Melissa McCarthy, Photo, Phyto, Proto, Nitro,
Sagging Meniscus, 2023
From Troy to Hiroshima, Crimea to the nuclear Nevada desert, we make our tracks over the war-scratched globe, and when we reach a ruin or a destination we read the markings, record them using various forms of photography. Later—or much, much later—someone else in turn will try to understand our silvery traces. These are the threads that Melissa McCarthy follows, unpicks, weaves again into a nexus of light and time: the mirrored silver cells of a shark’s eyeball, sunlight glinting off the foam and sea wrack of the Aegean on flower with corpses, the silver salts of photographic paper, silver grave-treasures at Ur.
Like an archaeologist in her own strange literary landscape, McCarthy cuts through layers of history and technology to realign the dead and their images. She examines both what can be photographed and what remains always just beyond the frame, and photography itself. It’s a practice involving chemicals and the action of light. But it’s also an organising principle for literature and beyond: there are marks made—by us, on us—that we can’t yet fully see or understand, though they push on through to the surface, always re-blooming.
“Four dazzling essays about images, destruction, flowers and invention, forging unexpected links between Agamemnon, archaeology, early photography, explosives, neuroscience, mirrors, Twin Peaks, and—the author’s special interest—sharks. (Did you know that sharks see everything twice?) Melissa McCarthy combines a sharp, precise intelligence with great warmth, wit and sensitivity; her brilliant monograph is sure to become a durable classic.”—David Collard
“In Photo, Phyto, Proto, Nitro Melissa McCarthy mixes her four headline prefixes in the crucible of her wit to capture the endless interactions in nature and art of destruction, flowers, images, and invention. Like Montaigne writing about the destruction of the Aztec empire, McCarthy constructs her text as a vehicle in which to move across the corpse-strewn wastelands and oceans of human history, gathering together the images that survive and the flowers that unconscionably bloom. The result is an extraordinary feat of quizzical, inquisitive invention, an essay that never stops moving.” - Richard Scholar
“McCarthy asks, How do we picture the world? Her answer is: Metaphorically, one thing in terms of another, and then another. And so she writes a beguiling microcosm of a book which, like the ‘aleph’ of Borges, contains everything: from Agamemnon to algae, from Hiroshima to Hergé, and not omitting the inside of a shark’s eyeball.”—Dr. Andy Martin
“From Aeschylus to Jaws, via histories of photography, tattoos, chemicals and some of the most horrific moments of the twentieth century, Melissa McCarthy’s Photo, Phyto, Proto, Nitro reads like the reed mats dug up from a Sumerian city: an assemblage of lightly woven textured texts, ‘crumbling as we try to consider them’. McCarthy approaches writing as a generous reader, as a detective, as a rummager among archives, as an archaeologist, as a photographic developing agent. The book is suffused with the pleasure of looking and finding and showing and sharing. McCarthy has a way of recalibrating perception, finding the depth in a surface and surfaces in the depths, helping you to see for just a fleeting moment that perhaps yes a camera is also a coffin, and a shark is also a camera. The result is forensic, joyful, surprising and rich. As McCarthy herself writes repeatedly, ‘This is great’ and ‘I love this’.” —Tom Jeffreys
“In this sequel to her amazing Sharks, Death, Surfers, Melissa McCarthy shifts the focus to photography and, as its jingle title advertises, makes completely new stopovers and connections that indelibly change how we look at and through the medium. While it participates in what is by now a genre of study of our deep attachment to the vestige, her contribution doesn’t get lost there. By offering rigorous reinterpretation of the photographic image’s posttraumatic temporality (from its lurking latency to its potent efflorescence, which in the end happens only to recur) McCarthy’s analysis situates not the history but the essence of the medium within its near miss with doubling.”–Laurence Rickels
Though I have now read it twice, I cannot remember the title of this book — that is, I keep getting its four words mixed up. This is perhaps because the four essays of which it consists (‘Flowers,’ ‘Early Processes,’ ‘Refixing the Image,’ and ‘Explosions’) follow a sequence not of Photo, Phyto, Proto, Nitro but of phyto, proto, photo, nitro. The title might not have been chosen only for its more euphonious qualities but to acknowledge the fact that what the book does among many other things — is to show that these four elements (to quote — ‘Photo: to do with light. Phyto: plants and flowers. Proto: the first, the original. Nitro: it blows up’) are not discrete objects or processes, but ones which inhere in each other. Each section loops back on the others, blooms and branches out, leaving traces on its counterparts.
