Our faith in the accuracy and credibility of photographs is still so strong that it can be easily used against us. More than any other medium, photography depends for its impact on the viewer's acceptance of the axiom that seeing is believing. It is because that acceptance is virtually automatic that Buckminster Fuller has written, "Seeing-is-believing is a blind spot in man's vision."
The exploitation of that blind spot is the theme of this section. The photographs brought together here show things that actually exist and events that actually happened. But these things and events didn't exist or happen independently of the images. In fact, it is doubtful that they would have existed or happened at all if it hadn't been for the photographers who created, generated, or instigated them in one fashion or another.
These photographers are working within what I have elsewhere defined as the directorial mode. In most of its familiar usages, photography treats the external world as a given to be altered only through strictly photographic means (point of view, framing, printing, etc.) en route to the final image. In the directorial mode, by contrast, the external world is viewed as raw material and is manipulated as much as desired prior to the exposure of the negative. I have applied the word directorial to works of this kind because their makers are approaching the presentation of their visions in an essentially theatrical way, creating (like the director of a play) a mise en scne, employing objects as props and people as actors, often working within a scenario. They have simply substituted the credence with which photographs are normally approached for the suspension of disbelief which effective theater wins from its audience.
Such images lead a double life of sorts. On one level --that of their "authenticity" -- they are false documents, intentional fictions. That is to say, although they do contain those tenuous elements of real time and fact which all photographs encapsulate, they are not exercises in realism. These are not moments that the photographers simply excised from the flow of reality around them.
Yet, paradoxically, they do truly document something: the very process of creating false photographic documents. Thus, they stand in relation to the medium of photography much as the works of Pirandello and Beckett do to theater. All the assumptions, rituals, and roles in the spectator/actor/spectacle relationship are laid out in the open and the audience is left free to engage with the event on whichever level it finds most intriguing.
The methods these photographers have used to initiate these images, although they vary in elaborateness, are neither incomprehensibly arcane nor prohibitively expensive. Props, settings, and models by and large are commonplace: found objects, old dolls, Halloween masks; bedrooms, cemeteries, front yards. The human models are generally not physically extraordinary. The photographic equipment is not "hopelessly sophisticated" (to quote the late Minor White). And the printmaking covers the range from functional to virtuoso without differing significantly from that of photographers working in other directions.
What distinguishes these photographers from many of their fellows, even within the grotesque mode, has far less to do with any of the above than with such matters as attitude, sensibility, and intent. Certain choices must be made, and within the traditions of photography they are major ones. The photographic medium at birth was betrothed to the historical imperative of realism. To work in the directorial mode requires a photographer to violate more than a hundred years of trust in order to engage voluntarily in active deception. As a rule it involves an image-maker in a symbology that is not "found," but consciously chosen, imposed, and explored. The articulation of such a symbology is often impossible within the snapshot or responsive style. Consequently, random elements tend to be minimized. Only a few of these photographers court chance. The extent of their complicity in what takes place before the lens prior to the exposure is the extent to which they can be credited with -- or held accountable for -- all aspects of their imagery.
Sometimes that extent is purely visual -- that is, primarily based on the understanding of optics. The images from AndrŽ Kertesz's "Distortions" series, made in 1932, and the one from Bill Brandt's classic Perspective of Nudes, made in Normandy in 1954, could be described this way. Kertesz created these images (pages 100-101) by photographing the reflections of his models in a carnival-style distorting mirror. Bill Brandt's fragmented, monumentalized nudes were made with an old Kodak camera whose wide-angle lens keeps in focus simultaneously everything it "sees." This enables Brandt to play with the spatial relationships between his models and their environment, creating images -- such as the one on p. 108 -- in which the human forms appear either monstrously disproportionate or misshapen. These originally aroused much controversy. A group of Popular Photography's editors responded to them with "shock, repulsion, and disgust" as "bordering on the pornographic." Others commented favorably on the imagery's power and its deliberate grotesqueness. Fortunately, the work survived the antagonism to find a wide audience and to influence others, notably Karin Szekessy, Ralph Gibson, Larence Shustak, and Waclaw Nowak.
