Category: Photo History

This afternoon I went to the Weinstein Gallery to see the selection of Mapplethorpe photos before it closes. I was surprisingly impressed, both with the exhibition space and the things on the walls. I hadn’t seen any Mapplethorpe prints in person before now because I’m not really a fan. However, the pieces on display made me reevaluate that. Mapplethorpe’s use of the body as a sculptural object never struck me as particularly new or interesting, but I suspect its because the most frequently published examples are those that are most closely aligned with the modernist/Westonian heritage (well crafted examples of “the thing in itself”). These pieces were different; they were well-wrought to the point of being overwrought. That was much more exciting. The blacks became like a reverse halo, with the darkness spilling over into the backgrounds.

Overall, the impact was closer to William Mortensen than Edward Weston. The veins on Ken’s arms in one of the shots were in such high relief as to resemble a Rodin; the over-the-top use of body paint made the bodies resemble dolls instead of people; the use of color was garish and cartoon-like. The artificial nature of the images just shone from the plain white walls and creaky floor of the gallery. It was silent as we looked around, but eventually a man came up from the basement, said hello, and then proceeded across the street without any interference in the viewing experience. It was a beautiful show, indeed.

The photograph in the 2000 article matched the appearance of the man from the basement; it was taken by Daniel Corrigan, the photographer whose show I saw yesterday. The design of Corrigan’s photograph is much the same as several of the thousands that came flashing across the hi-def TV screen. The Mapplethorpe photographs, on the other hand, were distinctive. Not what I was expecting, and unlike any of the others that I had seen in reproduction.

I haven’t been able to shake the well-circulated image from Walter Benjamin of history as a dream; it makes more sense to me to believe that I am awake and the past that inflects my consciousness is a dream. The orthodox Marxist paradigm proposes that we live in a dream of false consciousness where critical engagement/interpretation struggles awaken us. The visual counterpart of this is the orthodox desire to “penetrate the mask” of the subject to reveal the substance underneath; the unorthodox alternative suggests that the mask is the true reality, the substance “underneath” largely a dream.

I attended most of the events when the Diane Arbus exhibition Revelations came through town a few months ago, and it was interesting to listen to Neil Selkirk attempt to explain the nature of reality/perception interrogated by
Arbus’s photographs to those who were used to the more conventional take on “revelation.” Selkirk suggested that what was in play in Arbus’s work was the inexact nature of the fit between inside/outside, clothes/roles, belief/actuality. It was striking among the ordinary and unusual people she chose to photograph, the discomfort being palpable in both. In short, she came not to strip the mask but to celebrate it as a revelation of what the subject truly is. At every turn, Selkirk was forced to deal with questions regarding Arbus’s suicide—did the depressing/freakish nature of her subjects drive her to it? I admired his restraint—the only answer worth giving is that life is complicated— there was no reason to believe that her death was in any way connected with her work. The obsession with masks/guarded selves in her work has little in common with postmodern identity politics/dress-up games.

Selkirk produced (and showed) a film reconstructing a slide show Arbus gave shortly before her death that he hoped might dispel the image of her as a “tortured soul.” A new online photographic magazine has released the audio portion (complete with an irritating set of copyright disclaimers at both ends—we get it, it’s copyrighted!) of that slideshow on the web. It’s well worth a listen. I’d like to comment more about some of the other work at Almanac, but I’ll have to save that for later.

Revisiting the Revelations catalogue, I was immediately seized by a quotation from Arbus’s brother, Howard Nemerov, that she had copied into a notebook. It’s from a poem “To Cleo, Muse of History” — “As with the dream interpreted by one still sleeping/ The interpretation is only the next room of the dream” (165). How many rooms do we really need?

