Defining the Erotic: Laurie Haynes

Defining  the Erotic. 

As we have discussed, representation is dependent on a continual referencing of the object, in this case the image. This referencing draws upon a culturally dependent reading that will attempt to rationalise that which is ‘seen’, and in the case of the photographic, it is not the ‘photograph’ as object, rather the image within the boundaries of the frame, that are the ‘seen’.

The act of looking is mediated by both a conscious and subconscious recognition of the cultural act of viewing, which results in signification. This signification has many different identities, and serves to classify the image in a way that creates ‘recognition’ of the cultural codes and convention of that image.

For instance when we view photographic images of ‘The Family’, the classification/recognition is entirely personal and the images serve as triggers or memento mori, that fix the representation of actual events (The Photographs are not the event, but are signs that an event has taken place) Such images are made available to only intimate social group members, and carry imbedded a codex for viewing which is mediated by both the social and cultural frame of reference of the viewer. In lay persons terms, it means that to be shown such pictures positions you as part of that social/cultural group and you will respond in an appropriate manner that reflects and acknowledges the intimacy of presentation/viewing.

Now you may be thinking where is all this going? In this instance I am preparing the ground to investigate a mechanism of both viewing and object classification which essentially stands outside the contemporary social/cultural framework.

 The Erotic can be considered as a sub-cultural frame of reference that is dependent on an individual positioning of personal objectification. The Oxford English Dictionary classifies the word Erotic as an adjective, therefore descriptive: of, or causing sexual love; tending to arouse sexual desire/excitement. Now I consider this description to be overly simplistic, and not really striking any intellectual or emotional chord with my own concept of the erotic. What that is, is hard to define in terms of visual iconography, as I consider the Erotic to be dependent on a complex positioning of both intellectual and emotional trigger’s, that have long strand points (a chain of associated textual and visual signposts) of socio-cultural reference that are very hard to encapsulate in a simple statement. In short I know what I consider erotic, but it is mediated by a whole panoply of social interaction which can be object dependent, but is often a mental construct. There are however objects that are symbolic of the erotic, and wherever you have symbolic objects, you will get symbolic objectification.

 The erotic is gender/sexuality specific. There is  a chasm of difference between the female definition of the Erotic and the male. In terms of ‘Photographic history’ if we consider that early photographers used the visual devices and iconography of High Art, then the nude body is a prominent subject. The erotic has a lineage that predates photography by two thousand year or more. Erotic drawing and painting exist that depict the symbolic sexual objectification of both sexes. In Japan, for example, shunga appeared in the 13th century and continued to grow in popularity until the late 19th century when photography was invented. At the point of inception of the photograph, Japanese illustrators where still producing ‘Pillow books’ which essentially where used to introduce women to the concept of sexual love in graphic detail. In Japanese culture theses books were intimate tokens of love and esteem, and were accepted as part of the culture. European photographers, transformed or perhaps abducted these images and culturally positioned the erotic photograph as ‘outside’ the social mores of society. The resulting images which in some case copied faithfully the ‘poses’ of the pillow book, where secretly traded in the higher echelons of society, where their risqué charms became the subject for private collection and viewings amongst gentleman. But Erotic Art as a specific context was not a new thing. In Europe, starting with the Renaissance, there was a tradition of producing erotica for the amusement of the aristocracy. In the early 16th century, the text I Modi was an woodcut album created by the designer Giulio Romano, the engraver Marcantonio Raimondi and the poet Pietro Aretino. In 1601 Caravaggiopainted the “Love Triumphant,” for the collection of the Marquis Vincenzo Giustiniani. The latter is reputed to have kept it hidden behind a curtain to show only to his friends, as it was seen as a blatant celebration of sodomy. The tradition is continued by other, more modern painters, such as Fragonard, Courbet, Millet, Balthus, Picasso, Edgar Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec,and of course Egon Schiele, who served time in jail and had several works destroyed by the authorities for offending turn-of-the-century Austrian mores with his depiction of nude young girls. Erotic Art of this type was common in the Early 20th century. Artist E. J. Bellocq is best remembered for his down-to-earth photographs of French prostitutes in domestic settings in the red light district of New Orleans. In contrast to the usual pictures of women awkwardly posed amid drapery, veils, flowers, fruit, classical columns and oriental braziers, Bellocq’s sitters appear relaxed and comfortable. What is unuseual about Bellocqs studies is that they were to all intents and purposes largly unknown, A respected photographer on one hand, Bellocq had a darker side to his art which was realised in the images of La femme d’nuit. The critic David Steinberg speculates that the prostitutes may have felt at ease with Bellocq because he was “so much of a fellow outcast”, very similar in many respects to toulouse Lautrec.One of Mandel’s early outdoor photos.Julian Mandelbecame known in the 1920s and 1930s for his exceptional photographs of the female form. Participating in the German “new age outdoor movement,” Mandel took numerous pictures in natural settings, publishing them through the Paris-based studios of A. Noyer and PC Paris^. It is interesting to note that this work was not deamed erotic, but rather a romantic ideal that typified a whole philosophy that was adopted by the orchestrator’s of the Third Riecht, as the model of arian perfection. Deviant Art which included erotic images by Schiele and others being confiscated and destroyed. Another noteworthy nude photographer of the first two decades of the 20th century was Arundel Holmes Nicholls. His work, featured in the archives of the Kinsey Institute, is artistically composed, often giving an iridescent glow to his figures Following in Mandel’s footsteps, Nicholls favored outdoor shots.Many photographs from this era are damaged; Bellocq, for instance, frequently scratched out the faces of his sitters to obscure their identities. Some of his other sitters were photographed wearing masks. Peter Marshall writes, “Even in the relatively bohemian atmosphere of Carmel, California in the 1920s and 30s, Edward Weston had to photograph many of his models without showing their faces, and some 75 years on, many communities are less open about such things today than Carmel was then”    

Socially the early images are very significant. In 19^th century Japan women were the property of men, and ‘models’ from all classes were ‘procured’  without protest. European society, having gone through a social revolution that recognised the rights of the individual was a different matter. No ‘decent’ Women would be party to erotic photography, even when dressed in the academic finery of ‘Boudoir photography’

The models, both male and female came from the streets.

The economically repressed underclass of petty thieves and prostitutes. Erotic/pornographic images exist from France, Germany, England, and  Italy, and they all have the same common denominator. Class, and economic dependence. If you examine the images closely, you will see that in almost all the subjects and scenes, no matter how carefully crafted and dressed, the models show clear evidence of having spent a considerable time bare foot.

So early erotic photography was produced to sexually titillate the visual palettes of the ruling classes. The images were made by men, for men.

