Eavesdropping (31 page)

Exhibit 33
Blind woman
, Paul Strand, 1916

Even sighted individuals may not know that the visual image given off by their face or body is
them
. We take for granted that the person we see in the mirror is “us,” but this sense of self does not exist in all primate species, nor are human infants born with it. There is an age when normally developing infants pass the “mirror recognition test.” In this test, a bit of rouge is surreptitiously applied to the tip of the infant’s nose. The infant is then exposed to his image in a
mirror. If he attempts to rub off the rouge, which usually does not happen until about twenty-four months, it is assumed that the infant knows that the person in the mirror is
him
.
³⁵

The first street photographers to reach public attention were Humphrey Spender and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Spender documented the lives of ordinary English people in the 1930s and 1940s. His pictures were enormously successful, partly because, as he wrote a half-century later, he “believed obsessionally that truth would be revealed only when people were not aware of being photographed. I had to be invisible.”
³⁶
Spender’s counterpart in France, Cartier-Bresson, wrote that he “prowled the streets all day… determined to
‘trap
’ life—to preserve life in the act of living.”
³⁷

Perhaps the photographer most intent on capturing private moments was an American, Walker Evans. Between 1938 and 1941, when Spender and Cartier-Bresson were photographing people wherever they found them, Walker took more than six hundred pictures of people on the subways of New York. He used a camera that was concealed in his coat.
³⁸

Evans’ photos show subway riders with their masks off. Whatever influences their countenance is known only to them, and possibly not even to them—perhaps a personal problem, or the anticipation of something they will experience when they get home. Inspecting the photographs, one is freed from the observational rules that normally apply. It is not just that the subjects are unaware of us. They also cannot see that we are inspecting or examining them.

The subway photos are liminal in more ways than one. “The subway,” wrote photography historian Luc Sante, “is a neutral zone in which people are free to consider themselves invisible; time spent commuting is a hiatus from social interaction.”
³⁹
The poet Billy Collins also commented on this. In the introduction to a later book of subway photographs he wrote, “the subway is a place, but the human subjects are in transit. They are neither here nor there. These travelers often wear their ‘subway face,’ that look of self-absorption, the middle-distance stare that suggests that life has been temporarily suspended only to resume back on street level.”
⁴⁰
°

Exhibit 34
Subway Passengers
, Walker Evans

Most of the subway riders are not doing anything. There is little in their activities that would be legally actionable, but their images tell inferencing others something about their relationships, their selves, and their lives. This is why some countries have laws that protect the unauthorized use of a person’s image. In 1999 photographer Luc Delahaye was forced to publish his book,
L’Autre
(“The Other”), outside France (in England). The reason is that it contained close-up photographs of ninety ordinary French people—each taken surreptitiously by Delahaye on the Paris Metro. In France, Delahaye could have been sued for “stealing” their images.

It is no longer what people
do
in the privacy of their own
homes
—like the hoarding of meat by the Kung and the Samoans, or the adultery of English villagers living in lightly built seventeenth-century houses—but what they
experience
in the privacy of their own
minds
. To the observer, this experience is both liminal and
psychological. No longer seeking information about what people
do
in private, observers ask what they are
like
in private, enjoying spectatorial experience in its own right.

In unseeing faces, the absolute separateness of individual souls becomes fully evident. The photographer Peter Peter said he thought there was something
beautiful
about the subjects in his own subway photos, a beauty that derived from their spontaneity and openness, and their honesty.
⁴¹
He felt this particularly when something about the strap-hangers gave clues to their thoughts and feelings, something he could have used to relate to them had his purpose been social.

I too believe there is something beautiful and pristine about humans in their natural monadic state. There may even be a nobility of sorts, much as there is nobility in animals in the wild, unaware that they are being watched. The subways are the natural habitat for some members of the species
Homo sapiens
. It is their wilderness. When people appear in public there are display rules to follow, and they follow them. But occasionally they forget, and when they do, we discover what is happening on the other side of the display faces. We encounter experiences that resemble our own.

Photographer Diane Arbus once remarked, “it’s impossible to get out of your skin and into somebody else’s.” That other person’s tragedy, she wrote, “is not the same as your own.”
⁴²
This may be true, but we are intent on finding the areas of commonality. For any differences we discover are likely to tell us as much about ourselves as they do about the others.

We have consciousness for a particular reason, according to Nicholas Humphrey. It evolved, he suggested, because it “makes life more worth living.”
⁴³
Those who look for intimate experience in other minds are seeking to extend the sphere of their own consciousness. Walker Evans would have approved. “Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop,” he wrote. “Die knowing something. You are not here long.”
⁴⁴

1
Wiener 1954, p. 16.

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22
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23
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24
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25
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27
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31
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34
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35
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36
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37
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38
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39
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40
Tamar Levin, “Intimate strangers across the street, just don’t get too close,”
The New York Times
(The City), May 26, 2002.

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4
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11
Weatherhead & Robertson 1979.

12
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14
Gershenzon 2007, p. 5257; see also Ballaré 1999; Dicke & Bruin 2001; Heil & Bueno 2007; Kobayashi & Yamamura 2003, 2007.

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20
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21
Apicella et al. 2007; Collins 2000; Dabbs & Mallinger 1999.

22
Evans et al. 2006; Braun & Bryan 2006.

23
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Malek 1992, pp. 74, 75.

25
Briggs et al. 1996; Dugatkin 1998; Galef & White 1998; Grant & Green 1996; White & Galef 2000; Witte & Noltemeier 2002; Witte & Ryan 1998, 2002.

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32
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33
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34
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35
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36
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37
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38
Hare et al. 2001.

39
Hare et al. 2006.

40
Melis et al. 2006.

41
Brauer et al. 2008.

42
Hare & Tomasello 2004.

43
Galton 1871, p. 356.

44
Elgar 1989; see also Quenette 1990; in actuality, several things co-vary with group size, and any of these could independently reduce predator vigilance besides the hypothesized tendency to share watchfulness.

45
Clark & Mangel 1986.

46
Brauer et al. 2007; van Schaik et al. 1983.

47
Wrangham & Peterson 1997.

48
Hare 2001, p. 271.

49
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50
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51
Smuts 1987b.

52
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53
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54
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55
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56
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57
Aiello 1977; Baxter 1970; Sommer 1959.

58
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59
Baldellou & Henzi 1992; Boesch & Boesch 1984; Fragaszy 1990; Gould et al. 1997; Rose 1994; Rose & Fedigan 1995; Treves 1998, 1999, Treves et al. 2001; also see reviews in Quenette 1990; Steenbeek et al. 1999.

60
Quenette 1990; Rose & Fedigan 1995; Treves 1999.

61
Baldellou & Henzi 1992. I base this on data presented in Table 1 of Treves 1999 and Table 2 of Treves 1998.

62
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63
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64
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65
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66
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67
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68
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69
Lindenfors et al. 2004, p. S102.

70
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71
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72
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73
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74
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75
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76
Dunbar 2007, p. 280.

77
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1
Groves & Sabater Pi 1985; Hediger 1977.

2
Hediger 1977, p. 174.