This method in turn provides a guide to reading the book. The first section begins with a brief mention of tattoos before rapidly turning to John Hersey’s book about Hiroshima then pauses to closely parse one small excerpt from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon before moving on to archaeologist Leonard Woolley’s accounts of the excavation of Ur. That’s just the first ten pages. There are another 118 to go, and the pace doesn’t slow.
The reader here will be forgiven for worrying that PPPN may merely be yet another voguish non-fiction book, one which attempts to link together a number of disparate ‘oh-isn’t-this-quite-interesting’ facts, take a punt at uniting them somehow then add a dash of personal memoir to create something which we are assured will change how we think about subject X or Y for ever. Relax, it isn’t.
The book also manages to avoid the risk of information overload: while the method may initially seem digressive, it is anything but. PPPN follows its trails of argument precisely — every detail mentioned is vital as it will be returned to, and looked at again in a sharper light or from a different angle or in a new context, bringing each element and the whole they form into clearer focus and relief each time. McCarthy’s style is clear, even when dealing with complex subject matter (the interior of a shark’s eye, for example), and moves smoothly between lucid academic and casually friendly. There is nothing de haut en bas here, only the dazzling pleasure of being with an incredibly sharp, wide-ranging and well-informed mind as it thinks. McCarthy asks us along, inviting us to explore the worlds of cyanotypes, sharks, nitrates and memory books (among other things) together.
Though the structure is recursive, there are strong narratives here. The story of professional solider and amateur photographer Alfred Capel Cure, for example, reads like another modish genre, that of the ‘non-fiction novel.’ However, whereas, for example Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World speculates on the interior torment of the great men who would inevitably shape our world irrevocably, McCarthy resists such speculation and the temptation to fabricate, and gives us the lines of the story with enough narrative delay so as to make it both compelling and well worked into the book’s overall themes. If PPPN has any analogues, it is the work of Marina Warner (her book Phantasmagoria especially), or Philip Hoare’s Albert and the Whale. Anyone seriously interested in photography should place this book alongside Barthes’ Camera Lucida and Geoff Dyer’s The Ongoing Moment on their shelves.
The still-nascent field of Forensic Literature takes the useful mis-quotation of Walter Benjamin (‘every photograph is a crime scene’) and looks at a range of objects very carefully, looking at the marks upon them which show how they came to be and how they may have ended, at their erasures, lacks and scars, what is missing from them, and considers how they can reveal unexpected connections which shape our world. Photo, Phyto, Proto, Nitro is a vital addition to it. - C. D. Rose
https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/photo-phyto-proto-nitro/
Melissa McCarthy, Sharks, Death, Surfers: An
Illustrated Companion. Sternberg Press, 2019
We encounter the world through surfaces: the screen, the page, our skin, the ocean’s swell. Here on the sea is the surfer, positioned at the edge of the collapsing wave. And lurking underneath in a monstrous mirroring is the shark. When the two meet, carving along the surface, breaking through the boundary, is when death appears.
Steering her analysis from the newspaper obituary in and out of literature and past cinema, Melissa McCarthy investigates a fundamental aspect of the human condition: our state of being between life and death, always in precarious and watery balance. Sharks, Death, Surfers: An Illustrated Companion observes how sharks have been depicted over centuries and across cultures, then flips the lens (and dissects the cornea) to consider what sharks see when they look back.
These refracted lines of inquiry—optical, philosophical, historical—converge at the focal point where we can fix the image of the surfer and the shark. This is the picture McCarthy ends up framing: the cartilaginous companions gliding together in a perfect model of how to read, navigate, and exist.
