The streets of San Francisco: encounters with the Selle collection of street vendor photographs.

The pairs on the street become then just as much agents of division as they do units of social togetherness. A number of the Selle images selected by Tonnard comprise a catalog of internal variations that signal apartness rather than union. A sample listing of disturbing elements would include an odd character lurking in the background behind the couples; a compelling "negative space" in between, highlighting the separation of figures; an accidental alignment of arms or legs; mismatched clothes; a misalignment of the figures. These disturbing details serve to haunt the more reassuring signs of companionship and are charged with a kind of ambiguity that Sigmund Freud sought to explain in his essay on the "uncanny." Tonnard makes astute observations about this much-discussed idea as well as other important conceits about the impact of modernity on the psyche from such cultural critics and thinkers as Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin. Such theories of modernity are given a new twist in the context of the book. For example the solitariness of the flaneur is infused with new capricious meanings seen in the double vision of the Selle cameramen. In this way, Two of Us makes a thought-provoking contribution to a growing body of theoretical literature on the different status of the flaneur in contemporary culture, such as Ann Friedberg's flaneuse. (10) This artist's book has the added merit of embedding theory performatively in the nuanced rhetoric of archival images.

This book-as-performance raises additional questions of how the images and the figures themselves perform throughout the text. Mostly they walk, of course, frozen in passing by the Fox Movie Flash cameraman. The cameraman himself performs, usually encountering them frontally with the camera. Some, like the photographers, perform by looking, others seem to play their role by being looked at. The street performance is a network of motions and looks at different tangents, encounters. The acts occur repetitiously, too, step by step, day after day. The cameraman always points the camera from the waist level, adding a sameness to the pictures' perspective. Despite the repetition and the channeling of movement along the sidewalk, the performers seem to act on their own accord. If fate governs the actions of the double, it is an unpredictable fate subject to interruption and variation. At important junctures in the book, there are special characters of special notice punctuating the equilibrium of the doubles. They are "third men," in the sense of T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland," who are silent, unseen partners in the modern journey. They may also appear similar to Edgar Allan Poe's Man of the Crowd, mysterious figures that embody the crowd in their alterity. Such figures are exemplified in Two of Us by a special picture--the frontispiece of the book reproduced twice--that depicts a woman whose strange action rivets our attention. She seems to be falling down, her legs akimbo, offset at a sharp angle under her. Yet she looks straight into camera, seemingly as oblivious to her falling as her partner alongside her. This signature image epitomizes the standing of the double throughout the book, the double that is off-balance, somehow unknowingly falling.

This status of falling is not a peripheral issue but inscribed at the heart of the modern double as recounted by Two of Us. Being off-balance is part of its mathematics, its way of counting the multiplicity of urban modernity and, perhaps, enumerating the possibilities of very large archives too. Its peculiar mathematics comes down of the oddness of the number two. The very number that seems the epitome of parity and balance is off because it forever stands between values of singularity and multiplicity. Destabilized, the two plays one off the other in relation to the many This oddness of two explains the mathematics of the tensions in the Selle collection encountered previously in the Eskind/Pritikin show and Mount's 17523 Pictures and that Two of Us carries further.

Mathematics is especially relevant in recounting this tale of an archive if we follow the mathematician and novelist Rudy Rucker's explanation of number systems as relating to basic patterns of thought, sensation, and worldly conditions. In his 1987 book Mind Tools, Rucker summarizes levels of number systems that involve distinctly different quantities and intuitions about the world: small, medium, large, and inconceivable. (11) Beyond the small and medium numbers (which, like two, can have their own fascinating quirks), the large numbers require special conceptual tools and notational methods in order to think about them. In the 1930s, the mathematician Edward Kasner popularized the name "googol" for a fantastically large number that as Rucker calculates, "... if we could count up all the atoms in all the stars we can see, we would come up with less than googol of them." (12) And, hold your breath, googol is just the smallest measure of that inconceivable scale: numbers so large that they surpass the ability to describe them in terms shorter than the number itself Without any workable notation, they are very difficult to think about. That googol, and the inconceivable numbers beyond, is not a vapid thought experiment and relates to real historical conditions is shown by the current symbolic value of "googol" in our postmodern world. As the source of the brand name of the Internet's most powerful search engine, it summons up the huge registers of data in our digital culture, a magnitude of information rhetorically expressed as bordering on the infinite.

On the scale of these fantastic numbers, the Selle collection, at just over one million items, hardly stacks up to even the medium category of numbers in Rucker's abstract math. But relative to archives and the kinds of objects under count--a picture being, in itself, an inexhaustible repository of information--a million is equivalent to googol standing at the threshold of the inconceivable in the world of pictures. In a similarly scaled down way, Two of Us presents a countable sequence of about 400, but the meaning of this number is amplified by the implied universe of images lying beyond. In the fabric of Tonnard's book, we sense that the doubles could go forever and those presented are only the tip of the iceberg. The infinite sea of possible pairs mocks the act of counting in that two marks the primary act of counting, as in the schoolyard jab, "you can hardly count to two" (Does one even need counting?). Therefore, even the smallest, basic numbers possess quandaries of thought as Two of Us attests in linking the number two with the inconceivable. Moreover, the book builds on these mathematical quirks to link the number two with the persistent problematics of modernist metaphysics figured in the double.

Tonnard invokes these problematics explicitly in her introduction calling out the themes of incessant repetition in Baudelaire's vision of seeing the same "fiendish old man again and again in the streets." As mentioned, this image of perpetual repetition figures importantly in the fundamental theoretical texts of Freud's uncanny and Benjamin's commodity reproduction. But Tonnard's thoughts on repetition turn more on figures of temporality in concert with photography's complex relationship to time. The double is doubly stuck in Two of Us: once by the internal mirroring of the couples reflecting each other, twice by the snap of the photographer's camera. Tonnard sees in this stuck time a kind of vacuum, but there is also a splitting that suggests Friedrich Nietzsche's meditations on splitting as interpreted by Alenka Zupancic. In her investigation of Nietzsche's "philosophy of the two," she proposes that modern time arises at the moment "when 'one turns to two,' namely as the very moment of a break or a split." (13) The emblem of time born out of the double was the mid-day sun--noon--when the shadow is shortest and time seems to come to a stand still (One also thinks of the gun fight encounter in John Ford's 1952 film High Noon). Noon is the peak moment of ambiguity that symbolizes the truth that every moment is doubled in modern life.

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Two of Us similarly unwinds according to this Nietzschean figuration of the double as a condensed kind of time loop. The pages when flipped quickly set Baudelaire's words in circular motion, as they loop through the book as a whole front-to-back and back-to-front. The words that appear straight up and down at the book's center--"old" and "have"--would both be "noon" within the compass of the book. The frontispiece is doubled, capturing twice the falling women, an action at its peak, like noon. As in Fox Talbot's plate in The Pencil of Nature (1844), clocks, and all manner of devices for telling time, appear as unconscious timepieces that mirror photography's fixing of specific moments (recall Eskind's focus on movie marquees as temporal points of reference). There are evidently many times of day represented in the Selle pictures, even night pictures illuminated by flash photography. On sunny days the figures cast shadows that, like primitive gnomons, may indicate the time of day by the length and angle of the shadow. Whatever time is inscribed, as a clock, Two of Us is always set at noon. Like modern times, the doubles it draws from the Selle archive foreshadow a present, from the past, that never quite arrives.