NONFICTION

June 1, 2020: A Photo Essay

By Maggie Nye     VOLUME 57 No. 2

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Here is a picture I took:

You may be thinking, “That is not a picture.” But I assure you it is. If you look again— unfocus your eyes this time—you will see:

“A tree is a tree. Yes, of course,” says Roland Barthes. But a tree that has been declared a sentinel is “no longer quite a tree.” A tree has an ecological history, a soil-rooted purpose, an unimposed meaning. An elm houses finches, feeds rabbits and squirrels, produces oxygen, conserves water, gives shade. A tree that is a sentinel is repurposed; it is a message, a type of speech, a “myth.” And while a tree cannot really help pursuing its purpose—even in death it continues—a picture of a tree, which is a sentinel, is another matter.

I took this picture on June 1, 2020. By then, the United States had been in a national state of emergency for almost three months and DC under a stay-at-home order for exactly nine weeks. A PEW article released six months after the outbreak reported that 15% of Americans lost their jobs in the pandemic, that 21% suffered pay or hourly cuts, and that these hardships disproportionately affected non-whites, people under the age of twenty-nine, lower-income adults, and those without a college degree. I lived in the District then and went with my partner that summer to the Black Lives Matter protests, which had erupted in cities across the country after the murder of George Floyd—the latest in a long lineage of police violence against Black civilians. (We didn’t know then, and still don’t know, how many victims would follow him.) It was a time during which I was obsessed with taking pictures. I felt an obligation to record, to transmit. Everything was a symbol I was bent on deciphering. I became a codebreaker, a reader of omens. Everything was evidence of bad history unfolding while we all looked on.



Walter Benjamin was fascinated by Paul Klee’s 1920 monoprint, Angelus Novus: a grotesque figure with a huge head and jack-o’-lantern teeth. This figure inspired his famous writings on the “angel of history.” What I saw in Klee’s new angel was one of those deformed, yeast-swollen animal crackers that comes in a giant plastic jug; this one in the vague, pale shape of a lion. What Benjamin saw in the print was an angel “fixedly contemplating.” The angel “would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.” His angel is past facing. It can’t turn its weird brass eyes to the future because it is rapt with the preoccupation of redressing past horrors, which are ever mounting.

But there are surely rumblings, I thought, from within that historical mound of carnage: people, moments, ideas resounding beyond the termination of their historical moment, broadcasting through the slats in the wings of the angel of history.

A better image, it seemed to me, would be a room full of hitching posts onto which all pasts are fixed. At any moment, an inspired person may become an angel of history by undoing the tether on the rope of a certain past and knotting it to their rope of the present moment, which extends until the rope’s moment runs out of length and is itself hitched, or else knotted to another’s rope, and so forth.

Never did I imagine myself as an angel of history, but I did, with my picture-taking, try to capture one. Which is to say, I tried to create one.

In her seminal book On Photography, Susan Sontag says that to photograph “means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power.” Unlike Sontag, I don’t blame myself for wanting these things. I wanted them for others too—for everyone at the protests; for anyone faced down by the armored gaze of the police, the paramilitary; for anyone out of work, out of luck; for the so many marginal, oppositional others, living life in spite of. This was my vague, well-intentioned, reckless want.



There is a page of official city symbols on the website of the Office of the Secretary. Among these are the official DC bird (the wood thrush, common in the eastern United States); the DC dinosaur (the Capitalsaurus, extrapolated from a single, unique dinosaur vertebra found in a DC sewer); the DC fruit (the cherry, as in “I cannot tell a lie”); the DC rock (Potomac bluestone, “the rock that built Washington, DC,” which was quarried from Rock Creek and laid as the foundation of the Washington Monument, the Capitol building, and the White House by enslaved African laborers); and the DC flag (three stars and two horizontal stripes).

At the intersection of 16th and H, a black street sign with white type bears this flag and the words BLACK LIVES MATTER PLZ NW. This stretch of 16th was renamed Black Lives Matter Plaza with the support of Mayor Muriel Bowser and the DC government four days after I took the picture with the elms and the armored cars and the Man on the Motorcycle. Something like 300 protesters were arrested that night.

