A camera that cannot reach the Ideal
The sheet is modest in size, a little under two and a half feet tall by twenty inches wide, an upright portrait format, roughly the proportions of a magazine cover, which is exactly what it was for. And the first surprise is what is not there. There is no face. There is no figure. Standing upright in the middle of the sheet, where a person should be, is a camera: a folding plate camera with its leather bellows (the accordion-pleated tube that connects the lens to the body) pulled out, its lens board forward. The whole likeness of Stieglitz is this one piece of machinery, drawn upright like a standing man.
And the camera is doing badly. The bellows are extended, but they are slack and disengaged, the lens drooping rather than aimed sharply, hanging at half-mast. This is a camera that cannot quite point itself, cannot focus, cannot take the picture it exists to take. Scholars read that limp lens as broken, and several read it as something more pointedly bodily, a deflation, a loss of potency. Even without following that reading, the basic fact on the sheet is plain: the instrument is failing.
At the top of the sheet, on what reads as a lever plate, sits a single word in heavy blackletter (the dense, spiky, old-fashioned Gothic lettering you see on diplomas and beer labels): IDEAL. It is the thing the machine is straining up toward. The camera reaches for it. And here is the whole picture: it never gets there. Because between the camera and the word, Picabia has drawn two small, deadpan obstacles, and they are the punchline.
The first is an automobile gearshift, the lever that puts a car in gear, and it is drawn set in neutral, out of gear. The mechanism that should drive the climb up to IDEAL is disengaged; no power can reach the rest of the machine. The second is a hand-brake, and it is engaged, set, holding everything in place. Gears in neutral, brake on. The machine strains toward the Ideal with all its might and goes precisely nowhere, because it has been parked. Two ordinary mechanical details, drawn with an engineer’s straight face, deliver a verdict no caption needs to spell out.
And then the words that change the temperature of the whole thing. Inscribed on the sheet, with the title phrase Ici, c’est ici Stieglitz (“Here, this is Stieglitz here”), are three more: FOI ET AMOUR, French for “faith and love.”This is the vocabulary of devotion, of reverence, hung on a stalled and broken machine. The drawing is built out of the language of love, and it is a portrait of a man who can’t get into gear. That contradiction is the whole picture.