Betwixt

Barley, a dog, advances down a college hallway lit mostly by sunlight, without any evident signs of human activity.

As a medium so frequently geared toward the visual, the Internet has made much of liminality as a photographic aesthetic, particularly as it applies to places. We might say that a curiously nondescript hallway feels “uncanny” when photographed. I think this is owed in part to the fixedness of photographs: They situate the viewer in a spot and force them to remain there. In a liminal space, one we are meant to pass through, our in life has trained us to get a move on. Show me a long, empty subway tunnel and I’m going to feel the prospect of missing my connecting train in my bones. I gotta go fast, and a photograph refuses to let me do so.

I think this emphasis on place is limiting. This photograph doesn’t capture the feeling of what it depicts: A college campus at the absolute nadir of its activity, deep into a Spring Break that both students and faculty are taking full advantage of. The campus doesn’t feel vacated, it feels interrupted. The potential energy of a term about to be resumed hangs over the quietude of the offices and classrooms. Even Barley can feel it, in her way, displaying the kind of restlessness that comes of having been cut off cold turkey from her steady stream of guests and visitors giving her attention. Something’s about to happen. A liminal time is as oddly empty, and as uncomfortably so, as a liminal space, but that emptiness doesn’t photograph nearly as well.