Our Mystery in a Glass Slide

JUST A GLASS SLIDE. That was all I had when I started out. It wasn’t much, but it was mine, and somehow it connected me to other people who were mine, as well.

As we learned in the remarkable response to the photos of Roz Leibowitz, these mysteries engulf us. And as I wrote earlier, all I had to accompany my glass slide was a crumbling paper on which my paternal grandfather had written: “My mother’s name was Annie Madsen Johnston. Her father drowned in the Mersey River when she was ten. Alexander Johnston. 1865. He was a Dane. A ship’s rigger.” The slide and the note, found years apart in separate boxes, always seemed to belong together.

A trip to Mystic Seaport, in Connecticut, proved that they did.

A week before visiting Mystic Seaport, I had taken the glass slide in its frame to a specialist in nearly extinct photographic techniques.

“Ambrotype,” Michael Noonan had corrected me when I told him I had a daguerreotype of my distant relative. This distinction turned out to be the least of our problems since years before, someone had shoved the glass slide into a cheap frame that lacked a dark backing, thus blotting out the image. No one had seen it since. Vanishing from the glass, it had simply left.

A positive on glass, ambrotypes had a quick heyday for about 10 years, starting in 1855, along with the albumen print, pretty much replacing the daguerreotype in popularity. But this distinction dated the photograph, and that was an essential piece of the tale. Since he drowned in 1865, the image of the rigger had to have been captured before that. It was.

Getting it out of the frame was “going to be a bear,” asserted Noonan, and we finally agreed that he should pry it with pliers. I squirmed as shards of glass showered from it like cracked ice. But they were only from the glass frame, not the slide itself, though only from the edges of that, revealing that the glass slide and the glass frame had adhered. If we were unlucky, Noonan said, the image would be forever ruined when we pried them apart.

I went into the parking lot to walk around. Well, I thought, I’ve got to do it. It’s of no use the way it is. But I had come to treasure that little slide, a relic, which had somehow survived a trans-Atlantic crossing 100 years before and was inside in Noonan’s hands as I thought this, possibly facing being forever destroyed. And with that I strode back into the photographer’s old-fashioned place of business to ask him to stop the whole thing.

“Got it,” said Noonan, holding the bare slide in his hand just as I came through the door. The image was intact.

But after several unsuccessful attempts to back the slide with some dark fabric and view it, he finally suggested inserting it right into an old camera and shooting through it. He warned that the process might burn the image right.

I nodded.

Into the darkroom we went. He shot a few, then tossed what looked to me like a bare piece of paper into a huge tub of liquid, from which an antiquated system of armed baskets then lifted it, and dropped it along in a series of baths, on to the next, then the next.

After 10 minutes Noonan picked up the paper with tongs from its last basket and dropped it into a small tub. I stood over it as an image slowly assembled itself into place, coming back from the depths, bringing my genetic history into watery focus, each line seeming to swim up through the liquid and directly into my soul.

“Oh my God,” I said.

It was a face I had seen so many times and yet never seen, a face I missed so much: my grandfather’s stare, my father’s broad forehead, my cheekbones, all laid upon the florid face of what was undeniably a ruddy-colored man.

Noonan made me many copies including several large magnets. I kept one and gave the other to Margaret, bringing back from the deep nothing less than a long-ago drowned man, not buried, never identified, never even rescued, until now, by two women, two sisters, who finally came to claim him.

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