You are all familiar with term the male gaze, and it is true that the vast majority of Erotic images are made for exactly this, but there are images that make emotional and intellectual connections that completely negate the objectification of breasts, buttocks, and the pudenda. Now I am not making any distinction about the moral objections to the erotic, it exists in many forms, and the positioning is entirely subjective. But I feel that the erotic is an appropriate subject for visual investigation, in that we are by nature under the yoke of the visual; and use the language of the image to navigate an emotional and social connection with the world in which we live.

If you consider the hierarchy of desire, then sexual needs figure very prominently, and it is therefore easy to understand the proliferation of erotic photography. But there exists a world where such imagery is not connected with sexual objectification but social connection.

Social connection could be defined simply as ‘belonging’.

 If you are outside society, a loner, then you will feel disconnected and seek out a society that represents your inner vision of who you are. You become part of a sub-culture. Many sub-cultures co-exist within the mainstream, making points of connection that symbiotically cement the structure of society together.

 But there is a need for recognition of the individual and collective social group. Symbolic objectification is one of the devices that position such recognition; and it is displayed all around us. This display is often culturally removed from the place of origin, and owes its transmigration directly to the photographic image. For example consider skin art and  body piercing. Originally a specific ritual which would be used to delineate either the tribal nature of a collective society or to mark a right of passage. The motifs are now used to identify sub-cultural groups or alternate lifestyle. These images are in turn also often fetish-ised or eroticised to further delineate the social division. Clothing is also often used for exactly the same purposes, and rightly or perhaps wrongly is infected by the genetic catch-all title, The erotic.

The erotic image could then perhaps be typified as an in image which provokes an emotional, intellectual and physical response which are all interdependent, whereas pornography is primarily limited to the physical. So therefore if the individual sets out to create an erotic image it is doomed to failure, because the erotic cannot be staged, it just is; the ultimate movable feast.

(c) laurie Haynes. This document may be used for academic or research purposes on the condition that the author is credited. all other uses restricted.

  

An interesting academic essay on post modern surrealism

Surrealism and Self-Representation in the Photography of Francesca Woodman

Eva Rus      May 2004

 

“What happens…when woman serves as the looking-glass held up to women?”1

    
    What happens when woman finds herself in the empty space between the signs symbolized by the gaze and her objectified image? How are the conditions of her visibility produced, then? Following a path through eccentric subjectivity, gender theory, semiotics and psychoanalysis, I’d like to argue about the several repercussions of the collusion between Surrealist practices and the negotiation of theoretical models of female subjectivity in the work of Francesca Woodman, a photographer whose largest body of work was produced in the late Seventies. Working with self-portraits, fantastical representations of the body, and even depictions of the absence of the body, Woodman expanded the exploration begun during Surrealism to express female subjectivity through hybridization, fetishization, and displacement of self.

    
    Throughout art history, the woman has been fetishized by the male creative subject: both revered and feared as “Other”, admired for the formal aspects of the female body, and cast in a passive role as object of the (male) gaze. The concepts and principles that focused Andre Breton and other male Surrealists of the 1930s and 1940s on the female, also limited their capacity to view women as independent, active subjects. They conceived of woman as man’s mediator with nature and the unconscious, femme-enfant, muse, source and object of man’s desire, embodiment of mad love, emblem of revolution2. The male objectification of woman responded to their need to employ a body charged with otherness in order to ensure their access to sur-reality3. That is to say that, at the same time that Surrealism attacked some bourgeois concepts, it ended up in the reinforcement of others. As Jean Baudrillard affirmed in a 1976 essay, Surrealism remained within the purview of the realism it contested and redoubled, through its rupture with the Imaginary; while what he called “hyperrealism”, or the meticulous reduplication of the real, represented a much more advanced stage as it managed to eradicate this contradiction between the real and the real’s hallucinatory resemblance to itself .  That is to say that in “hyperrealism”, the objectivity of the pure gaze went beyond the power of simulacra4. Within this essential paradox women were eventually doubly negated as subjects: first, because they were defined as mediums of men’s communication; second, because woman’s sexuality came to be reduced to its “natural” biological functions5. Woman functioned at best as an idealized “Other”, at worst as an object for the projection of unresolved anxieties: male subjects sought transformation through a female representational object, which paradoxically reinforced the subject-object split that Surrealism was committed to overcoming6.

 

     The work of female writers and artists inside Surrealism often subtly subverted the male dialogue; or it reversed the male and female positions within the dialogue, often realizing interesting dialectical exchanges based on women’s own psychology and experiences7. Following the influence of Freud and anticipating Lacan’s re-reading of Freud, women were believed to be closer to the unconscious than men, because they had not entirely entered the symbolic order8. However, Surrealist techniques and strategies that provided means for getting at repressed areas of the psyche were also helpful to women attempting to assert aspects of the self unacceptable within their traditionally prescribed roles. Surrealist principles were therefore employed to breaking down the binary oppositions of mind/body, rational/irrational, art/nature that had functioned to identify woman with the rejected term – body, irrationality, nature – and situate her on an inferior position9. As a result, in response to an attempt to resolve the Surrealist polarities of inner and outer reality, many women Surrealists found in the self-portrait the suitable metaphor.

     In their many self-portraits, women Surrealists like Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, and Frieda Kahlo revealed their rejection of the idea of women as an abstract principle, and a substitution of the image in the mirror as a focal point in their quest for greater self-awareness and knowledge10. The mirror became thus the icon for the process of self-representation which involved the identification of the subject with the object of the gaze, and then became, as De Beauvoir affirmed in The Second Sex (1949),  the key image to the feminine condition. The use of the mirror as a tool of the artist eventually affirmed the duality of being, the self as observer and observed, at the same time spectator and object of spectacle, body and sign, image and representation11. To perform the terms of the production of woman as text and image finally led out of the mirror trap, and served as a demonstration of the non-coincidence of woman and women12.

     A radical shift from the category of the Surrealist woman to that of Surrealist women, intended as a heterogeneous group of individuals for whom Surrealism had played a significant role in their attempt to shape an autonomous feminine subject13, had finally taken place. The starting point for women’s personal quest took on the identification of the body as the main signifier of its own cultural politics as established by Surrealism, and led to the negotiation of a relationship between the female body and female identity. For the women artists influenced by Surrealism in the decades after WWII, the artist’s own body was still a starting point in collapsing perceptions of the feminine self. The radical re-inventions of self-representation that had occurred in the 1930s and 1940s resonated in later artistic practices and articulated how the body was marked by femininity as lived experience14.

