Giorgio Manganelli's Centuria: 100 Ouroboric Novels

Giorgio Manganelli's Desk

In the end, the reviewer considering a new book to read settles on one by Italian neovanguardia writer Giorgio Manganelli (1922-1990), his 1979 work Centuria: cento piccoli romanzi fiume, a collection of “100 Ouroboric Novels,” as the translator, Henry Martin, boldly renders the sub-title, given that “fiume” means “river,” not “ouroboric.” The reviewer allots his review a fixed length. He begins by relating the author’s description of his work: a “thin but endless volume” created when faced with a stack of loose-leaf paper. Using the page size as a parameter like the form of a sonnet or, adds the reviewer, an Oulipian constraint, the author wrote a single novel on each page until he arrived at one hundred one-page novels. The reviewer thinks an edition of 100 loose sheets in a box might have been fitting.

The author keeps these little novels little, acknowledging that novels usually take up a lot of room on bookshelves. The reviewer does not need to be told. The author views his deceptively small novels as concentrates, distillations, romans fleuves, in which a well-equipped reader, dipping in, may be able to discern much between the lines. They are, he proclaims, novels “from which all the air has been removed. And that might be my definition of a novel: forty lines plus two cubic meters of air.” In one such novel, a man provides a twist on this thought, averring that a wise society would give objects no corners or edges, that even books “should be spherical; balls with writing inside them.” The reviewer, bringing lips to index finger to apply suction to a sudden paper cut, ponders this.

To these conceptual assertions about writing, the author adds specific advice for “the optimum way to read this little book”:

Acquire the right to the use of a skyscraper with the same number of floors as the number of the lines of the text to be read; at each floor, station a reader holding the book; assign each reader a line; on a signal, the Supreme Reader will begin to plunge from the building’s summit, and as he transits progressively past the windows, each floor’s reader will read the line assigned, in a loud clear voice. It is understood that the number of the building’s floors must exactly correspond to the number of the lines, and that there be no ambiguity on second floor and mezzanine, which might cause an embarrassing silence before the impact. It is also good to read it in the outer shadows, better if at absolute zero, in a capsule lost in space.

The timid and thus unreliable reviewer, however, read the book in bed. Though the impact may have been relatively lacking, the reviewer nonetheless admired the conception and execution of the work. The book’s translator calls out its echoes of both the “100 tales” of Boccaccio’s Decameron and lists of “100 Great Novels” to which the author had been asked to contribute. Another precursor may be Giambattista Basile’s determinate number of tales in the Pentamerone. An almost certain influence, one with which Centuria shares a similar authorial, instructive, gently detached tone, can be found in the ten open-ended tales of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, by the author’s colleague Italo Calvino.

Absent the thrilling velocity of a plunge from the roof, one hundred of such narratives might wear. But the variety of the author’s conceits, his encouragement to imagine, his microscopic dissections of tedium, frustration, fantasy, power, relationship, and myriad other subjects keep the reader engaged. Through these tales pass ordinary men and woman, knights, emperors, assassins, lovers, prisoners, bored ghosts, a custodian of public toilets, a man trailed everywhere by a funnel-shaped chasm. Even more fantastic characters feature in the tales, including elderly dinosaurs, a perfect pink sphere to which a woman has given birth, a shape-shifting animal that becomes all mouth, a plaster statue whose happiness contrasts starkly with the bitterness of the figure upon whom he is modeled, and a celestial body that turns out to be an entire intact city square flying about alone in space.

