ANTHONY GAYTON

Behold the Man
Spanish Version

Anthony Gayton muestra una predilección especial por relatos que pueden ser contados con palabras y luego interpretados con imágenes fotográficas. A veces Gayton tarda meses o incluso años en llevar a cabo la investigación, la elaboración de los textos y los esbozos, y la visualización de la historia final ante la cámara. Este ha sido el caso en “Angelus” y “Falling Apart”, dos puestas en escena minuciosamente escenificadas que contemplan el papel de los clichés de representación en la erradicación de esquemas ideológicos universales y códigos psicológicos de género. Sin embargo, en el entramado retórico de Gayton existen también otros casos de cuentos que culminan de un modo más espontáneo y natural. Estas últimas narrativas, más cortas en extensión e improvisadas en su contenido, cobijan un espíritu ameno, indulgente y mórbido a la vez, que encuentra su inspiración en referencias tan diversas como la memorabilia, la fotografía victoriana del siglo XIX, los prodigios del vodevil y el porno. La presente exposición, que supone el regreso de Anthony Gayton a MiTO dos inviernos después de su anterior muestra, ofrece una colección de las escenas más significativas de dichas secuencias. Su aspiración principal es introducir en un marco crítico las premisas conceptuales alrededor de las cuales se ha ido desencadenando vigorosamente la producción de Anthony a lo largo de los últimos años.

Mini historias que aluden a fotonovelas y pin-ups con protagonistas encarnados por hombres jóvenes y fornidos y que se erigen como narrativas de un componente sexual descarado, introducen la pasión homoerótica en la mitología universal del amor, del deseo y del crecimiento. Con independencia de que se trate de un cuento autobiográfico sobre la vida de unos hombres jóvenes en los años ochenta, de unas composiciones al estilo de la pintura clásica repletas de desnudos apilados, o de unas escenas de harenes o santos, el juego de Gayton va más allá desafiando y deconstruyendo insaciablemente los motivos más recurrentes de la iconografía dominante, mientras da voz a un juego de representaciones alternativo que pertenece a ese otro desconocido y oprimido. Con todo, Gayton no se limita aquí a cuestionar la orientación sexual de la iconografía dominante, es decir, la exclusión de la audiencia gay y de sus discursos de los contenidos masivos. Al contrario, lejos de rendir simplemente un homenaje al elemento homoerótico inherente en toda representación, sus poemas visuales asumen inesperadamente una fuerte dimensión política, y lo hacen gracias a su voluntad de perseverar precisamente en lo que hoy hace falta: una mirada de reflexión intuitiva pero a la vez sutilmente sofisticada que ilumine el terreno de la ética homosexual. La postura crítica de Gayton se sostiene desde dentro, desde el corpus masculino, por así decirlo, así como desde la exaltación de la carne que este normalmente lleva asociada. Partiendo de esta voluntad, Gayton no duda en demostrar la manera en que la idealización y el narcisismo de categorías sólidas y cánones culturales se hacen presentes también en la iconografía homoerótica perpetuando modelos de discriminación.

Todo aquello que nunca fue visto y documentado, todas aquellas relaciones y aventuras ocultas emergen ante nuestros ojos, como si Gayton estuviera conducido por una necesidad urgente de aportar cuestiones y repuestas concretas. Como maestro en la manipulación de la puesta en escena, Gayton logra todos los efectos estéticos, tipológicos o estilísticos que desea ante la cámara e incluso después, en el momento del retoque. Asimismo, explora sin cesar todas las posibilidades de relatar una historia no sólo con la ayuda de imágenes sino también, como en “Angelus” y “Falling Apart”, con la ayuda de imaginativos cuentos escritos. Enseñar y exponer las grietas semánticas de historias que hasta ahora no han sido contadas, o narrar historias desde un ángulo diferente creando un paisaje drásticamente nuevo para la contemplación del otro, equivalen para él al acto de exponer los trucos y plagios inherentes a la ética humana.

Pero volvamos a la exposición y a los círculos iconográficos que en ella se presentan. Mientras la serie “The Martyrs” destapa las facetas homoeróticas del simbolismo religioso, “The Harem” negocia el deseo por el hombre perfecto, revisando la iconografía ignorada de los secretos harenes masculinos de Asia Central. “Ladslove” parte de un diálogo entre las nociones del arquetipo uranio británico de idolatría y el profesor platónico para llegar a desvelar una serie de relaciones ocultas. Por su lado, “Dead” da un giro inesperado, desplazándose lejos de la presunta veracidad de la muerte documentada para acabar mostrando el cuerpo en su objetificación absoluta. De un modo similar, en “Beautiful Freaks” —una serie de imágenes de seres anormales tanto a nivel mental como físico extraída supuestamente de un libro de medicina—, el paso de la belleza a la aberración atestigua todas las etiquetas de identidad y las denominaciones sociales de una naturaleza restrictiva que operan incluso dentro de la comunidad gay. Distintas en su estilo e inspiradas en la experiencia homoerótica contemporánea, series como “Boys will be Boys”, “Behold the Man”, “Spielen”, “Mid Life Crisis” y “Child’s Play” cobran sentido vistas en un contexto de contemporaneidad expuesto mediante las estéticas del pin-up y del porno.

Todas las historias de Anthony Gayton parecen partir de la ingenuidad. La voz del cuento, autoritativa y simplista, tal como se elabora en “Boys will be Boys”, “Beautiful Freaks” y “Child’s Play”, se impregna de un tono factual y desprovisto de juicio. Aun así, nada es lo que parece a primera vista. Bajo la superficie de estos cuerpos cargados con una belleza que corta la respiración y una sensualidad animal, queda la autoexposición, es decir, la manera en la que el cuerpo se inscribe en la narrativa —no simplemente la narrativa en cuestión, sino cualquier narrativa. Desde “The Harem” hasta “Dead”, la masculinidad gay manifiesta su presencia fuertemente en su exaltación carnal. Sin embargo, si nos tomamos un tiempo para contemplar estas imágenes, descubrimos que el auténtico objeto de interés es el cuerpo per se, el cuerpo en su hibridación y su naturalidad. Gayton reitera un nuevo concepto de identidad, surgido a través y por encima de un corpus que funciona como una masa vibrante de estereotipos tras una piel aparentemente suave. Paradójicamente, dicho cuerpo, el principal portador de prejuicios y quimeras en el transcurso de la historia, se convierte en su mejor defensor, es decir, en el feroz defensor de una mirada escrudiñadora y de un vocabulario reacio y hostil, contra cualquier dicotomía o ambivalencia, cuyo solo objetivo es designar quiénes son los chivos expiatorios y quiénes los privilegiados.

Una vez asimilada dicha reflexión sobre el rol del cuerpo en la diseminación y distorsión de significado, podemos contemplar desde una perspectiva novedosa historias como “Beautiful Freaks” y “Ladslove”. Basadas en premisas como el culto a la carne, estas secuencias intentan una anatomía del cuerpo como un valor de comodidad subordinado a los intereses de diversos agentes, entre ellos la iglesia y, por supuesto, la comunidad gay. Puede ser que el cuerpo, muerto, deformado y grotesco, personifique la manera en que la sexualidad masculina se ha configurado ante los ojos de la sociedad, pero a su vez el cuerpo mismo alude a un vocabulario entero de valores, promocionados hoy por la comunidad gay: el desprecio hacia cualquier polimorfía física, la exigencia de perfección y el culto al icono sexual del gimnasio. Esta es la noción básica en la obra de Gayton: el cuerpo como una materia trivial que ocupa la superficie fotográfica, y la necesidad irrevocable de trascenderlo y de mirar por encima de él. Tal cuerpo, portador de castigo y torturador en sí mismo, se ha convertido hoy tanto en un Dios del Olimpo como en el pretexto para que la comunidad homosexual adopte por sí sola una actitud igual de discriminatoria que sus enemigos más feroces.