     Surrealism continued to attract newer generations of artists (male and female) who were seeking to explore the unconscious as site of meaning and to challenge the essentialism of rationalist binary distinctions. Surrealism’s appeal was nevertheless still created by its originary challenge of the bourgeois – therefore patriarchal – social institutions of church, state, and family; and by its insistence on the centrality of the artist’s psychic life in the service of revolutionary politics15.  Consequently, many women artists who were looking for a support and promise of social liberation from feminine traditional roles, as well as for a legitimation of the expression of female imaginary, perceived the appeal of Surrealist tropes. Generally speaking, the works of women associated with the words surrealist and surrealism in contemporary art, present a common engagement with issues of representation of structures of fabulist narrative, a concern with constructions of femininity through surface and image, a tendency towards the oneiric and the phantasmatic, a preoccupation with the psychic powers assigned to the feminine, and an interest in doubling, masking, and/or masquerade16.

     In the late 1960s, a dramatic shift in European and American visual art practices began to emerge as a consequence of the drastic changes in popular consciousness. The very concept of high art established for visual culture was suddenly no longer unaffected. In the aftermath of WWII the success of American abstract expressionist painting had legitimated the passage of the monopoly of the concept of ‘modern art’ from Paris to New York. But after the United States had finally convinced Europe of its rightful place in the continuum of high culture, a new art began to emerge. The new concerns that were introduced and that still inform the art of the present, sought primarily to break from the ideological and material frame of traditional European aesthetics, calling for a new art that recognized the primacy of individual experience, and that consciously accepted the political terms within which human experience was produced and maintained, through a more direct engagement with life17. In this respect, new ‘lower’ art forms emerged in the shape of photography, video, installation, and performance.

     Given that women’s representations of women in 1970s visual art practices were mitigated by the cultural awareness of woman as object, they generally contained a certain self-consciousness of the social construction of the feminine as surface and image. Through the very act of re-presenting oneselves as subjects, 1970s women’s self-representational narratives reclaimed the right to authorship, to authority and agency in the world. Moreover, many of the artistic processes that openly incorporated the artist’s body were really about transcending it, getting outside of the corporal limitations of the human frame18, they were about the power of experience and the value of memory acquired through bodily physical gestures intended to enter into art dialogue19.

     Grown up in the atmosphere of the Sixties’ and Seventies’ debates, during the nearly 23 years of her life, Francesca Woodman produced a body of approximately five hundred photographs that, re-discovered only in the late Eighties, have eventually raised her work to a quasi-cult status. Daughter of artists20, she grew up in the studios of her parents both in Colorado and Italy, and often spent her summer vacations in the family house of Antella, near Florence. She studied at Rhode Island School of Design between 1975 and 1979 and spent a year in Rome on a scholarship. This was an extraordinarily creative period in which she was influenced by the classicism, sensuality and decay of Rome and she exhibited her photographs for the first time in the basement of the Maldoror bookshop-gallery. On her return to America she moved to New York. Some Disordered Interior Geometries, the only book of her work to be published in her lifetime appeared in January 1981.

     During her early days Woodman not only developed an understanding of art making as a way of life, but mostly as a mode of thought. One of her first self-portraits, taken in 1972 when she was thirteen (Fig.1), is an early example of the characteristics that will then develop in her later photographs and that stress Woodman’s preoccupation with herself as a subject of art. For instance, the investigation of space and the staging of the subject in a sort of hide-and-seek game of light and shade, the dematerialization of a body which seems to be associated with no face. How strong the similarities with a portrait of Joseph Cornell taken by Duane Michals that same year in New York, especially in the way in which the body is at the same time carved and hidden by light (www.pdngallery.com/legends3/michals/art/photos_large/joseph_cornell.jpg). In fact the narrative portraits of Duane Michals, as well as Aaron Siskind’s modernist teaching of photography at RISD, Man Ray’s techniques, Francis Bacon’s study of space in relation to the individual, and the evocative power of Italian Transavanguardia, sensibly influenced Woodman’s later work.

     At age 14 Woodman found her guide to photography in a gifted teacher she met at Abbot Academy, Andover, Massachusetts. Wendy MacNeil, unusually for her time, focussed her teaching on the importance of ideas over technical preoccupations, which encountered Woodman’s predilections. Woodman was indeed intensely fascinated by the work of contemporary photographers, such as Clarence John Laughlin and his gothic Southern Surrealism among others. However, the most profound sources of Woodman’s work are not to be found in a relationship to contemporary mainstream photography of the 1970s, neither in the formalist modes privileged in art schools such as RISD, nor in the photographic work now designated as postmodernist, since Woodman’s work contains no reference to mass culture, even if it regularly stresses the status of the photograph as representation21. The body of work that mostly seems to be recalled by Woodman’s art, is Surrealist photography. However, what is really crucial in Woodman is her re-interpretation of it together with other complex interactions she matured during her year in Rome. Woodman improves Surrealist photographic techniques in order to reproduce their power in the oneiric representation of the self but meanwhile she tries to stage her own reading of woman’s privileged place in the negotiation of desire.  

     If the juxtaposition of Surrealism and photography had seemed nothing but a paradox to Breton, this is because the revolution in values promoted from the 1930s, conceived of a reorganization of the very concept of the so-called photographic real versus a reification of unconscious activities. However, with the employment of techniques such as Ubac’s brûlages22, Man Ray’s rayographs23 and solarization24, and then negative printing, multiple exposure, photomontage, and photo collage, Surrealist photography allowed the possibility of a discursive re-interpretation of its more “straight” outcomes resulting from the instantaneous recording of events. One of the most interesting photographic strategies was that of photographic doubling. The appeal of the technique mainly resided in the very act of addition of a copy to its original, which created a sense of failing uniqueness of subject as well as a perception of difference. In this guise presence becomes seriality, and contributes to the spatial marking of the first element as a signifying simulacrum. Since repetition itself stresses the deliberate intentionality of the act of representation, we could argue that the production of meaning through doubling denotes doubling itself as the “signifier of signification”25. Spatial marking at the same time deals with the boundaries established by the camera frame, which mainly indicates the dichotomy between the experience of the real and the experience of representation that Surrealist photography deliberately marks in order to stress the act of artistic creation.

     And doubling, as well as the serial multiplication of the image as principles and techniques, is widely spread in the photographs of Woodman, either in the guise of the use of mirror devices as in the Self-Deceit Roman series (1977-78), or in the form of addition of other models resembling her features in the  portrayal of her own image (Fig. 2, 3). In Fig. 3 for instance we can see a portrait of three young girls, among whom Woodman has made herself recognizable (notice her black Mary Jane shoes), hiding their faces behind a drawing of Woodman’s own face, a copy of which is also on the wall. The doubled image in Surrealism has often assumed a determination to break with unitary meaning or a deliberate attempt towards the simultaneous representation of the real and the unreal and/or the illusory ( Fig. 2)26. At the same time the doubled image that provided women artists with a tool for a critique of otherness, also provided them with a means to argue about otherness by its reproduction as sameness; in other words, the woman made Other to herself, engaged in a dialogue with the very self that produced her life as narrative27.

