything – well-paid jobs, marriage and a home. Similarly and fondly, he devises a life plan that will provide him a minimum allowance to ensure he has maximum freedom. In the first place he establishes that the minimum required for a modest financial stability is around fifty dollars. With this aim in mind he will work for several commercial firms as a skilled clerk, chiefly writing letters. His next step is to secure a house that is large enough and with space well laid out, where he can put all his papers and books in proper order. In any event, assuming that his only item of furniture is a wooden trunk in which he keeps his papers, perhaps the best option is to find a place in someone else's home. A place where he can arrange his documents, so that his oeuvre may acquire clarity and a precise objective. Even allow him to replace the large chest with other smaller ones that will store his papers by order of importance.
Yet he feels time with great pain, and is continuously obliged to abandon things and houses. He is known to have lived in over eighteen homes. He doesn't feel well where he is and he will feel ill wherever he goes. He is burdened by the metaphysical presence in life and wants to abandon all duties, repudiate all homes, even those that are not his, and live on vagueness and remains. “To be something that that doesn't feel the weight of external rain, or the anguish of private emptiness … To roam with neither a soul nor a thought, not to be in the distance …” (Pessoa 2002, 53, n. 41). With no hope, he asks life to take a seat at the door of the cabin he has never had, and beneath a non-existent sun, demand nothing. Where there is no disquiet and no desire for it. A cabin, however, would liberate him from the monotony of everything, that is but the monotony of himself. Hence, not a good idea. Better to breathe the suffocated air of his room, the air that his lungs are used to breathing. And then, who's to say that he won't miss going down the four floors, exchanging a “good day” with the barber and buying cigarettes around the corner. All in all, it would mean giving up the continuous repetition of the same characters, the possibility of tracing daily routine in the dust on the glass inside the bars of his cell. Moreover, he never leaves Lisbon, he is hardly familiar with his country or even interested in it. In short, “Let those who don't exist travel!” (Pessoa 2002, 138, n. 122).
As unruffled as a deserted lake, in an intimate withdrawal, for him the exterior world is an interior reality. He has always acted inwardly; he has never touched life. “I never had a worry except for my inner life. The greatest sorrows of my life vanish when, opening the window inside me, I can forget myself in the vision of their motion” (Pessoa 2002, 110, n. 92). This time the window looks out from the inner landscapes. He decorates the empty room with the shadow of his dreams, imposing his oversight on the “arrested exteriority of our walls” (Pessoa 2002, 324, n. 307). He sits down in the home he never had and begins, “alone with myself, to make paper boats out of the lie they'd given me. Nobody wanted to believe me, though not because I was a liar, and I had no lake where I could prove my truth” (Pessoa 2002, 173, n. 155). In these houses where he drags poverty and loneliness, he even feels his distance and that of his clothes. “I'm a little boy with a badly lit candlestick moving through a huge deserted house in his nightshirt” (Pessoa 2002, 101, n. 83). He wants a refuge where he can cry, a shapeless and spacious refuge that is, however, warm and feminine, that will give him affection.
From bed to street
He leaves the shutters open so that he can wake up early in bed. Suddenly, the murmur of the street and of people can be heard upstairs and clashes with the crude furniture of his cheap room. An old coat for his sleepless mornings lies on the abandoned dream of his sheets, and an old pair of slippers are on the floor by the bed. Confused and overweary, he wanders around the empty perimeter of his interior room. He's up and begins to feel the assurance of not knowing himself. Between the bed where he reflects on the universe, and the street, unknown and truthful, between intimacy and what is public, we find the window that lets in the cries that rise up from the street or the solace of an early ray of sun.
