ABSTRACT
Before me, I have what is undoubtedly a marooned object of memory, unmoored from maker, owner, and story. A professionally-made photograph, mounted on stiff board, shows an elaborate brick building with sweeping arches and a wide, cone-shaped roof at one end. Except for the rounded rooms underneath the cone-shaped roof, all is in ruins: massive piles of debris, individual bricks on the ground, near-leafless trees. A framed picture, strangely, still hangs squarely on a second floor wall. In the foreground are passers-by, some carrying umbrellas or parasols, many blurred because of the lengthy exposure time. The photographer’s scratched-in label, “Union Club[,] Lafayette + Jefferson” is scrawled at the bottom. In the mid-ground, at the edge of the debris field, however, are four dark-skirted women pressed closely together who appear in crisp, immobile relief. One woman holds a baby in a white frock. Why would they be standing at this place and in that arrangement? They can only be posing for a photographer, perhaps the person who appears furthest left in the foreground. The four women have paused in front of a devastated building in order to create a souvenir, a visual trace of individual lives in the aftermath of a very public catastrophe. The anonymous photographer of the scene now in my hands has, in turn, made an image of their posing for a picture. This anonymous photograph in the Missouri History Museum’s archives showing the aftermath of a devastating 1896 tornado is thereby a sort of meta-picture about encapsulating a traumatic moment: one unseen photographer catches another anonymous photographer in preserving the memory.