Conscious of having passed the equator of his review and drifting into its southern climes, perhaps even around its pole, the reviewer, quickly then, has been impressed by how these stories – despite the descriptor “ouroboric” being the translator’s - indeed seem to eat their own tails and tales to produce a sense of stasis and circularity. The stories broadcast themselves as fictions, each page serving as a dividing plane between fiction’s enchantment and the reader’s ability to perceive it as enchantment. In one novel, a man does “nothing at all.”  As in a Samuel Beckett novel, “He walks around the house. He makes a cup of coffee. No, he doesn’t make a cup of coffee. No, he doesn’t walk around the house.” But the mere awareness of the enchantment may not be enough, as the reader, by the act of reading, becomes the author’s captive. In the 79^th story, a prisoner, unaware of the crime for which he has been condemned, is provided every luxury, even that of leaving the palace in which he’s been imprisoned. However, he must find the right door among the “dozens of doors that open into walls. Dozens more open into empty rooms that lead to nowhere; others which lead, by way of another door, into rooms where still a further door leads back to the room of the initial door – the design of a brief labyrinth.” Not knowing whether the correct door will open by key or password, he can request a daily series of questions from which he must deduce the “liberatory phrase… It’s a game. The prisoner feels flattered, and he is almost pleased that his freedom depends on the caprice of such a cultivated prince.” In perhaps the most ouroboric of the author’s novels, a man decides to write a novel. Having never written a novel, and having little clue as to how to go about it, and little in the way of experiences to bring to writing, the man recognizes the enterprise’s futility. He winds up where he began, in the story’s open mouth. As though to remove any doubt concerning the ouroboric nature of his pieces, the author’s ultimate selection involves fiction writers who in their fictions have the power to create – and extinguish – other fiction writers.

Centuria, as the reviewer, in his limited knowledge, has come to understand, is neither typical nor atypical of the author’s output, which is said to display a remarkable range of styles, subjects and forms. Though at least one other collection of stories has been translated into English, the reviewer, as usual, etc., etc., knows little of the author’s work but would nonetheless like to see more made available, perhaps especially the intriguingly titled Pinocchio: un libro parallel. But the abyss below the page on which the reviewer has committed to write rapidly approaches convergence with his dwindling words, threatening to swallow them. He can only say, pivoting to the shelves to grab a new book to read before vanishing, that as an introduction to the author’s work and to contemporary Italian experimental writing, Centuria has been a good place to start.

Giorgio Manganelli, Iceland

Images: Centro Studi Giorgio Manganelli

Calvino in America

Poke almost anywhere into post-war Italian literature and one can find the fingerprints of Italo Calvino: novelist, essayist, editor, publisher, anthologizer and champion of his fellow writers. One might add to this list: travel writer. Few accounts I’ve read by foreign writers of voyages within the United States have proven as surprising and engaging as “America 1959-1960,” a sketch of six months Calvino spent in America on a Ford Foundation grant. Writing in a hybrid journal/diary/epistolary form and addressing his observations to Daniele Ponchiroli of Einaudi publishers, Calvino intended a book, but as he thought the material “too slight” as literature, the book never materialized. His unpolished account - “a kind of journal for use by my friends in Italy” - has fortunately survived, one of several autobiographical writings translated by Martin McLaughlin and collected under the title Hermit in Paris (2003).

The rough form of the piece notwithstanding, one could scarcely ask for a more responsive, insightful, amusing tour guide, one whose comments still resonate six decades later. Calvino seems capaciously open to adventure, nearly always finding himself in the right place at the right time, even if this means a frequent inability to find a motel room. His comments on literature and other writers reveal a wide-ranging reader and a writer with sharp opinions. His perceptiveness with regard to American culture and politics is astute. On top of this, the piece is strewn with marvelous details. Italo Calvino wrote pop songs? Who knew? Following the lead of a tossed off comment in the narrative, I find that he in fact wrote the great anthem of the Italian partisans, no less. 

“America 1959-1960” is organized quasi-chronologically: we move as Calvino moves, but within a particular place, Calvino largely abandons linear time, his writing turning around themes, a page, sometimes just a line or two on a particular topic: “Cars,” “Chinatown,” “How a Big Bookshop Works,” “Broadway,” “Tree-houses,” “Prospects for the Election,” “TV Dinners,” “The Suburbs.” He spends most of his time in New York, which bookends a trip of two or three months through the upper Midwest, Chicago, then California and Las Vegas, before a combination of trains and buses take him across the south and back up the eastern seaboard to New York.

In New York, Calvino is entranced and can hardly get enough of the city. He lavishes praise on the United Nations building and on Frank Lloyd Wright’s just-completed Guggenheim Museum. He attends a new Paddy Chayefsky play on Broadway. He rides a horse through Central Park. He finds himself in gay bars in Greenwich Village. He visits with publishers and writers, and at a party meets Allen Ginsburg, “with his disgusting black straggly beard, a white T-shirt beneath a dark, double-breasted suit, and tennis shoes.” He arranges for a visit to Merrill Lynch and, in the head office of IBM, is wowed by the imminent computer age. He visits Lee Strasberg’s Actors’ Studio and, with an astuteness typical of his observations, limns method acting:

…to make your own psychological problem identify with the problem portrayed in the play is regarded as the ne pus ultra. In short, it is the umpteenth proof of the weakness of American thought; however, it is a place where one breathes a genuine atmosphere, full of passion for improvement, and it is also the place which symbolizes better than any other the elements that make up the American spirit in New York.