Las imágenes de Anthony Gayton representan en este sentido las dos caras opuestas de la misma moneda. Son ídolos y espejos a la vez, y como tales deberían ser contempladas, teniendo siempre en cuenta la función política de la mirada como cómplice de las palabras en la erradicación de cánones y en la subordinación del ego/naturaleza bajo aforismos construidos artificialmente e inhibiciones culturales estrictas. Muchas de estas imágenes son sarcásticas y humoristas en su concepción. A pesar de ello, en su banalidad se convierten en envoltorios de un juego intrínseco entre la atracción y la repulsión para disolverse al final en hostilidad. Tales imágenes resultan ser crudas para nuestros ojos, ya que ponen en evidencia las formas en que nuestro subconsciente ha sido entrenado a leerlas. Algo parecido ocurre especialmente en cuentos menos simbólicos y más cercanos a un registro de la realidad, como “Boys will be Boys” o “Beyond the Man”. Asentadas en una premisa pseudodocumental que proyecta la veracidad del momento fotográfico con sus pros y contras, estas historias trascienden nuestra percepción con sus imágenes y su narración. Su final anula su humor ameno. Nos señalan cómo están las cosas y la manera en que la injusticia se ve tolerada, naturalizada y perpetuada en un sinfín de acciones.

Así es como son las cosas, apunta Gayton, y sus textos, en mayor o menor medida, reafirman dicha suposición como elementos acompañantes de la narración visual. Es significativo que muchos de estos cuentos escritos, como “Beautiful Freaks” o “Boys will be Boys”, parecen ilustrar las imágenes en lugar de que sean las imágenes las que les ilustren. Los textos se convierten en pilares fundamentales para la comprensión de esas historias. A través de esta acción, nos enseñan que la diseminación del sentido final de toda representación se ha visto siempre irremediablemente condicionada por las palabras. Parece como si los finales de estos cuentos fueran impuestos y nada autónomos. Como si una mano invisible moviera los hilos, como si la sexualidad y su destino se transcribieran mediante reglas externas. Las historias son primero escritas y, después, las representaciones se enredan dentro de la trama del guión que marcan los textos. No sería impreciso señalar, por tanto, que en el fondo la obra de Anthony Gayton trata esencialmente sobre el lenguaje y su derivativo más enfermizo: una mirada esquizoide y explotadora que tortura y se tortura. Apelando a una respuesta sensorial, intelectual y emocional por parte del espectador, sus imágenes nos invitan sin miedo a aceptar el reto de superar las barreras del lenguaje, liberándolas de las limitaciones de las palabras.

Behold the Man
English Version

Anthony Gayton has a penchant for writing tales and for interpreting them photographically. It often takes him months or even years to carry out the research, writing, sketching and the final visualisation of the story before the camera. This has been the case with “Angelus” and “Falling Apart”, two exhaustively staged tableaux-vivants wherein Gayton contemplates, by means of a set of iconographical displacements, the role of representational clichés in the eradication of universal ideological schemes and psychological genre codes. There are in turn other cases of tales that culminate rather spontaneously and effortlessly. Shorter in extension and improvised in content, these latter narratives are characterized by a playfully indolent and morbid spirit that draws its inspiration from references as diverse as popular memorabilia, 19^th century Victorian photography, prodigious vaudeville tales and porn. The present show, Anthony’s comeback in MiTO two years after his last exhibit, offers a recollection of some of the most significant scenes of these sequences. Its aspiration is to bring under the focus of critical attention the core conceptual propositions around which his most recent artistic production has strenuously revolved.

Mini stories alluding to photo-novels and pin-ups, with well-built young men as their protagonists, operate as narratives of a blatant sexual component that introduce the homoerotic pathos into the universal tale of love, desire and growing up. Whether it is an autobiographical boys’ tale from the eighties, classical Renaissance-like compositions of bodily clusters, saints or harem scenes, Gayton’s play goes further and further to relentlessly deconstruct the patterns of the dominant iconography, while giving voice to an alternative set of representations that belong to the unseen and oppressed ‘Other’. This time, however, what is at issue is not merely the gender-specific nature of the dominant iconography, namely the exclusion of gay audiences and their respective discourses from the mass-produced visual contents. On the contrary, far from just paying homage to the homoerotic element inherent in all representations, Gayton’s visual poems unexpectedly assume here a strong political dimension, and they do so by providing precisely what is missing today: an intuitive, yet subtly sophisticated, self-reflective gaze that throws light onto the field of homosexual ethics. Gayton’s critical posture is sustained from the inside, from the very male corpus and the exaltation of flesh that is usually associated with it. In doing so, it does not hesitate to show the way in which the idealisation and the narcissism of categories and cultural canons are also present within the homoerotic iconography, perpetuating patterns of discrimination.

All unseen and unrecorded, all secret relationships and affairs, everything rises before our eyes, as if Gayton were driven by an urgent need to pose questions and provide answers. A master in the mise-en-scène manipulation, he accomplishes any aesthetic, typological or stylistic results he wishes either before the camera or afterwards in the process of retouching. Moreover, he incessantly explores all possibilities of telling a story with the help of images, but also, as he did in “Angelus” and “Falling Apart”, with the help of imaginatively written accounts. To show and to expose the semantic lacunas of stories so far untold, or to tell stories from a different angle creating a drastically novel landscape for the contemplation of the ‘Other’, is for him equivalent to exposing the trappings and plagiarisms inherent in human ethics.

But let us now go back to the exhibition and the featured iconographical circles. “The Martyrs” unmasks the homoerotic facets of religious symbolism, “The Harem” negotiates the current desire for the perfect male, taking a peek into the hidden boy harems of Central Asia, and “Ladslove” is steeped on the notions of the British uranian archetype of worshipping versus the platonic relationship with a teacher to unmask a series of hidden affairs. “Dead” takes an unexpected twist: it shifts away from the presumed veracity of death to show the body in its absolute objectification. Likewise, in “Beautiful Freaks”, a series of images of physical or mental deviants from a fictional casebook, the switch from the beautiful to the aberrant points to the identity labels and societal denominations of a restrictive nature in work, even within the gay community. Distinct in style and inspired by the contemporary homoerotic experience, “Boys will be Boys”, “Behold the Man”, “Spielen”, “Mid Life Crisis” and “Child’s Play” proclaim relevance within the contexts of the contemporary pin-up aesthetics and porn.

All the stories Anthony Gayton narrates seem to depart from a naïve element. The voice of the fairy tale, authoritative and simplistic, as elaborated in “Boys will be Boys”, “Beautiful Freaks” and “Child’s Play”, is impregnated with a factual and morally non-judgmental tone. And yet, first appearances are deceptive. Beneath the surface of bodies charged with a breathtaking beauty and an animalistic sensuality, what remains at stake is the issue of self-exposure, namely the very way the body inscribes itself on the narrative – not just the narrative in question but any narrative. From “The Harem” to “Dead”, gay masculinity manifests its presence so aptly in its exaltation of flesh, and yet, if we take some time to contemplate these pictures and mind looking under the hood, we discover that the real object of interest is the body per se, the body in its hybridisation and naturalness. Gayton reinforces a novel concept of identity, emanating through and beyond a corpus that operates as a living mass of stereotypes beneath a seemingly peau douce. Paradoxically, this very body, the main bearer of prejudices and misconceptions over the course of history, becomes also their finest advocator; the advocator of a scrutinising gaze and a vocabulary reluctant and hostile towards any dichotomy or ambivalence whose sole aim is to designate who the scapegoats and who the privileged ones are.

Taking upon us this reflection on the role of the body in the dissemination and distortion of meaning, we can now see anew stories such as “Beautiful Freaks” and “Ladslove”. Based on premises, such as the cult of the flesh, these sequences attempt an anatomy of the body as a commodity value subjected to the interests of diverse agents such as the church and the gay community. The body, ‘dead’, ‘deformed’ and ‘grotesque’, may epitomise the way in which male sexuality was seen in the eyes of society, but, at the same time, it alludes to a whole vocabulary of values as reinforced in the gay community today: the disclaim of any physical utterance, the quest for utter perfection, the cult of the gym-built sex icon. This is the bottom notion in Gayton’s oeuvre: the body as a trivial matter taking up the entire frame of the photographic surface, and the compelling quest to transcend and look beyond it. Such a body, a bearer of punishment and a torturer in itself, emerges today both an Olympian God and an excuse for the homosexual community to become as discriminating as its worst enemies.

