When it comes to visual description, photography remains the only game in town. The medium's earliest function as a witnessing process has not yet been superseded. The print media -- newspapers, magazines, and books -- continue to rely on photographs for visual documentation. Videotape is gradually supplanting still imagery in television reportage, although video equipment itself is still quite primitive: expensive, bulky, undependable, and intrusive enough that there are many situations that remain accessible only to the still camera.

Predominantly as a result of our exposure to photography, we are becoming visually sophisticated enough as a culture to realize that photography is not a transcriptive process but a descriptive one. We are beginning to develop our awareness of the extent to which people inevitably shape the photographs they take casually, as well as the ones they make deliberately, whether they do that shaping knowingly or unconsciously. We are even learning the dimensions of the gap that lies between any event and any photograph of it.

Yet, for better or worse, the photograph has become an acceptable surrogate for direct experience on many levels. And some impulse in human beings -- curiosity, a thirst for knowledge, a lust for vicarious thrills, whatever it may be -- pushes many people to see everything they can lay their eyes on. Consequently, photography has been used consistently to examine the abnormal as well as the commonplace and the banal. From the sheer volume and diversity of the resulting images we are learning that we live in a world so bizarre that "normalcy" itself may be the most remarkable aberration of all.

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For some photographers who work within the informational /representational modes (which are usually referred to as "straight" or "documentary"), disturbing subject matter is not necessarily a predilection. It simply comes with the territory.

Thus we could point to such grisly images as Margaret Bourke-White's 1945 portrayals of German concentration-camp victims (those from Buchenwald, for example), or her "Vultures of Calcutta, India, 1946," in which carrion-eating birds tear at corpses, as representative of a kind of imagery whose grotesqueness resides in the subject matter, not in the photographer's attitude toward it. Such has been the case with a number of photographers. Lewis Hine made a powerful series, "Morons in Institutions," in the eastern United States in the early 1920s, but these images seem linked more directly to his central crusade against the exploitation and mistreatment of the underprivileged than to any psychological or esthetic attraction to the visual potential of the mentally defective.

Because the deformity and/or destruction of the physical self is a central theme in the grotesque mode, images depicting such actualities evoke its impact. Some of W. Eugene Smith's images of the mercury-poisoning victims of Minamata, or his "Iwo Jima, 1945," showing the rotting corpse of a soldier; the Vietnam reportage of Philip Jones Griffiths, Larry Burrows, and many others; Mark Edwards's images of cadavers being gnawed by scavenger dogs behind the Taj Mahal; Donald McCullin's visual accounts of human suffering around the globe -- these are additional examples of what might be thought of as an adjunct to the grotesque mode. They are not made accidentally or na•vely. Yet I think it is safe to say that most if not all of the photographers mentioned so far would have preferred never to encounter the events they've portrayed.

Other photographers deliberately seek out such subjects as vehicles for the exploration of more personal concerns. It is not possible to generalize about their reasons, and speculation in that regard is rarely fruitful. It is not unreasonable, however, to discuss the effects of their imagery, or to suggest that differences in motivation and intent may be reflected in differences of style and content.

Weegee -- Arthur Fellig -- consistently addressed the theme of the grotesque in several styles (see also Chapter 4), particularly its manifestation in violent, messy, public death. "As a free-lance newspaper photographer I covered a murder a night," he wrote. To assist him in this task he had a police radio installed in his car. He was the first photojournalist to do so.

Weegee's appetite for both the excesses and the nuances of American urban life was enormous. He relished the sprawled corpses of assassinated mobsters as thoroughly as he enjoyed teenagers swooning over Frank Sinatra. His photographs of crimes of violence (pages 54-59 ) epitomize the variety of tabloid imagery which has helped to make "grotesque" into a household word of sorts -- a branch of entertainment for the whole family, a spectator sport for children and adults alike.