As stated in one of the poems by Álvaro de Campos (the only heteronym Pessoa had personal dealings with), the window belongs to a room like so many others, a room nobody knows anything about. And if they do know something, what do they really know? In this poem Campos describes how he walks up to the window and sees the street with absolute clarity; he sees pavements, cars, dogs, clothed human beings passing by and shops like the Tobacconists opposite. Everything seems alien to him, and he decides to write about it. At a certain point, a man enters the tobacconists and stamp suppliers. On his way out he recognises Esteves. They greet one another and De Campos says that the universe is rebuilt in him without ideals or hopes. Shortly afterwards, the owner of the tobacconists leans his head out of the door, the shopkeeper smiles and the poet thinks that when the two of them die one will leave the closed sign on the door and the other will leave some poems. This is how is daily existence is shaped in its mysteries. The window in the room gives on to the street continuously criss-crossed by passers-by. A truly unknown street that, as Lefebvre would say in The Production of Space, is made up of cells adjacent to it that are the rooms. When we walk through city streets by night, the lights on in the rooms reveal their windows. Alberto Caeiro, knowledgeable as few of the pagan soul, describes in a poem that by night, perpetually lost in the peaceful streets, his body just as tired as his soul, he discovers the bright light of a window in a far-away house. He is drawn to the light seen from a distance; only the light, not the life of the individual who lives there. He must surely be real, have a face, a profession and a family; and yet, he doesn't know him, nor is he bothered by the fact – he's only interested in immediate reality. In these disquisitions the light, the only reality, goes out. The man who had turned it on earlier and has now turned it off will continue to exist, but he is the only one. It is precisely this lack of knowledge that streets and cities are built and rebuilt every day.
Leaning against the windowsill, the poet has spent long hours on the verge of his becoming, observing what is insignificant. A fallen container, a cry without an echo in the middle of the desert, a useless lighthouse in the abandoned ocean, “I will only have been the void of myself, the nameless echo of the stars that are present” (Pessoa 2008, 63). From the window (or towards it), Pessoa writes on solitude, the awareness and mysterious importance of existence, the “winged importance” of the commonplace. A penetrating teacher, from the threshold of the window he reveals how we surrender to ourselves, desolated by feeling our existence. For him, life only acquires reality thanks to the pains of literature and its intimate uprising. “All impressions are incommunicable unless we make them literary” (Pessoa 2002, 134, n. 116). Kafka believed much the same. On one occasion he wrote to Milena to say that perhaps she was right when she declared that writing was more wanting than living, but at least it was clearer.
Often when he returns home, Pessoa feels quite depressed and eager to express his feelings in writing. Observing the city like anyone else, and secretly imitating infinity. So many hours spent reading his work, on the everyday domestic verge of his existence have produced seas and shipwrecks. A passer-by of everything, like a forgotten castaway, he impatiently questions the ashen words of the message in the bottle to be discovered, insisting that he is the castaway. And yet for him living is not necessary, creating is necessary: “to narrate is to create, so to live is only to be lived” (Pessoa 2002, 181, n. 163). At the end of the day he makes his way home with the lapels of his clerk's jacket turned up, avoiding the puddles of cold rainwater, intimately confused at having “always forgotten his umbrella and human dignity” (Pessoa 2002, 48, n. 36).
Bibliography
Pessoa, Fernando. 2002. Libro del desasosiego: Compuesto por Bernardo Soares, ayudante tenedor de libros en la ciudad de Lisboa. Barcelona: Acantilado.
------. 2005. Escritos autobiográficos, automáticos y de reflexión personal. Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores.
------. 2008. Autobiografies, edited by Richard Zenith. Barcelona: Angle Editorial.
------. 2009. Diarios / Journals. Madrid: Gadir.
Zenith, Richard. 2005. “Post mortem.” In Fernando Pessoa: La educación del estoico. Barcelona: Acantilado.
Visualising Migrant Interiors: George Sims and Jacob Epstein - Peter Leese, University of Copenhagen
Introduction
Public discourses on migrant interiority have a rich, highly contested history. In this essay I ask how two accounts from within this history might tell us about the image and inner life of migrants both past and present. In particular, I investigating a pair of radical interventions from the early 1900s, from a moment when some in Britain and the United States felt themselves besieged by apparently endless streams of new arrivals. Visibly different among the new settlers, more so than Italian or Irish for example, and the target of greatest overt hostility, were the rural Jewish peasants from the central-eastern European settlement “Pale” within the Russian Empire. As large, dense populations of new settlers flourished in East London, and the Lower East Side of Manhattan, journalists, political propagandists and philanthropists began to explore, observe and report, often in crude clichés, and often without directly engaging those who were the subject of their investigation. Such mediations of habit, custom or mentality were part of a wider, highly polarising debate on the place of new migrant workers in the urban metropolis.
