He is a pretty young man who stooping for a bed in his apartment in Brooklyn, taking off his selfies. Oh, he pulled out all the stops. He installed an old -fashioned camera on the simulator. He installed a mirror. Its dark hair is tightly running into a stylish flip. His mustache is neatly trimmed. He wears ribbed, without sleeves of a white T -shirt.
He is comically circling the camera, but also tries to be cool to take off from people. He is a native of Williamsburg. He-all that we imagined to imagine about the area since he was rebooted at the turn of this century, transmulating with a shabby multi-apartment enthusiasm to post-hipster, a false bohemian paradise that he is today.
Only this young man is not from this Williamsburg. He is old. He does this selfie in 1935. I know this because he is my grandfather, Eli Fuchs, and to the left of him is the crib of his newborn daughter Lola, my mother.
During a recent visit to my mother’s house in New Jersey, I went through several old boxes and was stunned to find dozens of selfie, taken by her father in the thirties and forty years: funny, straight, embodied thirst. Eli was a reserved, modest person when I knew him – a retired employee of the federal government. He worked for most of his adulthood in the Arsenal Raritan, in the Midlsex district, designed, illustrating and controlling the seal of posters, guidelines and booklets for the US Army.
I did not know about his artistic side. Eli was a gifted photographer and artist. I have a portrait with oil on Canvas, which he made of me when I was about eight years old, his worthy average was cut by the fact that I wear a dull white Sexenties T -shirt with a red pipeline. And or was, sometimes a little like. He subscribed to PlayboyLeaving problems with the view of his grandchildren. As I also discovered recently, a little to his horror, he made a few cheesecake -kadrov and my grandmother Tessy, when she was a young woman.
Eli Fuchs's wife, Tessy.
But this selfie surprises me. This is a favorable anniversary for the form. Fifteen years ago, in June 2010, Apple brought to the iPhone 4 market, the first model, including the front camera. While mirror selfies were already popular, now you could more accurately organize inflated pouting before clicking on the shutter or strategically place your phone so that it is not obvious that you are taking a photo. Four months later, in October 2010, a new application for social networks called Instagram was launched on Apple App Store. This provided selfie and immediacy: your self -portrait can be loaded instantly from your phone to constantly thirsty. If you were a certain type of person, with a certain degree of influence, this could even be monetized.
For Eli Fuchs, selfie did not provide such immediacy or audience. The actual process took on a great job. In your early efforts, you can say that he used the mirror to capture his reflection, and, of course, he carefully calculated his efforts, founded in the world accessible to him. Then he had to develop his film. My mother, who is now ninety, recalls that although the space was densely at home: “He held a dark room with trays holding all kinds of various solvents. Then there was a whole situation of drying, with prints hanging on the line. ”
At some point, Eli met the shutter cable, which allowed him to abandon the mirror and simply outline the camera. A little later he acquired a 35 mm. The camera, and this means that he could shoot on the street, not to drag around his bulky installation: a plate camera, a tripod and a dark fabric, which he sometimes threw over his head.
By nineteen years, when he was thirty, Eli was clearly more confident in his appearance. In the photographs of this period, his thin frame was filled, his hair is diluted, and a mustache from a thin pencil, a variety of Clark Gabla. The robbery of his early selfies disappeared. He poses dreamily and without a shirt in a hammock. He looks stunning in a peak with a bud. He supports the elbow on the low wall, holding in the “On the Author” pose. Sometimes he uses both the excerpt cable and you can say a mirror, because when he holds the cord, he also slightly casts his eyes to the side to check his reflection.
In one such series, the cord and the mill accumulate in the checkered Oxford shirt and tie. He tries a tricky smile, then a daring wink. Then the shirt breaks off, and the stomach is absorbed. When I praised these photos, I was stunned, finding that he did not always perform these shoots alone. Sometimes he had a small assistant: my five -year -old mother, who in one photo stands behind him in a dress with a cap of sleeves, onions in her hair, pressing to the clamping of the stuck while he smolders behind the mirror, wear only cakes with boxers.
What is striking in Eli’s selfie is how they rhyme with today. His intention, at least, was not artistic about these photographs. He was not going to create a self -portrait à la Rimbrandt or Frida Kahlo. He certainly was able to do this; An elegant self -portrait hangs on the wall of my office, in which he sits at his table in the Arsenal Raritan, looking at the layouts of the pages and weakening a cigarette. No, in his photographic selfie Eli Fuchs was just a young dude Brooklyn, trying to create an idealized image of himself – to imagine himself a star.
My mother recalls that he was dissatisfied with his “hook nose.” This term was just as much as descriptive. In James T. Farrell “The lengths of LoniganThe trilogy of nineteen novels located in the Chicago Irish American southern side, rude characters repeatedly call Jews “hulcoses”, not to mention “brilliant”, and my beloved “drinkers for dry courts”.
