the image never taken

the image never taken is the absent photograph imagined around the fifteen-and-a-half-year-old girl crossing the Mekong River on the ferry between Vinh Long and Sadec. Its decisive significance lies in its paradox: because no one recognized the crossing as important while it occurred, no photograph was made, yet that omission allows the image to become more than a record. It represents the moment when an awkward child becomes deliberately visible to herself and to the world, while the ferry, the river, and the approaching Chinese man place her at a threshold between family, school, desire, and an irrevocably altered life.

The Ferry and the Missing Photograph

The image belongs to a journey from Sadec, where the narrator’s mother is headmistress of the girls’ school, back to Saigon and the boarding school. The native bus leaves from the marketplace, and the mother places the girl in the care of the driver, seating her near him in the section reserved for white passengers. At the ferry she gets off, as she always does, and goes to the rails to look at the Mekong River. The crossing is between Vinh Long and Sadec, across the great plain of mud and rice in southern Cochin China, a landscape the narrative calls the Plain of the Birds. The river supplies the image with both beauty and danger. The Mekong and its tributaries run toward the sea through an immense flatness, their current seeming powerful enough to carry away rocks, a cathedral, or a city. The girl fears that the ferry cables may break and that the current may sweep the vessel out to sea; she watches the water as though it already contained the spectacle of her last moments. The image therefore begins in a physical passage whose force exceeds human control, before the emotional and social passage associated with the Chinese man has fully emerged. The photograph is explicitly imagined as something that might have existed but did not. The event was too slight for anyone present to think of photographing, and no one knew in advance how important it would become in the girl’s life. The absence is not treated as a mere loss of documentation. The image was never detached from ordinary reality because it was never created, and precisely this failure gives it its virtue: it can represent and generate an absolute rather than merely preserve a visible instant. Memory turns nonexistence into a form of artistic presence.

Clothing, Self-Recognition, and the Hat

The imagined image is defined by an unsettling combination of garments. The girl wears a threadbare, almost transparent dress of real silk that once belonged to her mother, its worn fabric reduced to the sepia color of old silk. A leather belt may have belonged to one of her brothers. She wears the famous Gold Lamé High Heels, bought by her mother at a final reduction, shoes decorated with small diamanté flowers and intended for evening wear but insisted upon for school. Their extravagance eclipses the flat white canvas shoes of childhood and becomes part of the girl’s chosen appearance. The shoes alone do not make her look strange. The crucial ambiguity lies in The Man’s Fedora, a brownish-pink, flat-brimmed hat with a broad black ribbon. No woman or girl, native or European, wore such a man’s hat in the colony at that time. Its origin has been forgotten, though the narrator supposes that her mother bought it because she asked for it, again at a markdown. The forgotten reason for the purchase is part of the hat’s force: its meaning is discovered through the transformation it produces rather than through an explanation of intent. When the girl tries on the hat and sees herself in the shopkeeper’s glass, the thin, awkward inadequacy of childhood becomes something chosen and provocative. Nature no longer appears as an unavoidable imposition; it becomes a deliberate presentation of the self. The girl sees herself from outside, as another person might see her, available to eyes, journeys, cities, and desire. The hat makes her feel whole, while the Gold Lamé High Heels contradict both the hat and her small body, and therefore belong with them. She wears both everywhere and in every weather. The absent photograph thus records not passive appearance but the invention of a visible identity. The later photograph that comes closest to the missing image is not a photograph of the girl at all. It is a picture of her son at twenty in California with Erika and Elizabeth Lennard. He is extremely thin and adopts the distorted image of a young drifter, presenting himself as poor and precarious. The resemblance is not literal; it is a resemblance of attitude and self-fashioning. The son’s attempt to assume an image of himself recalls the girl’s discovery beneath the hat that identity can be staged, viewed, and made available to others.

The Image as Threshold of Desire

The image begins before the Chinese man reaches the white child by the rails. It includes his arrival from the black car, his approach, and the girl’s immediate recognition that he is afraid. She understands that he is at her mercy and that, through him, others might also become vulnerable to her. Entering his car marks a decisive separation from the family: for the first time and forever, her mother and brothers will no longer know what happens to her, whether she is taken away, wounded, or spoiled. The black limousine becomes the vehicle in which family protection ends and private consequence begins. The man then comes repeatedly to collect her. On a Thursday afternoon, the weekly half-holiday, he drives from the boarding school with her to his flat in Cholon, opposite the boulevards connecting the Chinese part of the city with central Saigon. In the dark studio, amid the loud city beyond the shutters and blinds, he says softly that he loves her. She does not answer. His trembling and his failure to understand her reveal that the encounter is not simply his initiative. She realizes that she had already been attracted to him on the ferry and that the movement toward desire depended on her alone. At the flat, she acknowledges that she desires him through his wealth because when she first saw him he was already in his car and in his money. He wishes he could take her away, but she says she cannot yet leave her mother without dying of grief. The image therefore holds together desire and refusal, material attraction and emotional attachment, escape and entrapment. It does not offer a simple romantic beginning; it shows a girl entering a relation whose possibilities are already restricted by family, race, age, money, and colonial law.