In this setting, the use of visual techniques to express interiority to a mass audience was an innovation, all the more necessary given the inability or unwillingness of the newly arrived to explain themselves to their host societies. Around 1900 photography had not yet gained an overpowering grip on the public imagination, so that newspaper sketches or watercolour paintings for example, were still widely used in journalistic reportage. Similarly photographs could be made or adjusted using engraving, multiple exposure and retouching techniques. Identification, documentation and surveillance were often the purpose behind later Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century photography, but a new mood of ethnographic observation and a more sympathetic mediation between new migrant arrivals and the emergent middle class reading public became increasingly important in political discussion.
The first account is by London journalist and playwright George Sims (1847-1922), who wrote extensively on working class life, including its immigrant populations, in the later Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century. The second is by visual artist Jacob Epstein (1880-1959), who grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, took an early professional interest in the characters and daily life of his home neighbourhood, and worked in collaboration with the New York journalist Hutchins Hapgood (1869-1944). Both Sims and Epstein started publishing work on the Jewish immigrant populations in mass circulation journals and magazine articles, both attempted to communicate experience, feeling and aspiration to a wide audience in the host community. My claim, which I will return to at the end of this essay, is that Sims, Epstein and their various collaborators pursued a particular kind of hybrid communication. They exploited and modified existing image conventions to bridge the gap between newly arrived, and recipient community; attempted to place unfamiliar figures within known settings, to display material and emotional interiors which could in some way be identified by their audiences. Moreover, they worked within a persistent minority tradition of “subjectivist” migrant representation which can be dated back at least to James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw (Eighteenth Century) and which persists into the late Twentieth and early Twenty-first Centuries, for example in A Seventh Man (Berger and Mohr 2010).
George Sims’ “Sweated London” (1901)
Between 1901 and 1903 the journalist and playwright George R. Sims edited and partly wrote Living London, a wide ranging survey of the capital published in Thirty-six instalments, which included contributions from many well known authors of the day (Sims 1901-3). One of Sims’s essays, “Sweated London”, begins with the author imagining himself on the banks of the Thames in the docklands district. He describes the scene for his readers:
Let us meet a ship from Hamburg, laden with men and women who will presently be working in the dens of the sweaters. It is a pouring wet day. The rain is coming down in torrents, and one has to wade through small lakes and rivulets of mud to reach the narrow pathway leading to Irongate Stairs, where the immigrant passengers of the vessel lying at anchor in the Thames are to land. This is a river steamer, and so the wretched immigrants are taken off in small boats and rowed to the steps. Look at them, the men thin and hungry-eyed, the women with their heads uncovered and only a thin shawl over their shoulders, the children terrified by the swaying of the boat that lies off waiting to land when the other boats have discharged their load! What must these people feel as they get their first glimpse of London? (Sims 1902, 50)
Sims’ last question was critical. It was one that he had asked of various neglected groups within the newly emerging metropolis of the later Nineteenth Century, not least of the young, but also of native rural migrants arriving to the city in search of labour.
In partial answer to his question “what must these people feel?” Sims worked throughout his career with set designers, sketch artists and photographers to find visual parallels which elaborated and supplemented his own written texts. To understand this process fully (the ways in which Sims developed this technique, the purposes he had in mind, as well as to judge the extent of his success) it is necessary first to examine the images and text, as well as to consider Sims’ earlier career, in more detail.
Three thousand or so words long, “Sweated London” incorporates three watercolour paintings, and six photographs1. Two of the watercolours, “Just Landed” and “Aliens Arriving at the Irongate Stairs”, are by the celebrated, popular Dickens illustrator William Rainey (1852-1936). These images are still widely recognized and reproduced. The remaining painting, by the French illustrator H. H. Flere, is titled “At the West End: Surprised by the Factory Inspector”. One photograph shows a small Red Cross control station label and is titled “Alien’s Baggage Label: ‘Disinfected”’. The remaining five photographs have a painterly quality which, as Keith Wilson has stated, suggests they are made by a photogravure technique whereby the photographic negative is not developed in a dark room, but transferred to a copper plate, which is then used to reproduce the image in ink (Wilson 2007, 134). These five photograph-based images consist of two interiors (“An East End Den”, “In the Poor Jews Temporary Shelter”, and two street scenes “Alien Types” (two portraits juxtaposed into a single image) and “Gouldston Street on Sunday Morning”.