    Discussing women’s autobiography, Sheila Rowbothan states that a woman cannot experience herself as an entirely unique entity because she is always aware of how she is being defined as ‘woman’, that is, as a member of a group whose identity has been circumscribed by the dominant culture (male)28. Not recognizing themselves in the reflections of cultural representation, women develop a dual consciousness: the self as culturally defined and the self as different from cultural prescription. In taking the power of representation, women consequently project onto history an identity that is not purely individualistic, nor purely collective29. De Lauretis herself, expanding on Althusser’s concept of the subject in ideology30,  theorizes a subject that is at the same time “inside and outside the ideology of gender, and conscious of being so, conscious of that twofold pull, of that division, that doubled vision”31.

     It’s difficult to avoid any reference to Lacan’s concept of “mirror stage”32 (or of “misrecognition”) when referring to the process of photographic doubling. Discussing the child’s first encounter with its image in a mirror as the source of a fictional self-projection that influences subsequent identity formation, Lacan offered an interpretation of doubling as the replication of a conscious subject that becomes significant within a persistent exploration of the double as a structural principle of optical power. Lacan’s theory of the subject, derived from Freud’s concept of narcissism and the “specular ego”33, relegated woman to the position of signifier for the male other, her subjectivity determined by the discourse of patriarchy. If we agree to see the camera as being itself a mirror,  we can observe Woodman’s mirror photographs (Fig.2, 4) as an attempt for the renegotiation of bodily, temporal, spiritual boundaries during the enactment of her self/body through a registering of its traces and through images that suggest its absence. In particular, Woodman created a series of self-portraits entitled Self-Deceit (Fig. 2) in which she seems to be playing a game of hide-and-seek with the aid of a large mirror. Her nude figure crawls in front of the glass as if she were afraid to acknowledge her sense of otherness, and the mirror becomes a barrier that conceals rather than reveal identity. In a following series of self-portraits emblematically called A Woman/A Mirror/A Woman is a Mirror for a Man (1978) Woodman represents herself trapped in between a mirror and a transparent glass, as if hidden and confined within the boundaries of femininity.

     In connection to the mirror image, in his 1919 essay ‘The Uncanny’34, Freud ties the uncanniness generated by the idea of doubling to the primitive fear of mirrors: he reads the double as a first  narcissistic projection that translates both the shadows cast by the body and the body’s mirrored reflections. According to Otto Rank’s study35, superstitious beliefs interpret the double as shadow as the earliest form through which the soul is imagined, or even as the form in which the souls of the dead return to haunt or take possession of the living, and the polished surfaces of mirrors themselves are believed to be a medium for the return of the dead36. Of course one has to consider the apotropaic potential of these creations of the mind that,  while expressing the attempt to protect oneselves from a feared object, actually end up representing it through the strategy of doubling; and all this, if seen through Roland Barthes’s eyes, could just validate photography’s connection with death through its process of objectification of the subject37. In particular, Fig.4 associates the question of mirror doubling with another recurrent issue in Woodman’s photographs: that of her seemingly dead or sleeping body.

     Common features of Surrealism had been the belief in dream, in free association, in hypnotic states, in automatism, in ecstasy or delirium38; the concept of bassesse39 as developed by Georges Bataille, which had contributed to the theorization of horizontality as the pure expression of the instinctive animal nature; and the consideration of woman as a central, obsessional subject , especially in the guise of femme-enfant40, the so-called woman child who was believed to be an enchanting clairvoyant creature who through her youth, naiveté, and purity possessed enough direct connection with her own unconscious to allow her to be a guide for man. Therefore, if we just put side by side the belief in dream, the aesthetic theory of horizontality, and the idealization of the woman child as a medium for the access to the unconscious, we will see why the history of Surrealist art seems to be literally covered with bodies of sleeping or seemingly-dead young women (Fig. 4, 5).

     Furthermore, this aspect in Woodman seems to be linked to the deliberate choice of denoting her own limp, lying, motionless body with common props of femininity such as dress, flowers and underwear, instead of leaving it nude as she mostly does in the majority of her self-portraits. The use and over-use of accessories41 is in fact a typical feature of Woodman’s self-portraits that has been variously associated to fetishism42, in that they simultaneously provide an appropriation of the Surrealist fetish and an ironic critique of Surrealist fetishism. Garter belts, high-heeled shoes, jewellery, black Mary Jane shoes43, gloves, stockings, Easter lilies, Calla lilies, are all there to reveal “both her burgeoning womanhood and her understanding and deliberate assertion of ‘the fetish status of the woman’s body’ as defined by Western art in general and the Surrealist photographs of Man Ray and André Kertész in particular”44.

     Woodman’s photographs are always characterized by an almost bare or basic setting in which her body and few other objects are displayed. Occasionally she portrays herself in the company of other people or in outdoor natural settings that, anyway, reveal little about the actual location, and practically nothing about the historical or social contemporary realities. Since 1972 Woodman started to transform her own environment adopting unusual dress, behaviour and inhabiting unique surroundings, which constantly amazed and charmed all those who fell under her fairy-like influence45. Her environments, often densely installed with different collections of objects, are always very important to Woodman and frequently appear as the settings of her photographs. Woodman seems to prefer indoor, domestic derelict uninhabited interiors, which she uses as a stage to enact her personal mise-en-scene where the props of her choice suddenly lose their own intrinsical predictability and finally rise to a new existence in a totally new relationship with the feminine subject. Fig. 6 is a particularly meaningful example of this process. Woodman portrays herself nude and kneeling; with a hand she’s hiding her pubis. In the foreground a white Calla lily has been put standing against a wall. The Calla lily is a symbol for pure, virginal love that here is instead positioned in order to resemble a phallic object, or rather a deadly one, since the Calla is also a poisonous flower and Woodman seems to be trying to protect herself from an unknown fate.

     In Horizontale (Fig.7) Woodman adopts the same hiding gesture of the hand that, in this case, is doubly represented by a glove as a fetish and by the hand of the artist at the same time. What really looks amazing in this picture however, is the way in which Woodman’s legs, bound by a ribbon forming a regular pattern on her flesh, create a contrast that plays against the geometric pattern of the rug below. In this way, if fetishism is the substitution of the unnatural for the natural, Woodman creates her own aesthetic object, a fetish of herself. A Surrealist precursor of Horizontale is Hans Bellmer’s Unica (1958)46, featuring the artist Unica Zürn wound tightly with a string that crops her body like a piece of meat, therefore eliciting questions about sadomasochism and its relation to art. We know by the way that the male Surrealists of the 1930s and 1940s celebrated the Marquis de Sade as the incarnation of the free erotic desire capable of transforming human consciousness47; in short, Surrealism can be said to have explored the possibility of a sexuality that is grounded in the idea of the informe, in fantasy and representation, rather than on ‘human nature’48.