If the most basic aspect of modern human life is species supremacy, to be eaten is perhaps the true inverse of being alive. In the words of Valerie Taylor, one half of the couple who pioneered the underwater filming of sharks, becoming the first to film great white sharks outside of a cage: “We all realize that the chances of being taken by a shark are exceedingly remote, but it is the horror of having chunks bitten from one’s body while still alive which evokes fear out of all proportion to the actual danger.”
I’d never heard of the Taylors until reading Sharks, Death, Surfers: An Illustrated Companion by Melissa McCarthy. Sharks, Death, Surfers is a beautiful art object, petite and strange, replete with artist renderings of sharks that span the ages, from 750 BCE to the cover of Jaws. It is more a brief philosophical exploration of the intersection described in the title than anything else, unique in its take on the topics at hand but at times scattered and abstract. McCarthy is the chief obituary reviewer of the International Necronautical Society, a twenty-year-old organization whose goal is to “bring death out into the world.” It was in this role that she began to study obituaries of surfers, and thus the lives of sharks.
McCarthy was captivated by a 1982 Rolling Stone feature on the death of Lew Boren, a veteran surfer who was killed off the California coast in 1981 by a great white. Boren’s death is the stuff of horror movies: He went out to surf alone and didn’t come back. First, his board was found with bites taken out of it, indicating a creature in possession of an eighteen-inch jaw, and then his body was discovered, missing a portion of his chest cavity roughly the same size. “The excess population [of sharks] is made up of loners, often deformed in some way,” McCarthy quotes from the Rolling Stone article on his death. “They abandon their home waters. They live in areas normally not visited by their own species. They never return to the usual shark breeding grounds. And sometimes what they do, at least in coastal waters, is kill people.” Boren himself was a loner, she points out, someone who was single-mindedly interested in abandoning his native land for sea, and preferred to do so without the company of other humans. “The surfer,” she concludes, “is the shark.”
The book is filled with metaphors like these, some of which feel sharp and elucidating, others heavy-handed—calling the preeminent shark scholar an “apex predator,” for example. McCarthy’s most interesting metaphorical detour comes at the halfway mark: She jumps from Moby-Dick to Crash to a calendar of L.A. Artists In Their Cars, and finally to Ted Kennedy driving off the Dyke Bridge in 1969, leaving Mary Jo Kopechne to drown in the submerged vehicle. She writes, “In the photographs, a beautiful, sleek, rounded machine (it’s an eighteen-foot-long, four-door Oldsmobile 88) lurks just beneath the surface of the water, next to the reeds and sedge and the pathetic plank bridge. The car looks just like a shark.” It is in passages like this one that McCarthy’s purposeful confusion is strongest: She is speaking in symbols, and if the shark attack is the symbol of the most frightening, helpless, isolated but conscious death, what could be more that than drowning in the passenger seat of a politician’s car, a death that could have been avoided “if competent effort had been made at the time of the accident”? The car is the shark, but so is Kennedy, who swam away unscathed and spent the night in his hotel, failing to alert anyone of the incident until morning.
McCarthy brings a variety of seemingly unrelated characters to her narrative: Captain James Cook, an eighteenth-century British explorer whom she develops an interest in after learning (incorrectly) that he died surfing; schizophrenic surf photographer Ron Stoner, who sold his boat and went to Maui, never to be heard from again and first presumed missing, then dead; Dr. Samuel Gruber, “the world’s foremost authority on sharks from the perspective of marine zoology.” The pages flit from character to character, under subheadings like, “Dissection & Pleasure,” “A Fence, a Boundary, a Distinction,” and, “Dude, Where’s My Counterpart?” She connects the disparate narratives through concepts that are central to surfing and inherent to sharks: balance, slippage, steering, lurking, vision, light, shadows, misdirection. The method is effectively disorienting, pulling the reader into sudden, unexpected points of connection.
I was drawn to McCarthy’s book because I’m terrified of sharks. They are my biggest irrational fear, by which I mean that they are the thing I am most afraid of that has nothing to do with the reality or possible reality of my life. It’s been this way for as long as I can remember, and I have no idea when or why it began. I am perversely fascinated by them, as happens with the things we dread, but usually too scared to look. When I research shark statistics, I cover my phone screen lest an image come up first. When I was a kid, I sat with my legs folded up onto my seat during dinner, scared that sharks were swimming in the open space under the table. I hated showering, panicked at being shut in with water, thinking the faucet would turn into a mouth. On planes, I was scared not that the plane would crash and I’d die, but that it would crash into the ocean and I’d survive, only to be eaten by a shark. Somehow, all of this did not extend to being scared of the ocean itself; I loved to swim then, and still do.