Gayton’s pictures represent in this sense the two opposite parts of the same coin. They are reflections and mirrors, and they should be looked at as such, taking always into account the political function of the gaze as an accomplice of words in the eradication of rules and the subordination of the self/nature under artificially constructed sets of aphorisms and tight cultural inhibitions. Many of these images are sarcastic and humorous in their conception. Yet, in their banality, they become the containers of an intrinsic play between attraction and repulsion and eventually dissolve into hostility. They result as cruel to our eyes, for they expose the way our subconscious has been educated to “read” them. This happens especially to the less symbolic and more reality-driven tales, such as, “Boys will be Boys”, or “Beyond the Man”. Based on a pseudo-documentary premise that enacts the veracity of the ongoing photographic momentum with its pros and cons, these stories transcend our perception with their respective images and narration. Their end cancels their light-hearted mood. It capitalises on the way things are and on the way injustice becomes tolerated, naturalised and perpetuated.

This is unfortunately the way things are, Gayton seems to point out, and his texts reaffirm to a lesser or broader extent this assumption as accompanying elements of the story. It is significant that many of these written accounts, such as “Beautiful Freaks” or “Boys will be Boys”, seem to illustrate the pictures, rather than vice versa. They become essential and important for their understanding. By performing this action, they show us how representation has been irremediably conditioned by the written texts in the dissemination of its final meaning. It seems as if the endings of these fairy tales are imposed, as if they are by no means autonomous. There is an invisible hand moving the strings, as if sexuality and its destiny were ascribed to some external rules. Stories are previously written and representations are entangled into the bounds of their storyboard. It would not be inaccurate to argue then that on the bottom line Gayton’s work is all about language and its sickest derivative: an exploitative schizoid gaze that tortures and becomes tortured. By asking for a full sensorial, intellectual and emotional response from our part, his images fearlessly challenge us, the viewers, to exceed the contrivances of the language and liberate them from the constraint of words.

Natasha Christia, November 2009

LILIAN BASSMAN - PAUL HIMMEL

They were one of the most exceptional couples of the 20^th century. Lillian Bassman and Paul Himmel spent 78 years together, in life and in photography. They first met when he was nine and she was six; one decade later, they reencountered each other, fell in love and got married. This was back in 1935. Their common journey was interrupted only last February, when Paul passed away in the age of 95. Now the House of Photography / Deichtorhallen Hamburg is organizing an extensive retrospective of the two artists, the first ever to be held internationally.

Lillian Bassman and Paul Himmel still remain relatively unknown to the broad audience. This is of great surprise if one considers that they both spent more than two decades at the cutting edge of the American post-war fashion industry and the New York art scene, their pictures illustrating some of the world’s best magazines, among them Harper’s Bazaar, Junior Bazaar and Vogue. All this lasted until the late sixties, when their style “wore off” to the eyes of the fashion elite of the time. The era of these two grand fashion photographers was over.

It was no earlier than the release of Martin Harrison’s seminal publication “Appearances” in 1991 when Bassman and Himmel came once more into the focus of international attention. The eye of the time detected in them what earlier generations had failed to see: two self-accomplished authors whose work had not merely encompassed the limitations of standard commercial assignments but had revolutionized the fashion industry with its sophistication and experimental character. For Bassman and Himmel were uniquely different. If the era that had bred them celebrated naturalism in its uttering materialistic glamour (Irving Penn) and post-war life in its effusiveness (Richard Avedon), they opted for an atmosphere of evanescence, appearances and disappearances. Regardless whether it was a lingerie editorial or a street shooting, their impressionist-like pictures incessantly transcribed the fleeting interiority of their sitters and of the external urban world that surrounded them.

“The designer intended a column of chiffon and you have given me a butterfly. Lillian, you are not here to make art, you are here to show the buttons and the bows!” In 1949, Lillian Bassman shot the Paris collections for Harper’s Bazaar, but Carmel Snow was at odds with the oblique final results. With the help of a window glass, the transparent Piquet dress had been transformed to a butterfly! This was about as far as Lillian could go! Or perhaps not… The pictures published in the March 1950 issue would reach an unthinkable anti-realism for the time that involved total elimination of every detail. There were no dresses any longer, but painterly masses, light and shadows. Lillian had printed the negatives through a tiny hole by exposing only selected areas, and had erased the outlines by applying parches of colour onto the positive.

Bassman made her breakthrough as a photographer in 1946, while she was running the art direction of Junior’s Bazaar. At first, she would stay during the lunch break at the studio of George Hoyningen-Huene experimenting with the photographs of others. She was looking for something different. Then she would try her own luck. Soon her pictures were published.

Bassman did not imitate the style of her female colleagues – and they were quite a few in the forties. Before the dynamism of Toni Frissel and the photojournalistic view of Louise Dahl-Wold, her women seemed to have little to do with politics, society or household banality. Neither did they carry anything from Avedon’s ethereal monumentality. Hers was an overtly intimate approach. Her lingerie and bathing suit editorials for Harper’s Bazaar expressed a romantic and idiosyncratic femininity. Bassman was renowned for her long sessions and for the rapport she would establish with her models in order to bring out their inner mood and aura. By developing a method of enlarging through tissue, she was able to produce out of focus prints alluding to a sensuous dream world, whereby the models, their faces and garments would literally disappear. For Lillian Bassman understood before anyone else that fashion was all about inner mood, emotion and elegance.

By contrast, Paul Himmel’s gaze seems at first sight to be driven by documentary concerns. Unfortunately, most of his fashion photographs do not survive, but what remains makes it clear: his camera pointed at the street, its dynamism and the fleeting moment of an urban life replete of fragility. Himmel imbued his “decisive moment” with movement that culminated into a poetic, subjective quality. His pictures show a multiplicity of human bodies flirting with the intangible in the rash of the metropolis. Out-of-focus and blurry, they are as much as moody and atmospheric as Lillian’s work, while sometimes preserving an unsettling aura, dissonant with the spirit of his post-war contemporaries.

An autodidact himself, Himmel took up photography as a teenager, much earlier than Bassman, and for many years he combined his hobby with teaching. In 1946 he went on to study graphic journalism under Brodovitch, his mentor, who used to remark: “Among all, Paul is the best in movement.” A few years later, in 1954, Paul would pay homage to the legendary art director and his distinct feel with his book “Ballet in Action”. Constructed on long exposures, the use of grainy film, high contrasts, dance and poetry, Paul Himmel’s ballet stills were celebrated by the famous chorographer George Balanchine. But Himmel soon took his artistic concerns a step further. In his seminal work on nudes published in the sixties, movement is replaced by evanescence. Bodily forms become so elongated and abbreviated that they eventually vanish, in a graphic imitation of Giacometti’s sculptures.

In the fifties and sixties the couple celebrated their consolidation. In 1951 they opened their studio, formed a family, and in 1956 one of Paul’s pictures was included in Steichen’s “Family of Man”. They produced more personal work and experimented in the darkroom. But times were changing. After the negative reception of his “Nudes”, Paul felt discouraged and in the early seventies he dropped photography for psychotherapy. By that time, Lillian’s increasing disenchantment with the fashion’s changing ethics also led her to undertake teaching in Parson’s School and painting. She was to make her professional comeback, shooting for John Galliano, Vogue and New York Times in the nineties, when interest on her work underwent a revival. Since then, the couple has been enjoying their resurgence through exhibitions and books, but even so a comprehensive record of their artistic production in unison has been missing to this day. Now the Hamburg retrospective, compiled by a series of iconic photographs, other still unpublished vintage prints and a documentary film, comes to fill in this gap and let the world know about two of the greatest artistic personalities of all times. “A unique opportunity not to miss”, in the words of Brigitte Woischnik, who has curated the show with Ingo Taubhorn.

Natasha Christia: When and how was the idea for the exhibition born?

Brigitte Woischnik: A long time ago, I was introduced to Lillian, Paul and their amazing work. Lillian has been a famous photographer but nobody in the photography world really knew much about the great Paul Himmel after the late sixties. Nobody had ever been able to see their work in conjunction. Stunned, I realized what an outstanding creative couple they had been. Each of them is unique but, if you look at their photographs, you see their joined life and work. I spoke to them about my idea of an exhibition and they granted me their approval. In 2003, I curated a little show in F 5,6 Gallerie in Munich and went on looking for a museum. Again with F 5,6, we showed some images of Paul Himmel during Paris Photo 2006. F.C. Gundlach, the famous German photographer, collector and founder of the House of Photography / Deichtorhallen Hamburg, came to the booth with Ingo Taubhorn, the museum curator. They looked through Paul Himmel’s images with great interest and I told them that Paul Himmel is Lillian Bassman’s husband. Mr. Gundlach owns some Lillian Bassman prints and included them in the most recent exhibition of his collection. Ingo Taubhorn gave me his card, I visited them in Hamburg a couple of times and when it was decided in October 2007, Ingo told me the good news. I was thrilled! By that time Lillian Bassman was 91 and Paul Himmel 93. We all knew we had to try and do it as fast as possible! But to let Lillian and Paul know that there will be a retrospective of them together filled me with tremendous joy!

