Some Strange Pity

Views of Niagara

Views of Niagara Falls

This book is largely what it says it is. The record of an episode or two, early in the history of the medium, of photographing the great and mighty waterfalls that mark the border between two countries and two parts of an vast continental water system. Niagara is immense. It’s extraordinary. And it’s powerful. In Hollywood films from seventy years ago, people seemed (quite disproportionately) to want to go on honeymoon there. Perhaps I would have, too, if I were them.

But times change.

We might be inured to natural wonders. Things that ought to amaze us somehow don’t. Part of it must be the nagging sensation of familiarity. Niagara is too commonly depicted, too popular. It’s often seen. We’ve watched people tightrope across it too many times: Blondin first, then the world. We’ve seen people go over the side of it in barrels. And what natural wonder’s reputation, its awe, could survive something as stupid as that?

It’s something to consider.

I heard a story once that when a tourist family went to a restaurant that overlooked the Grand Canyon, the bored waiters seated them by a window that didn’t look out into the immensity beneath. When the tourists protested, the waiters rectified their mistake with all sincerity, but only after confessing that, when you worked there for any length of time, the canyon ceased to have much visual interest. It ceased to amaze, at least to amaze you.

This book itself has the same feeling. There are only a few pictures. We aren’t — pardon the metaphor — drowning in the Niagara here. There should not be too much of it. It should be impossible to grow bored in such a short time. And yet, I confess it here, before everyone — I did get a little bored.

Some of that is no doubt a question of anachronism. My modern eyes find most photography from a long time ago interesting. But mostly for antiquarian reasons. A picture of someone dressed in the fashion of the past fascinates me; pictures of long-dead luminaries, too. But Niagara is Niagara. It’s been done and photographed since. And so static shots, some of them out of focus, in varying weathers but not necessarily from many angles, just don’t do it for me. I need more drama. I need some excitement.

You would think that Niagara ought to supply the excitement. It’s exciting. And yet, in this collection at least, all I see is unmoving water, frozen in time, frozen in precisely the same pose, from precisely the same angles, a number of goes — one after the other. There’s only so much the reader’s mind can do with that.

Mine isn’t inventive enough to imagine myself enthused.

But think of the first Europeans to encounter Niagara. It must have been so great and so destructive. It must have filled their heads instantly, this thing they could not have imagined from home. The world’s biggest waterfalls are in Africa and the Americas. Norway has one or two that compete on a purely technical basis. Switzerland, too. But compared to them, Niagara is something again. It’s a portal to a thundering, seething world hard to imagine. A place of elemental force, inevitable destruction, a might that could only be comprehended in cosmological terms.

As I stare at images of Niagara, surprisingly bored, I think of the people for whom it meant more than it does to me: people who saw it in the flesh, or rather in its flow.

Blondin must have grown bored by it, as he sauntered across on his tightrope many, many times. He cooked himself lunch on one of his ropes once; made a small fire and took a pan and some eggs across to it. Blondin carried his own manager across, on his back, across Niagara. That seems a little disrespectful of the falls, to me. Cross it on foot, if you must. But to humiliate the waterfall by saying it cannot even vanquish a manager, a middleman, a worm, a leach in human form, is quite another thing.

We’re often told, blithely and by people not well placed to know, that this or that place on the North American landmass held immense spiritual significance to some previous inhabitants. And of course, often that is true. Forests and rivers and the sun are all religiously potent. Niagara must be, can only be, yet more so.

Nowadays, people pay a lot of money to don bright yellow oilskins, and to hold transparent plastic umbrellas, and to stand behind the rails of a boat that comes as close to the falls as safety and legality may allow. They jump up and down, delightedly, in the splash zone, as if this immense natural obstacle were in fact a water park where marine animals are imprisoned and forced to perform for visitors.

Photographs don’t do a thing like that justice. Don’t capture Niagara. Perhaps no image, still or moving, ever could.

For so many, the falls have meant a great deal more than these photographs can possibly get me to feel. It seems a strange pity — at least it does for me.