![]() The scientist tells Weschler, “It can get to be like having a billion tiny suns between you and the thing you’re trying to see.” A poet friend later corrects him: “You mean a billion tiny moons.” Particles floating in that stillness have about the same diameter as the wavelength of natural sunlight, which they refract and block. He interviewed a CalTech scientist who has studied the area and describes the stillness behind the shadowless light and haze in the air. Two decades after he had left for the East coast, Weschler still held Los Angeles at the center of his attention. Simpson but by the late afternoon light in Los Angeles, “golden pink off the bay through the smog and onto the palm fronds.” It was a masterful lens on an overexposed news event, using it as a trick to lure the reader into a deep dive on the science of L.A.’s visuals. ” That piece opens with Weschler’s memory of watching the infamous 1994 Bronco chase on television in New York, and weeping. I first encountered his work many years ago, when I read his seminal essay “L.A. From the time he was, in his own way, discovered by the legendary editor William Shawn, Weschler has never stopped writing the city of his birth into being. Unlike the droves of New Yorkers who move here and decide they have “discovered” L.A., Weschler is a native, a polymath who has spent most of his 70-odd years in New York but who never dropped a nostalgic passion for the art and light and space of home. Weschler was, for a long time, The New Yorker’s Los Angeles writer. ![]() But I digress I’m trying to describe Lawrence Weschler. In Weschler’s hands, it’s more like what might happen if Eadweard Muybridge and Rebecca Solnit got together to play dice with a magician over absinthe and tea cakes. But these questions aren’t raised in the style of, say, Susan Sontag’s philosophical interrogation in On Photography. The technique raises questions about how photographs relate to evidence-about how photographs do and don’t reliably preserve the past for perusal in the present. ![]() The long exposure times, with subjects often posed in a studio and immobilized for a few minutes, mean that they are carefully staged and can’t capture motion. These were made with a chemical process that renders glass plates sensitive to light before they’re inserted into a tripod camera. He won’t quite say that he discovered the Zohar archive he thinks of himself as a “facilitator” for an elusive historic figure named Shimmel Zohar and his collection of wet colloidal images. But then, nothing has ever been as it seems in Weschler’s work.īerkman is a longtime student of photography and its history, and Weschler quotes him saying he has a pattern “of uncovering things, trying to popularize them, and nobody really caring.” He sports the long muttonchops known as dundrearies, and lives in Pasadena in a cluttered studio. A photograph of a knitted condom recurs throughout the book and, like the mustache connection, seems like it might be fake-has to be fake. The twins appear in this archive-and in Weschler’s book-alongside a bearded lady, a merkin merchant, and a Prussian princess on a pony. Berkman is fascinated with an archive of colloidal photographs from the 19th century that chronicled, it seems, the Jewish immigrant community on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The breadth of his topics ranges from political coverage of Solidarity in Poland to profiles of artists of all types working in every medium, all presented through Weschler’s peculiar form of cultural criticism that traces correspondences across fields in McSweeney’s, Rachel Cohen described him as “a proponent of conversation where others see cultural and political life breaking up into isolated fragments.” His most recent book, A Trove of Zohars, focuses on an iconoclastic man named Stephen Berkman, like many of his subjects a fellow traveler in curiosity and non-conformity. This territory is well traveled in Weschler’s work, which spans more than 20 books, 20 years as a staff writer at The New Yorker, and time spent as a professor in the humanities. They’re staring intently at the camera, and the effect is both whimsical and uncanny. They’re sitting side-by-side and facing the camera, and from the left side of one man’s lips to the right side of the other’s, an unbroken handlebar of facial hair connects them. ![]() THE COVER OF Lawrence Weschler’s most recent book reproduces a sepia-toned old photograph of identical twins wearing vests and bowties. Subscribe now or preorder a copy from the LARB shop. This article is an excerpt from the LARB Quarterly, no.
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