George Prochnik at Cabinet:
Just inside the tall white door of Sigmund Freud’s waiting room, with its cross-hatched metal strips evoking prison bars, stands a dark valise ready for flight. Beside the case, dropped in disarray, lies a leather camera case, straps snaking into the air, then coiling across the wooden floor. The image is the first interior shot in Edmund Engelman’s book comprising fifty-four of the photographs he took in May 1938 of Freud’s apartment building, home, and offices at Berggasse 19.1 In the suite of pictures, this is the only one to advertise the photographer’s own presence. Perhaps the serendipitous configuration proved irresistible to him; the valise at the threshold makes a potent emblem of Freud’s impending departure from the city where he’d spent almost the whole of his life. The adjacent cast-aside camera holder, meanwhile, attests to the case’s true function—a kind of signature left by Engelman to indicate that the evidence of the resident’s imminent exit is only symbolic, just as the photographer himself is only “there” as the conservator of transience, a cipher behind the cyclops eye of the lens.
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