NC: So, you had the privilege of working closely with the couple in the selection of the images. How would you describe the idiosyncrasy of each one of them after so many years?

BW: In 2007, I hired a cameraman to tape two interviews with Lillian and Paul. I was so scared of their age and wanted to have a document! The first interview was conducted at their house on Fire Island and the other one in New York. In August 2008, I introduced Ingo Taubhorn to them. We all spent almost a week in New York and discussed how we would work together. Ingo immediately discovered the historic value of their work. During that very week, they were excited, interested, helpful, inspiring, but also extremely calm due to their characters. For Paul and Lillian had shared a life of almost 78 years together. They stayed unique and each of them was able to develop a career on their own. They both shared the same interests and their children. They almost seem symbiotic, though this is not the right word to describe them. To me “each of them fills in the part of what might be missing in the other”. In her most recent book, which has been produced by her son Eric Himmel, there is a remark by Lillian on the last page: “To my husband Paul Himmel who always believed in me!” This statement speaks for itself.

NC: Still, Paul Himmel died last February and you had to continue solely with Lillian Bassman. Could you describe those moments?

BW: We arrived in New York in January 2009, when Paul Himmel had his first stroke and was in hospital. The family was with him 24 hours. Ellen Liebermann, Paul’s assistant for the last three years, guided us through his work. We discovered the most amazing images, negatives, vintage works and much more. Like two moles we worked through them and made the first selection. We visited Paul’s Gallery, Keith De Lillis, and went through all the images there, made a small selection and went down to Kelton Lab, where we found many prints ready for us to take. Every item we selected was photographed, archived and packed. Ingo left after ten days and I did a couple of days later, after they had brought Paul back home. A week later, Paul Himmel died.

NC: To my knowledge, there is very little material of Paul Himmel’s fashion, and Lillian Bassman is said to have jettisoned in the early seventies negatives of years of commercial work! In which state did you encounter the archive of the two photographers? Did you have to resort to the archives of Harper’s Bazaar?

BW: At Hearst there is no archive! Hard to believe, isn’t it? We found more than anyone could possibly imagine at the Bassman / Himmel studio. Paul Himmel had cleaned out his commercial fashion photography in the late sixties but all his great experimental work was still there – ballet, architecture and street scenes, nudes, sports, family and friends, besides solarisations and other experiments, all conducted in the late sixties. Lillian had also cleaned out her commercial pictures, but, luckily, after fifteen years they came by chance across the garbage bag and pretty much most of the material she had overworked.

NC: On which level do you trace the influences between Himmel and Bassman? Though they never photographed in conjunction, they share an extraordinary universe of abstraction, intimacy and formal sensuality …

BW: In many ways they shared their work, but each of them stayed unique. Till his end, Paul was arguing that he had taught Lillian how to take a picture. This was in a sense true. Lillian started later, in the middle of her career as an art director for Junior Bazaar, by working in the lab with other photographers’ negatives. She wanted to get something different out of a negative, and since she was an artist she began from there before she ever took a picture with a camera.

Their oeuvre is totally different but you can see that they had shared a studio. They lived side by side, so they might have discussed different ways to experiment and often helped each other. While Paul was shooting the ballet pictures, Lillian was designing the book for him. In the sixties Paul experimented with the solarisation in colour. As we discovered, Lillian had also tried it in black and white. They both had a crash on black and white; both worked in their own darkroom. Paul was a master in movement, while Lillian created the movement in the lab. To say it in her own words according to an interview she gave in 1951: "Paul is, I feel, a better photographer. His work is virile, it's more direct and he deals with the world as it actually is. Photographically speaking, we're probably as close as you could come to opposites. I'm completely tied up with softness, fragility and the personal problems of a feminine world."

NC: But she was the one who came back to photography in the nineties, whereas Paul didn’t. How do you evaluate her latest works?

BW: We will integrate some of Lillian's latest prints in the show. She started to work again after Martin Harrison, who had edited her last book, incited her to do so. Up to this day, she is working on new projects employing digital manipulation. She is so wonderful! But what a few people know is that in the last years Paul Himmel archived his work with the help of his assistant. He also used Photoshop to experiment with colours and crop pictures to different sizes. Through this technique they both reinvented their work in a new way.

NC: How would you describe la raison d’être of this retrospective? What is the contribution of both photographers to the world of photography?

BW: Their contribution is of a historic value! You can put them side by side with many photographers of their time, like Helen Lewitt, Ilse Bing and many more. To me, Lillian is the most outstanding Fashion Photographer. I have found her artistic quality in no one else! She knew through instinct and her feminine intuition how to show a woman in fashion and beauty and all over. Following on this, the ambition of this show is no other but to honour two of the greatest artists in photography through the world. My true dream is to watch one day the show coming back to New York, to the Whitney Museum. Paul and Lillian used to live just a few blocks away!

Text by Natasha Christia

All Rights Reserved.

All images: Lillian Bassman – Paul Himmel

Exhibition:

Lillian Bassman & Paul Himmel. Eine Retrospective

Curators:

Ingo Taubhorn, Haus der Photographie

Brigitte Woischnik, Foto Factory

Exhibition:

November, 27, 2009-February, 21, 2010

Haus der Photographie, Deichtorhallen, Hamburg

Published in Eyemazing 04/2009

ANTHONY GAYTON 2

Beautiful Freaks


Mirrors that reflect shadows of dismembered existences: The ‘real’ self always seems to be elsewhere, beyond clouds of indolence and imaginative poetry. Representations entangled in their very bounds; raising questions of identity in a world wherein masquerade has become the rule is a dangerous task. Transcending the barriers of the skin and decoding the universal patterns of life in a linear teleological sequence: what is at stake here is providing a space for minorities – this shadowed ‘Other’– to share their story, to tell it loud and clear.

At first glance, we perceive Anthony Gayton’s vivid tableaux-vivant as naïve and playfully charming attempts to introduce the homoerotic pathos into the universal fairy tale of love, desire and growing up. But soon morbid indulgence gives place to reflection. Before our eyes images unfold, which in their syntactical complexity courageously thrive in the act of viewing the self as part of a sexual grammar whose main components, masculinity and femininity, intermingle within a hybrid sensuality. In this big play of humanity, deviants, outcasts and misfits emerge out of Plato’s cave. They all stoically carry on their shoulders their respective category labels. Tiny but inventively acute, these labels are nothing but societal denominations of a restrictive nature, essentially designated to them, the scapegoats of our culture…

For Anthony Gayton the camera and the spoken word go hand in hand. Articulated according to a clear visual diegesis and accompanied by short texts and poems, his narratives scrutinize the way in which axiomatic stories passed on from generation to generation advocate given attitudes towards homosexuality. Still, Gayton’s more recent body of work, consisting of portraits of well-built young men in archetypical postures with a pin-up quality, takes a step further. And it does so by exposing specific cases of iconographic misplacements that unveil hidden iconographies and secret relationships with an unforeseen sexual component: the homoerotic laps of religious symbolism in “Martyrs”, the current desire for the perfect male alongside the cult of the body in “The Harem” and the British uranian archetype of worshipping versus the platonic teacher-student relationship in “Ladslove”.

