'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'
Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen
A native American family taking a ride in a car. The picture was
apparently taken in 1916 in the American Pacific Northwest
There's a
piquant quality about the image. For the photographer and the publisher of the
time, were the passengers meant to be ridiculous? A mocking look at native
peoples in the White Man's world? Yet even if so they surely do not know that.
For the passengers of that day, they are very modern, very grand.
The picture shows that realities fuse together in ramifications of accidental experiences.
Notably, the image contains the awareness that symbols deeply embedded in societies take on different senses given different motivations and perspectives.
We now know how Native Americans, in general, fared with modernity: the car is a symbol of
their fate and oppression. An image such as this accumulates meaning by virtue of some of its
intrinsic symbolic values, which are nonetheless unusual in the face of deep-rooted events – events
that allow a symbol to become an icon.
There cannot be
anything strange to see a Native American family driving around in an automobile. Yet this occasion, strange indeed might be the Indians pictured in the limousine. The first
possibility shades into a reality where everything becomes like a dream and realisation is
always immediate, no matter how many complex things are combined. The second bears the idea
that realisation will always be something postponed to the future, and that in this
process elements reappear as odd, as clashing symbols.
The difference
in the language is subtle. This is the delicacy on which an icon can be raised.
