“These are beautiful!” my mother said, as she scanned through the photographs. The little bell tinkled, and a rush of cool air followed us outside before it faded into the muggy heat. Shot after perfectly-framed shot slipped out of the envelope and into her hand. The sleeve was labeled “July 18 – Danaus eresimus”. She held a photograph up. “Now how on earth did you get this one?” It was a perfectly centered portrait shot of the old, charmingly rusted spigot in the garden. Perched above it was the butterfly, a lightly spotted little thing with wings the smoky, sienna color of aviators. Danaus eresimus. The Soldier. Two to three inch wingspan. Slow-flighted and easy to approach. “Got lucky, I guess,” I said, shrugging. I returned to my sandwich as she continued flipping through them, marveling at the impossible close-ups and perfect poses.

We crossed the street to the car and stepped inside. I slid the door shut and handed the envelope to my father. “A Soldier, eh? Kingdom-phylum-class-order-family-genus-species. Go.”
“Ergh,” I said “Animalia…” My father had worked for the Audubon Society. “Animalia… Arthropoda, Insecta… Lepidoptera?” He nodded. “Nymphalidae, Danaus, eresimus!” I finished, quickly.
“You forgot Danainae,” he said, as we pulled away.
“Didn’t ask for subfamily,” I muttered, looking out the window. I wouldn’t have remembered, even if he had.
Klingus Stefanis. The Father. Six foot wingspan. Very difficult to approach.
The lush, rural landscape of upstate New York rushed past the car, separated from the clear azure sky by a bold, never-ending strip of mountains. Hundreds of butterflies peppered the scene, flickering little pinpricks in the scenery. This time of year, every type of butterfly you could think of took a trip to these fields. Somewhere in the vast expanse between the small town of Port Henry and the even smaller town of Westport was nestled our cabin. Right on Lake Champlain. We had been coming up about once a month in the summer, every year since before I was born.
We reached the almost invisible turn from the highway and pulled onto the rocky, uneven path that my siblings and I had affectionately nicknamed “the Bumpy-Road.” Two minutes later, we reached a pair of cedars with a homemade “KLING” sign nailed to each of them. Between them and through a small field was the cabin. Built by my great-grandfather and his son, finished by his grandson, my father, the cabin was a marvel of amateur architecture. The lumber all came from the forest around it, the rocks were collected from the lake’s edge, and there was still a faded red cement mixer by the outdoor table where the mortar had been made.
The three of us got out of the car. My parents walked down the path to the cabin to start making lunch. “I’ll be right there!” I called. I slid the door shut and made my way through the foot-high grass to the front of the car. I bent down and examined the grill. I squinted and peered into it, then I grinned, picked up a twig, and fished out the corpses.
Two Monarchs (Danaus plexippus) and what looked like a Zebra Swallowtail (Eurytides marcellus). There was a West Virginia White (Pieris virginiensis), but there was a large portion of the left wing missing. I nudged them out carefully and let them drop onto a maple leaf that I had picked. Then I picked it up and walked a few yards into the woods until I reached a clearing, where I set the leaf down. These new catches were added to the mass of almost forty other dead butterflies, all more or less intact. This was my collection, a beautiful mass grave. Aside from the fact that they weren’t moving, and perhaps a bent antenna here or there, nothing about them betrayed the fact that they had been peeled from the bumper of a car. They were as vibrant as ever; some were the color of autumn leaves, some looked like stained glass windows.
I looked up at the sky. Still pure blue. I tried to think back to art class. What was a complimentary color to blue? I tried to see a color wheel in my head, but it wasn’t working. I glanced down at the array of butterflies, each on its own leaf. Then kneeled and dragged a few out of their lines. Using an empty leaf for green and what I think was a Karner Blue (Lycaeides melissa) for violet, I made a color wheel out of the insects. Right across from blue was orange. I picked up the Monarch’s leaf and brought it into a sunnier clearing, where there were wild strawberries growing. I gingerly pinched the very tip of its wing, like Thetis dipping Achilles in the River Styx, and placed it on top of a berry. I rotated it to obscure a missing leg, and tweaked a wing so it would appear poised for flight. Then I wound up my camera, and click.