Living London began as a monthly illustrated magazine which over a three years period published one hundred and seventy five articles. The magazine format allowed a mix of trivial, thoughtful and informative pieces with titles like “Sunday Morning East and West” (Arthur St. John Adcock), “Loafing London” (Arthur Morris) or “Cat and Dog London” (Frances Simpson). These were observational rather than overtly political writings, yet Sims’ overall choice of subject matter was always timely. Produced as it was over thirty six months, and employing as it did a varied authorial voices, the unifying conceit and coherence of the collection never entirely stabilises. In the first volume prologue Sims refers to Living London as a set of theatrical scenes, but also as a panoramic landscape, and even as a tableau of filmed moments (Sims 1901-3, Vol. 1, 3). Still, taken as a whole the essays have a powerfully democratising impulse: politicians, lawyers and gentlemen in their clubs are given equal space and attention as the unemployed, homeless and newly arrived immigrant. Assumptions of class, race or gender are powerfully present and often unconsidered, yet a remarkable absence of condescension is often noticeable, particularly in Sims’ own pieces.
A second context for Sims’ “Sweated London” article was the wider, intensely polarizing immigration debate prompted in part by the increase in Eastern European arrivals. In East London for example the recorded number jumped from 9.000 in 1881 to 63.000 in 1911 (Marriott 2011, 228). In 1902, 45.000 signatures were collected in a petition opposing the continued presence of “aliens”; in the following year the Royal Commission on Alien Immigration proposed a formal limit on “undesirables”. Political agitation led eventually to the Aliens Act (1905) which was almost wholly ineffective, but which acted as a statement of intent specifically to reduce the arrival of Baltic Jews (Winder 2013, 258-59; Glover 2012, 117-20). Against this background of strong public opinions, Sims’ decision to directly identify with “alien” labourers was anything but a disinterested act of reportage. He chose rather to trace in depth the path of Jewish migrants’ arrival and settlement with all the attendant dangers of penury, homelessness and exploitation by ruthless employers; to describe their anxiety, fear and despair; to record their apparent types and motives; and to demystify their living and workshop labour conditions in Whitechapel and surrounding districts.
Sims’ counterweight to the Judeophobic mood of the early 1900s is suggested by the title of H. H. Flere’s painting. “At the West End: Surprised by the Factory Inspector” dramatises the author’s argument that exploitative working conditions were common across the capital rather than confined to, or imported by, newly arriving garment industry bosses. By contrast, Sims account of the “sweating” system explicitly opposed the more extreme anti-alien commentaries of, say, the British Brothers’ League. As in the following description of how workshop supervisors are themselves exploited:
We have seen the sweater engaging his hands in the slave market. Let us follow them to the den. But first it will be as well to remove a false impression with regard to the sweater himself. He is not always a wealthy spider sucking the life-blood from the flies he has caught in his web. He is not a gorgeous Hebrew with diamond rings and a big cigar. He is frequently a worker also, a man sweating because he is himself sweated. (Sims 1902, 53-4)
Such overt appeals are less effective, though, than the visualization of migrant experience which Sims incorporates through his article’s commissioned images. Rainey’s “Just Landed”, for instance, takes a full page in the original text, and uses a language of imagery which would have been familiar to his audience. This is a crowded urban scene incorporating a number of full-length portraits, clearly readable character types, and a well-defined set of dramatic events and emotions. Far from being “alien”, the characters of “Just Landed” are recognisably familiar: the mother feeding an infant; the distressed child carrying a bundle of worldly possessions; men whose poses, features and dress in part match conventionally identifiable markers of foreignness, but who also register vivid emotions in recognisably nearby localities.
To give another example, a composite pair of photographs placed centrally across two columns of text in the original page layout has the title “Alien Types”. One figure stands in a shop front doorway leaning against the wall; the second stands in a street holding bolts of cloth on both arms: both wear long beards, long coats and bowler hats. While they are certainly distinctive in appearance, and while the idea of “types” indicates an impulse to categorise and classify, they are also notably ordinary, even mundane figures. They might be photographs of almost anybody in the streets, and certainly are less picturesque than the poses and portraits in two other articles “Russia in East London” and “Oriental London” by Sims’ travel companion and fellow journalist Count E. Armfeld (Sims 1902, 24-28; 81-86).