Yet, more than any press photographer before him or since, Weegee also made himself a star in these events. Calling himself "Weegee the Famous," he became a folk hero and a legend in his role as a self-appointed roving public eye. Not content to be an anonymous reporter, he transformed himself into a picturesque personality whose presence at such events was an event in itself, which converted those incidents from statistics into spectacles. His raw slices of city life were collected in several books, most notably Naked City, which inspired a long-running television series.

Such younger contemporary photographers as Charles Gatewood and Paul Diamond are Weegee's lineal descendants. In some significant ways they differ radically from him. They tend to work independently rather than on assignment, and their imagery is usually presented in galleries and books, not newspapers or magazines. Yet their subject matter is essentially the same: the extremes of public behavior and the overall weirdness of urban life.

As can be seen from their images (pages 48-53, 64-69), both work extensively in public situations. Gatewood is particularly fond of the Mardi Gras festivities in New Orleans, to which he has returned year after year to photograph the revelers. He has also recently completed a project on tattooing as an art form. Diamond spends much of his working time simply exploring whatever locale he finds himself in, equipment in hand; sometimes his subjects are strangers, sometimes friends and relatives.

With their role as photographers clearly stated, through the visibility of their equipment, Gatewood and Diamond enter into and become part of the events they photograph. To some extent they even use their medium as a goad. The presence of the camera frequently entices their subjects into outrageous performances.

Here is a paradox: While some people will never do in front of a camera those things they do freely in their private lives, others will under certain conditions display for the camera aspects of themselves which they might never exhibit in everyday circumstances (the photographic demonstration of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle that observation automatically alters thyat which is observed). Living as we do in a photographic culture, we have become aware of photographs as, among other things, potential stages on which to act out and verify our inner lives and fantasies. There is a cathartic aspect to such self-revelation, a confessional side. There is also a streak of exhibitionism in many people that is specifically activated by the presence of a camera, corresponding to the undeniable streak of voyeurism manifested in our attraction to such images. Gatewood and Diamond are certainly aware of these factors,and employ them effectively in their work.

The late Diane Arbus frequently expressed her feeling of empathy with the work of Weegee. It is Arbus's name that in recent years has been linked most closely to the theme of the grotesque in photography -- to such an extent that although her images were not available for reproduction in this survey it seems necessary to discuss her work in connection with this theme.

In part, her linkage to the grotesque in the minds of critics and viewers is no doubt due to factors extraneous to her imagery -- her suicide and the publicity surrounding it, for example, and the public's attitude toward members of sexual minorities, circus and sideshow performers, and the other unusual individuals who were among her subjects. However, Arbus's vision was more complex than such oversimplifications acknowledge, and the totality of her work is much more than a study of "freaks."

Her central inquiry was directed towards locating that line in contemporary American society which divides the normal from the abnormal. To some extent her determination of that location was unavoidably affected by aspects of her own personal history -- her age, race, sex, and class, for instance. Yet even with all those built-in biases her instincts enabled her to pinpoint that position for herself with remarkable and consistent accuracy. Standing there, she photographed those who stood on both sides of that line. The result was a group of images that require the individual viewer to decide on which side of that line each of her subjects belongs, and thus to examine the basis for those determinations.

The linked themes in the work of Diane Arbus, then, were the normality of so-called "freaks" and the freakishness of supposedly normal people. Part of the power of her work as a whole can be traced to the resonances between these images.

Much of the impact of individual images springs from her intentionally confrontational approach. She faced her subjects head on, usually at a close distance, and always asked their permission before photographing. Thus these are not "candid" snapshots but transactional portraits, reflecting the conscious relationship between photographer, camera, and subject.

Arbus in turn confronts the viewer with her subjects: by bringing him/her face to face with them, for one thing, and also by making her prints so large (sixteen by twenty inches in most cases) that the miniaturizing effect of photography is lessened considerably. In those portraits in which the head of the subject fills the frame, the viewer encounters it virtually life-size. That violates many deeply inbred social norms. Cultural patterns of spatial distancing usually eliminate the possibility of such close proximity to strangers making eye contact with us, especially unusual strangers such as dwarves, tattooed men, and ferocious women. Through these stylistic decisions Arbus was pointing out our protective barriers by calculatedly violating them.

