Sometimes when I'm looking at photographs of people from a long time ago, 100 years or more, I do this weird thing that I wasn't aware of until recently. I call it my time game. I stare at the photograph really hard, stare at it so that it seems like I couldn’t possibly see anything else in the whole world. I try to imagine that I am alive during the photograph’s era, and that all the petticoats and top hats and other items that no one wears today, are in fact contemporary. I try to look at the photograph as though it represents the now. Here’s a demonstration:
I’m looking at a 1910s photograph of a young man shot by the photographer Emil Otto Hoppé, who many think of as one of the pioneers of documentary photography. The young man stands outside a building on a bustling street. He's shot in 3/4 profile, caught in mid-gesture as he pushes his hands into the pockets of his three-piece suit. Even though he's wearing a top hat I'm pretty sure he's a blonde, he just has that sort of face. He actually kind of looks like a guy I matched with on a dating app last night. The game starts working—-I’ve been staring at the image for quite a while now—-because some part of my mind genuinely expects him to pull out a pack of American Spirits and an iPhone 16 from his pockets. My imagination wonders whether that faint shadow on his neck, below the impossibly crisp white collar of his button-down, is the tip of a really hot tattoo.
Time is beginning to melt in my head; this is the goal of the time game. It never lasts, these fleeting impressions, but I play the game anyway, and often.
-Eugenie Dalland