To begin with, a truism: the history of photography encompasses all photographs ever made. This might seem self-evident. Yet much of what is generally defined as "the history of photography" has been restricted quite narrowly (and often politically) to certain branches of what is variously called "serious," "creative," or "art" photography. That those branches are significant and influential is undeniable. Yet the origins of much contemporary photography of all kinds -- including the above -- can be traced to other sources. Some of these could be called the vernacular usages of photography, the diverse practical functions for which the medium has proved suitable.
The pervasiveness and multiplicity of such functions is well known. Yet in many cases they are known to the general public only by name, not by direct experience. Thus, for instance, while medical, anthropological, and police crime-lab photographs are produced by the millions, their intended audience is specific and extremely limited. Composed of specialists interested primarily in the informational content of these images, that audience is inured or oblivious to their potential emotional impact, and does not demand any aesthetic resolution or justification.
Presented in a radically different context -- that of "serious/creative/art" photography, say -- such images might evoke another set of responses. Certainly it would have been possible to assemble a book-length group of them so bizarre and repellent as to alienate most viewers and affect them as grotesque in essence. But that is not the purpose of this survey. My concern in this study is to map tentatively the evolution of the grotesque as a mode of conscious photographic expression, not simply to anthologize informationally intended images whose subject matter alone might predictably shock the reader.
At the same time, such images are unquestionably a part of the tradition of the grotesque in photography and must be accounted for in its history. Many of the contemporary photographers represented here are directly aware of these comparatively obscure and/or naive grotesqueries. Whether they have deliberately searched them out, accidentally come across them, or encountered them during some overlap of professional activity and personal expression, photographers have naturally come in contact with such forms of imagery. Surely, therefore, it can be said to have exerted an influence on photographers themselves.
As for the general public, the existence of such imagery is a well-established fact even for those who have never seen a single example. Yet such innocence is increasingly rare. This means that such imagery has become part of the visual environment in which other kinds of photographs also operate. Additionally, more and more undeniably grotesque vernacular images have transcended the restrictions of professional applications to become public, or have even been made specifically for public presentation (as with many news and war photographs). Deposited thus in the image banks of mass consciousness, they too contribute to the context in which all photographic imagery must stand for interpretation and evaluation.
Much of the imagery which forms the roots of the grotesque in photography can without exaggeration be called unprecedented. Among the many purposes to which photography was applied early on were some that no medium had ever previously performed; they depended entirely on unique characteristics of photography and could even be said to have been invented expressly for it.
Much of that same imagery could also be termed na•ve in that there often was no intent to evoke the sense of the grotesque on the part of the photographer, nor any response to the image as grotesque on the part of its original audience. The grotesqueness of many of these pictures is retroactive, the product of the gap between nineteenth-century sensibilities and those of the present.
One clear example of this shift in attitude can be seen in the contrast between the two images of hunters with their kill on page 18. The first is an anonymous postcard made sometime around the turn of the century, evidently intended for distribution by mail to friends in celebration of this achievement. The second, from a recent series by Les Krims titled The Deerslayers, takes a decidedly more jaundiced and ambivalent view of the event, although Krims himself is quick to point out that deer hunting is necessary to keep the species from mass starvation through overpopulating available habitat.
For another instance of such change in social mores, consider the post-mortem daguerreotypes of dead children on pages 14-15. Such images began to be commissioned not long after the medium of photography made its public debut in 1839. That was an age in which infant mortality rates were extraordinarily high. Because photography had not yet been simplified enough to be widely accessible as a hobby, most photographs were made by professionals. Few parents had the opportunity -- which we take for granted today -- of making photographs of their own children. Consequently, if a child died in infancy it was quite likely that no image of it had been made during its lifetime. So it became customary to have dead children photographed on their death beds or in their coffins. Sometimes the children's bodies were even brought to the photographer's studio and posed for a portrait in death. (This was also a not-infrequent practice with deceased adults.)
Needless to say, the intent on the parts of all concerned was ceremonial, commemorative, solemn, and loving. The act sprang from a poignant, painful cherishing of the subjects, with no suspicion that the resulting images would ever be considered grotesque.
Yet alterations in cultural attitudes toward death have been so drastic -- at least in the United States -- that by the latter part of the nineteenth century the actual body was photographed far less frequently. As the cabinet photograph by C. E. Dickerman on page 14 indicates, the body itself was replaced by symbols of the deceased and of his/her mourners, in this case a funeral wreath and a photograph of the deceased while still alive. Photographs of cadavers ceased to be made for commemoration and display, and began to be taken principally for the record, as was the case with Charles Heinrich's morgue photo of a murder victim (page 26). Today in the United States it is highly uncommon for commemorative post-mortem or coffin photographs to be made of anyone other than public figures lying in state.The custom has, however, remained strong in many parts of Europe.
