Refracted Imaginations in a Seemingly Silent Medium
/By Sinem Eylem Arslan and Sophie Edelhart
A woman and her daughter sit at a dining room table reading a book while two sets of candles flicker in front of them.
Joseph Davidovitch (Davis) The Bronx, 1935-1936
Sophie:
The first time I started keeping Shabbat every week was in March 2020, a couple of weeks into lockdown due to COVID-19. The ritual of candles marking time between work and rest felt like a necessary moment of grounding during days that kept running into each other, with no end in sight.
In April, my Mom sent me a photo in the mail. In the photo, my grandmother Davy, then a child, sits with her mother, my great-grandmother, Mathilda, sits at the dinner table in their Bronx apartment. The Shabbat candles light up their faces as they read a book. I have never seen the photo before.
Shabbat is a ritual that engages all five senses. The taste of wine, the smell of spice, the sight of candles, the touch of the challah, the traditional braided bread that is eaten on Friday nights which must be touched by all present as it is blessed, and the sound of prayer. The tunes of Sabbath prayers feel ancient and holy, so ingrained in my mind that I don’t even consider it music.
What struck me about the photo first was how mesmerized I was by seeing my ancestors in a new light. The images I have of my ancestors become entrenched through the second-hand stories and objects of theirs that have existed in my life. A couple of photos hung on the wall, a story about how every family got together, a piece of furniture taken from my grandmother’s living room, a pot, some candlesticks. To see a new snapshot of their life and such an intimate one felt like an extremely special opportunity.
To be receiving it at a time in which I had been relying on the same ritual they did when they were in new and uncertain circumstances, in a world that presented new heartbreaks every day felt even more palpable.
In the late 1930s, my grandmother and great-grandmother escaped an increasingly hostile Hungary. As the Nazis rose to power in Germany, they packed their things and left their village of Satmar behind. They made it to the United States despite severe immigration restrictions by bribing an officer at the American embassy with a cabinet that my great-grandfather made. I think about how it must have felt for them to arrange their Shabbat table with the candlesticks they stowed away from a home they knew they wouldn’t return to.
Every Friday night that spring, the song of the candle blessing filled my mouth in prayer. I wonder whether their prayers sounded the same, whether the room smelled like mine does, whether their wine tasted bitter or sweet, and whether the challah rose that week. Something dissatisfies me about not having answers to all those questions, to only being given access to one sense of the many that are supposed to be engaged in Sabbath ritual.
When I set my table and sing the prayers, I feel as though I am filling in those gaps. Creating a sensory experience that brings me closer to the world of the photograph. Singing the prayers, I feel as though I’m voicing past generations, their melody having been passed down through so many Sabbath tables to arrive at mine. Despite the stillness and silence of the photograph, singing elicits a feeling in me of pulling up a seat to the Shabbat table and watching the candles flicker as a mother and daughter sit, prayer just having left their lips.
***
Sinem:
In his celebrated 2003 monograph, In the Break, Fred Moten asks, what is “the sound that precedes the image”? Is it the intrusive sound of the mirror flipping inside of the camera body? Everyone is familiar with the sound of a shutter clicking. It is what marks the beginning of a documentary process that provides a seemingly silent end-result, a photograph. However, what does that seemingly silent medium envoice in photographs?
Silence is of growing concern in the emergent field of sound studies. Though it generally is conceived of as a lack of sound, or sound with a loudness lower than 20 dB., sound studies scholars have argued that how silence is understood not only depends on how it is measured but also how “its relationship between the listener and his or her surroundings are conceptualized.” Then, photography as a silent medium can also be analyzed in its relationship with the participants and the viewer.
For the outsider viewer, a photograph may represent an absolute silent medium that doesn’t translate sound onto an image. It lacks the inner music, the screams of emotions, or the background noises that are part of the storytelling. The participants and their stories in the photos are not heard or listened to, but only imagined. Unlike hearing, listening requires an effort to channel attention toward a sound. It is different from hearing, for hearing is generally considered a more passive mode of auditory perception. Hearing may also be regarded as a kind of sensory substrate in which listening is grounded: “listening requires hearing but is not simply reducible to hearing.”
It is only the photographer and the participants in the photos who can set them in a sensorial frame that provides sonic, historical and affective backgrounds and foregrounds that give voice to photography. To the ear of the outsider, the background story of any photo is neither heard nor listened to. It’s merely silent and imagined. Hence, oral histories are crucial in gathering information about family photos and eliciting memories that pave the way to voice and retell their own social, cultural, and familial narratives.
Works Cited
Cage, John. “Experimental Music.” In Silence: Lectures and Writings. 50th ed., 7-12. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2011.
Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
Sterne, Jonathan. "Hearing." In Keywords in Sound, edited by Novak David and Sakakeeny Matt, 65-77. Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2015. Accessed May 20, 2021. doi:10.2307/j.ctv11sn6t9.9.