It is evident that there are structural properties to the grotesque as a mode -- that the grotesque does not depend solely on subject matter or on audience response for its definition, but usually involves certain creative requirements as well. An entirely different example of this is the simple dislocation of habitual seeing that creates the fantastic profile in Clarence John Laughlin's "Head of Oceanus" (page 40). This same understanding of how things will appear when translated into photographic form resulted in Laughlin's "The Insect-Headed Tombstone" (page 41).

As this indicates, even within the sphere of common, everyday experience, events occur which have (or can take on) a dark and even nightmarish quality. In the brooding images of Michael Martone (pages 70-71), for example, objects become frighteningly hallucinatory, glowing strangely in a gloomy darkness or an even more ominous light. Much the same could be said for Bill Brandt's study of statuary on page 109.

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In both German and Japanese art the grotesque has long been recognized as a distinct mode. Perhaps that is why the work of Leslie Krims has met with such enthusiastic response,in both these countries. Of all the younger American photographers, it is Krims who has involved himself most consistently and prolifically with the grotesque.

His work has taken two directions, which seem deliberately chosen to amplify each other. In one of these, as illustrated in the next chapter, he stages dramatic tableaux which he photographs. In the other, as can be seen here, he addresses unusual but actual events: a convention of dwarves and midgets, members of the Little People of America, for example Pages 42-47). Krims, who was for a time the official photographer for the L.P.A., refers to them as "the ultimate minority." He has also photographed such real-life phenomena as American deerhunters displaying their kill (page 18). These images function as the objective correlative to his projective fantasies. An interplay is set up between these two facets of his work: the straightforward, representational series provide glimpses of a world peculiar enough for the staged scenarios seem to quite at home therein.

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Death -- an aspect of the decay and destruction of the physical self -- has been a frequent subject for photographers, even those who are neither war- nor news-oriented. Most often, the death portrayed is animal rather than human, and the most recurrent creature in such images is the dead bird.

This is more than coincidental. For American photographers, at least, the animals most often encountered, whether living or dead, are household pets and birds. As free beings the latter carry a symbolic connotation of their own which cats and dogs do not share. This adds an element of poignant irony to their being brought down by death. (There is also a connection with traditional still-life painting, which often incorporated dead game birds.)

In any case, the dead bird is by now a photographic clichŽ, a predictable image in the portfolio of every advanced student. Manuel Alvarez Bravo, David Batchelder, and Edward Weston are among the few who have lifted such images above the ordinary. Weston's "Pelican on Sand, 1945" (page 39) is one of several major images he made of this subject.

Other dead creatures have also become the subjects of photographs, even if less frequently. Frederick Sommer, who has lived for years in the dry regions of Arizona, has photographed the dessicated, virtually mummified remains of wild animals -- rabbits, coyotes, and frogs among them -- who have perished in the desert. In striking contrast, he has also photographed the liquid, viscous fetuses and other parts of unborn fowl.

Les Krims, Jeffrey Silverthorne, Manuel Alvaraez Bravo, Marion Faller, Emmet Gowin, and Paul Diamond have also photographed the carcasses of animals. Diamond's ferocious close-up of a set of snarling dog teeth bared in a rictus of death (page 69) is such a "found" event, as is Gowin's "Butchering, Near Chatham, Va." (pages 34-35).

Of all deaths, those of human beings are most powerfully affecting. Richard Avedon's portraits of his dying father, showing the man's progressive deterioration; Avedon's "portrait" of Andy Warhol, which studies the horribly scarred torso that resulted from an attempt on Warhol's life; Frederick Sommer's "Detail," a still life involving the severed foot of a hobo, cut off by a railroad train -- all these images force us to face the inevitability of death and the fragility of flesh.