Sims’ background is critical to any understanding of his intervention. Playwright, author of popular recital verse, prolific journalist and social activist, Sims represents an unusual alignment of interests and activities particular to the later Nineteenth Century (Fishman 2007, 13-15). His family background, as the author explains in his memoir My Life: Sixty Years’ Recollections of Bohemian London (1917), was proudly nonconformist in religion and politics; he could trace back several generations of keen political debaters, writers on social issues and, not least important, enthusiastic theatre goers.
Sims’ own theatrical persona developed early, alongside his lifelong affection for the music hall and his enthusiastic, costly, though never entirely ruinous career as a gambler. His first success as a stage writer was in the late 1870s when he produced “knockabout” comedy sketch shows. An early recitation piece from this time, “In the Workhouse – Christmas Day” is characteristically observant and surprisingly hard-hitting in its attention to poverty. Sims’ first major success for the stage was The Lights o’ London (1881), a workmanlike, vivid and crowd-pleasing piece which incorporated its author’s enjoyment of distinctive characters, concern for the urban poor, and outrage at the degradations they were often forced to endure. The play is a fast-paced story of elopement, greed, a disputed inheritance, an innocent man framed for murder, and the righting of an injustice. As the critic Michael Booth has noted, this lively mix of incident, character and sudden reversals of fortune proved a huge success because it was witty and engaging, but also because it communicated with audiences so effectively through the pictorial and theatrical conventions of melodrama (Booth 1995, xxiii-iv).
Sims’ awareness of visual cues develops in his early theatrical work then, and from The Lights o’ London onwards he heightens both spectacle and emotion: in the observable, physical language of stage melodrama this meant such techniques as actors striking an attitude, or forming an urban tableau (Tonnies 2008, 185-88). The author also used both visual and moral dramatic contrasts throughout the play, for example, between experience and innocence, riches and poverty, evil and good. These techniques were further enhanced in the original 1881 production of The Lights o’ London with the noted, ambitiously spectacular staging and production of the play by Stafford Hall and Wilson Barrett (Booth 1995, xxiii). In particular, as the programme notes for 1881 state, Act 4 Scene 2 opens with a reproduction of a widely recognisable image of the day, Luke Fildes’ “Applicants to a Casual Ward”(1874), which first appeared as a wood engraving magazine illustration for The Graphic in 1869, and was only later made into a full scale painting. The differences between these two versions, especially the greater stress on character, pathos and light in the 1884 painting, indicate a shifting sensibility among audiences through the 1870s which Sims is well able to exploit by 1881 (Meisel 1983, 386-88). This can be characterised as an attraction to pictorialism since it picked out and expressed recognisably truthful and local aspects of everyday experience that were absent in more notably “respectable” art than magazine illustration or stage melodrama.
Over the next twenty years Sims worked as a jobbing journalist and playwright more interested in maintaining his finances than securing a place in the literary cannon. Yet he also maintained a strong interest in social issues, for example in How the Poor Live, collaborating with his childhood friend and professional illustrator Frederick Barnard (Sims 1883). Like Living London, this account begins as a collection of magazine articles following a series of walks by the pair around East London2. So, in light of his early career “Sweated London” becomes a powerful expression of Sims’ aesthetic and social concerns. His use of photographs and paintings locates newly arrived migrants as one of many exploited groups among the working poor whose difficult lives are readily, identifiably similar to the wider urban population, and whose experiences are not very different from those of unemployed or homeless native Londoners.
Yet Sims cannot reach very far into the experience of newly arrived Russians, Galicians or Lithuanians. To keep the attention of his curious audience, more middle class than for his play of twenty years earlier, he uses melodrama to generate moral certainty. In particular by re-working the stock figure of the Jewish sweater to show the wider set of East End working and living conditions, then in dire need of reform. Still, if “Sweated London” and the Living London project as a whole cannot escape the ambivalence expressed in the 1905 Aliens Act, it nevertheless challenges misplaced assumptions as part of a sustained effort dating back to the late 1870s to convey a subjective truth, expressed in the question, addressed directly to Sims audience, “what must these people feel?”