About American writing, Calvino is skeptical: “Good literature in American is clandestine, lies in unknown authors’ drawers, and only occasionally someone emerges from the gloom breaking through the leaden cloak of commercial production.” He’s amused by American writers’ privileges in comparison to those afforded writers in Europe: “All writers here have the chance to say that they have to write a book and have to stay at home for a year and can obtain a grant for it.” A publisher provides him a list of up and coming writers, some of whom came up – Philip Roth, Grace Paley, Bernard Malamud – and others who seem to have lapsed into relative obscurity - Peter Fiegelman, H. E. Humes, William Humphrey.

Calvino also displays a deft ability to switch from high culture to low, as when he turns his attention to the details of American automobiles:

A study of the American psyche could be carried out by examining in particular the enormous tailfins of their cars and the great variety and elegance of the shapes of their tail-lights, which seem to embody all the myths of American society. Apart from the enormous round lights, which one often sees even in Italy and which evoke chases of cops and robbers, there are those shaped like missiles, like skyscraper pinnacles, like film-actresses’ eyes, and the full repertoire of Freudian symbols.

On his circuit to the west and back, Calvino again displays a remarkable knack for exploration. He visits the nation’s oldest African-American theater (the Karamu House in Cleveland), drives through impoverished housing projects and enters a mission for the down-and-out in Detroit. In San Francisco he lunches at Bohemian Grove, meets with labor organizer Harry Bridges, runs into Graham Greene at a Beatnik party, and encounters perhaps the most interesting person of his entire trip, the poet Kenneth Rexroth. In Los Angeles, where no one walks, he’s nearly arrested for walking. In Taos Calvino meets Freida Lawrence’s husband (the one after D. H.). Calvino’s timing too is impeccable: he arrives in San Francisco to catch the Chinese New Year’s parade, hits Houston in time for the rodeo and New Orleans just as Mardi Gras is getting under way. His observations, while necessarily somewhat superficial given the tight itineraries and limited time of Calvino’s visit, still give the impression of an observer able to grasp the essence of a place and a people with extraordinary rapidity:

On San Francisco: “Life is monotonous here…New York is perhaps the only place in America where you feel at the centre and not at the margins, in the provinces. So for that reason I prefer its horror to this [San Francisco’s] privileged beauty, its enslavement to the freedoms which remain local and privileged and very particular, and which do not represent a genuine antithesis.”

On Texas:  “What comes over is an impression of a country in uniform, these middle-class families marching in formation all wearing Stetsons and fringed jackets, proudly displaying their practicality and anti-intellectualism which has developed into their mythology, fanaticism, and alarming belligerence. Luckily it is a mythology that is constantly tied to work, to production, to business, to this enormous amount of livestock… so there is a hope that, even though Texas feels itself ready to make war on Russia, immediately if need be, as some of them claim, nevertheless deep down the isolationism of the agricultural mentality will have the upper hand.”

On the South: “This famous Southern aristocracy gives me the impression of being uniquely stupid in its continual harking back to the glories of the Confederacy; this Confederate patriotism that survives after a century, as though they were talking of things from their youth, in the tone of someone who is confident you share their emotions, is something which is more unbearable than ridiculous.”

On American insularity: “You cannot really have a discussion with an American in which you outline first the seriousness and historical legitimacy of certain phenomena, and then their negative aspects – but they don’t understand a thing, it’s like talking to a brick wall.”

“…capitalism wraps itself round and permeates everything, and its antithesis is nothing but a meager, childish claim to a spiritual dimension, devoid of any coherent line or prospects…here we are in a totalitarian structure of a medieval kind, based on the fact that no alternative exists nor even any awareness of the possibility of an alternative other than that of individualist escapism.”

“the American ruling class understand nothing but power-politics, is a thousand miles away from starting to think that the rest of the world has problems to solve.”