Entitled as “Beautiful Freaks”, the fourth of these series seems to take this premise to its extreme. The ongoing issue here is the subtle yet apparent association of homosexuality with physical and mental abnormalities, as it derives from a fictional casebook of “deviants” brought to the doctor’s lab. Accompanied by exhaustive reports in German which Gayton expressively commissioned for this purpose, the pictures seem to establish a factual and morally non-judgmental tone appropriate to a medical document. This may be the case on a linguistic level at least. Yet, in visual terms, much more seems to be beneath the surface. The mirror which we look and are looked at through is cracked. It is upon us, as viewers, to restore the unknown ‘Other’ in its deformed members to an integral whole that makes sense. Above all, it is upon us to accept and recognize the essential humanness of this ‘Other’; a humanness imbued by an animal-instinct-driven sensuality that exists outside any preconceived ideals of beauty. Fetishism, voyeurism and desire can have another colour, another taste and odour…

Anthony Gayton lists among his sources of inspiration for “Beautiful Freaks” case studies of deformities as encountered in the medical books of the 19^th century Victorian world, in ethnographic and travel photography, vaudeville prodigies and slideshow cartes-de-visite. To all this, he adds his own distinctive touch. Although it would be easy to go after the mere shock-value of the grotesque, he does not do so. Gayton’s freakish creatures carry an ambiguity, both intriguing and compelling at the same time. They are all decayed Gods and Angels. Their abnormal bodies become the containers of an intrinsic play between attraction and repulsion, radiating an unprecedented sensuality.

Gayton has deliberately reinforced this switching from aberrance to beauty by asking models from a fashion agency to help him deconstruct these archetypical scenes of deformity. Gayton explains how in the before-session mood he discussed the concept behind the story with each of these men and the way he would alter them on the computer afterwards. Following a shooting of long exposures, so as to bring the most natural and naïve expression out of his sitters, he would proceed with digital manipulation, applying nevertheless considerably less than the usual retouching to the skin so as to maintain the aura of a believable deformity, more down-to-earth and less grotesque or idealized. In this sense, the images of “Beautiful Freaks” work as honest medical statements as much as they are the carriers of provocative hints for the eye and the soul. An incessant play between desire and repulsion is taking place here. During the photographic moment, both the imagined subjects and the actual sitters are unexpectedly asked to switch roles; the beasts unexpectedly become the subjects of longing, and apt men in terms of standard appearance become the beasts!

By grounding this ongoing dissonance between the body’s commonness and naturalness and the archetype of the freak as testified through medical cases, films and prodigious circus tales, Anthony Gayton’s photographic representations shift away from any given assumptions concerning beauty and physical attraction. Moreover, they show us that the coin has always had two sides, both on a human and a historical level. To the eyes of society freaks may have always been ‘freaks’, yet many of these tortured creatures have claimed their right to be the exception to the rule. And they have accomplished it. Gayton describes how his working experience with Paralympics medal winners and the paradigm of Frank Lentini – a three-legged man, who in the thirties ended up being from an entertainer to an educator, celebrity and family man – have offered him valuable feedback at the moment of conceptualizing “Beautiful Freaks”. Through the fascinating stories of these people, Gayton was lucky to discover that behind any well-rooted assumption there are the exceptional lives of those men who are both ‘deviants and Gods’. The bottom-line is that what ultimately hurts is the perturbing gaze, the one that labels and discriminates alimented by the scrutiny of the historical moment and its vocabulary; a vocabulary always reluctant and hostile towards any dichotomy or ambivalence.

Following on from this, it would not be an exaggeration to claim that “Beautiful Freaks” essentially is all about language and its sickest derivative: a schizoid gaze that tortures and becomes tortured. The meaning of deviance is relative and the synecdoche here is more than evident. Historically, homosexuals have always been considered ‘freaks’ and in many communities of the world are still confronted with social barriers and suspicion, among them the hypocrisy of the church and other tight cultural inhibitions. But the mirror has two faces, Anthony Gayton seems to point out, and the harm comes from the inside too. As much as the gay community has fought against aphorisms, it has been in need of them in order to conquer self-definition. From this point of view, the aesthetically and formally kinky pictures in “Beautiful Freaks” offer a very-well accomplished oxymoronic questioning of the homoerotic ethics today. The overt aestheticism of the body in these pictures alludes to a whole vocabulary of values as reinforced in the gay community today: the disclaim of any physical utterance, the quest for utter perfection, the cult of the gym-built sex icon... It is precisely this trivialization that can make gay men as much as discriminating, suggests Gayton. Deviants from the norm are rejected within and without a homosexual context. Hypocrisy is everywhere.

“Beautiful Freaks” invite us to look through both sides of the mirror, from the within and from the outside. This ongoing interplay of the image and of language in its atrocities culminates into a new, meta-semiotic context, in which the notion of the abnormal is reworked into a novel cultural whole of ‘alterity’ designed to be contemplated in and out of context. What is left upon us as viewers? We can either buy into the standard values, or we can willingly let ourselves be carried away by this new challenge of multiplicity. In the first case, it would be obvious to think of these beautiful freaks as nothing but regular pin ups; it is easy to see the model before the message, guided by the common denominators of body and sex. In the second case, in turn, a drastically novel set is created for the contemplation of the ‘Other’. The new angles of the mirror lead us to a context somewhere between the real and the imaginary, whereby masquerade falls and the narcissism of categories dissolves into allowance and tolerance.

Anthony Gayton’s work offers a very intuitive, self-reflecting gaze on gay masculinity and perception. His constructed images are medical statements insofar as they are aesthetic assertions. In their quality of pseudo-documentary, they ‘enact’ perception and photography with its pros and cons. But, before all, they expose the contrivances of language and the problematic of liberating the images from the constraint of words. For as Gayton concludes: “Terms as homosexual and heterosexual are by definition labels. They are not character definitions but artificial concepts –convenient, perhaps, but still artificial concepts that entrap people, precisely because they force them to choose sides…

Text by Natasha Christia

All Rights Reserved

©All pictures: Anthony Gayton

Representing gallery:

Galería MiTO, Barcelona

Published in Eyemazing 04/2009

STEVE McCURRY

The Unguarded Moment


The legendary name of Steve McCurry is the first thing that pops into mind when it comes to photojournalism and travel photography at its best. Encompassing the “decisive moment” of Henri Cartier-Bresson, the tender humanism of Werner Bischoff and the agonizing social compromise of Eugene Smith, McCurry’s photography sheds bright light on a world reigned by absurdity and incongruence, celebrating dignity, endurance, and above all humanity’s extraordinary commonality despite the existent cultural, geographical and religious borders. From the mountains of Afghanistan and the monsoons of India to Cambodia, Philippines and Burma, McCurry’s prolonged journeys and stays at some of the most remote and conflictive zones of this planet have culminated into seminal images that have marked “a before and an after” in our inception of photography and the world.

For three decades, the work of Steve McCurry has been incessantly featured in National Geographic and other prominent magazines worldwide. In all these years, the world has changed. Photography has changed. More concept-driven, it has become ill critical of its proper rhetoric properties. Affect dominates intuition. Still, the way McCurry’s photography speaks to the hearts of millions of people has not been diminished in the least. In recent years, monographs such as “Portraits” (1999) “South Southeast” (2000), “In the Shadow of the Mountains” (2007) and others, all published by Phaidon, have become bestsellers with McCurry one of the Phaidon’s most prolific and well-represented authors. Now a new release entitled “The Unguarded Moment” is summed up as a companion volume to this appealing editorial offer, and especially to “South Southeast”. Of the same size and format with this latter title, the book contains an astonishing range of both recent as much as older work obtained from McCurry’s travelling across Africa, Europe and particularly Southeast Asia.

The notion of the “unguarded moment” has been regularly reappearing in McCurry’s statements over the last years. Comparing with Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment”, which seems to make reference to the very instant of image capturing (the subject being unmediated by the lens and the photographer somehow deciding what is to be recorded and “made” into history), the “unguarded moment” alludes more to an energy emanating from the sitter, a so-to-speak sudden revelation of an unaffected core humanness before the camera and despite it. Paraphrasing Fox Talbot’s expression, the camera becomes the pencil of the “inner” nature, and the photographic act an orchestration of situations, which sort of effortlessly seem to happen upon it.

Fishing, herding, praying, sleeping… The vernacular “rhythms” of everyday life provide the stage for an enactment. Common people in their common realities, common needs and routines —the final word belongs to them, and their houses, landscapes, rivers, mountains and lakes become the photographer’s studio. As Steve McCurry recounts, “I have always hoped that I could bring about pictures of my subjects in a natural way. I have always hoped that I could take a glimpse of their humanity and capture their essence without any deliberate attempt to reconstruct a fact or get a pose and a gesture out of them. What I ask from these people is to be themselves. Most of them have wonderful life-stories to narrate, sufficient to make the encounter fascinating”.

