Writing in Norwood, Virginia, I’m surrounded by silence. Well, not exactly. The crows kick up a ruckus every now and then, and wintering-over wrens cheep at the window. The train passes a couple of times a day, and the heat kicks on and off. Maisie, the dog, pads around on the front porch; I can hear her nails clicking on the wood. Sometimes a ladybug buzzes past.
But mostly what I hear is quiet.
That quiet got me thinking about some photographs I saw last season at Gallery 339 in Philadelphia and specifically how the press of things – the noise and the clatter, the world’s cant – drowns out whole pockets of life.
The photographs were by Rita Bernstein and they were part of Personal Views, an exhibition of portraits by seven Philadelphia photographers.
Made by hand-applying emulsion on Japanese rice paper, Bernstein’s photographs are small and exquisite images of mostly young women (only two of those on view at 339 included a young man), mostly in interior spaces, mostly bedrooms.
I suspect these pictures are easy to underestimate – rather the way that people always thought Emily Dickinson was just a spinster poet when in fact she’s one of the most muscular writers the country ever produced.
And at first glance, Bernstein’s pictures might seem to be simply precious objects – all femininity and nostalgia. Take a longer look, though, and you’ll find something delicate, yes, but also tough-minded and rough around the edges.
Their literal edges are literally rough. The paper is imperfect as well, marbled with cracks. With their deckled edges and wrinkled surfaces, the images seem to have been ripped from their source – or flayed like animal hides.
The Soul Exposed
Study the imagery itself and you begin to think that the people pictured may have been flayed as well – only psychologically. Bernstein seems to skin her subjects, stripping away identity and personality and leaving only the soul exposed. I’ve come to think of these pictures as psychic skins, the pelts of individual souls.
In Bernstein’s world, the soul’s natural habitat is a closed room. It is only there, in this interior landscape, that the psyche can reveal itself to itself. Each room serves as a visible manifestation of the spirit it houses – as though all these young women were projecting their inner state outward. The room becomes the picture of the soul.
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In some cases – Awaiting Matthew and Last Light [top image at left] – the young women are alone, as though locked inside their own mind with no way out. In others, they are afflicted, haunted by a double – a second self as in Virginia and Ann [bottom image at left] or a ghost self as in Renovations. 
This reading works, too, for those that don’t fit the basic figure-in-a-room pattern. In Charmaine [opening image], runic graffiti seems to emanate from the central figure as though seeping, unbidden, out of her psyche. In Garden, a young woman, caught between an engulfing darkness and a threatening light, holds herself close.
That Polar Privacy
We live in a time of great sound and fury, noise and flash, endless blog posts and people yelling at one another. Step outside of that bubble – spend a week in Norwood, Virginia – and the preoccupations of the moment evaporate.
Small wonder then that, in this isolated country retreat in the still mid-winter of the year, I come back to these pictures and, in turn, to Dickinson:
THERE is a solitude of space,
A solitude of sea,
A solitude of death,
but these Society shall be,
Compared with that profounder site,
That polar privacy,
A Soul admitted to Itself:
Finite Infinity.