At a dinner in New Orleans with several heads of corporations, Calvino is taken aback by the “reactionary discourse,” especially when one of his hosts expresses support for Richard Nixon by asserting that “at this point in time you need ‘a tough, ruthless guy’.” 

One could raise a few issues with Calvino’s account. Whenever finding himself before a group of women, he has a disagreeable tendency to separate them into attractive and unattractive. He occasionally displays a sour grapes attitude, for example regarding Death Valley and the Grand Canyon – neither of which he could visit – as places likely to differ little from the deserts he’s seen. The west’s open spaces, in fact, make little impression on the humanist Calvino, who seems incapable of processing the vastness of wildernesses “without human dimensions.”

The planned title for the book Calvino hoped to write – An Optimist in America – may seem ironic, given the disparagement implicit in many of his observations. But a healthy skepticism and bemusement, even towards his own perceptions, pervades the narrative, throughout which one can’t help but sense Calvino’s awe of and admiration for the U.S. despite its evident, abundant flaws.

At one point during his trip, Calvino has a nightmare. He is back in Italy unaware of why he is there, “seized by a mad despair at not being in America, a terrifying sense of anguish, a desire for the USA that is not connected to any particular image but it is as though I had been snatched out of my normal existence.” Awakening in “the squalid little room” of his New York hotel “is like finding myself back home.”

This sense of personal attachment amid conflicting attitudes about the U.S. reaches a dramatic denouement during an especially congruous arrival in Montgomery, Alabama and a confrontation with the savage brutality of American racism – “a day that I will never forget as long as I live.” Almost completely belying Calvino’s assertion that his travel account is “slight,” this remarkable, unexpected scene - showing Americans at their most terrible as well as at their best - casts Calvino in a light and a setting one might not expect for a writer of such fantastical leanings, capable of creating a family drama set in a liquid nebula at the beginning of the universe and of describing invisible cities. But it is riveting, essential writing, showing a side of Calvino often less visible to American readers: a figure politically engaged with and at the center of the issues of his time, even those far from his own country. “America 1959-1960,” however rough around the edges, reveals a writer with his finger on the pulse of literature and one surely with his finger on the pulse of life – a humanist of very high order.

“…the changing motions of indeterminate vibrations; but perhaps that was nothing more than the buzzing of bees and the flights of ladybugs” - Surprising Sicily in Giuseppe Bonaviri’s Nights on the Heights.

The death of the head of a household may be a common subject in Sicilian literature – think of di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, Federico De Roberto’s The Viceroys, even the works of Verga – but never has it been treated as in Giuseppe Bonaviri’s thoroughly immersive, surprising 1971 novel Notti sull’altura (Nights on the Heights in the English translation). In the passing of Donnané, patriarch of a family in the strangely-named hill town of Qalat-Minaw inland from Catania (modeled after Bonaviri’s hometown of Minèo, “the navel of Bonaviri’s universe” according to translator Giovanni Bussino), the usual parade of grieving and handwringing relatives scheming for favor or bemoaning the passing of a whole way of life scarcely exists. Replacing it is a deliriously bizarre series of endeavors aimed at locating what might remain of this “mild man” in the universe and at coming to grips with the emotions surrounding death, both Donnané’s in particular and mortality writ large. Italian literature from its beginnings demonstrates a recurrent entwining of the real and fantastic, but Bonaviri’s short novel, the stand-alone second volume of a trilogy, is in this regard unlike anything I’ve read from Sicily, unlike anything I’ve read from anywhere, for that matter.

Not that Notti sull’altura is a surrealist or magical realist work. It defies pigeonholing into any such categorization, sharing neither surrealism’s arbitrary and privileged manipulations nor magical realism’s application of varying degrees of torsion to reality. Rather, its fantastic elements come across as organic, intrinsic aspects of the novel’s world, rooted deeply in the natural and human history of Sicily; drawing on such literary sources as mythology, chivalric romances, Dante and the Arabian Nights; and above all sifting deeply through the rich loam of regional folklore. In Bonaviri’s preface to his Saracen Tales, a collection he claims to have adapted from his mother’s transcriptions of tales she’d recounted to him when he was a child, he reveals the debt he owes to stories handed down and embellished over centuries by people even of “rudimentary education,” and which contain a vitally rich mixture of practical wisdom, anecdotes borrowed from literature, and no shortage of the bizarre and implausible. Over the two hundred pages of Notti sull’altura, Bonaviri consistently invigorates and examines the world, investing everything in it with a potent, powerful extraordinariness.

