The Changing of my Desktop Background: Joseph Glover on Elliott Erwitt’s Fontainebleau Hotel
When I hid as a child in a game of ‘hide-and-seek’, I often hid my eyes, thinking this act would cloak me from the vision of others. As I’ve gone through my life, I’ve revisited this moment on countless occasions, wondering if anything is lost when you stop looking. Does everything around you cease to be? Or does it continue in the absence of your seeing?
Elliott Erwitt’s Fontainebleau Hotel has an inkling of what may be lost. It almost feels like staring into an optical illusion – knowing that what you see is a trick of geometrical design, but being enticed to look again and again by its alluring unusuality. During a moment of hesitation I blink my eyes, and begin to see the illusion again, afresh, at its beginning. In the apparent infiniteness of the hotel’s towering walls, and seemingly endless swirling patterns, I am drawn into the Fontainebleau Hotel, exploring the many possibilities before my eyes.
‘…THESE WALLS MUST HAVE A CEILING, I ARGUE TO MYSELF, BUT THERE IS SOMETHING HERE, WITHIN THE IMAGE, WHICH MAKES THAT IMPOSSIBLE’
These walls must have a ceiling, I argue to myself, but there is something here, within the image, which makes that impossible. I am constantly pivoting my gaze toward the far corner of the room, that cluttered corner. It’s as if all the patterns point here, toward the familiar objects so oddly arranged. As I fix my focus on this trio, the rest of the room melts away, and in so doing, I lose sight of all else that sits before them. I am drawn into a place which has a never ending infinity pointing out in all directions.
Much like the Red Room in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, Fontainebleau Hotel invokes in me an endless feeling of waiting: a waiting for the door to be closed, the seat to be filled, the marble to be tread on, the tree to grow; each element that makes up the photograph seemingly residing in a liminal state.
In my waiting, the numerous possibilities within the frame multiply: the door to open wider, the seat to remain vacant, the tree to wilt and die (“This is the waiting room. Would you like some coffee?”). This waiting room acts as my space for exploration in the extension of the image; the events which have taken place beyond the outer reaches of the frame slowly become visible to my mind’s eye.
For this writer, viewing this photograph demands time – time spent unknotting the intricacies in its seemingly endless avenues. It demands time spent sitting, looking, questioning, seeing – closing my eyes and imagining, replicating, searching.
I will never truly know why the chair is vacant, or the view on which it faces, much like I will never truly know why the door is ajar, but in the moment of looking, the need for this truth diminishes, and all that comes to matter is my own empirical understanding.
Optical illusions are meant to teach us how our eyes and brain work together to see. The brain processes the information the eyes gather, forming a perception of light, patterns and colour based in unreality, creating a false image of the one in front of us. When Szarkowski situates Erwitt’s photograph as, “… a window, through which one might better know the world” what is being touched on, for me, is this visual function of teaching to see.
When I look at Fontainebleau Hotel, I know that I am seeing the hotel itself, though granted only a small section of it, but part of me wonders if what I am actually seeing is some form of optical illusion. Am I really seeing an unreality which Erwitt has created for his viewers with careful selection? The swirling patterns, the cluttered corner, the infinite walls, the cascading light, all culminating into a false image of the Fontainebleau Hotel on Miami Beach?
As a child, when I hid desperately behind my hand, I was hiding from the knowing look of others. In my solipsistic act, I became invisible until otherwise proven visible. Perhaps, when we stop looking, it is a similar sort of knowing which is lost – the knowing of anything beyond ourselves.