These Four Sisters Pose Elegantly — but the Youngest Girl’s Shadow Reveals Something That Shouldn’t
The auction house called it lot 247, a Victorian era photograph of minor historical interest.
Estimated value between $2 and $400.
The catalog description was brief and dismissive.
Four young women in formal dress circa 1887.
Photographer unknown.
Provenence unclear.
It had been consigned by the estate of a collector who had accumulated thousands of such images over a lifetime of obsessive acquisition.
Photographs purchased from antique shops and flea markets and the basement of old houses.
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Most of them anonymous, most of them unremarkable, most of them destined to be sold to other collectors who would store them in their own basement until they too died and the cycle began again.
I purchased it for $350, not because I was a collector, but because of what I saw when the auction house sent me the highresolution scan I had requested.
The four sisters stood in a parlor, arranged before a painted backdrop depicting a pastoral scene that was popular in portrait studios of that era.
They wore matching dresses of dark silk, their hair elaborately styled, their hands positioned in attitudes of refined elegance.
The eldest appeared to be in her early 20s, the youngest perhaps 12 or 13.
They did not smile as was customary for photographs of that period, but there was something in their faces that suggested more than the usual discomfort of holding a pose for the long exposure times required by the cameras of the day.
It was not their faces that had caught my attention, nor their dresses, nor the painted backdrop with its improbable sheep grazing in an improbable meadow.
It was the shadow cast by the youngest girl.
Shadows in Victorian photographs are notoriously unreliable.
The long exposure times, the limitations of the equipment, the vagaries of lighting, all contributed to images in which shadows appeared where they should not, disappeared where they should, stretched and distorted in ways that defied the laws of physics as we understand them.
Experts have spent decades analyzing the shadows in old photographs, trying to determine what was real and what was artifact, what was captured by the camera and what was created by the process of development and preservation.
But this shadow was different.
The youngest girl stood at the right edge of the frame, her body angled slightly toward her sisters, her left hand resting on the back of a velvet chair.
The light source based on the shadows cast by the other three sisters came from the upper left, creating shadows that fell to the lower right, consistent and predictable.
But the shadow cast by the youngest girl fell in the wrong direction.
