Brighton, c.1938

There seems to be fewer shops selling old photographs these days. These would be antique shops, not thrift shops.

The antique shop in Kerrisdale next to Economy Barbers on West Boulevard where I used to get my hair cut still has old photos for sale, but the last time I was there, I noticed more portraits than landscapes: fussy looking people who seem to resent paying so much to have their pictures taken.

A couple days ago I read a paragraph in Graham Greene's Brighton Rock (1938) that felt like I was looking through a handful of old photos. Those familiar with the book will recall how a photograph figures in the demise of Spicer.

Here's the handful-of-photos paragraph, with what feels to me like a photo taken (the punctum sentence, as it were) in bold:

"It was quite dark now: the coloured lights were on all down the Hove front. They walked slowly past Snow's, past the Cosmopolitan. An aeroplane flying low burred out to sea, a red light vanishing. In one of the glass shelters an old man struck a match to light his pipe and showed a man and girl cramped in the corner. A wall of music came off the sea. They returned up through Norfolk Square towards Montpellier Road: a blonde with Garbo cheeks paused to powder on the steps up to the Norfolk bar. A bell tolled somewhere for someone dead and a gramophone in a basement played a hymn. "Maybe," the Boy said, "after tonight we'll find some place to go." (179-180)

Journey Without Maps (1936)

On a Liberia-bound cargo ship Graham Greene meets a young German couple who boarded as deck passengers at Funchal. From what I can ascertain, the husband could be the painter Mathias Alten (self-portrait above), though Alten is almost too old for Green to describe him as "young" in 1935. On page 26, Greene writes:

He was a bad artist, but he wasn't a bogus one. He lived on almost nothing; he believed in himself and his hazy Teutonic ideas; and there was a sensual beauty in their relationship. The two lived in a kind of continuous intimacy, she had no ideas but his, no vitality but his; he supplied all the life for both of them and she supplied a warm friendly sensual death; they shared the universe between them. All the time, in the cabin, at dinner, at a cafe table, they gave the impression of having only just risen from bed.