Colonial Space and Social Visibility

The missing photograph is inseparable from the spaces through which the affair moves. Cholon is a Chinese part of Saigon linked to the colonial center by busy boulevards filled with streetcars, rickshaws, and buses. The lover’s family wealth comes from housing for native workers: his father has built three hundred cheap semidetached compartments, owns several streets, and has exchanged apartment blocks and rice fields for building land south of Cholon. The lover explains the compartments as practical dwellings suited to working-class habits, with covered balconies over the street where residents spend the day and sleep during extreme heat. This account of housing interrupts the intimacy of the affair with the material organization of colonial society. The girl and the lover converse about compartments, epidemics, money, Paris, and ordinary events rather than about themselves. Their relationship lasts a year and a half, but from the beginning both know they cannot have a shared future, so conversation itself becomes a controlled surface, a back-and-forth exchange that avoids the forbidden destination. Their private room remains acoustically open to the city: wooden clogs, shouted Chinese voices, crowds, and passing shadows enter through shutters and blinds, while the couple’s existence remains unknown to those outside. The public world nevertheless polices their visibility. He drives her back to the boarding school at night and stops short of the entrance so no one will see him. She runs inside without looking back. The school contains mostly half-caste girls, including those abandoned by fathers who were soldiers, sailors, or minor colonial officials, and only she and Hélène Lagonelle are white. Hélène fears the occupations assigned to such girls by the French government and speaks of running away. Against this background, the image’s unusual hat and shoes signal a visible transgression, while the limousine and the hidden entrance reveal the practical methods required to conceal the affair.

Departure, Persistence, and Later Return

The image also foreshadows separation. When the narrator’s departure is fixed, the lover’s body suddenly loses its potency; he says he can no longer make love and describes himself as dead. The two decide not to see each other, but the decision fails, and he continues waiting outside the high school in his black car, his head turned away in humiliation. Their final separation occurs at the ship’s departure. The liner gives three long blasts, the tugs draw it into the middle of the river, and the ship’s farewell cries make not only the departing lovers but also onlookers and unrelated witnesses weep. Its shape slowly disappears toward the sea and is finally swallowed by the curve of the earth. The girl weeps without allowing her mother or younger brother to see her tears, because he is Chinese and grief for such a lover is socially forbidden. She sees his large black car standing apart near the Messageries Maritimes car park and recognizes the nearly invisible figure inside. She leans on the rails as she did on the ferry, looking toward him even after she can no longer see him. The first crossing and the final departure are thus joined by the same posture, the same rail, and the same waterborne threshold. Years after the war, after marriages, children, divorces, and books, the former lover comes to Paris with his wife and telephones her. He recognizes and fears her through the voice, as he had feared her before. He has learned that she writes books and has heard about her younger brother through her mother, whom he met again in Saigon. He tells her that he still loves her and will love her until death. The telephone call cannot restore the missing photograph or the lost relationship, but it confirms that the absent image has continued to organize memory across decades, war, family histories, and geographical distance.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

the image never taken functions as a visual origin for the narrator’s self-creation. The girl’s face, clothing, and hat are not stable evidence of an already formed identity; they are the means by which she becomes legible to herself. The hat produces a mirror-like recognition in which the body is seen as another person might see it, but the resulting wholeness remains constructed and precarious. The later description of the narrator’s older face as laid waste intensifies the contrast: the contours remain, while the substance has been destroyed. The photograph that never existed preserves an imagined moment of coherence more powerfully than an actual photograph might have done. The expression also transforms omission into method. The narrative repeatedly approaches the ferry scene through fragments: the river, the dress, the Gold Lamé High Heels, The Man’s Fedora, the black car, the dark apartment, the city’s noise, the boarding school, the ship’s siren, and the later telephone call. Each fragment belongs to a different social and temporal setting, yet the absent photograph holds them in suspension. Its incompleteness prevents the past from closing into a single official meaning and leaves room for desire, shame, historical violence, and artistic memory to remain active. Its significance is finally spatial as well as psychological. The image begins on a ferry crossing the Mekong, passes through the segregated seating of the bus and the boulevards of Saigon, enters the Chinese housing world of Cholon, returns secretly to the boarding school, and ends in the maritime departure toward France and the later telephone connection between Paris and Saigon. The image is never taken, but its invisible frame contains the geography of a colonial world and the first decisive crossing through which the girl becomes the narrator who will later write it.