Printing Performances: Snakes and Other Blips

my all time favorite freak show story has to be the one about Charles Eisenmann and the Snakes...

​During the late-nineteenth-century, Charles Eisenmann was the premier photographer of the freaks, prodigies, and nature’s curiosities who had set up shop in New York City’s colorful Bowery District.  In the only published collection of Eisenmann’s cartes-des-visite, Monsters of the Gilded Age, Michael Mitchell briefly mentions a series of negatives that managed to capture snake charmer Jane Devere’s unattended snakes slithering about the studio.  In response to these unwelcome wanderers, Eisenmann built a signature pen specifically for his bevy of snake women.  Unfortunately, the tell-all negatives are all but untraceable.  Other than a charming anecdote detailing the everyday problems of running a photography studio catering to freak perfomers, this tale, and in particular Eisenmann’s part in it, got me thinking about how the producers of the performance souvenirs become unlikely key players in  archival lives of freaks.  Of course, it’s usually the freaks themselves who take the dubious honor of being in the limelight, but as we can see with Eisenmann’s story, the body of individuals imparted with the duty of creating the freak show souvenir round out a supporting cast of characters who have equally shaped the visual legacy of the freak show.

With this story always wiggling around in the back of my head, during my short foray into book making, I found myself becoming attuned to the way in which printmaking and the production of the book were performances of the everyday, rife with minor perils akin to Eisenmann’s.  From training the hand to hold the type stick “properly,” to the flick of the wrist to secure the lockup, to working the handpress like a slot machine to produce text, the process of printing is an embodied as much as it an intellectual one.  Printing relies on routinized, if not repetitive, kinesthetic engagement.  However, sometimes it’s the moments of singularity, when the snakes are on the loose, that have the longest or most potent impact.  Every unnoticed upside down apostrophe or backwards “c,” for every slightly crooked or off-centered piece of prose, and for that one run of “Bearded Lady”’s with the ghostly lines traversing her because my hair got stuck to the tympan—these “freaks” of printing serve as clues to the printer’s unseen part in the freak show.