Jacob Epstein’s Hester Street (1902)
In his search for a more effective way to transmit the experience of others Sims supplements and tempers melodrama with a newer ethnographic sensibility which emerged through the various social investigations of the 1890s. One remarkable example is Beatrice Webb’s self-reflexive journal of her investigation into the East London sweatshop trade (Webb 1898). A parallel development was under way in turn-of-the-century New York, which had its own long, intricate traditions of city reportage.
Considering the later Nineteenth Century phase of this tradition, immediately preceding The Spirit of the Ghetto,it was Jacob Riis who most prominently stepped away from the anecdotalism of, for example, James D. McCabe’s Light and Shadows of the Great City (1872) and towards a more practically minded activist writing. Riis’s photographs have perhaps lasted better than the text of How the Other Half Lives (1890). Yet the lives documented in his images remain anonymous and as such can only characterise “types” or “problems”. An early exponent of flash photography, Riis’s pictures of the urban poor depended as much as anything on surprise, as Luc Sante has noted. “The flash awoke sleepers and momentarily blinded drinkers and workers and nursing mothers, pinning them in their surroundings and shocking them into submission to the lens, also allowing Riis and party to get away without fuss” (Sante 1997, xvii). Riis’s two chapters on “Jewtown” and “The Sweaters of Jewtown” use the same approach, in words as well as images; How the Other Half Lives covers much the same external topography as The Spirit of the Ghetto (1902), yet Epstein and Hapgood additionally takes pains to map the individual interiors as well as the external landmarks of Hester Street (Rischin 1967, xxiv).
The beginnings of The Spirit of the Ghetto werenot very different from Living London. Sections were originally published as a series of articles for Atlantic Monthly, The New York Commercial Advertiser as well as various magazines and papers in Boston and New York. The idea of gathering the pieces together came from Hapgood’s fellow author and partner Neith Boyce Hapgood (Rischin 1967, vii). Yet where Sims, a native Londoner, appears to have depended on his own instinct and long experience as a wandering investigative writer, Hapgood, a New Englander by descent, found two collaborators as he started to explore the emerging megastetl on the Hudson. One was fellow reporter, author of Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896), and later editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, Abraham Cahan. The second was a young artist born and raised on Hester Street, later an eminent sculptor living in London, Jacob Epstein3.Hapgood’s opening captures the mood and themes of his account:
No part of New York has a more intense and varied life than the colony of Russia and Galician Jews who live on the East Side and who form the largest Jewish city in the world. The old and the new come here into close contact and throw each other into high relief. The traditions and customs of the Orthodox Jew are maintained almost in their purity, and opposed to these are forms and idea of modern life of the most extreme kind. The Jews are at once tenacious of their character and susceptible to their Gentile environment, when that environment is of a high order of civilization. (Hapgood 1965, 3)
The New York writer begins from a community which is already present rather than one which is just arriving, as in Sims’ report; and where Sims stresses the difficulty of understanding migrant experience at the same time as he interprets it on behalf of his audience (“what must these people feel?”), Hapgood confidently assumes his role as knowing guide. Like Sims in London, Hapgood’s timing was apt, if in part accidental. The Spirit of the Ghetto can be read as a Judeophilic statement in response to the Dreyfus Affair in France, and as a defence of Eastern central European arrivals following the assassination of President McKinley in September 1901, which was followed quickly by the passage of the New York Criminal Anarchy Act (1902) (Gilboa 2009, 41).
Visually, where Riis uses middle distance sketches and one interior shot, “‘Knee-pants’ at Forty-Five Cents a Dozen – a Ludlow Street Sweater’s Shop”, and where Sims’ illustrations and photographs move in a little closer, Hapgood’s approach complements Epstein’s close-up, hand-drawn portraits of named protagonists. What interests me here is the visual re-assignment made by Epstein’s drawings: the ways in which they complement and support Hapgood’s text as well as the artist’s own concerns, to create a uniquely sympathetic portrait of a migrant community. To understand these two aspects of The Spirit of the Ghetto requires a closer look at the backgrounds of both Epstein and Hapgood, and an examination of the illustrations.
