|
|
Three Photographers:
David Hamilton, Jock Sturges and
Sally Mann
There are
difficulties of determining artistic intention and even authorship in
photography that do not pertain to painting or sculpture. One consequence is
that the history or criticism of photography cannot with any confidence
appropriate the terms of a painting-based history of style. The
photographer’s style and even his vision are limited by technological
decisions and givens of materiale that predate his
undertaking any photographic project. For example, the limitations or
opportunities of the film, the contrast, speed, color balance and grain all
restrict stylistic choices on the part of a photographer (by restricting the
number of his selection parameters) in a way that the support and the medium
of painting do not. So do the image collecting properties of the lens (not
just focal length but the very way the composite lenses are arranged to
direct the light), available filtration and camera format. All this applies
to film photography as it does mutatis mutandis to digital
photography, the parameters of which are currently in constant flux because
of the speed of technical innovation. In a way the blanche agonie
does not exist for the photographer. Much of the surface is already filled
in. The photographer can assert himself against these predetermined
parameters by deliberate, often manual, intervention. But there is a
frontier at which the resulting work is no longer a photograph but a
composite that uses photographically derived means of applying color and line
to a flat surface.
There are two
other less obvious limits to a photographer’s style. First, there is the
sheer ease and speed with which an image can be created. The effect of this
is that the competent photographer can assume a hundred different
photographic and even painterly styles in as many days. He is less bound by
the economic calculation of the effort and time required in creating a work,
and so each individual work is less deliberate from a style standpoint.
“Art” photographers tend to impose, artificially so to speak, the
significance of these style decisions on themselves. But there is something
essential in the very protean nature of the photographic medium.
Moreover, in the
case of figure photography and consequently nude photography, the model
contributes as much to the final image as the photographer. Much can be done
to change her appearance, but the presence of the model whose appearance is
photographed is largely ineluctable. Once again, change her too much and she
is no longer the model originally chosen. This is why in the passage from
painting to photography, the identity and appearance of the model herself
begins to supersede the technique, style or “world” of the photographer.
Occasional models’ names come down to us from the classical world or the
Renaissance, but only as afterthoughts, since it is known that she is only
the starting point for the creation of the artist’s image. Models become
more important in 19th century painting not simply because of the
better reporting, but also because advances in technique and the turn to
real time life studies led to images of recognizable individual women. Still
there is a sudden and unbridgeable break in the transition from painting to
photography. In photography the model is the co-creator of the image. Model
searches are significant for the content of a photograph in a way they are
not for painting. Finding the right model could be the most significant
aesthetic act the photographer performs. The photographer can assert himself
in his selection of models and in this case his actual control, as opposed
to what happens with style decisions, is decidedly greater. Every photographer
decides whom he will or will not shoot. However, the unavailability of the
specific look he wants will limit his power of decision in a way that, in
theory at least, the painter is not limited.
David Hamilton did show us new things through his lens or showed them in
a new way. Iconographically, he focused on adolescence and lesbianism.
Stylistically he also moved his settings permanently out of the studio and
the neutrality of seamless paper. His typical unarticulated background is
identifiable as a wall and specifically the cool sort of plaster of the
French Midi (most often shot with natural window light, minimum depth of
field and varying degrees of graininess). He served up softness almost
promiscuously achieving effects emotionally comparable to those produced by
Guccione’s filtration around the same time. Comparisons of the two are
interesting since together they were instrumental in showing alternatives to
the prevailing style of nude photography. (Notably the critical differences
come down to choice of model types, deliberate make-up effects with Guccione,
none or almost none with Hamilton, Hamilton’s grain effects vs. Guccione’s
filtration, the different settings and costumes chosen by both) Hamilton’s
softening has the following effects: In color photography it limits the
saturation, creating in one gesture a limited palette. It also serves to
give the feeling of the past tense as if these photographs are memories. The
sex happens not now but years ago and the image survives not as a record but
as a vague memory image imprinted in the mind of the model, somewhat like a
Freudian Deckerinnerung where, grown up, she remembers a moment of
her life, but does so in a self-deceptive manner, from the outside, seeing
herself through someone else’s eyes. (Hamilton claims he never used filters,
which is not strictly true since a gauze curtain in front of a model is
effectively a filter. And whether his effects were achieved in processing or
in some other way during shooting, the result is much like some sorts of
filtration.)
Hamilton stands
out because of his personal vision, which, when it appeared, was relatively
new for the photographic nude: The sweet cusp of pubescence, the fleshy Eden
of slim hips and large nipples sitting disproportionately on small breasts.
The icon of the nude before Hamilton was Playboy’s big-boobed college
girl, and , looking at a Hamilton, we felt as if we had never seen a nude
before. I suppose one has to reach all the way back to Lucas Cranach, whom
Hamilton acknowledges, to find something similar, something a world away
from the ruler and compass dome hips of Renaissance and Baroque nudes.
Equally Hamilton’s personal vision tends to idealize the image, casting the
photographic nude as a non-specific female and avoiding thereby the
excessive specificity of painters like Lequesne or Collier, whose very
success in turning the nude into an individual person was often viewed as
insufficiently aesthetic.
Jock Sturges also shoots in the Midi but you do not feel the heat of the
sun in his photos. The outlines are sharp and the air is cold, which gives
them an air of unreality as if they were designedly museum objects.