It is precisely in these chance encounters between the photographer and his subjects that a metaphysical-like fusion of the signified, the signifier and the punctum takes place. All converge to one by means of a mystic renunciation of the very principle of “being there” that has traditionally constituted the photographic momentum. And still, these pictures are not suggestive of an absence but rather of a sort of “elsewhereness”, of a transposition to that neutral blank moment when the yin and the yang converge and the “instant” —this seemingly insignificant suspension of history— melds into an expanding humanness of a sublime beauty and warmth. “It is the particular moment that counts”, stresses McCurry. “You can achieve amazing things and a wonderful quality by the way you relate to people. When you are before a situation with people talking, moving, gesturing, it is a question of the moment to reveal something interesting and profound of the human condition”. And he goes on to further add: “The amount of time does not necessarily correspond to the quality of the portrait. Trying to know somebody really well is not always the solution”. Neither are the words. “I do not rely much on them. Often, I do not even speak the language of my subjects. There is an interpreter and the encounters are very brief. When I photographed the “Afghan girl” in 1984, I only disposed of two or three minutes”.

Still one would wonder: Today that lens culture has penetrated even the remotest places of this planet, people who believe that the camera steals the soul are becoming less and less. Where is then the clear unmediated gaze to be found among subjects who pose before the camera with the awareness of an actor who is ready to look at you and be looked at? In a certain way, Steve McCurry’s camera unveils remote cultures and people as much as it underlines the potential eclipse of the sacred and the exotic in the twilight of westernization.

Certain pictures in “The Unguarded Moment” leave some clear hints of these changes. “Virgin” sitters confronting the lens appear alongside candid pictures taken from a clear distance or next to images of subjects seemingly absorbed, “hypnotised” by an activity, as for example in the case of the “Buddhist monks playing video games” or the “Geisha in the subway”. In these pictures, there is no direct gaze, but rather a sensation of a hurry, of a so-to-speak old world melting under a fleeting moment, as if the subjects were not aware that they were being photographed or did not care less about it. “I guess the world is changing and you have to record it”, admits McCurry. “I don’t think it makes any difference though! I don’t see any difference between photographing now and thirty years ago! The only differences today are that people want you to send them a picture and that you are shooting with a digital camera. There will always be new people and situations. Insofar as there are new songs to be written, new poems to be told, likewise there will always be a new photograph to be taken!”

Steve McCurry admits, of course, that high expectations may often break down to pieces when a situation becomes materialized. Every person is a world and every moment is uniquely different. Some situations are inevitably more truthful and interesting than others, and likewise some subjects are more manageable than others. As the children for instance, who constitute frequent protagonists in his pictures… “Children tend to be more accessible and easy to work with. They are fascinating! They never say no because they love to be playful”. With adults the situations are more confrontational and complex, but even so, McCurry has discovered the keys to his close-ups: “It is all about instincts, intuition and a bit of the universal language of humour. And trust, of course… Yes, trust!” he remarks with confidence. “It is all about making the person feeling somehow relaxed, not conscious of oneself and non-embarrassed. It is about creating a comfortable, friendly, non-threatening ambience”.

“The Unguarded Moment” constitutes one of Steve McCurry’s more intimate and personal statements. The monograph epitomizes neatly the overall philosophy and restless curiosity of a man who has had one hundred lives; of a man who has recollected the seeds of an amazing trajectory but also paid the price of following a very tough path. His eyes have born testimony to innumerable conflicts. And yet, despite the unbearably irrational cruelty of their surrounding historical circumstances, what these pictures transmit in retrospective is a gaze that has preserved a soul resistant to profound despair and nihilism. The sublime play of light and shadows, and the quasi-mystical energy underlying them are statements of an uncontested faith to humanness and a deeply rooted optimism.

What has helped Steve McCurry sustain his spirit? The passion for wandering and observing, the contact with the Buddhist stoicism, photography…? “No. It is people first and foremost”, he responds without hesitating. “People who get caught up in conflicts; good people who just happen to be in the wrong place; people one cannot help but admire and respect for their capacity to survive, their dignity, kindness and generosity despite losing everything”.

To them —not to the ones who do the fighting, but to civilians and refugees, to women and men and children who, though carrying the burdens of death, loss and refuge, preserve their smile— Steve McCurry has dedicated his inner creative urge. Over all these years, his iconic images have conferred visibility to their human stories, arising international attention and sensibility. They have also contributed in sustaining the non-profit organisation “Imagineasia” that works in collaboration with local community leaders in central Afghanistan to provide fundamental educational and health resources. “Imagineasia consists of sending very simple things such as textbooks, notebooks and pencils to universities and schools”, clarifies McCurry. “We wanted to do something very manageable, where one can actually see the benefits”. When he goes on to describe illustratively the eagerness of these children to learn and to play with the pencils and books they are given, one clearly sees how photography can contribute to a better world.

Steve McCurry is a master of colour, form and ambience. His influence has been more than paramount to the way the rhetoric of travel photography and photojournalism has been constructed over the last three decades, and yet nobody photographs like him! From the Soviet war in Afghanistan to the current Taliban conflict, from Yugoslavia and the Gulf War to mundane everyday scenes, McCurry’s images seem to preserve a life-openness imbued by the wisdom of the oriental mysticism.

Just a short look through the biography of this American-born photographer who gave up his job in a Philadelphia newspaper to make himself “a stranger in a strange land” leaves sufficient clues. For McCurry’s decision to leave back the Western civilization did not just imply wandering across Asia as a nomad with a rucksack and a camera, but, instead, a constant process of confronting and assimilating original raw cultures of a fascinating diversity, despite their geographical proximity. Such is the case of Afghanistan and Tibet. With their striking frictions, these two countries have invigorated him profoundly —Afghanistan as a place of turmoil, and Tibet as an inward, more spiritual, non-violence driven world. However, over his thirty-year career he has personally attested various times how differences in language and culture end up all being superficial when one gets to know people and their yearnings closer. “Deep down human beings are very similar”, McCurry stresses. “Ironically, one of the things that tend to generate division is religion! While spirituality is supposed to be something that should bring people together in a mutual understanding, it does completely the opposite! It often forces people to think: your way is wrong and therefore I will force you to mine”. And he concludes with the most important lesson he has gained in life: “The fundamental problem of this world is the lack of respect. It is astonishing how humans completely disregard humans and other living creatures, how poisonous civilizations can be to nature and animals! It is irrelevant if the roots of the contemporary chaos are in the Middle East or the Tigris river area. It all comes down to the fact that people do not respect each other”.

In their wisdom —a wisdom culminated by long hours of witnessing and observing the world with the camera as a “passport”— Steve McCurry’s “unguarded moments” become exceptionally universal. Though many of these visions are set against landscapes ravaged by disaster and death, they bespeak a profound appreciation of life and its wonders. By appealing to an essential humanness, the supposed “Other” becomes us. The individual gazes of these children, men and women —vulnerable and attentive, careless and warm at the same time— transcend language and culture. They reveal the remarkable range of beauty bridging the unknown and the familiar. Frontiers break and one cannot help but get carried away by the grand river of life which flows on endlessly. “We long to maintain the here-and-now but it is continually disappearing, changing, evolving”, stresses McCurry, his words reminding us of Heraclitus.

Yes, indeed, everything is in a state of flux. But, Steven McCurry has managed to suspend the moment with his camera. What remains is stillness and photography —photography articulating with humility the possibility of a new life of unguarded dignity and hope; a new life of a human kind replete of light and shadows, waters and skies.

Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved.

All pictures: Steve McCurry
Imagine Asia Foundation

Publication:
Steve McCurry, “The Unguarded Moment”.
Published by Phaidon Press, May 2009
Hardback, 156 pp
75 colour illustrations
Price: 59,95 €
ISBN 978 0 71484664 4

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THERESIA VISKA

La Danse Française

There are spirits and they can be photographed. In an uncanny, almost magical act of conjuring up the eye with the semblance of shadows, the “photographic momentum” has attested to this novel envisioning of the body enduring time. Old forgotten lives and presences have eloquently been fossilized in emulsion. The dialectics of reason have been reconciled with the metaphysics of religion, and the tangible with the intangible. To the eyes of people from all walks of life, photographs arise as the ubiquitous remains of what is deemed to evaporate and ultimately vanish with the flow of time. Be they real spirits or apparitions observed or preserved photographically, photographs are anchored between the realms of the visible and the invisible. They become, in Roland Barthes’ words, “the lexicon of each person’s idiolect”, and as such abolish any distinction between the luminous translucent flesh and the immaterial essence underlying it.