Jacob Epstein’s family were relatively early arrivals on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. His parents were also more affluent, but otherwise not uncharacteristic of the rapidly expanding immigrant population who helped transformed Manhattan from international trading centre intourban metropolis and, by the second decade of the twentieth century, into a global capital. The newly arriving populations in New York amounted to about 1.4 million between 1880 and 1920. Eastern European settlers over the same period increased from about 60 000 to 400 000; three quarters of Manhattan Jews settled in the Lower East Side (Dowling 2007, 110). Jacob’s father, Chatskel Barntovsky, was born in Augustów, 1859, in Russian Poland. On arrival at Castle Garden in 1870 the immigration officials changed his name to Epstein. Max Epstein’s journey took him via Whitechapel, whereas Jacob’s mother had already arrived with her parents, Isaac and Boschy Solomon, in 1865 (Babson 1984, 1-2). Jacob, born in November 1880, was the third of eight children. Growing up in such distinctive surroundings Jacob, partly due to illness as a child, spent much time observing street life, as he wrote in his autobiography:
This Hester Street and its surrounding streets were the most densely populated of any city on earth, and looking back at it, I realized what I owe to its unique and crowded humanity. Its swarms of Russians, Poles, Italians, Greeks, and Chinese lived as much in the streets as in the crowded tenements, and the sights, sounds, and smells had the vividness and sharp impact of an Oriental city. Hester Street was from one end to the other an open-air market, and the streets were lined with push-carts and pedlars, and the crowd that packed the side-walk and roadway compelled one to move slowly.(Epstein 1955, 1)
This life of the neighbourhood led to a brief, but significant spell of political engagement around 1902, when Epstein was in his early twenties, and when he worked as an inspector for the Tenement Housing Department. He was certainly engaged too in the social and intellectual milieu of the Lower East Side, which was much preoccupied with socialist and anarchist activism. He knew Rose Pastor Stokes, for example, campaigner for women’s rights and in 1919 a founder of the Communist Party of America, from his teaching at the immigrant-centred Educational Alliance. He also became friends, despite his father’s disapproval, with the anarchist activist and writer Emma Goldman (Babson 1984, 5). Perhaps just as formative for Epstein, his circle included thinkers and artists whose objections to capitalism and political centralization were expressed more in an admiration for Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy or Walt Whitman.
Epstein also had connections, through Hutchins Hapgood, to a group of writers who favoured “realism”. Social investigation, detailed description, and an engagement with social issues, especially of the poorer city communities, preoccupied this group of young, highly educated, metropolitan journalists; their broader ambitions extended to both social reform and literary reputations. Although he was of an earlier generation, and Hapgood’s circle reacted against his superficial ethnic categorisations, Jacob Riis was best known of the campaigning writers in 1890s New York. Conceiving his account in part as a counterweight to Riis, and in his search for better insights, Hapgood was encouraged by Lincoln Steffens, editor of the New York Commercial Advertiser. Through Steffens, Hapgood found both Abraham Cahan and, indirectly, Jacob Epstein.
Even within this group of journalists and writers, Hapgood’s approach was distinctive. Robert Dowling has noted how Hapgood’s early academic ambitions gave way to a more wide-ranging literary sensibility influenced by his studies in Berlin with Georg Simmel (Dowling 2004). Simmel’s notions of character type, strangers and wanderers are certainly apt for Hapgood’s purposes. Across the ten chapters of The Spirit of the Ghetto his account maps the sensibilities, mentalities as well as artistic and intellectual activities of a migrant community. The study is at its most eloquent when exploring the tensions faced by new arrivals: their pressing economic, housing and educational needs on the one hand, but also the urgency to find expressive forms which could assert identity and values as well as articulate a critique of the host society. Hence the detailed portrait of various artists and thinkers, from theologians, to theatrical performers, to the self-expressive personalities described as “odd characters”.
The Spirit of the Ghetto explores a singularly defined set of preoccupations, and seemingly as a by-product allows the outside reader a glimpse into the characters and aspirations of a migrant community; it is also a work of heightened observation. Given the time and place in which the account was produced it would be difficult to avoid shades of theatricalization, melodrama or colonising appropriation (Haenni 2008, 14-16). Hence, there is an inherent contradiction in the account between the wish to individualise or even exaggerate through character sketches, and the requirement to contextualise individual portraits within a scenic panorama. Hapgood is forced in his account to continually zig-zag between two competing goals. First is his wish to guide a wholly unknowing audience whose interest is benign, but also acquisitive – a more observationalist, expository style. Second is his more engaged, activist impulse – to explain the world as it seems from another’s precisely localised standpoint.
