Page - 22 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 4/2018

22 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 4 2o18 Katy Beinart | Khlebosolny/Bread and Salt Later, looking at these photographs alongside the originals, there seemed so many incongruities: the informality of the clothes we were wearing compared to Anne’s formality, the differences between her tightly held-in waist, hourglass-shaped body, and our unbound bodies, the formal- ity of the studio compared to the shiny shop window full of advertisements for photographic services where we photographed ourselves (figure 4). And yet I could see traces of gestures, in the shape of the lips, the eyes, a disobedient fringe (figure 5). In one photograph, Rebecca wears a photograph of Edith, Anne’s daughter, around her neck in a direct echo of Anne’s necklace. In gazing off somewhere else, my expression is not unlike Anne’s, and my folded hands and arms are positioned exactly as hers were, leaning casually on an ornate stand (figure 6). The elaborate- ly detailed architectural elements of the studio lend gravitas to Anne’s pose, even though she is very young in the photographs, while next to me the rucksacks and the woman smiling with a card suggest a more slapdash, less serious self-presentation. In our guise as tourists, recreating a family photograph from another time, the intentional act of reconstruction highlights the mixture of excitement and disappointment at finding the location one has been searching for, but where nothing actually remains of what one had been looking for. We could not find any remnants of the studios Anne had had her picture taken in, but the act of taking the photographs made us look more closely at the original photographs and begin to imagine the intentions behind them. The photographs probably date from the late 1870s or early 1880s. Anne looks about 17 or 18 years old, which would make the date 1883, when she departed for England. We know she was staying there with her father, and he may have taken her to have the photographs done for an occasion. Perhaps they marked her arrival into womanhood? In his account of a journey to Lithuania in search of his grandfather Heshel Melamed, whom he never met, Dan Jacobson carries a studio photo of Heshel taken just before he was due to depart for America: “There is just one photograph of Heshel Melamed in my possession. It is in front of me now. It is not large – about six inches by four inches – and is printed in the sepia tints of the time … Looking at them [his eyes] I can still see today, reflected in his eyes, the light that once shone in some photographic studio in Kaunas (Kovno to him) or Siauliai (Shavel to him). The reflections bear indisputable witness to the consciousness that was then his. Obedient to the photographer’s command, he had self-consciously stiffened his gaze and directed it into the back lens of the camera.”19 19 Jacobson, Heshel’s Kingdom, pp. 9-10. Figure 4-6: Katy and Rebecca Beinart, Finding Anne, 2012-2017. Source: author.