One of the pieces on display at TMU’s The Image Centre is this is pen and ink drawing signed by “Fun & Borckmann” from about 1895. It is part of the exhibit, “Hypervisibility: Early Photography and Privacy in North America, 1839-1900.” The drawing is on loan from the collection of Stephen Bulgar and Catherine Lash. As you can see, across the top is the title, “A Common Enemy of Mankind”. If you start at the first panel on the top left, you might think it is etiquette suggestions for photographers, but on closer inspection, is it?
Let’s take a look!
Panel 1 (below): ” The amateur
Photographer
A cheerful sort of nuisance is.
Does it occur To him – or her –
He shouldn’t take what isn’t his
Panel 2 (above): A man whose life
Has been one strife
Against appearances of wrong,
Can’t kiss his wife
Lest lenses rife
On negatives his kiss prolong
Panel 3 (below) – along with “The other fellow’s girl!”
“Where’er one goes
To seek repose
Far from the city’s heat and din
Be cannot doze
In wooded close
But that a snap-shot takes him in.”
Can I call him a jaunty looking fellow with his striped blazer and the polka dot band on his hat?
Panel 4 (below): “Sometime mayhap,
A city chap
May linger in the moonlight fair;
He hears the tap
Of shutter-snap
And knows too well he’s pictured there.”
Panel 5 (below): “Or in the street,
If he should meet
A former friend of single days,
It’s not meet
His smile so sweet
Be captured in actinic rays.”
Panel 6 (above): “But in default
Of dungeon vault
In which to lock this modern pest,
A plain assault
Might cause a halt –
But then, perhaps, a gun were best.”
Life’s little indiscretions now preserved in little snap-shots! Please don’t shoot the photographer!
Extra litte note or two: Peter Borckmann was an artist whose pen and ink drawings appeared in the “New York Fun Magazine”. In the 1880s and 1890s, this art form became very popular as demand for humorous illustrations grew along with the increasing popularity of magazines and journals at that time. The “Fun Magazine” was published in the 1880s and early 1890s.
Oh, in case you were wondering about that word ‘actinic’. I looked it up….According to Merriam Webster: “of, relating to, resulting from, or exhibiting chemical changes produced by radiant energy especially in the visible and ultraviolet parts of the spectrum.” Sounds a lot like old-fashioned, pre-digital, light hitting chemically treated film, photography to me!
as I walk Toronto 