McCarthy’s approach is literary and scientific—she doesn’t seem scared of sharks, or death, only curious. I’m not sure how one becomes a chief obituary reviewer for an avant-garde group studying death, and she doesn’t explain, but does tell us early on, “In the summer of 2007, my organization undertook a research visit in Durban, South Africa, to what’s commonly known as the Sharks Board,” which, “carries out academic zoological research and, on the pragmatic side, encourages beach-based tourism to the region.” The center performs ticketed, weekly dissections of sharks for the public, and it’s in this tradition that her book follows, presented like a conceptual dissection, neutral and studious.
The most frightening page of the book is a reference to another book. Under an underwater photo of a great white, albeit mouth closed, the caption appears: “In their 1978 book Great Shark Stories, the Taylors, who worked on Jaws the film, report that the most frightening thing about being chased by a shark is seeing the horror in your friend’s eyes as he or she watches you about to be eaten.” I promptly bought that book, and though I pored over it, was unable to find this reference. It’s composed of excerpted stories of attacks, adventures, and benign behaviors, both fiction and nonfiction, each introduced by the Taylors. A few provided the gore missing from Sharks, Death, Surfers—a gruesome account of a diver watching his friend torn in two—but many were reverential and measured, particularly Valerie’s descriptions of recording great white sharks for documentaries and narrative films. It was perfectly clear to her that sharks don’t attack without extenuating circumstances, and that when they do attack, you don’t see them coming. I found this comforting. The anticipation of being eaten is probably worse than the act itself.
McCarthy believes that surfers have “the special quality of being in a privileged relationship with the boundary.” I think this is a metaphor for madness. Surfing is a mad sport, exceedingly dangerous not because of sharks but because of drowning, and rocks. Because of the depth and strength of the ocean. (And terror is a mad thing too: all-consuming, divorced from reality, triggering paralysis or sudden, rash movements.) Death by shark is rare but horrible, though death by surfing isn’t uncommon for surfers. Yet the focus, always, is on the shark. Every movie is about the shark; every spotting of a shark makes the news; every July we are promised the wildest Shark Week yet. But maybe it’s all symbolic—surfing is the best symbol of the thrill of risk, and sharks the best symbol of risk’s randomness.
I am less afraid of sharks now than I was before I read these books. I’ve been searching them on the internet every day, never wanting for fresh news because every shark sighting is newsworthy in the summer, no matter how insignificant: the great white that may or may not have entered the Long Island Sound; the influx of sharks off Cape Cod, threatening the tourist industry; the sixteen-foot behemoth that circled a New Jersey boat named Big Nutz Required II before snatching the dangling bait and swimming away; the guy who was bitten in Florida and headed straight to a bar rather to a doctor's office. I’ve been closing my eyes less, but when a trailer for 47 Meters Down: Uncaged started playing on my Twitter feed before I could scroll away, I screamed. I knew I could lure myself back into being as scared as I was; indulging fear is formulaic and easy. And it is both useful and exciting to cling to a fear as pointless as man-eating sharks—to have a site to which to attach free-floating anxiety, and to so easily jump.
When you surf, the board has to slip just enough, but not too much: it’s “controlled and focused slipping.” I never thought I’d stop fearing sharks, and I haven’t, but I’m slipping. Their demonization is fatal for them, having significantly diminished their population through hunting. I know it’s our fault they are moving closer to shore, as water temperatures change, and our fault their ecological status is “vulnerable,” if not yet endangered. Great whites don’t want to be near humans; it’s we who make the world smaller, with respect to what is habitable, and force our proximity. We’d do better to look to them as a model for freedom than for terror, but those concepts are hard to separate for our species, when they appear at surface level. I’ve not given up my fear but I’m playing at its boundary—I imagine McCarthy would be satisfied. - Sophia Giovannitti
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