The city conceived this plaza as a focal point for the memory of the summer’s needful rage and its brutal corollary. When we wish to impart conclusion on an ongoing event, we memorialize it, which is to say, we extract it from its complex meaning, which is bound up in time and place. The resulting regulation of collective memory and its interpretation is what we call history. I surely have a picture of the plaza somewhere on my camera roll, among all the others of that time, but it is not worth including because the photograph does not mean anything different from the plaza itself. It is only testimony to the same constructed history.

The critic John Berger distinguishes between the personal photograph, which “remains surrounded by the meaning from which it was severed” and the public photograph—“a seized set of appearances.” For Berger, this decontextualization renders the photographed object “dead,” vacated, and therefore vulnerable to appropriation—what Barthes would call myth.



Here is some context for the photograph of my life then: My partner and I were renting a two-bedroom apartment on East Capitol Street, 200 yards west of the DC Armory. Two of our three pairs of windows faced the brick wall of the next apartment building. From the third, our bedroom window, I could lean out and take pictures of the glorified median strip that constitutes the Armory lawn, parked up as it was then with fleets of tour buses and armored cars. The National Guard’s website advertises employment as a driver of such a machine like this: “In combat, these road warriors climb into monster vehicles with mounted weapons and dominate the roadways.” There is no mention of how the road warriors are to occupy themselves during the off hours: the closest corner store for a Red Bull, the best routes for a time-killing walk shaded against the drenching sun of a DC summer when you’re wearing a long-sleeved uniform, how to make small talk big enough to overcome the feeling of being an occupier in your own country.

I ran past the paramilitary idlers of this pre-combat tailgate nearly every day on my way to the trail along the Anacostia River. And here is a secret: If you go at the hottest part of the day, you might, if you’re lucky, find yourself alone with your music, provided you know the Kingman Island trail does not end at the picnic benches overgrown with trumpeting creeper and wild blackberry—its fruit just beginning to flush with terminal color—but extends into a narrow trail choking toward lush impenetrability. You might find that you like the whip of vines and the slash of thorns against your shins, how the aphids drop from every leaf you touch and fleck you with their green and smearing bodies.



A photograph is a problem—one I had not spent much time considering beyond my personal discomfort, my own aversion to being captured. But strident anti-photography messaging emerged around the demonstrations. It’s difficult to call up the sense of tension, of anger, the adrenaline, and the nausea of this time, but the pervasive fear was that all personal acts could and would be surveilled and co-opted by the police as evidence: encrypt your messages, disable your GPS, above all, no faces. I focused my photographic efforts not on people, but on what I felt was the basic situation of the city then. I took dozens of pictures on the walks I took during my lunch hour, the holding pen of midday. Pictures of life, as I saw it responding to, resisting occupation.

These were the practical paranoias—protections against punishment—but they were closely followed by ideological paranoias.

On the phone with my father in the final days of May, I told him of my fears about an all-out war. The feeling of the city, indeed of the country—a feeling gleaned from social media, the meetinghouse of a world in lockdown—was that we were on the precipice of great upheaval, which is never met without great violence.

He dismissed my prediction. “I lived through the sixties,” he reminded me. “And I thought the same thing.” As if to say: See? Nothing. I asked him what it was like being a kid during the Civil Rights Movement, how his parents talked about it. His answers were vague and disappointing. He rarely talked about his childhood; his father died the same year I was born.

Berger sees the solution to the problem of the public photograph in the private. What he suggests is the elimination of the division between private and public photographs where “the living take the past upon themselves.” To resurrect a public photograph, to save it from appropriation, “the past [must become] an integral part of people making their own history, then all photographs would reacquire a living context.”