What nudges The Spirit of the Ghetto towards a more “subjectivist” view is Hapgood’s stress on individuals rather than types, but more decisively Epstein’s complementary view: the artist’s wish to portray his own migrant community from within, to draw friends or local characters, but to avoid picturing the district as he felt even up-towners saw it, as “a jungle for strangeness” (Epstein 1955, 8).
Chapter Three, “The Old and New Woman”, may serve as a case study of the collaboration between Hapgood and Epstein. Hapgood’s text stresses the distinctive mentality, appearance and preoccupations of the newly arrived, in sharp contrast to their “American sisters”. The cost of physical labour on health and appearance, the contrast between orthodox and ‘modern’, and the drive towards financial and social independence are all important themes the author finds in everyday life as well as reflected in immigrant writing. Epstein’s portraits fill out and individualise these subjects. “Her life is absorbed in observing the religious law” (Epstein 1955, 73), as it is titled in the first edition, is an image which parallels the male devotion of an earlier sketch, “submerged scholars” (58). Bewigged and plainly dressed, an older woman looks down in contemplation. Where Hapgood stresses oppression under the weight of religious law and male authority, Epstein sees devout engagement and dignity. “Intensely serious” (78), “A Russian girl-student” and “A Russian type” are a group of three half-portraits, each of which is an attempt to capture individual character, engagement with the world of ideas and moral values, as well as a practicality of purpose which stresses activism and engagement over appearance or outward manners. Raquel Gilboa has suggested that at least two of these portrait subjects were known to Epstein: “Intensely serious”, his then girlfriend Adele; “A Russian girl-student”, the campaigning anarchist Emma Goldman. Certainly these are less “types”, as the picture label suggests, than personalities rendered with tender respect. They are also portraits of the “New Woman” who found common cause in political and personal liberation. “Working girls returning home” (Epstein 1955, 84) extends this theme into the material world, stressing the variety of possibilities and procedures of integration that came more readily, and more willingly, to the young. Of the various street scenes this is among the most crowded, highlighting new experiences, standards of dress and behaviour, as well as the changed circumstances of a younger generation, while the street trade and more familiar, traditional life of the ghetto continue in the background.
Visualising Migrant Interiors
To return to my opening claim, I would like to suggest that there is a persistent minority tradition of migrant interior portraits which we can trace back certainly to the eighteenth century, and which creates a “genealogy” of migrant-figure images that we still observe today. One earlier strand of these interior representations emerged with the various accounts of formerly enslaved Africans. James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw (1710-75) for example, who worked with a collaborator to transcribed his spoken words into a written text for the purposes of communicating with a wider “host” society. This collaborative “transcription” role is easily caricatured as one of erasure or forgery, the distortion or hijacking of “authentic” inner lives for other purposes. Yet Gronniosaw’s Narrative (1772) advocates the right to freedom, cultural difference, and common humanity (Leese 2012). Gronniosaw, for one, could not have communicated his life-story, dire circumstances or beliefs so effectively without an amanuensis to further his communicative act.
In this light we can see Sims and Epstein as two points on a scale of reference: two sets of strategies by which the interior life and the interior circumstances of migrant living are registered with varying degrees of success. The success of these cross-cultural communications depends on proximity to the subject, and in particular on the degree of collaborative exchange in the image-making process.
By the late Nineteenth Century it is possible to more readily make composite text / image portraits such as those by Sims, Epstein and their collaborators. In “Sweated London” only one photograph-like image comes close to a domestic interior. “An East-End Den” (Sims 1902, 52) shows four men, a kind of surrogate family, eating a makeshift meal, perhaps at the end of a working day. Three figures squat in a circle eating, drinking and reading. An older man sits on an improvised box-chair. In the centre is a small table also improvised from a box. Above the “table” is a single light. Scattered around the room are a few clothes, a chest of draws, and on the walls a couple of tattered posters. The fireplace is unlit and empty. The surroundings are convincingly sparse, stressing the secondary importance of whatever is not work. The stark single light makes the scene “alien”, yet also reveals an urge for stability and domesticity. Compared to a Riis photograph, “An East-End Den” does not “pin down” its subject, but does keep its distance, displaying rather than engaging.