And yet, there are photographers such as Theresia Viska, who choose to cut themselves loose from this melancholy-drained envisioning of the photographic subject as an objet perdu. Viska’s overall engagement with photography shifts from representation to a performative enactment of the very “absence” the photographic speech is supposedly about. By exploiting the structural and materialist properties of the camera apparatus to their fullest, Viska’s practice proposes performing the “ghostliness” sustained by the discarnate part each one of us carries within. It is precisely this daring experiencing of the ethereal interlace between the past and the present, family genealogies and personal visions that unburdens and at the same time relieves the gaze from the “culture of trauma” photography carries on its shoulders.

Long exposures, flash, and blurriness in suspended motion… Just with a shutter release, the “here-and-now” of the photographic act becomes everything. As a living presence, it punctuates solemnity at the moment of creation. As a quintessential ingredient of perception, it bridges temporal and spatial dichotomies while conferring continuity to life. Photography ultimately becomes the container of an expanding self-openness and a medium of personal healing. The words of Theresia Viska below will attest how the miracle is produced during the photographic momentum, how the omnipresent identity beneath the skin flourishes as the image surfaces on paper…

Back in 2006, Theresia Viska debuted in these very same pages with “Stable Girls”, a series of black and white photographs in which abstract conceptualism is linked with intuitive images of infantile femininity at the crossroads of representation. Now it is not young riders but “La Danse Française”, Theresia Viska’s most recent project, where this very feel of a rhythmical drifting in dreamful suspension bursts out in the form of dancing figures that dissolve into space and time. It could be real people dancing on a backdrop of a military academy at a castle in Stockholm. It could be Viska’s ancestors –knights and warriors, fathers and mothers. It could be here and now, there and then. What counts, after all, is the mood and the liberation of senses photography proposes.

The words to follow will be about the past and the present, about an ever-expanding self alimented by photography, a book, and an exhibition of ghosts, and once more about photography encompassing time, film, ceramics. At the outset of her new project, “La Danse Française”, Theresia Viska is sharing her reflections with Eyemazing.

Natasha Christia: To begin with, could you describe to us how “La Danse Française” was born?

Theresia Viska: After the release of my first book “Stable Girls” in 2006, I had high expectations of what could happen, but they all sort of failed. At that time I was not aware that it takes much more than a couple of exhibitions to establish oneself. I got depressed and had no clue how to proceed with my photography. I began taking random, subject-unspecific pictures. After a couple of months, I went through the first rolls and realized that it was really something about my family and self. Then an opportunity came up out of the blue. While I was shooting a freelance assignment at the Military Academy of Stockholm, it occurred to me that I could try making photography within this context. My family has been in the army for over three hundred years. So, I solicited for permission to go back and take pictures of a personal character this time. The Academy responded affirmatively and suggested I attended their annual winter ball where the young cadets dance La Dance Française. This was an interesting idea. Both my parents and grandparents have been attending these balls. Yes that was it: I was going to take pictures of my father, mother and of all my old ancestors!

NC: When you embarked on this project were you aware that the final result would turn out to be this peculiar ghost story?

TV: I did know that some “wrong” images would come out. At the time I was shooting my random pictures, everything around me was melting —shapes and colours. All of my photographs were beautifully staged and yet, there was always something wrong about them. On the other hand, I was conscious that producing sharp images of the beautiful guests would be really dull. It would be too perfect, too neatly done. So, when I began, I would have the camera in long-shot shuttle and small flash just to obtain rather blurry images. Another factor of paramount importance was that for the “Stable Girls” book project I had spent one whole year wandering in the stables. Now, for “La Danse Française”, I just had at my disposal two or four opportunities in a year, and in each occasion, just a couple of hours. Therefore, before the ball I needed to be very clear on how to obtain images that would work and during the event be overly concentrated. Despite this, various complications arose on my way. Two of my cameras broke down and I ended up using my pocket camera. But, in the end, it all went pretty well!

NC: The way you have chosen to represent your ancestors is quite spooky. To the eyes of many people, it could even be regarded unflattering and most certainly ambivalent and grotesque. Does the project express an underlying demythologizing attitude towards the past and the notion of tradition?

TV: No, not at all. “La Danse Française” does not constitute any critical statement. It is about ghosts basically. The whole series is impregnated by the mood resembling the atmosphere of “Twin Peaks” or that movie sequence from “The Shining”, when Jack Nicholson wakes up in the middle of the night and all of a sudden there is a big party. I wanted my pictures to feel similar. I wanted the viewers to “enter” a house where they hear sounds without actually seeing something. I wanted them to feel watched by ghosts –creatures that are not necessarily mean but not normal either. Ghosts have been undoubtedly dead for a long time or since last year, which makes it normal for them to look sometimes beautiful and sometimes a little scary!

NC: I am curious to know what kind of reactions to this ghost and monster photo-tale you got from the military academy. Did they approve of your peculiar style?

TV: They were aware of my style since the beginning. I had explained my intentions clearly: I was not going to take pictures of the guests, but would work in artistic terms. When they saw the work, they thought it was fantastic. I asked them if they would like to be mentioned in the book to be released —it would be totally understandable if they did not wish to be represented like this. But they did! They are proud to be within the project! Judging from their profile—the Stockholm military academy is based at the Castle of Karlberg, a 16th century castle full of mural paintings—you would expect them to be strict and old-fashioned but this is not their case at all. They embrace contemporary culture.

NC: In comparison to your first artistic project, “Stable Girls”, which negotiates female representation in alternative spaces, “La Danse Française” is more intuitive and imagination-driven, as if the very illusory metaphysics of representation were at stake here. Form and content is diluted in movement…

TV: That was also my purpose in “Stable Girls”: Formulating a proposition in memory with less-specific images instead of a fact-based documentary practice. But here it got more intense. I let loose, wore a really nice dress, went to the ball and had a great time with my camera, this is what happened in “La Danse Française”. I may work as a press photographer on a daily basis, but no one can take my ghost images away from me!
Now, as far as blurriness is concerned, already in “Stable Girls” I was expressing my frustration with the “pure image”. My stance towards this clean aesthetic, which is so popular today in the inception of photography as an intellectual exercise, is the following: If the image is too close to your reality, with perfect colours and thorough veracity at the time of representation, photography is unnecessary. You should better exhibit the object instead. Half of the job is to make the image, and the other half “to paint” on it. You have to put your signature on the photograph when you work on it!

NC: Does this last commentary stand for as an explanation for the presence of so many autobiographical elements in your work? It is as if you regarded necessary for photography to establish a link with your life in order to obtain a sense...

TV: According to my point of view, if you make a photo-story about something you do not relate to, it can be up to 99% perfect. Still, if you have an emotion about it, there is a little more percentage added to this, and this little bit makes the difference. It costs so much money, effort and time to bring a project ahead, so a strong inner motivation is essential in order to keep going!

NC: And photography? What input has photography had in your life?

TV: I was always having a really hard time at school. I had no idea what to do with my life. I was trying out different kind of jobs —working at a restaurant, taking care of the elderly—or was just traveling around. When I met my husband about eight years ago, we decided, why not take a photography course, travel around taking pictures and selling them? So, in 2001, I enrolled to a one-year photography course. For the first assignment, whose theme was “contact”, I went back to my old stable and took pictures of the girls. When I came out of the darkroom and showed the images to my teacher, he was impressed. That was it. Magic! It had always been so difficult to express myself with words and finally somebody had understood me thanks to photography. The camera helped me canalise my high energy and express myself, and this was such a relief. At last, I could concentrate. Nothing was actually wrong with me! Paradoxically I don’t travel that much anymore. When I make photography, it is more like travelling to my own world. I stay more at home now; I feel more at home now!

C: So, do you feel even closer to yourself after completing this series?

TV: I feel relieved. I reached my comfort zone and hopefully it will be different afterwards. I like the grotesque. I like to surprise people, to make the beautiful vulgar. Hopefully I will continue though I have no idea about the future!

NC: But you must have some plans for “La Danse Française”!