Because photographs now stand in for memory and because I cannot present my father’s memory, I present instead this personal photograph, turned public in its exhibition, an image for you to carry, to enfold into your own history:





My partner and I left the protest when the sound bombs deployed. We were trying our best to adhere to the citywide curfew, but we were forced to yield at 15th and Constitution to a long, slow parade of combat-ready vehicles. (I wish I’d had the prescience to count; they truly seemed unending.) And there was the June sky, the elms, the mall, the monument, and the approaching harpsicord effect and honeyed vocals of Ronald Isley crooning, Wo-o-oah Oooooh baby (baby), which heralded the appearance of the Man on the Motorcycle. He might not have been remarkable, but context made him so: an older Black man on a white motorcycle, dressed all in white. And of course, he was flat-out blasting The Isley Brothers’s bona fide baby-making jam “Between the Sheets” as he pulled up alongside a particularly monstrous vehicle en route to H Street.

A spoken interlude: Enough of this singing, let’s make love. Cue the bridge—a kind of epic-fantasy workout montage punctuated by sensual grunts and Isley’s falsetto proto-orgasmic ad-lib outro (Turn it over / I’m coming coming coming baby /coming on strong). When I call the motorcyclist up in my mind, I add fringe to his white leather jacket, but there is no proof of this detail in the pictures.

Barthes’s Camera Lucida is a vigorous investigation of photography’s power to appeal and to move a viewer. In it, Barthes identifies two elements that are essential to the provocative photograph: There is the “studium,” a “wide field of unconcerned desire”—the studium attracts the looker vaguely; simply put, it appeals—and there is the “punctum,” the thing which, for Barthes, “disturbs the studium.” An agitative “accident” which “pricks” and “bruises,” which is “poignant.” I like the idea of this disturbing accident; it suggests agency in the subject that is beyond the photographer’s control.

The punctum is not intended, except by the subject. I had intended to take a photograph whose studium attracted me. In it, I saw endless possibilities for meaning I might find personally useful. And in service of this possible appropriation, I embarked on a search to find the man: I posted to DC Craigslist, to various DC Facebook groups; I wrote to a connection at the Mother Jones DC office whose beat was protest coverage. No one knew him. I created a Reddit account; my username was 99_Questions. Within minutes, members of a motorcycle subreddit identified the man’s bike: a Victory Magnum X-1 with factory paint and an aftermarket top box, year unknown. Victory was discontinued by its parent company, Polaris, in 2017 because it couldn’t compete with beloved American manufacturer Harley-Davidson. Still, Hotcars.com eulogized the model for its “perfect combination of a loud music system [making lo-o-o-o-ove between the sheets], LED headlights brighter than halogen bulbs, and a 21" Black Billet front wheel […] All of this was enough to make the owner of this beast stand out from the crowd.”

Finding the rider proved more difficult. I posted to the subreddit for the city, and my posts were largely ignored in favor of more popular content—dogs in snowscapes, neighborhood sunsets, breaking news—until a Reddit user named Skunkytuna messaged me to say he thought he knew the man I was looking for.

“There are two possible matches of bikers in that hood,” he wrote. “I am pretty sure that you are referring to the guy known as Legs.”

I was instantly giddy with the strangeness of this. The poverty of information made each emergent detail tremendously provocative. Tuna said he met Legs at a Petworth neighborhood barbecue a while back. He recommended the barbershop on Kennedy as a possible haunt for my motorcyclist, and I was too embarrassed by my lack of locals-only knowledge that he exuded to ask which one he meant. I considered and then dismissed a road trip, settling instead on calling the number for a Vera’s Barber Shop, which one reviewer described as having been “a staple of Kennedy Street for decades.”

I was relieved when the call went to voicemail, and I didn’t leave a message. After all, what would I have said? “Hi, I’m looking for a man I’ve been obsessively tracking down on the internet for reasons impossible to articulate, and I got a Reddit tip from guy called Skunkytuna that his name might be Legs and that he might hang out here. Can you help me?”