It may not be entirely coincidental that as the evolution of social customs led to a decline in popularity of this form of death imagery another rose to replace it. As though by cultural consensus, certain forms of death were tacitly agreed upon as "public" and therefore worthy of increasingly widespread dissemination by way of the photographic image. War, crime, and disaster (natural or man-made) rapidly became mainstays of such reportage.
In each of these areas, photography provided the public with mounting numbers of images which, by their very nature, offerred an involvement with the events depicted on a higher order of magnitude than any of the other existing visual communication systems. The photograph particularized by encoding a specific instant in time and space. Purely manual graphic techniques could not equal that effect. Additionally, the information provided by the photographic image was quite unlike -- and often contradictory to -- portrayals of the same subjects in the other visual media. For example, the standard approach to military subjects had always been to concentrate on heroics -- charging horses, aasaults on the barricades, and the like. Owing to technical limitations in equipment and materials, early photographs could not render fast action. So the first photographs of war portrayed the aftermath of battle -- demolished buildings, shattered landscapes, and broken bodies. Where painting had directed its attention to the intangible glories of war, photography focused on its ghastly effects.
In different forms, these images reached an ever-growing audience. The photographs made during the Civil War by the "Brady Team" -- such as the one by Alexander Gardner on page 23 -- sometimes were converted into several forms of line illustration for reproduction in periodicals. (The halftone process was not invented until the 1880s.) Original prints were sold, singly as well as in sets and bound volumes. Some were stereographic images, made to be viewed through a stereoscope, which far from being a mere parlor fad was in fact the first successful means devised for mass communication by photographic image. For decades it was a rare household that was without a stereoscope; and the images -- usually original prints of good quality -- provided an effective illusion of three-dimensionality.
The Civil War was perhaps the first major war to be thoroughly documented photographically. Virtually everything that did not fall outside the medium's technical limitations was photographed, including the war's continuing effect on its casualties (page 22). As the medium advanced technically, war photography became an area of specialization with its own bizarre sub-genres; aerial photographs of bombing missions, infrared photographs of enemy troop movements, and reportage are only a few. Experts in the latter have brought us ever closer to the instant of death. Robert Capa's famous image of the falling Spanish Loyalist comes to mind, as does Eddie Adams's picture of a summary execution in Vietnam (page 28).
Indeed, the photographic history of the Vietnamese conflict -- if it is ever assembled -- will embody most aspects of the grotesque. In addition to the already published images of death, disfigurement, suffering, and torture, there are voluminous amounts of photographs in private hands that make the published images look tame. It must be remembered that the images that have been published -- Nick Ut's picture of the napalmed childen running down the road, the many images of flaming Buddhist monks, the color photographs of the My Lai massacre -- are those that in one way or another made it past the censors. Many did not and many more were smuggled out. The world is in fort a revelation when they eventually surface, as they must.
Unlike painters, photographers had a difficult time avoiding the realistic details of war's effect on all those it rolled over. The visual accounts they provided in turn affected other artists. It is hardly coincidental that fictional accounts of battle became more grimly realistic in the second half of the nineteenth century, subsequent to the invention of photography. (Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, published in 1895, is a case in point.) Doubtless, these changes reshaped the public's perception of war.
Prior to photography, illustrations of crime stories in tabloids -- whether woodcut, line drawing, or engraving -- usually depicted the actual criminal acts involved, as reconstructed by the artists. Obviously it was impossible to photograph most crimes when they occurred. So forensic photography and photoreportage of violent crime were devoted initially to consequences: the fate of the victims and, whenever possible, the doom of the culprits. As public execution fell out of legal and social fashion it was replaced by photographic documentation of executions. Alexander Gardner's series on the hanging of the Lincoln conspirators (pages 24-25) includes the ascent to the scaffold, the final rituals, and the twisting bodies among its selected highlights.
One function of such images is to provide graphic evidence that the wages of sin is death. Everything from legal execution to vigilante "justice" (page 24) has been documented photographically -- even informal lynching. In our century, faster film and lighter equipment have made possible such astonishing and unique images as Tim Howard's unauthorized photograph of the electrocution of convicted murderer Ruth Snyder (page 29). Taken with a hidden camera on January 13, 1928, it captures the instant of her high-voltage end. The New York Daily News filled its front page with this picture. By the 1960s, inevitably, it was no longer surprising to be barraged with photographs illustrating the explosion of an assassinated president's skull or the ad-hoc extermination of his alleged killer. Nor was it startling to find a Latin-American dictatorship providing the world with visual proof of the elimination of one of its arch-enemies (page 27). That practice was already almost a century old by the time of Che Guevara's death. This can be seen in the stereo card of Jesse James's body by A. A. Hughes on the same page, the photograph of Cole Younger's corpse with the bullet holes neatly marked (page 26), and the postcard -- one of many from a sourvenir set -- showing the mass burning of bodies of defeated Mexican rebels (page 26). These events may have shocked viewers of the pictures, but the existence of the images themselves was taken for granted.
