Young girl holding a fox that has been clubbed to death.

Photo: Wallace Kirkland, Mar 01, 1944 

(via Life:sealmaiden).

LIFE! Right?! I’ve been looking into this girls eyes and studying her face for, what, like ten minutes, now. Looking as well at the dead fox with eyes and mouth agog, arms akimbo, body cupped in that uncomfortable locus shoulder ball joint. Ignore the crowd behind. Their field depth means they’re less than strophe than antistrophe, less antistrophe than epode, less epode than afterthought. Look at this girl!

I’ve been looking into this girl’s eyes and studying her face for some sign to indicate she’s evil or joyful or awful, and she’s not. That’s the entirely the whole point of this photograph, right? Juxtaposition! As if every photograph weren’t an already obsolete recapitulation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. As a person with eyes, I take umbrage at the imprecation. I do not gawk. I do not intuit logic from mere position. I do not truck with the notion that a this plus another this equals a that. There isn’t superposition in two dimensions.

Jarring orthogonality? Jawing originality. Even in 1944. But what if they’re just putting us on? I suppose it is that simple! Just another day in Kenosha, dear. But look at her smile! At them both. The fox with his arms up as if to say Don’t shoot! I’m unarmed! The girl slightly out of phase: Seeing a camera seeing her.

—History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.