A maybe/maybe-not image of the lofty comte de Lautréamont. A daguerreotype of Poe, four months before his unreadable death. Cameo souvenirs from an early modernity that feels so far away: all the monochrome boys made shooting stars by the camera. A séance for the ghosts of a long-gone epoch. It is ‘the refuge of every would-be painter’, we’re warned in ‘The Salon of 1859’, ‘every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies … If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether.’ How did it play with him personally, this strange new experience of being photographed, disconcertingly intimate yet somehow flattening? Did he look at images of himself and see his disappointment and suffering etched there? Or was it all just a trick of the light? Photo-biography: we confidently think we spy the ghosts of a life in the fish-slab lines of the face. He said some awful things about photography. There is surely also something of the child who was once hurt so badly they’ve never quite recovered. An arch and dissipated superiority, with tender spots. The same odd motley of delicacy and debauchery. As with similar images of Baudelaire by Nadar and Étienne Carjat, I’m always reminded of W.C. Charles Baudelaire might be one of the first great poseurs of our time – a not inconsiderable legacy.
He could be lost in reverie, or just bored to tears. His face is mask-like, giving little or nothing away. Start with those eyes: distrustful, assessing, imperious. T he image on the front of Late Fragments is a portrait taken by the Belgian photographer Charles Neyt in 1864. Oh, God, what depressing places hotel bedrooms can be. What is wanted is history, the man in the raincoat, wearing the loops of his ideas, the buttons of his period.
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