The Past is a Foreign Country
Shaun Castle 07 July 2006
David Lowenthal’s adage The Past is a Foreign Country is an apt description for this faded cartes photograph from around 1850. For the most part, “here and there a few individuals detach themselves from the dark and silence to which time has consigned to them. They walk slowly towards us”, says Gillian Tindall, the master of miniaturist history. Not in this case. The scene intrigues and disturbs, enigmatically. Apparent rural hands hold sticks to a contorted female figure sat across a pipe delivering semi-solid matter to the foreground, overseen by a gentleman charge. Is the female figure human, making for a macabre scene, or a finely made dummy, signifying some offbeat rural rite? Whatever the inference, the scene remains completely alien, lives lost to time. Here, the past is indeed a foreign country.
David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, Cambridge University Press, 1985
Gillian Tindall, The House by the Thames, Chatto and Windus 2006 Links to this post
