Spirit Photography

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Earlier this year, my partner and I took a day trip to Brighton. It rained the entire time, the storm striping the sky black and grey like a mackerel's back. For shelter, and for something to do, we visited a shop filled with bric-a-brac, where I discovered a corner filled with hundreds of photographs. There were photographs of weddings, of babies, of lovers, from the late-Victorian era to the mid-twentieth century, a history told in silver nitrate and Kodachrome, in sepia and in hazy, blistered color. Some had inscriptions on the back, some had been sent as postcards, others bore only the names of long vanished photography studios. I was entranced by them, by the people I saw in them, the intimacy and the distance of the whole thing, the essential unknowability of it all. Think of Barthes, mourning his mother, writing that the irreducible thing "in every photograph [is] the return of the dead"1 — the photograph as a "movement"2 through time, a spectral kinesis, a journey between the living and the dead. Think of Derrida, of his obsession with Hamlet's time out of joint, of how "the logic of the ghost,"3 unhooked from temporality, "points toward a thinking of the event that necessarily exceeds a binary or dialectical logic."4 No wonder, then, that the photographs in Brighton lingered, haunted.

Taylor Swift's "marjorie," the thirteenth song on evermore, takes the form of a dialogue between Swift and her grandmother, an opera singer named Marjorie, who died in 2013. Its accompanying video features images of Marjorie, photographs smudged by time, creased and cracked. In one photograph, a young Marjorie opens her mouth to sing, pinched nose and half-moon eyes giving her face an uncanny resemblance to her granddaughter; later, an older version of her holds an infant Swift. The overall effect is similar to that of the photographs I saw in Brighton: of lives both ended and not yet begun, of time twisting, whirling, out of reach. It's this that Deleuze referred to when he wrote that "there is no present that is not haunted by a past and a future, by a past that is not reducible to a former present, by a future which does not consist of a present to come."5 In Barthes's essay, photography allows him to see his mother as both a young girl and an old woman, the two overlaid like a double exposure. She exists in a multiplicity of states: alive and dead, young and old, present and absent.

This intermingling of past, present, and future is evident in the lyrics to "marjorie," which take the form of a eulogy, a conversation, an inheritance. "What died didn't stay dead / what died didn't stay dead / you're alive, so alive," Swift sings, her repetition emphasizing the unending return, the refusal to let rest. Her voice slides between the lower and upper ends of its register, never simply one thing, at once ethereal, spectral, and all-too human, rippling with emotion. Swift acknowledges the haunting, shifts her tenses: "And if I didn't know better / I'd think you were still around" becomes, by the close of the song, "I know better / But you're still around." Following this, we hear Marjorie singing, her voice emerging from the orchestral arrangement like sunshine from parted clouds. She sounds angelic, unearthly, hovering just on the edge of hearing. Then she disappears. The credits of the video roll over a black and white photograph of her face in close-up, staring at the camera.

"marjorie" is not the first Swift project to explore photographic memory. The cover of her album 1989 (2014) was a polaroid of herself, bathed in orange light as though trapped in amber. The physical version came with thirteen different Polaroids (randomly picked from sixty-five possible selections), with snippets of lyrics written underneath. On the same album, "Out of the Woods": "You took a Polaroid of us / Then discovered / The rest of the world was black and white / But we were in screaming colour." I've always found there to be something curiously photographic in her songwriting. Others have noted her knack for this6; her eye for specificity and off-hand moments, her consciousness of the porosity of time.

In Proust Writing Photography, Aine Larkin talks of how Proust's descriptions of memory function as a form of written photograph, with their "freestanding, isolated fragments of the past, temporal crumbs ('émittement') of the beloved snatched from swift time by the hungry perceiver."7 I think of Swift's representation of the past in the same way; a textual haunted photograph, careening between past and present and future. It's no coincidence that these snapshots most commonly occur during the bridge, the disconnect of which allows it to function as a camera shutter, a Deleuzian fork in time that delineates the recollection-image, a speeding-up of momentum that acts to destabilize. The peak of this arrives on evermore's "champagne problems." If, as Julian Wolfrey argues, "all stories are, more or less, ghost stories,"8 then "champagne problems" is spirit photography — a depiction of a relationship that is dead, alive, longed for, spurned. During the bridge, Swift sings "Your Midas touch on the Chevy door / November flush and your flannel cure / "This dorm was once a madhouse" / I made a joke, "Well, it's made for me.'" We flip through the images like a sheaf of photographs, all crisp-leaved romance, American yearning. They are untethered, out of context. They contain the residue of something much larger, unknowable in its entirety. Time slides like wine in a glass; the madhouse recurs. Throughout the song, Swift careens through tenses like a wounded animal, but it's in this snapshot that the past, present, and future collide definitively: "How evergreen, our group of friends / Don't think we'll say that word again / And soon they'll have the nerve to deck the halls / that we once walked through." They're already ghosts.

Hannah Williams (@hkatewilliams) is a writer and critic based in London. Her work has appeared in Granta, The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian and other places.

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