     A process of transformation of Woodman’s body into an aesthetic object takes place in many of her self-portraits where, as in Fig. 8 and 9, her body is positioned and cropped to resemble something other, and it does so ironically, as if to confront and problematize her feminine identity. In both photographs her body is denatured, first into an embellished, mockingly feminine  reproduction of Brassaï’s phallic Nude49 (1933), then into a torso-face which ironically refers to Magritte’s body-face in Le Viol (1934). But Woodman’s attempted transformations of her body led her also further toward the accomplishment of proper physical metamorphoses, like in the three series Angels (1977-78), House (1975-76), Space² (1975-78).

     Woodman always felt fascinated with the ways in which the human body could be made to seem an apparition. As a young teenager she photographed a naked person crawling through a large, cross-shaped gap in a tombstone. By using a slow exposure speed, she turned that person’s body into a blur, even as she rendered the world around it bright and clear. Woodman used this technique throughout her life, photographing herself jumping, bending, waving, and stretching, usually in near-empty rooms. In 1977 she started the series On Being an Angel while still in Providence, and then subsequently completed the Angel Series in Rome in 1978 (Fig. 10, 11). Rosalind Krauss has hypothesized that some of Woodman’s series might have originated from the framework of  student assignments, and that the Angel Series might have stemmed from the need to respond to the task of photographing “a non-existent being”50. However true or not, Woodman’s emphasis on distortions within structuring elements of physical and representational space, results here in the development of an ineffable, impossible attempt to experience something: Woodman’s angel rises out of the bottom frame of the field, her breasts open out into the image, her wings float into light, her scream fills space.

    During her year in Rome, the beauty of Baroque fountains had inspired Woodman’s Angel Series, which she photographed partly in the premises of a spaghetti factory, but echoes of Italy pervaded Woodman’s work in various changing forms also through the Self-Deceit and Eel Series, (both accomplished in Rome) and would have haunted her work even back in New York, in her Temple Project. In retrospect Woodman’s experience in Rome seems to have been essential for her to develop core aspects of her later work in a way that goes from her profound appreciation of Italian architecture, to her fascination with the eclectic Symbolist, Surrealist, and Futurist range of books, catalogues and journals she found in the Maldoror bookshop, as well as to the lasting friendship relationships she established with the bookshop’s owners and other artists who in Rome, in 1978, were in a transition from Minimalism and Conceptual art to the later called Transavanguardia.

     Deeply engaged in exploring the extreme limits of bodily experience, Woodman gives shape to a strongly performative work that unveils her fascination with margins and boundaries. In the Angel, House, and Space² series her body dissolves, mutates, merges with the environment, and just like the Surrealists themselves had anticipated, she breaks with the notion of the unitary self and embraces a defamiliarized and at times threatening body of fragmentation and incoherence. Woodman’s work in the House and Space² series, both accomplished in Providence, offers images of the body that border on the unfamiliar,  the uncanny, the transitional, and the grotesque. In the House series (Fig. 13, 14) Woodman explores issues of hybridity  and transforms them into a self-reflexive project that owes much to Surrealism’s concern with the collapse of interior and exterior reality, and finally leaves the body as a signifier of absence and deformity.

     Distortions, faceless bodies, cropped bodies, dissolving bodies, all contribute to the idea of a constant transitionality and mutability of being. Woodman engages her body in a subtle and at times strongly dynamic physical exchange with the built environment, thus achieving the goal of both revealing and concealing her body and identity. She is the girl hidden under the detached mantel of the old fireplace, she is the woman in the wallpaper of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, imprisoned in the overlaying pattern, creeping around the circumference of the room, who is unnamed because the experience she is undergoing robs her of her identity. She is the presence haunting those decrepit surroundings, and like one of H.P. Lovecraft’s gothic creatures,  that in the writer’s imagination had really haunted the houses of Providence, Woodman is the ghost inhabiting the unhealthy, damp, sinister atmosphere of that dilapidated house51.   

     The Surrealist desire to dissolve any difference by blending the bodies with furnishings, architecture, or nature, responded to their belief in the possibility for dualities to coexist in a state of disunity; in fact for Breton, even the ultimate polarity between life and death could potentially coexist52. This desire in Woodman produces a strain of melancholy that most notably in the series Space² (Fig. 15) and From Space² (Fig. 16) succeeds in the accomplishment of a gloomy atmosphere of entrapment. While in some of the photographs she seems to be testing the potential of a dimly lit empty space in order to define it through the inscription of her freely moving body, in the ‘cage’ pictures the exploration of the geometries is taken to extreme effect. The ‘cage’ pictures expose Woodman’s nude body entrapped in a glass and wood display case she had found in the storerooms of a museum. In this cage her body presses against the glass panes, it shines as if caught by a blurring blaze of light, or it appears like a shadow of claustrophobic imprisonment. What mostly emerges from this series is first of all the way in which a three-dimensional space is made to fit the square frame of a picture and, secondly, the significant choice of a cage as an object of study.

     A characteristic of Woodman is her fondness for the square photographic format. A horizontal format is a widely accepted way to make photographs, particularly if working with a figure in a landscape. By using a square format, Woodman creates a constricted space instead, in which a viewer is made aware of how the body is flattened and framed and, considering that many of her photographs address the representation of space, the square format seems a deliberate choice. The choice of the display cage, on the other hand, is strongly indebted to the conceptual interpretation of the idea of ‘display’, which renders Woodman’s body at least doubly objectified by a gaze that pins her twice as an object. Barthes has eloquently made clear that any choice to photograph a subject inevitably transforms that subject in a spectacle, and that photography has the power to transform a subject in an object, literally into “a museum object”53. At the same time the museum glass display case intensifies the impression of ‘being on display’, eternally at the center of the gaze. Images of women trapped in cages have often been taken by the Surrealists to convey disturbing ideas of a female exoticized other, and of masculine control54. Namely, if one function of the cage is that of the display, another is that of preventing the escape of what is considered to be threatening and monstrous.

