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