The responses of photographers to these and even more terminal manifestations of our mortality are as diverse as their sensibilities. Alvarez Bravo, who has photographed death in many forms, sometimes explores it matter-of-factly, sometimes poetically. Weegee, as previously noted, had a taste for the extravagant sensationalism of violent death. Edward Weston, by contrast, approached the dead man he came across during a photographic tour through the southwestern desert in much the same formal fashion as he did so many of his other subjects, treating it as a still life. Indeed, without the caption's information we would be hard pressed to ascertain whether the man was dead or only sleeping (pages 38-39).

Emmet Gowin's images of Rennie Booher in her coffin (pages 36-37) are similarly understated, but within the context of his work they have other ramifications. Gowin's photography, though very deliberate and formally conscious, incorporates many elements of vernacular imagery, especially from the snapshot/family album matrix. Thus these images refer tacitly to the coffin photographs of the nineteenth century.

At the same time, Gowin has structured one ongoing channel as a family album, centered around his relatives: his wife Edith, their children, and the larger circle of family members. Rennie Booher was one of these, and photographs of her alive have appeared in exhibits and publications of Gowin's imagery over the past decade. For anyone familiar with Gowin's work, therefore, these images of her corpse have reverberations. They are not simply anonymous images of a disconnected death, but symbols of the termination of a life with which the viewer had become intimately involved through Gowin's photography. They are part of a larger metaphor concerning the cycles of living and dying. (In the second version of the same image, Gowin has combined two negatives in the same print, creating a vision of the earth swallowing the body.)

The transition from life to death, from flesh to meat, has its rituals in our society. One of these is the autopsy. Alwyn Scott Turner, Wolf von dem Bussche, and Jeffrey Silverthorne are among those who have photographed this activity. But death has been ritualized in other ways in other times. Peter Hujar's "portraits" (pages 60-63), made circa 1963, are of the mummified cadavers of monks, members of the clergy, and wealthy patrons of the Capuchin monastery in Palermo, Italy. What Nadar in the nineteenth century saw merely as a collection of random bones, and Elliott Erwitt once used as a humorous counterpoint to the arguments of the living, Hujar sees as a group of living gestures arrested by death.

There is no simple summation to be made of such diverse and unsettling images. They are not only consciously made artifacts but also descriptions of demonstrably real aspects of the world. Thomas Mann has written, "The grotesque is that which is excessively true and excessively real, not that which is arbitrary, false, irreal, and absurd." Could any images fit that definition better?

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Even though we might define all photographs as "fictions," insofar as they are all no more than partial and highly subjective descriptions of individual perceptions, these more than any other kind of photograph within the grotesque mode embody ambiguous questions for the viewer to confront. As Kayser points out, "As long as the ornamental and pictorial grotesques were regarded merely as something alien to nature and arising from the artist's 'subjective' imagination, they could justly be rejected by those who held that art is based on the principle of imitation." But if all these things exist to be seen, are they not natural? If so, where does their grotesqueness lie -- in the events depicted, in the depiction, or in our response? If not, then what is normality -- a statistic, a specifiable quality, or merely an attitude?

Unlike grotesque works in other graphic media, these are not fabrications, not illustrations of fantasies or visions or dreams. They are representations of things as they are. As such, they provide cruel evidence to buttress Goethe's words: "Looked at from the height of reason, life as a whole seems like a grave disease, and the world like a madhouse."

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This text appeared originally in A. D. Coleman, The Grotesque in Photography (New York: Ridge Press/Summit Books, 1977), pp. 30-33. © Copyright 1977 by A. D. Coleman. All rights reserved. For reprint permissions contact Image/World Syndication Services, POB 040078, Staten Island, NY 10304-0002 USA;T/F (718) 447-3091, imageworld@nearbycafe.com.