     In a famous essay, Julia Kristeva identified the feminine space, and more precisely the metamorphosed maternal body, with the monstrosity of the abject55. That which crosses or threatens to cross the ‘border’ is considered abject; of course the concept of ‘border’ may change, but the function of what’s considered monstrous is the same. Woman, being herself a sign of ‘otherness’ is therefore deemed as monstrous, as an exotic monster to catch, tame and exploit in order to gain access to hermetic knowledge. The Surrealist assault on Western assumptions of bodily wholeness and integrity, and obsessively on female bodily wholeness and integrity, follows the dissolution of the natural and the assumption that woman, being herself the fetish par excellence, is nowhere in nature. Woman and photograph become then “figures for each other’s condition: ambivalent, blurred, indistinct, and lacking in…authority”56. In fact, part of Woodman’s artistic aspiration seems to rely on the use of the photographic means to reflect on photography itself, and to reflect on how the entrapped feminine fetish is disfigured in order to disavow the accomplishment of female subjectivity.   

    

     To conclude this journey across Woodman’s photographs and Surrealist imagination, I’d like to focus on two last pictures, both taken in Rome, that I see as emblematically linked to the issue of othering and otherness. The first picture (Fig. 17) shows Woodman sitting on a chair (only her arms and legs are visible) and a dark human shape marked on the floor. The second picture, called Yet Another Leaden Sky (www.palazzoesposizioni.it/schede/woodman_foto2.htm), shows Woodman heavily clothed in a dark frock hiding her face behind a round white object while confronting a giant tortoise that is crossing the room. The ‘tortoise’ picture is particularly striking because of its intrinsic absurdity, absurdity we only find in dreams. Here Woodman seems afraid of the exotic animal and hides her face as if seeking solace by choosing ‘not to look’. The refusal to acknowledge the existence of the exotic in the realm of the everyday, domestic, cultural and urban interior, reflects the fear of the other as abject. The tortoise could be there as a symbol for the exotic objectification of the female self, for a threat of castrating female sexuality, or just as a metaphor for all the uncanny feelings people are afraid of, a metaphor for the need to shelter from the realities of life. Like Freud’s ‘uncanny’ and like the mechanisms of dreamwork that so much fascinated the Surrealists, anything we find unidentifiable in terms of ‘real world logic’ belongs to the category of the marvelous. The marvelous, the exotic, the abject, all unite here in the creation of the uncanny other.

     In the ‘shadow’ picture a human shape (presumably Woodman’s) is lying at the feet of the sitting person whose fetish shoes mark as being Woodman herself. The issue of doubling as discussed earlier in this paper is self-evident; however there is more to it. I imagine that mark as being a water mark that Woodman made by simply lying on the floor. But water marks tend to dry and then fade, they are ephemeral, just like shadows, and phantoms. Freud sees the ‘double’ as an insurance against destruction to the ego, a denial of the power of death. In psychoanalytic terms, this double is the first narcissistic projection, the earliest form through which the soul is imagined. The double as shadow can be a self-projection, a locus of collapse of interior and exterior reality, a shield against limiting boundaries. And, in this self-representation in space, space itself is for Woodman like a “devouring force…[where] The body desolidifies with [her] thoughts, the individual breaks the boundary of [her] skin and occupies the other side of [her] senses…[Where she] feels [herself] becoming space”57.

     As a woman of the 1970s, Woodman gets outside of the corporal limitations of her female human frame through the very act of incorporating herself as subject of her own art. Applying strategies of doubling, fetishization, and metamorphosis, Woodman renegotiates bodily, temporal, and spiritual boundaries. Her body, as the main signifier for feminine identity, symbolizes a margin that not only delimits the morphology of her imaginary self, but also allows the access to the unfamiliar, the social, the symbolic. Her body is an open boundary between the outer reality, the social institutions, the unconscious, the “Other”. In brief, following Freud, Woodman affirms that we can become subjects only to the extent to which we also are bodies. So, if again we wanted to ask, What happens when woman finds herself in the empty space between the gaze and her objectified image?  In Woodman’s own words, woman would multiply her image and, in the midst of so many illusory ghosts of herself, she would conceal the true herself, who makes them move.58

---

1  Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t. Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (London and Basingstroke: Macmillan, 1984), pp. 6-

    7 (italics mine).

2  Mary Ann Caws, Rudolf E. Kuenzli, Gwen Raaberg, eds., Surrealism and Women (Cambridge, Massachusetts;

   London: MIT Press, 1991), p. 2.

3  Ibid., p. 6.

4  Jean Baudrillard, ‘Symbolic Exchange and Death’ in Mark Poster ed., Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings

    (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988) pp. 119-148: 145.

5  Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, p. 20.

6  Ibid., p. 8.

7  Ibid., pp. 5-6.

8  Ibid., p. 19.

9  Ibid., p. 8.

10  Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985), p. 4.

11  Ibid., p. 92.

12 De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, p. 36.

13  Whitney Chadwick, ed., Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism, and Self-Representation (Cambridge, Massachusetts;

    London: MIT Press, 1998), pp. 3-4.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid., p. 5.

16 Ibid., p. 6.

17 Laura Cottingham, ed., Seeing Through the Seventies: Essays on Feminism and Art (Singapore: G+B Arts

    International, 2000), p. 119.

18 Ibid., p. 121.

19 See for instance Adrian Piper’s performances in the streets of New York with balloons stuffed under her clothes,

    bubble gum stuck over her face, wet paint on the front of her shirt; Eleanor Antin’s self-imposed weight loss; Carolee

    Schneemann’s trapeze-style performance while suspended nude from a ceiling; Linda Montano’s positioning in

    public dressed like a chicken.

20 George Woodman was primarily a painter from the 1950s until 1987, when he turned to photography full-time. For

    nearly 40 years he has divided his time between the U.S. and Italy, and he has visited the Pitti collection regularly

    (the exhibition included work from the last eight years). His photographic images are highly constructed, with

    elements often double exposed or reversed, and layered over other images of objects, people or nature. Betty

    Woodman is a well-known ceramist.

21  Abigail Salomon-Godeau, ‘Just Like A Woman’, in Francesca Woodman: Photographic Work (Providence:

    Wellesley College and Hunter College Art Gallery, 1986) pp. 11-37: 18.

22 Photographs in which the image is modified by melting the negative emulsion before printing. Ubac describes the

    procedure as a system of placing the glass plate of an exposed negative over a heated pan of water in order to melt the

    emulsion (Rosalind Krauss, Jane Livingston. L’Amour Fou. Photography and Surrealism. New York: Cross River

    Press: p.42).

23 Cameraless “photograms” produced by placing objects directly on photographic paper, subsequently exposed to light

    (Ibid. p. 24)

24 Photographic paper is briefly exposed to light during the printing process, thereby altering in varying degrees the

    relationship of dark and light tones, introducing elements of the photographic negative into the positive print (Ibid., p.

    28).

25 Expression borrowed from, Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, trans. J. and D. Weightman (New York:

    Harper & Row, 1970), pp. 339-40.

