Watching over the watchers

What are photographs about? I never quite know, which I attribute to the fact that the camera, when its shutter opened and closed, also didn’t know. That’s what I like most about the medium. The fact that it’s a mechanical device means that a lot about it escapes intention. It’s what keeps me curious.

What is this photograph about? It was taken by a little-known photographer, Jim Gagnon, and it shows a woman at the Metropolitan Museum of Art looking at a work of art. When I passed it at the Met a few weeks ago, I did a double take, backtracked and leaned in, not unlike the woman pictured.

I immediately noticed the picture’s slight tilt — as if the people in it were all at risk of sliding toward the object of their attention. The well-dressed patrons on the right seem intent on resisting this slide. But where they stand back, upright and correct, clutching their winter coats, loath to break convention, the woman, in her pearls, her pumps, her gorgeous Grace Kelly hair, has broken from the pack and now bends at the waist to get a closer look.

Gagnon, off to the side, his finger hovering over the button, must have gasped.

When the picture was taken, at the end of the 1950s, photography was forbidden in the Met’s galleries. So Gagnon, who rightly thought the behavior of museum-goers was as good a subject as any, had to take his pictures covertly. I don’t know how many he took, but — wow, hats off — he nailed it with this one! The thing could be a New Yorker cartoon. It practically is. Except that it really happened.

You’ll want to write your own caption. But the more I look at Gagnon’s picture, the more this woman strikes me as a role model for how to be in the world. I want to show her to my kids, to say, “Be like this! Be like her! Get up close. Be gauche. Break from the pack. Don’t fret over what anyone thinks of you. Let your body find the forms that fit your interests. Don’t stand apart like the others — stiff, sterile and repressed.”

I thought all this only after I’d succumbed to one of those hall-of-mirrors moments that museums can sometimes generate, bringing on brief bouts of dizziness. I was struck, suddenly, by the tautology, the redundancy, the excess of being a person in the Met looking at a photograph of a person in the Met looking at art …

And this prompted my thoughts to take a fleeting philosophical detour.

Why, I wondered, do we cherish representations of things in the world when we ourselves are already in the world, surrounded by real things? I could only think that this excess, this superfluity, must be inherent in art and perhaps in life, too. It might even be the means by which life goes on. “This is really all we have got,” as the British novelist Ian McEwan once wrote, “this increase, this matter of life loving itself.”

As a philosopher, it’s clear, I’m limited. That we cherish art is ultimately more urgently interesting to me than why we do. And to me, Gagnon’s image of how we do is just incredibly funny. It’s also beautiful and engaging. Contemplating it is like observing the way cats sit solitary by windows or pigeons perch sociably on city monuments. We’re all watching, that is to say, we’re all being watched, and we’re all playing the game in our own fashion, our own inimitable style.

Curiosity animates everything. Remove it from the museum, remove it from life, and everything is ashes.