Much the same could be said for photographs of disasters. Fires, floods, train wrecks, airplane crashes, earthquakes -- such images provide evidence ad infinitum of either the random violence of a chaotic universe or the wrath of a vengeful god. What has it meant in terms of this culture's world view to have such visual proof dropped at the doorstep for close to a century, to be absorbed with the morning coffee?
Certainly, on the level of individual experience it has its frightening aspects. There is nourishment aplenty for paranoia in endless visual accounts of madness, violence, pain, and mortality. But it brings with it the vicarious thrill of being eyewitness to carnage, balanced by the protection of the photograph's ultimate artificiality. Each such image tacitly exempts its viewers from the specific moment of doom it describes, leaving them free to say, as the British put it, "I'm all right, Jack."
That sequence of responses is similarly evoked by photographs of human oddities. All those shown here were made for comparatively wide distribution and public consumption. Some were made for sale as objects of interest in and of themselves. The stereograph of Tom Thumb's wedding; the cartes-de-visite of the Siamese twins, the armless lady, and the male dwarf; and the postcard of Margaret Anderson, "World's Smallest Lady" (pages 19-20) -- these are all mass-produced photographic prints sold as souvenirs to the general public. Others were made as illustrations for somewhat specialized audiences. O. G. Rejlander's "Fear" (page 22) is one of a series of images made during experiments that led to Charles Darwin's book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, first published in 1872. And Eadweard Muybridge's sequential images (page 21) are from his monumental project, Animal Locomotion. Published in 1887, this enormous compendium of human and animal movement was intended for the use of scholars, scientists, and artists. (The British painter Francis Bacon, whose work contains many grotesque elements, has incorporated a number of Muybridge's images into his canvasses, among them this one of a deformed boy walking on all fours.)
With very few exceptions, the work discussed so far was created by photographers who, by their own lights, were not creating grotesqueries or even addressing the theme, but were simply documenting their realities. But the first hundred years of photographic history also contain a variety of grotesqueries in other than strictly documentary form.
Louis Ducos du Hauron, a Frenchman who made the world's first color photographs, also experimented with special lenses and created a series of remarkable self-portraits in the grotesque mode (pages 16-17) in 1888. During the same period it was a hobby of the upper class, particularly in Engladn, to make collages incorporating hand-painted elements, bits of magazine illustrations, and fragments of photographs. Some unusual and distinctly grotesque imagery resulted, notably from the hands of a British financier, Sir Edward Blount. Equally strange cartes-de-visite like those from the firm of C. D. Fredericks (page 20) were also not uncommon. These photomontages may have been commissioned by their subjectsas comic "calling cards."
But images such as these were not taken seriously as expressive photography. Considered (if at all) only as curiosities, they did not enter the mainstream of art photography in their time. When they were made, photography had already undergone the first of its major branchings. One group of practitioners devoted itself to a documentary (or, as it was sometimes called, "naturalistic") approach. The other was committed to the pictorialist mode, which permitted any and every kind of technical manipulation of the image but was conceptually limited to the tepid pictorial conventions of genre painting. To the naturalists the articulation of personal fantasies was irrelevant; to the pictorialists the deliberate crafting of a truly ugly or frightening image was unthinkable.
Subsequent developments in the morphology of "creative" photography precluded much involvement with the grotesque, outside of its appearance in documentary imagery. The "straight" or "purist" school of photography, whose ascendance began in the late 1920s, disdained many of the techniques vital to the grotesque mode and ignored its themes entirely. Photographers working with those techniques and exploring those themes vere disparaged by their peers, disregarded by critics and historians, and thus never reached a wide popular audience.
The techniques discarded by the "straight" photographers -- staged events, symbolically arranged still lifes, the manipulation of negatives and prints -- were put to use in various genres of commercial photography, particularly advertising and fashion.
Because one function of fashion photography is to titillate the jaded sensibilities of the wealthy, images with grotesque overtones are not uncommon in this genre. Some fashion photographers have restricted their attraction to the grotesque mode to their non-commercial work. Sometimes the dividing lines are less clearly drawn. George Platt Lynes, Erwin Blumenfeld, Nikolas Muray, Irving Penn, Paul Outerbridge, and more recently Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin, Deborah Turbeville, and Chris von Wangenheim have all entered the territory of the grotesque.
