The Depth of Meaning

This is a photo I took in Amsterdam in 1993. As a lifelong fan of non sequiturs, I couldn't walk past this bit of cobblestone without taking a photo. What strikes me now, almost 20 years later, is how the primary meaning of the photo is not because of the photo, but rather is embedded in the subject. And yet the subject is complex, because it involves indicators of things that lie beyond what is denoted. In addition to the tactile and geographic elements that surround the words, we are faced with a number of questions: Who is 'He?' Where is 'He?' What happened, and why have we marked time one half hour after it happened? Even more important: why memorialize it, and why here of all places? And if this is in Holland, why is it in English?

The inscription is on a sidewalk, and if my memory is accurate it was outside a courthouse. Had I been one of those meticulous types I might have indicated where exactly it was in the city, but I am not and I have never been able to find it again on subsequent trips to that amazing city. Typing the phrase into Google reveals something interesting - I have no luck finding any reference to this particular instance of the phrase (on a sidewalk in Amsterdam), but I have come across several instances where the exact phrase has been used. Often the phrase is coupled with personal modifiers, for instance: "He believed he had been dead for half an hour...," or "He had been dead for half an hour before she called...", and a variety of others. Finding the exact order of words appropriated for various situations made me realize that this is an example of a way in which people talk, it is a way of speaking; in other words, it's an expression. And because it is also the subject of this photograph, another form of expression, we encounter a field of expression here that is much deeper than the photograph's two dimensions.

I find it interesting that we are able to peer behind that basic referent and imagine an entire world of meaning. In this image there is a sense that something of great significance lies underneath the stone tile, but we have no power to discover it. It is also interesting that a central subject of this photograph is language, which is itself comprised of signs that imply significance; we can only ever really gain knowledge from it through some form of abstraction. There is a necessary tension in the fact that photographs work as signs while also conveying a sense of actuality - because, ultimately, this is just a sidewalk with some words on it. And there is no doubt that my memory of having been there and my awareness that this is a real place obscures my ability to see it as only a photograph; my observation conforms to codes that are not strictly limited to the photographic artifact. This begs the question: what do you see?