Where We Find Ourselves by Margaret Sartor

Author:Margaret Sartor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2019-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

Cornelia Smith Fitzgerald, original print by Hugh Mangum shown at actual size, ca. 1897–1902. Courtesy of the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

With a printout of Cornelia’s portrait on my desk, I began to comb through Duke Library’s digitized Mangum archive. Beginning with negative one (N1), I studied every face on every negative, looking for Cornelia. After hours of clicking, enlarging, and moving on without success, I began to question the practicality of what I was doing; after another hour, the futility of it. After all, there were seven hundred negatives with, literally, thousands of faces. Then I arrived at N315, a multiple-image plate with nine separate portraits. On the bottom row, in the center frame, there she was. Not only did the image resemble the one I had propped on my desk, it was the portrait on my desk—only clearer, less blemished, and without the orange spots. The next thing I remember noticing was that while the other eight sitters on the multiple-image plate were looking to their left, Cornelia, ever the contrarian, was looking to her right.

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