TV: Yes, definitively! In November, when it gets darker, a ghost exhibition opens at the KG52 gallery in Stockholm. I am currently working with an art director in an artist’s book similar to “Stable Girls” to accompany the exhibit. I have also asked a history teacher to have a look through the diary my grandfather wrote when he was soldier in the Finish winter war in the 1940s. He will contribute additional text inspired from this source…

NC: This is an interesting element. It provides another dimension to the non-site specific, timeless images of the series.

TV: The series becomes more reality-based, I guess. There will be real whispers from ghosts in my images, although my grandfather managed to survive this war!

NC: What about the movement and blurriness present in your pictures? Are they suggestive of an interest in shifting to film in the near future?

TV: Actually, yes! I will accompany “La Danse Française” series with a video that consists of a close-up portrait of a small girl, my 11 year-old niece, sleeping on water. The video will be projected at the narrow gallery corridor and will be the first thing the visitor will see when entering from the street. The main show will be featured at the gallery’s main space, which is hosted at the cellar below.

NC: This all sounds like a dream-state regression to your childhood…

TV: Well, the film is not a direct hint to my early years. It rather alludes to the fever dreams of ice and water I used to have as a child, while expressing the feeling I have chosen for the whole series to breathe—a watery and greyish feeling similar to the aspect of my ghost images. But, besides film, I am also experimenting with other type of media as well, which will attribute multiple modes of experiencing to the whole series. There will be, for example, a wall with different ceramic masks of faces forced onto the ghosts. These masks allude to the face we assume when partying around with people, when, for instance, we are laughing at something when it is not funny.

NC: As I can understand then, you do not draw inspiration solely from photography…

TV: Very little, to be honest. I am rather inspired from excellently written books, the movies or the theatre. I love culture! I try to see as much as non photography-related art as possible. Today there are so many people taking pictures with a camera, and that is good, but unfortunately, there is too so much bad photography as well.

NC: What is bad photography for you?

TV: When you are not using the camera 100% but just 50%. Everyone can take a picture but, you know, this is simply just not enough…

NC: As if there were too much concept, at the expense of photography?

TV: Exactly. As if the concept was good but the rest needless. This is why I find it more challenging to get a grip on other genres of art. I think nowadays we, photographers, do not take on challenges with our proper apparatus. A photograph can be so extremely good but overly boring as well. My only wish is to see more experiment with the camera and the photograph!

Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved.

Published in Eyemazing 03/2009

JEN DAVIS

Self-portraits


If we were to attempt a contextual reading of this contemporary photographic representation, it would most certainly be in the area of the self-portrait where all the issues at stake are to be found. Since Cindy Sherman and her Untitled Film Stills, self-portraiture has become the field where the aesthetics and the politics of representation converge into a subversive whole that dynamises the coherence of orthodox representation. Self-portraiture has provided the stage for the enactment of a friction inherent in all representation: the friction between reality and fiction, inner and collective self.

In this expression of photography’s existential concerns, the lens does not unveil the subject but, contrary to what is expected, masks it. The outcome is a photographic surface that obscures vision and blurs the frontiers between what is represented and what is not, jeopardizing the very metaphysical envisioning of photography as the potential “mirror of the soul”. In a schematic paraphrase of the Lacanian discussion of the gaze, the mirror breaks and the lens becomes a vehicle of transportation to an “elsewhereness”, whence what is projected is not the physical idol of the self but the self after the image. In this “elsewhereness”— not in the absence of the subject, but in its distortion and resurrection as the embodiment of otherness — the fluidity of representation cancels what the retina longs to see. A window opens and speech is conferred to the “Other”. This unfamiliar and uncanny “Other”, in aesthetic, political or gender terms, does not simply aliment the overall practice of portraiture today but provides it with its raison d’être.

The portfolio of the photographer Jen Davis is an exemplary case of this tendency. In her Self-Portraits, a series, which she has been methodically building up since 2002, Davis directs her gaze and content to herself as an overweight American woman subjected to the pressures and expectations of the outside world. By displaying and thus defeating her insecurities about body image, Davis lends her own “otherness” a space of representation. Formulated as a voluntary conceptual statement addressed to a generic matrix of gender categories, her oeuvre acquires a broader symbolic value, while instructing perception and interpretation into a complex, yet very precise network of gender, politic and aesthetic relations.
The pictures show Davis in her domestic settings and surroundings. Associated with food, many of these moments provide visual testimony for a personal documentary of obesity tinged with loneliness and culpability. We often see Davis in mundane everyday-life scenarios —watering plants in her garden, hanging her knickers on a clothesline, or on the beach in the company of friends— yet we cannot help but feel her presence as the subtle intrusion of an outsider carrying the burden of a body that inhibits social interaction.

Davis scarcely confronts the camera and the viewers. More often than not, she seems to direct her gaze towards a vantage point outside the picture. From a distance, we observe her in moments of self-absorption, watching the external world through her window. Walls, pillars, door frames and other architectural elements rise between Davis and us, break our field of vision into pieces, and obstruct our act of looking at her. As such, they punctuate the uneasiness of our perception and its potentially conditioning force in the misconception of her being and life.
In this confinement of flesh and perception, the house becomes the “wrapper” of the self but also an off-limits space. The house seals, conveys and protects, as much as it allows for spontaneous moments of personal recognition to take place. In the intimacy of her bedroom, Davis is gradually able to overcome the oppressive external gaze and perform her sensuality and self. The body is the undisputed protagonist in these sequences of close-ups — body, flesh and silky skin unfolding restlessly beneath the shower towel, expanding playfully all over the frame, constituting the main volume of the photographic surface. We can feel, sense the odour and touch this “Other”. The distance between our eye and the photographic reality becomes dissolved like never before.

By eliminating this distance, Davis’ self-directed gaze unavoidably strikes us. Overweight women may have been at their best in Baroque art, but with this exception, fashion photography and television have done much excluded them and worshipped the thin silhouette instead. Alongside the queerness of Diane Arbus, and the plethoric dominant women of Federico Fellini, Jen Davis proposes an alternative set of representations that “naturalise” the female body, with its abundant curves and sensuality. And yet, it does not end there.

From the tense scrutiny of her first images, seeking to heal the victimised self, Davis goes on further to conduct a wide-ranging exploration of this unseen “Other” femininity. Moreover, she veils this femininity anew with a masquerade of sensuality and eroticism that still allows a view of her chapped legs. For, she has finally come to terms with herself. As a result, she is free to appropriate and critically rework the stereotypical patterns of female representation. Her self-perception dominates our perception as viewers and validates her actions before our eyes. She has finally taken control.

This latter element becomes particularly evident in Davis’ more recent series of men in I ask in Exchange, which stages a hypothetical and fictional relationship between the artist-subject and her half-dressed male companions. Here, an inner and powerful female gaze materializing sexual fantasies in a commodity world substitutes the external gaze of her earlier self-portraits. The unmediated eroticism and sensuality of these pictures put into effect an extreme objectification of a body suppressed by its “to-be-looked-at-ness”. It is as if the mere enactment of a role before the camera were sufficient for Davis to become that “Other” she has long yearned for in these pictures since she becomes both a protagonist and a symbol of attraction, both a bearer and a maker of meaning.

It is precisely this clash between the objectified body and its striking otherness that produces uneasiness when contemplating Jen Davis’ photographs. We feel compelled to question the actual possibility of this really happening. We are tempted to think in terms of a staged narrative progress, longing for a resolution. We expect the body to transform into something else as the series evolves. But resolution never comes.
Over these recent months, Jen Davis’ work has obtained an unexpected parallel, the fairytale ascension and descent of Susan Boyle in Britain’s Got Talent. The tension of our gaze tagging Davis with admiration, as an “emerging twenty-something overweight female photographer”, in a way revives the collective euphoria of the program’s audience towards a woman whose looks absurdly excluded the possibility of her having a decent voice. At first glance, even Davis’ artist statement seeks to render her Self-Portraits effective in this sense; it is so politically correct that is hard to resist. But it is worth doing so. It is precisely when we decide not to consume the “myth” of the photographic surface but rather see beyond its raison d’être on the level of perception that paradoxically Jen Davis’ photographs become effective. They become effective and meaningful to the extent they impart us with the awareness of the narrowness of preconceptions about beauty. The disjunction between the gaze and photography’s stillness calls for an energising of our consciousness. Insofar as the body succumbs to the lens, it becomes nothing but a masquerade and nothing but an image; no less than a copy without an original and no more than a body after an image.

Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved.

Published in 1000 Words 5/July 2009