26 As argued also in ‘Corpus Delicti’ by Rosalind Krauss, L’Amour Fou, p. 78.

27 Whitney Chadwick discusses this point in her introductory chapter to Women, Surrealism, and Self-Representation, p.

    29.

28 Discussed in Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Women’s Autobiographical Selves: Theory and Practice’, in Sidonie Smith

    and Julia Watson, eds., Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader (Madison, Wisconsin: The University of

    Wisconsin Press, 1998), pp. 72-82: 75.

29 Ibid., p. 76.

30 Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses )Notes Toward an Investigation)’, in Lenin and

    Philosophy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971)

31 Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender. Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (London: Macmillan Press, 1987),

     p. 10.

32 Jacques Lacan, ‘Le Stade du Miroir Comme Formateur de la Fonction du Je’, Ecrits (Paris : Seuil, 1966) ; in English

    as ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I’, Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1982).

33 The formation of the subject around a dynamic of seeing/not-seeing that initiates the castration anxiety around which

    male sexuality is formed. In Whitney Chadwick, Mirror Images, p. 8.

34 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. And ed. James

    Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-73), vol. 17, pp. 234-35.

35 Otto Rank, The Double, trans. Harry Tucker, Jr. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1971).

36 Ibid., pp. 62-3.

37 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 1993), p. 14.

38 Just think about Breton’s fascination with Charcot’s study on hysteria and Dalì’s famous 1933 photo collage in which

    he identified hysteria with the phenomenon of ecstasy.

39 An axial rotation from vertical to horizontal of the subject of representation, which apparently allowed the

    achievement of the informe – or rather of the shapelessness of meaning –Georges Bataille, ‘Informe’, Documents 1,

    no. 7 (December 1929) : 382.

40 This image of ecstatic inspiration was at the same time one of innocence and sexual ambiguity, at once erotic and

     irrational.

41 Notice how in Fig.5 Woodman appears as wearing 4 garter belts, surrounded by 2 pairs of stockings, looking herself

   like a garment left there lying on the sofa. If underwear garments have been commonly associated to fetish objects

   and therefore to phallic power, then Woodman’s body in this picture has to be interpreted as a strong symbol of

    phallic power.

42 Susan Rubin Suleiman, ‘Dialogue and Double Allegiance. Some Contemporary Women Artists and the Historical

    Avant-Garde’, in Whitney Chadwick, Mirror Images, pp. 128-154: 146-7.

43 See for example the use of the same type of ‘schoolgirl’ shoes in the Poupées series (1935) by Hans Bellmer.

44 Posner, ‘The Self and the World. Negotiating Boundaries in the Art of Yayoi Kusama, Ana Mendieta, and Francesca

    Woodman’, in Mirror Images, pp. 156-171: 167.

45   While at Abbot, sleeping in her closet, Woodman turned her room into a photography studio. It was when she filled

    the room with feathers that she provoked the house authorities, and her parents were advised that she was “too

    extreme”. (Ann Gabhart. ‘Francesca Woodman 1958-1981’, in Francesca Woodman:Photographic Work, Wellesley

    College Museum and Hunter College Art Gallery ed., 1986: 53-58, 53).

46 Bellmer’s photos of Unica had appeared on the cover of the Surrealist journal Le Surréalisme, même, no.4 (Spring

    1958) – not hard to find for Woodman during her period at the RISD (1976-77). Furthermore, a number of books and

    articles about Surrealist eroticism appeared in the 1970s, with discussion and illustration of Bellmer’s work. During

    Woodman’s stay in Rome (1977-78), she surely saw Surrealist photographic work in the avant-garde bookstore

    Maldoror; and also subsequently in New York (1979-80) when she met the art collector Timothy Baum, who also

    owns some Bellmer photographs.

47 See for instance Mary Ann Caws, et al., Surrealism and Women, pp. 19-20.

48 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Corpus Delicti’, in Rosalind Krauss, L’Amour Fou, pp. 55-112: 95.

49 Brassaï, Nude (1933); in this famous photograph, the female body and the male organ have each become the sign for

    the other. Another interpretation of this photograph by Woodman (Fig.13) is given by Susan Rubin Suleiman in her

    essay ‘Dialogue and Double Allegiance’, in which she argues that Woodman might have found her inspiration again

    from one of Bellmer’s Unica photographs.

50 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Francesca Woodman: Problem Sets’, in Rosalind Krauss, Bachelors (Cambridge, Massachusetts:

    The MIT Press, 1999), pp.161-177: 173.

51 “The small-paned windows were largely broken, and a nameless air of desolation hung round the precarious panel

    ling, shaky interior shutters, peeling wallpaper, falling plaster, rickety staircases, and such fragments of battered

    furniture as still remained. The dust and cobwebs added their touch of the fearful”, H.P. Lovecraft, ‘The Shunned

    House’ (1924), http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/theshunnedhouse.htm,

    The Complete Works of H.P Lovecraft, visited on 28 April 2004.

52 Posner, ‘Negotiating Boundaries in the Art of Kusama, Mendieta, and Woodman’, in MirrorImages, 156-171: 158.

53 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 13.

54 See for example Man Ray’s Mannequin, 1938.

55 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980), trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia

    University Press, 1982), pp. 53-55.

56 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Corpus Delicti’, p. 95.

57 Roger Caillois, ‘Mimetisme et Psychasténye Legéndaire’, Minotaure, no. 7 (1935), pp. 8-9. Quoted in Rosalind

    Krauss, L’Amour Fou, p. 74.

58 Francesca Woodman, Some Disordered Interior Geometries (Philadelphia: Synapse Press, 1981)

 

Introduction to Photography as Contemporary Art

Photography as contemporary art

 Laurie Haynes   

From the point of inception the key debate surrounding photography is its position in the lexicon of Art practice. 

The writer/ philosopher Baudelaire conceded photography only one legitimate function: recording what might otherwise be lost to the human eye due to the ephemeral moment of viewing. Photography’s ability to hold that moment in detail that could be revisited after the event, serves the sciences and not Art. The direct quote is: if only you will lie down and behave dear photography. ‘If you will act as handmaiden to the arts and science, you will deserve our thanks and applause’.

Of course photography could not be restrained in this way, instead of ‘keeping its place’ photography has gone forward to literally reshape and reinvent, if not the world in which we live , at least our perception of it.

Our exposure to photography either as subject or maker has conditioned us to the point that at virtually any point in time or place we turn our rehearsed faces to the lens; the apparent objectification giving validity to our existence. This validity, this rendering, is of course under critical scrutiny, as much an abstraction as a cubist portrait. Context removed, little more than a brief moment of ‘performance’, (what the erotic photographer Bob Carlos Clark termed ‘a smug little trick’)

yet the fact that that moment is located in a real time and place serves to imbed some notion of truth to the photograph.