When the daguerreotype, one of the earliest forms of photography, was invented in 1839, it opened up a world of possibilities. The ability to capture an image directly, without relying on a human interpreter to recreate it, is a concept that amazes me still today. A problem with the daguerreotype, however, was the incredibly slow exposure time. This meant that the subject had to refrain moving for an extended period of time while the picture was being formulated, making portraits difficult to produce. Matthew B. Brady, known for his iconic daguerreotypes of Abraham Lincoln, Edgar Allan Poe, and other titans, discovered a loophole to this: photographing corpses. He invested his entire life savings in a massive effort to document the American Civil War, by photographing the piles upon piles of bodies that lined the trenches. He amassed a collection of hundreds of images depicting the horrors of war, which he intended to sell to the United States government for historical purposes. The government was, not surprisingly, uninterested in preserving even more evidence of this scar on the face of US history; Matthew B. Brady died alone and in debt.

Photography of the dead was applied not only for historical purposes, but sentimental purposes as well; especially in the Victorian era, when infant and childhood mortality rates were extremely high. The bodies of children would be posed and photographed as though they were living, so as to preserve their memory. Afterward, paint or makeup was often applied to the image to enhance the illusion. The cheeks were sometimes drawn up to produce a lifelike fullness, as well. This created what could be mistaken for a grin, during a time in which people never smiled in photographs. It was not unusual for parents to be photographed with their dead child as well, although this resulted in an interesting phenomenon. Due to the long period of time in which the camera’s aperture had to remain open, the living subjects in the picture, because of slight movement (especially eye movement and blinking), were faintly blurred. The deceased, however, were in sharp focus and clear contrast. The effect is an eerie, silver image in which the living subjects are smeared and solemn, and the only eyes that can be viewed clearly are soulless, perched above a haunting grin.

Then again, the smile of a dead person isn’t any more artificial than the forced smiles that most people pull when their picture is being taken.

The relationship between one’s image and one’s soul is the subject of much cultural and philosophical debate. It is said that a vampire has no reflection in a mirror. This stems from the ancient belief that one’s image is, in reality, his/her soul. Indeed, the practice of manipulating a soul by means of manipulating an image of the soul is fairly well-known; many have heard of Voodoo. Australian Aborigines believe that when a person is photographed, a piece of his/her soul is captured. This notion is most often applied by those who hold it to avoid having their image taken. However, it presents another concept to consider: the true value of a photograph. If it does, indeed, contain a piece of soul, a photograph is an immensely valuable relic. A model profiting from copies of his/her likeness would be tantamount selling their soul. And to own a photograph of another! To happen upon a lost photograph of someone else’s would engage one in an intimate relationship with a stranger. The pursuit of found photographs is a hobby of mine, because I find this relationship fascinating. Even if a photograph doesn’t contain a slice of soul, there is a singular connection between, for example, the man in the Yankees jacket with the shocked expression on his face and myself. I found him fluttering under a subway seat, like a butterfly with a broken wing, and pocketed him surreptitiously. I will never know his name, nor will I know what caused the expression, but I know his face, in that moment, as well as anyone in his life. I’ve considered endlessly the bag in his hand, and wondered about its contents. I’ve mused over his haircut, clearly recent and clearly botched. He’s looked over me as I’ve typed countless essays, watched movies with friends, learned to moonwalk in front of my mirror.
And Yankees guy is just one in the collection. All of these strangers, tacked haphazardly onto the wall, form sort of a patchwork family. Sometimes during warm summer nights, I like to think, to the hum of the window fan, that one of the old women posing in front of the deli at the grocery store is the grandmother of the kid with the orange shorts on the skateboard, who maybe almost ran into the guy in the Yankees jacket, startling him as his picture was taken. It strikes me that there could very well be someone, or several people for that matter, studying my nose or chin, wondering where I got the scar on my arm, or where I am running to in the picture on their wall. I’d imagine that each of us is in the background of a whole score of pictures, scattered around the country in albums and frames. Are all of our souls fragmented, then? Do we lose a little of ourselves each time, fading throughout life like an old Polaroid? I don’t think so. I think it serves to connect us. The fact that you might be in a glass elevator near Times Square in the far corner of someone’s family photo is exciting, isn’t it? And just as post-mortem portraits served to remind families of a loved one that was once here, a found photograph, or the presence of a background stranger, serves to remind a mailman in Kentucky that a 6-year old in a karate uniform was here–is here–and that this kid’s life brushed up against his own, touched it, just for a moment.

