Raymond Roussel as a Child

There are so many images from the nineteenth century, of children posed with various taxidermy and plaster animals. Their childhoods aligned with an artifice of nature--the beginnings of Disney. Nature was something a boy or girl could hold to, safe enough to sit on in a white frock while gazing vacantly out into space. This, some forty years after the invention of photography.

Roussel grew up to create his own artificial worlds, writing for instance a whole book on Africa, to which he'd never been, while never leaving the residential hotel room in which he was living at the time.

One wonders if his poetical invention, "resurrectine" was not some latent reaction to a childhood desire to encounter something like life in the empty circumstances of this photograph.