 Now Photographic truth is a subject that is constantly debated, and will be examined in this lecture  series. On some level of either conscious or sub-conscious thought each one of us has the echo of ‘the camera never lies’ resonating within us; which in turn can serve to transform the banal sometimes into the significant. Here lies the unshakable strength of the photographic image.

The photograph shares a birth right with the realist school of painting. The nineteenth century was also the century in which the realist painters Carot and Courbet strove to capture the exact reproduction of what the eye recollected.

Their preoccupation-to focus on the exact instant or sight-was  abducted forever by the instantaneous contingencies captured so easily by the camera. Fox Talbot, coined the term ‘Photogenic drawing’ and his first published volume of images was title ‘ The pencil of nature’  and was derived almost entirely (in subject matter and style) on established painterly conventions, but in terms of contingent realism that no painter could ever replicate.

Art photography was born.

I have to move forward quickly now stopping on my way to note significant changes in practice.  1857 saw the birth of the pictorialist school and this statement by Henry peach Robinson serves to illustrate the narrowing of the division between artist and photographer.

  ‘Any dodge, trick, any configuration of any kind is open to the photographers use… It is the photographers duty to avoid the mean, the bare, and the ugly, and aim to…. Correct the unpicturesque…. A great deal can be done and very beautiful pictures made, by a mixture of the real and the artificial’ Pictorial effect in Photography- Henry peach Robinson. 

The construction of images, unreal, but playing on the real, an artist positioning of the ‘vision’ of the maker, replicating the skill of painter.. Robinson worked in a time when the prevailing style of the arts was essentially romantic. A Polish critic announced

‘Photographers do not copy nature now, they interpret it’  

collectively they positioned themselves on higher ground’ than the realist painters, becoming more refined; their interpretation becoming more academic than Delacrois or Ingres. The first real breakthrough came at the hand and eye of an English eccentric. Julia Margaret Cameron. Obsessed with portraying the ‘inner man’ she ignored the techniques that where currently ‘a la mode’ and returned to long exposures (20 Minutes) that where agonising for the sitter; but served to strip away the artifice of performance. Techniques used sixty years later by Both Penn and Avedon to ‘get inside’ the subject.

From these beginnings Art Photography was born. Art by its very nature is contextualised by the economic-social-political climate of making, photography shares this heritage, but perhaps is more overtly effected by the ever shifting social climate.

The fundamental mechanism for viewing a photograph is ‘truth to appearance’. The viewer, that is you and I, bring to the photograph a pre-history of actual and a priori experience that conditions our response to the image. It is this factor above all else that enables the ‘Art photograph’ to play with visual and emotional perception.

 Alfred Stieglitz, who I consider to be the Father of ‘Modern Art photography’ came to Europe From America to study engineering, and whilst there bought a hand held camera, and set about capturing the ‘Life’ on the streets. On his return to the States

(1917) he embarked on a deliberate series of un-pictorial studies of a city in the midst of, snowstorms. Driving rain, bad light and shadows. He tracked the marks of man, and took these ‘impressions’ to a public unused to images of this type.

 He founded a magazine, and Gallery, the legendary ‘219’( its address on fifth avenue) and  set photography on the map as Fine, high Art, the brother of both cubism and surrealism.

(expand) For thirty years Stieglitz led a growing brotherhood of Art Photographers. The American school fundamentally different from its European counterpart( explain why), but also indelibly linked by a strand of enquiry that first and foremost examined the human condition. By the outbreak of the second world war Photography occupied an unassailable position as a medium of artistic expression, But the almost exponentional change of social status between 1836 and 1936, was nothing compared with what was to come over the next ten years.

The global nature of WW2 changed forever the strict delineation of class and status as two generation of men went to war, leaving a vacuum in the home nations that had to be filled. Women left the home and rose to the challenge forever undoing a social status quo. Life became focussed on mortality, and in so doing served to loosen moral ties and boundaries. In the midst of war and death people became aware of a new freedom, a resilience, a joy d’Vivre, that caused them to celebrate life. Photography went through a process of division, a tool of propaganda, that served to inform and misinform in the same breath. But above all render the horrific details of modern warfare forever indelible for the surviving generations.

This breaking of the final taboo, the pictorial rendition of the arena of death and destruction starting a process of de-sensitisation that continues unabated to this day. Gloves off, photography, became the key mode of representation. In the post war era virtually every aspect of life in western society became the focus for the lens. Advertising was born, and the pre-war fascination with the moving image, scaled new heights.

Now in ascendance as the dominant mode of representation, The lens strategically ate away at the spoken and written word; film and photography were central as the visual signposts of a new prosperous society, where everything and anything was achievable.

European and American photography and film making developed in tandem, like fraternal twins, sharing the same linage, but being markedly different in appearance. Europe the first born, being on the surface the quieter of the two, intellectual, reasoned, self-questioning, somehow reflecting the trauma of the war years, containing embedded within the myth of peace.

America the second born, brash, confident, but essentially a society isolated from the reality of both the horror of war and the agony of rebuilding a shattered society. Adopting the role of hedonist. From this re-birth this new beginning, the language of representation became in some ways almost diametrically opposed. The more commercially advanced America, already embracing a burgeoning commercial use of the ‘Image’ began to explore the yet as unnamed mechanisms of ‘Popular culture’.

The booming economy of post-war America still with the wraith like twin spectres, of the depression years and the War still indelibly fixed in the consciousness of the nation, dived headlong into the waters of hedonism. The pursuit of ‘leisure time’ becoming almost a national obsession (in the states above the Mason–Dixon line). The camera in turn was focused on these events, on a society freed from economic shackles, celebrating life.

Europe by contrast was still reeling from the impact of war…The economy in tatters, struggling with massive rebuilding and subsequent debt. A collective society still in mourning with a misdirected people of traumatised and displaced individuals was forced to look inward. Yes there were celebrations at the succession of hostilities, yes people danced in the streets, hugging strangers. But this euphoria was soon replaced with the stark reality of loss-poverty-the daily grind. As a post war baby I cannot comment on the reality of the situation, but life in black & white, with the colour stripped away by adverse circumstance, was mirrored in the imagery of the moment. The gritty ‘realist’ images of nations coming to terms with the loss of a generation. The contrast with post war America could not be more stark. But in that dark hour the camera turned unwaveringly toward recording the human condition. Apparently free of the strings of political motive it moved unfettered amongst the people of Europe and did find small flames of hope, love, and charity.

The post war photography of Robert Doisneau perhaps best captures the almost hidden beauty of these times.

More To Come….