On the topic of the man’s name, Tuna wrote: “He has titanium legs… hence the nickname.” He didn’t offer an explanation for the titanium, and I didn’t ask. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t speculate. I could feel myself getting carried away by the possibilities, all of the meanings I could imbue him with in the absence of contradictory fact, which is to say, the absence of the man’s own claim to his life and its significance. In my mind, he was already a veteran, of our war in Iraq or in Afghanistan, or possibly in Vietnam—the ultimate symbol of global disillusionment with American imperialism. He could have been in his early sixties, if he enlisted young, which would align with his musical selections: The Isley Brothers’s “Between the Sheets” came out in ’83, and the song he played next, the Bee Gees’s “Stayin’ Alive,” came out in ’77. I had also recently watched Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods, and the temptation to remake his history in the image of the men in that movie—as an expendable body sent to Vietnam to smother the growing flames of third-world liberation—was considerable.

When Tuna asked me what I wanted with Legs, I told him I was a writer, that I wanted to interview the man, which was true. What I didn’t say was that he was the key figure in a convenient image of striking juxtaposition, that he was the perfect myth for the essay I was composing, that I had already begun to think of the Man on the Motorcycle as a rewriting of Benjamin: a new new angel, my angel of history, reaching out from the past with his white leather fringed wings, blasting his message into the future. I had yet to figure out what that message was, but I was a capable enough writer that I could have made it work for me. Instead, I described the scene, the music, the spectacle of his arrival, and this was enough. “OK,” Tuna wrote me, “that definitely sounds like Legs. Who should I tell him to contact?”

The whole exchange with Tuna happened quickly. Two or three days during which I was utterly in thrall to the pursuit of my angel. Tuna promised to talk to his neighbors, blanket his contacts with text messages on my behalf, and this turned out to be his last message.

I wrote to him a handful of times and posted three or four more calls on the DC subreddit until I was shut down by the moderators, but Tuna never replied, and neither did anyone else. The most engagement I got was from a user who, to my great embarrassment, commented, “That’s one bad mutha (shut your mouth!),” along with a YouTube link to the Shaft theme song. It was at this point that I abandoned my search, recognizing in the commenter, the interpretation of the myth I was building.

One of the most intriguing details of the Man on the Motorcycle photo is that his face is turned toward the open window of the armored car, as though captured mid-conversation with the guardsman. This, I think, is the photograph’s punctum—a conversation I can never overhear, can never appropriate, but which I have imagined in enough ways to escape the tendrils of myth:

Guardsman: “Isley Brothers, nice. I love that sample in “Big Poppa.” You a Biggie fan?”
Angel: “Not really.”

Or:

Guardsman: “Nice ride, brother. Is that a Victory Magnum X-1 with factory paint and an aftermarket top box, year unknown?”
Angel: “Man, shut the fuck up.”

Or:

Guardsman: “Hi there, how’s it going?”
Angel: “Not bad, not bad. Headed downtown?”
Guardsman: “Yep, afraid so.”
Angel: “Well, thank you for your service. Stay safe now.”

Or:

Guardsman: “Hi there, how’s it going?”
Angel: “Feel the city breakin’ and everybody shakin’ / and we’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive.”

Here I leave you with a picture, a real picture, which cannot be easily appropriated because blue has a meaning, sky has a meaning, summer has a meaning already that is beyond mythologization: gradients of unambiguous color. I took this picture prone on 13th and E among hundreds of other bodies. The protest leaders instructed us to lie on the ground, silent and unmoving, for eight minutes and forty-six seconds—the length of time, according to early reports, that Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck. This time stamp, 8:46, is now a myth too—though it is incorrect. Body cam footage would later reveal the duration of asphyxiation to be 9:29.



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MAGGIE NYE is a writer, teacher, and PhD candidate at FSU in Tallahassee, where she lives with her rabbit, Grimoire. Her work has been supported by MacDowell, Tin House, and the St. Albans School Writer-in-Residence program. She is nonfiction editor for Southeast Review and author of the novel The Curators (Northwestern University Press / Curbstone). She is presently hard at work on a second one: a strange, radical retelling of the Medusa myth.


VOLUME 57 No. 2