Despite their
obsessive use of clear contours in tension with softly glowing light
(Sturges shoots frequently in open sunlight which accounts for the hardness
and sharpness of much of his imagery. Even his use of shade for modeling is
rather high in contrast and so sharp around the edges. Mann takes advantage
of the softer light of her environment with abundant use of cross shadows.
The links in this essay are to high contrast jpegs that don't really
represent the original silver gelatin prints at all well.), Sturges
and
Sally Mann display a hugely sentimentalized and possibly mendacious view
of the family and the small community as the framework for the identity of
the adolescents. The young nudes cannot be successfully defined outside of
reference to their family or group. They do not exist outside that
framework. These are indeed assertive neo-hippy families (Note how directly
the characters stare at the viewer in most of the photos, as if they weren’t
just nude; they also need to confirm their nudity). What is disturbing is
that the family is one of the most favored institutions of despicable Xtian
bourgeois society, and the embrace of the family by the fundamentally
reactionary though confused counter culture movement shows a nostalgia
barely distinguishable from that of your ordinary Sunday morning sermon. We
cannot even see the adolescents divorced from their group, which
subliminally gives them not only their identity but also whatever comfort
and strength they may have (The favorite word in the textual commentaries is
“connect”). But such a quasi-idyllic pastiche contains the lie of their art.
For the family baptizes the emerging individual into unquestioning
obedience, and parental oppression. It is the template for the universalized
oppression we call a nation. It is a privileged or primal situation whose
destruction is the work of a sort of metaphysically free act. The struggle to
free oneself from the family and the shadeless treacle of this sort of
imagery is waged in the expression of the adolescent’s sexuality - which is
the same as her freedom.
Is there a
sense in which Mann represents a different view of the family from the
oppressive tyrannical grouping that has been dubbed the bourgeois family but
which in reality is the family, any family? Her Preface to
Immediate Family contains indications along these lines. The world view
behind her musings partakes of a happy communitarianism redolent of
Woodstock and pantisocracies. I am rather inclined to think that these
largely perceived (in Mann’s case perceived through the eye of memory)
utopias really don’t address the central problem, which is the power
structure inherent in the very notion of family. They have in the course of
the past decades managed to impose on the rest of society an almost
obsessive child worship. And indeed the only real consequence of that
worship has been its cynical manipulation by goober preacherhood into a
revival of sexual tyranny. It is noteworthy that Mann’s
reminiscences are redolent with clichés lifted from Southern literary
sources: the free thinking father (quite often a doctor), the miracle of
nature seen through a child’s eyes, the strong armed elderly female (a
relative? a slave? a former slave?), whose limbs may whither but whose
spirit is dauntless.
Hamilton’s
women, in contrast, are family-free individuals, that is unbound by the
oppressive imagery of “connecting.” They are context free as far as family
or group is concerned, although, reminiscent of the naiads that more likely
than not inspired much of Hamilton’s iconography, they merge into large
tapestries of nature like elements in a frieze. Paradoxically their
separateness is tied to integration with the woods and beaches from which
they emerge fully developed, a delicate and yielding dragon seed. (The
fractured groups – schools, families and the mysterious bande in
Un
Eté à St. Tropez - in Hamilton’s awkward films simply underline the
feeling for the individual in his still photography.)
Mann’s explicit
identification with her subject matter makes her photos much more
interactive, something very different from the uninvolved eye (There are
exceptions, but the painter’s involvement in famous examples such as the
Arnolfini Marriage Group or
Las Meninas is part of the
composition whereas Mann’s involvement is inextricably linked to the
background iconography arising from our knowledge of the circumstances under
which the photographs were made) of much Western art. The photographer is as
much a part of the work of art as the individuals actually appearing in the
images. Despite his lavish use of more obviously personally distinctive
aestheticizing techniques, the eye of the Hamiltonian observer is much
closer to that of Millet or Seurat - as close as he can possibly get to
simply not being present. Sturges is somewhere between the two. He appears
not to photograph his own family but acquaintances in communities he visits
alone (though we need the commentary to realize this; nothing in the
photographs themselves makes it obvious). He, like Mann, is somewhat of a
figure in his photographs, but he is the essential outsider, whose
participation is limited to observation and visual recording.
Is the work of
any of these photographers better than that of the others? The problem is we
are loaded with culturally induced bad faith whenever we break into the
realm of value judgment. (Have you ever noticed that practically the only
thing οί πολλόι says or writes about art or “entertainment” is whether or
not it pleases them? Comments that go further than thumbs up or thumbs down
are notably missing from their phrase book.) For one thing, there is much
room for doubt as to whether there is anything such as aesthetic quality at
all, whether it isn’t just a scam, a fraudulent attempt to cover erotic
feeling, which in the end is the only real source of pleasure in the visual
arts. Likewise the discovery of aesthetic quality is invariably an
introspective act and consequently not objective at all. Its communication to
others may amount to a sort of anti-social imposition. One is tempted to say
that the only thing that comes close to objectivity is the market. That is,
the most aesthetically (or perhaps erotically) stimulating is in fact what
sells best. Such a view approaches the truth only where the market is truly
free. Otherwise, as we know, fanatic preachers are more than happy to
manipulate market results to make it appear as if Disney kiddie porn had
real value. |