Ralph Hower, a business historian and Harvard University professor, argued that advertising was a powerful tool for private profit and social control and “essential to a free modern industrial society.” He thought that advertising agencies, by their contribution to the free enterprise system, “have helped to build the American nation,” equating engagement with business with patriotism. [n. Hower, History of an Advertising Agency: N.W. Ayer and Son at Work 1869-1949 p.622-632]

Beyond its perceived value in epitomizing American modernity, photography became the choice for commercial images of the newly solidified American empire because it affirmed economic and class structures, Its call to spectators to identify with the prosperity and joy of its subjects, its implicit moral relativism in equating social good with “progress,” and its obfuscation of social stratification and disregard of the conditions of the production of goods all worked to reinforce the status quo. Photography sold its ideology by sleight of hand, in which the inscribed social relations were made to seem natural rather than constructed. (Patricia Johnston, Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen’s Advertising Photography, p. 32)

I noted Steichen’s brand of experiential realism back in 2004 in a timeline.

As our methodology developed, we discovered that each new picture, when combined with an earlier image, forms a mutually dependent pair with fresh potency. Viewed in the same context, both photographs seem to extend beyond their own time frameworks and refer to an intervening period without actually describing a specific course of events. Thus, they enact the potential for an unusual dialectic about a changing landscape, a discourse that may be continued through time, activated by repeating the first images over and over. The earliest pictures mark the starting point, but no one image, first or latest in the series, represents a definitive statement. Each is simply another perspective in an ongoing time-image network. (Mark Klett)

The idea of participating with a site was reinforced by coming to see how each place might variously be represented by the photographer. Each series of photographs I took reminded me of a phenomenological exercise in perception—as if I were moving from vantage point to vantage point asking perceptual and conceptual questions about the place and receiving an appropriate response each time in the form of the resulting image.

My experience at each site became an interaction, a kind of double funnel: a flood of awareness poured in from the site and my selected responses seemed to pour back onto it. My experience was both an exchange and interchange, an engaging and a blending, an agreement and an affirmation. (Rick Dingus)

Second View: The Rephotographic Survey Project (1984)

Continue reading “Time-Image Networks” →

Few persons are aware of the extent to which this art is practiced, or how deeply it has interwoven itself with all social habits. From being an article of luxury the simple photograph has become by its inherent attractiveness and usefulness, one of the necessities of civilized life. It can be produced so cheaply that the very poorest can patronize it, and its best production so nearly approach works of high art as to make it welcome with those who value it only for its intrinsic merit. It therefore adapts itself to all the varying means and conditions of a society, and its cultivators find in every civilized community a means of obtaining an honorable livelihood. Granted that, as an artist, the photographer occupies a very humble position in the eyes of the public, yet the fact remains that not only in our large cities are there to be found prosperous photographic establishments, but our smaller towns also support them, and few large villages even exist but some adept in the art ekes out his means, if he does not entirely support himself by it. Nothing can, therefore, better prove how exactly adapted this singular art to meet a craving want of our common nature. In the smallest communities, long before the penny newspaper has arisen, or the railway station has made its appearance, the photographer will have established himself a “local habitation and a name.”

Jabez Hughes, “Photography as an Industrial Occupation for Women” Anthony’s Photographic Bulletin No. 4 (1873) 162-166

Inns of Court, Lambert Block (1858) MHS

Things look a little different at 3rd (now Kellogg) and Cedar these days. But maybe not all that different, really.

Continue reading “Inns of Court” →

A new age does not begin all of a sudden.
My grandfather was already living in the new age
My grandson will probably still be living in the old one.

The new meat is eaten with the old forks.

It was not the first cars
Nor the tanks
It was not the airplanes over our roofs
Nor the bombers.

From new transmitters came the old stupidities.
Wisdom was passed on from mouth to mouth.

“New Age,” Berfolt Brecht. Poems 1913-1956 (New York: Methuen, Inc., 1976), p.386.

Priceless epigraph from Like a Razor to a Razor Blade Company by Jim Pomeroy— a remarkably accurate article about technology from 1984.

There is a great NPR interview with Helen Levitt from 2002 (if you have eight minutes to spare). I have become intrigued by Jeff Rosenheim’s assertion regarding Levitt’s stretched version of the decisive moment. He made the same claim about Arbus during the pre-show panel. I’m still trying to process the Arbus show, and don’t feel like I can say much right now.