And yet, making one’s way through one after another of the writer’s strangely imaginative paragraphs, one easily sees Sicily itself. The island comes completely alive under Bonaviri’s imagination: stark hills, rugged valleys, dusty plains, volcanic ravines, “dwarf” rivers, prickly-pear and orange trees, medieval castles, “an occasional peasant or emaciated donkey, right in the middle of the winding clay paths,” the unpredictable and erratic ringing of church bells, snow-capped Etna hovering in the distance and the blue Ionian Sea glimpsed from the heights. And no one who has visited Sicily will want to miss Bonaviri’s occasional references to Sicilian food and drink:

“Uncle Pino, with his expertise, killed a young goat and, after having punched holes in it with a knife, filled the meat with sharp cheese, pepper, rosemary, potatoes and Vittoria wine.”

“Yahin wanted first to offer us some wine from an old carafe; it was like water animated by a little rosy devil that stung the palate and made ideas reemerge.”

“Lucrezio, taking advantage of Nergal’s moments of silence, told us that there existed a town in which with eight ounces of sugar, some bitter orange rinds, nutmeg, grapes, cloves and pomegranate seeds, and what is more, all that mixed with ground cinnamon, tangerines and some more sugar, one could, with a proper fire and by whipping and stirring, make a pastry such as no human mouth could ever have tasted.”

Bonaviri also digs vertically through the strata of Sicilian history to reveal the passing of Greeks, Phoenicians, Romans, Arabs, Normans and others, all those who have inhabited and impacted this crossroads of the Mediterranean. Names of characters reflect both this diversity and Sicily’s mythic and literary traditions:  Zephir, Lucrezio, Rowley, Aramea, Orlando, Totosimic, Ibd-al-Atir, Bethsam, Al-Hakim, Tirtenio, Abdfilip, Gheorgy, Nergal, Mullhalel. Despite the presence of an airplane in the opening scene, time too seems askew, as though Sicily’s history has coalesced into a concentrated present. There may not be a variety of the island’s geology and topography, quality of light, species of flora or fauna, ethnographic composition or historical influence that Bonaviri doesn’t reference at some point. As an evocation of landscape, Notti sull’altura already stands out as an exhilarating work.

But Bonaviri offers far more than a mere atmospheric appreciation of Sicily, as is evident from the novel's curious plot. After Zephir arrives at Qalat-Minaw and confirms Donnané’s death, he and various family members notice a few oddities around the place, including a couple of large eggs, with symmetrical black and red circles, on the terrace. Reports arrive of a fireball and of a large “thanatobird” seen in the region. Zephir recognizes that “…one could no longer resort to the usual empirical observations that when compared to one another yielded general laws suitable for calculating the time of day or for discovering what was happening within us.” And as the National Almanac also proves useless for comprehending “the lack of correspondence between my thoughts and the oscillations coming from those extremely vast spaces shut in by mountains whose massive ridges and clay slopes rose up with an irregular morphology,” Zephir and his relatives organize teams to track the mysterious bird and seek out his father’s traces. And so begins a series of explorations to understand the material and immaterial consequences of Donnané’s death.

In this “love peregrination,” the groups grasp at any tool they might use to discover the “Whispers? Waves? Imperceptible sounds?” that might mark Donnané’s passing: intuition, calculations of stellar positions, provisional empirical examination of rocks and plants, mathematics, alchemical processes, the measuring of winds and streams of solar ions, clairvoyance, the crude interpretation of portents, signs and symbols in whatever form they might appear.

Each of us had a task: to jot down celestial signs, loops and squiggles, or to spread out maps in order to track down the lost traces. And some, like Lucrezio and Orlando, in an effort to get less tired, looked with a squint at those lights and those whorls in which dust and pebbles were continuously grinding and polishing one another.

In one chapter, a team turns to the topography of the moon and planets for succor. In another a group sets off to seek vestiges of Donnané in the hieroglyphics of the sea:

Yusuf, our Arab relative, spoke further of waterspouts rising perpendicularly to the sun, and of globular waves rising up behind and in front; and not only that, but also of the daily activity of the oceans that rise and fall along the sides of the earth, creating trenches and abysses abounding in fish. And the sea, like men, knows no peace, its paths continually opposed by tides and occasional conches. What is more, at night, it is swollen by warm lunar rays and the bustle of large, sleepless fish.