During his senior year of high school, my brother worked for one of the last photography business in the area, the majority of them being forced to close because of 1-hour photo places. He spent most of his time doing busy-work, but one of the perks of his job was that he got to develop photographs. As a private establishment and a small business, his place of employment was ideal for two types of photograph: post-mortem photographs, from crime scenes and coroner’s tables; and amateur pornography, most often the sorts of things that would be shunned at the local Walgreens kiosk. Often it was difficult to decide which of the types was more repulsive. Both are developed with the intention that they be seen by only a select few. These are the photographs that aren’t left lying under subway seats, trembling in the wind from the tunnel. One type depicts a person, devoid of soul, with only the empty wrapping. The other exposes the secret inner layer of its subject; for once, without any cover.

There’s an antique store in my town that sells everything from crumpled, leathery cameras to ancient prosthetic limbs. This kind of store is very much like a graveyard, stuffed full of artifacts from past and finished lives. Near the back, where the knives and mirrors are kept, is a folder, fastened to the wall. This folder contains old portraits and daguerreotypes, as well as postcards. When I first discovered this, I became addicted to purchasing and studying these 75-year-old postcards; forming biographies for the subjects and continuing the story post-mailing.
I reached a point, however, when I had purchased every one of the fifty-something postcards in the folder. I expressed my displeasure to the woman who ran the store, to which she rather unnecessarily assured me that she couldn’t produce antique postcards at will. Frustrated, I returned to the folder to double-check. I felt around and pulled something out at random. It was a portrait, a landscape-oriented oval-shaped affair. From the center, seated side-by-side, five gaunt faces stared. Five girls with dark, sunken eyes and morbid expressions. Even in such a high-contrast, black and white photograph, I could tell their skin was ghostly white. White like the tubers of a plant grown without sunlight. They looked very much like photographs I had seen of Tuberculosis patients. I flipped the picture over and read the words scrawled on the back: “The Minninger Girls. Left to right: Annie – Gertie – Elsie – Emma + Julia.”
I returned my gaze to the girls. Save the pallid skin and the severe brows, not one of them resembled another. Annie, the leftmost, sat perfectly straight. She was the only one of the five that might be considered attractive. Soft, high cheekbones, shadowy eyes capped with bold eyebrows, and an aquiline nose; she might have been Indian had her complexion not been lighter than her white dress. Shadowy eyes like two candles in a cave on a dark cliff face. Her face conveyed nothing, save an impassive lack of concern. Gertie’s thin hair weaved around her sickly face, tied up into a bun that stuck out just half as far as her notably square jaw. She very much resembled a female Poe, if not perhaps a touch more masculine. Next to her, Elsie’s head was titled slightly to the right. This, and the position of her eyes, gave the impression that she was focused on something beyond the camera. Hers was the only face that could be considered full; the others ranged from thin to dreadfully emaciated. Emma–where to begin? Emma’s hair was done up mostly above her head, giving it an appearance of volume. This, coupled with the normal size of her head, perched atop the thinnest frame, made her appear as though she was constantly struggling to keep her head up. She seemed to be leaning it back slightly to alleviate this discomfort. Her mouth was the widest of the five, and she hardly seemed to have any lips, giving her mouth the look of trembling firmness that you might find on someone burdened with a secret. Her eyes, though, were the most different. She was the only of the five whose eyes were not dark enough a brown so as to appear black. Either blue or hazel, and I am inclined to think blue, her eyes were wide and imploring. And unlike the others her eyebrows were not straight or furrowed, but open, the way a drawbridge opens, with some tragic and now petrified secret. Last was Julia, whose appearance was nothing worth mentioning, aside from perhaps a facial structure that suggested she was Eastern European. Julia was also the only in the portrait to don what might be called a smile. Sometimes when I look at it, I see the smile. When I look back, it is often gone. None of their eyes meet mine.

I paid fifteen dollars for the portrait, and it is now mounted above my headboard. As much as their faces are haunting–I’ve often considered that they could be dead in the photograph–I feel that someone needs to stay with Minninger Girls. I like to think that I am their hero, years after their death, wondering what could be in Annie’s locket; what is Elise looking at; what is causing Julia’s smile? I like to think that it helps Emma to have someone with whom to share her secret, even though she can’t. I like to imagine who they met and who they married; where they live and when they died. And sometimes I come across the thought that they might not have lived at all past that moment, or even up to it; That their ghostly faces and sunken eyes are the result of a fatal illness, and that they were arranged, five limp little butterflies, and frozen in that empty state. But it doesn’t matter, really. Not as long as there’s always someone to look at it and feel any way about them.

This was posted on June 4th, 2009 at 12:07 pm in the category Memoir.
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