In the novel’s most ambitious project, the experimenters graft a human child onto a carob tree in an effort to link the animal and vegetal kingdoms and thus avoid missing any possibility of an answer lying somewhere between the two, creating a “human-wooden combination” that brings to mind Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio.

Because Bonaviri spreads these multiplying experiments with such consistency across the novel, a selection of passages can barely hint at the immersive spell the accumulation of these attempts weaves for the reader. All of this wandering activity, these tentative and grasping efforts of the human intellect and heart in the wake of death and grief, is moving, raising innumerable questions about how one proceeds after such a loss. In which direction does one go? What remains of the deceased? How does one communicate the loss to others? What care does one need to take in attending to one’s bereavement and going forward? What are the implications for future generations? What is death?

Bonaviri’s interrogation of these aspects of life and death is filled with imaginative conceits, yet also shot through with humor. Occasionally, Bonaviri charmingly follows a disorienting explanation of the teams’ fantastical methods by acknowledging his audience: “All this is said for the common reader who is probably perplexed.” Frequently too he’ll amusingly ground a character’s stratospheric musings with an earthbound detail, such as when one character, extemporizing on the possibilities of “green molecules united in gelatinous complexes with detractions and connections to atomic aggregates,”  touches a snail, “which for a second retreated into its shell.” Skepticism greets each new proposal and each failed experiment: “What shall we do?” “What’s our destination?” “What devil brought us here?” “We’re spinning our wheels!” “Why continue to count the stars?” “We’re all going crazy.” The aptly named Orlando, in a moment of exasperation, exclaims, “It’s a muddle…Out of a common mortal event, we’ve made a romance!” Cooler heads like Aunt Agrippa, “shrewder than any of” the group, say nothing, though she appears periodically and is rumored to have special powers requiring none of the nonsense in which the others are engaged. Zephir’s sister Welly, for another example,

…considered it senseless for us to search for the exact time and position of stellar wheels and to plunge into them with hearts full of emotion. In her opinion, that would take us away from our father’s splendor and his uncontaminated journey from the heavens to the earth with inanimate rhythms. To make us understand that she pursued love and not the empty labors of the mind, she left town for the rich valleys and the multitude of nocturnal shadows.

Bonaviri also draws on the droll conflict between the peasants of Qalat-Minaw and these searchers, whose frenetic activity they consider suspect, perhaps aimed at stealing the moon. These infusions of humor, the wonder at nature’s manifestations as well as at human attempts at knowledge and at confronting emotion, give Notti sull’altura a remarkably warm, bemused, receptive and affectionate tone.

That such a rich and distinctive literary voice seems so little known today is puzzling. Bonaviri appears to have few close literary relations, though at a distance Notti sull’altura finds company in the works of João Guimarães Rosa, Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, the last an early champion of the writer. Bonaviri’s writing should interest anyone who appreciates challenging literature of rare caliber and beauty, and those at all familiar with Sicily will likely revel in the narrative’s evocation of the place. Though Bonaviri occasionally and quietly references Sicily’s poverty, episodes of hunger, the clash of intellect and peasant superstition, and aspects of change such as industrialization, deforestation, the misuses of science, the encroachment of a bourgeois mentality unable or unwilling to perceive the island’s marvels, these elements are so subtly incorporated into the narrative that they scarcely stand out thematically - nor do they need to. Though many modern Sicilian authors have concentrated on the grimmer human realities of the place, its anguish under deprivation and the Mafia, its frustrated search for justice and prosperity, the intensity of intra-family conflicts, Bonaviri has taken an entirely different approach. One could see in this an element of escapism. But in transforming the island’s spectacular natural, historical and cultural treasures into a defiant and startlingly original affirmation of its infinity of wonders, Bonaviri reveals a magnificence that can only make one feel more deeply the waste incurred in the problems that have afflicted Sicily, “the half-moon lost in the sea.”

Images: 

Top: Thomas Cole, "View of Mount Etna," 1844, Private Collection (public domain)

Bottom:  Giuseppe Bonaviri, photographer unknown