Many photographers have created still lifes, assemblages of inanimate objects, which they have then photographed. Often these have grotesque connotations. Frederick Sommer patiently organizes found objects into sculptures specifically for the camera. The same is true of Vilem Kriz, as can be seen in his surrealistic constructions (pages 136-137). Berenice Abbott (in her "Parabolic Mirror"), Josef Sudek, Ruth Bernhard (in her "Untitled, 1955," a luminescent cow skull draped with a rosary), and Jacqueline Livingston have all worked in this fashion. Another example is Erwin Blumenfeld's "Minotaure" (page 95).
Photographers committed to a "straight" or "purist" stance, which requires maintaining the appearance of neutrality and/or fidelity in relation to subject matter, often have difficulty working in a more active, initiatory relationship to the event taking place in front of the lens. Yet even Edward Weston was able to do so. Although he did not pursue the grotesque mode extensively, he did not ignore it either, and there are many directorial aspects to his nudes, portraits, and still lifes.
Though they stand at a relatively light-hearted end on the scale of grotesquery, his parodies of 1940s war-drive propaganda -- such as "Civilian Defense" (pages 138-139) --are fully realized images that amplify the directorial tendencies of a large number of his images. They also reveal much about his humor, evidence of which is hard to come by in his other photographs and writings.
Ralph Eugene Meatyard (pages 110-115) was an optician in Lexington, Kentucky. His interest in visual perception led him to photography and to experimentation which probed the relationships between human seeing and camera vision. In many of his images motion has been only partially arrested by the camera, so that elements become blurred, translucent, and ghostly.
The camera's lens can only investigate surfaces. It is up to the photographer to find within that limitation ways of articulating what is perceived and intuited beneath those surfaces. Meatyard's metaphor for this was the dime-store Halloween mask, a recurrent presence in much of his work. The settings in which he introduced these masks were usually casual and mundane, which makes the vibrations they set off even more eerie.
The intimate, familial settings are normality itself. Finding them inhabited by these demonic presences dressed in otherwise ordinary street clothes is discomfiting. This is particularly true of the extended series which he called The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater. In this group of images, the character represented by one cronelike mask, whom Meatyard named Lucybelle Crater (a variant of the name of a character in Flannery O'Connor's fiction), covers the faces of a number of the photographer's friends and family circle. Very much in the Southern Gothic tradition, this series was made during the last few years of Meatyard's life, when he knew he was dying of cancer. Its theme would seem to be the essential otherness and shifting personae of people, even those to whom one is closest.
Clarence John Laughlin's photographs (pages 40-41, 116-119) could also be described as Southern Gothic in essence. Laughlin, who lives and works in New Orleans, Louisiana, has based much of his work on the hag-ridden mythos of the Deep South: the moldering plantations, decrepit mansions, crumbling cemeteries, and dank, encroaching vegetation, which are emblematic of a past still haunting the present. His intent goes beyond that, however, to -- as he says -- "the creation of a connected sequence of symbols dealing with the misery and madness of modern man . . . images of the fear, the hate, and the confusion which led to the two great World Wars."
A frequent apparition in Laughlin's imagery is a mysterious female figure, often veiled or faceless, who seems to represent (among other things) Southern womanhood in all its cultural and historical implications. She walks through Laughlin's settings and participates in his tableaux like an ambiguous specter, sometimes seductive, sometimes repellent, never neutral.
Elements of the grotesque have been present in Arthur Tress's work from the beginning, even though his first themes were such social ones as ecology and the quality of urban life. Like Laughlin and Meatyard, Tress uses human beings in his images (pages 120-129) not only as models but as actors. Usually, the dramas they enact are their own, performed by them for the camera at the photographer's request. Thus most of them can be defined as collaborations between the photographer and the subject.
Another kind of collaboration resulted in Eikoh Hosoe's Ordeal by Roses (pages 102-107). This monumental work was the joint creation of Hosoe, one of Japan's finest photographers, and the late Yukio Mishima, the novelist and politician who committed suicide publicly in 1970.
Thematically recurrent in the work of both these artists is the cultural identity crisis set off by World War II, Hiroshima, and their aftermath. Though these images are also powerful as individual statements, they interconnect in an extended, multifaceted exploration of the traumas Japan suffered from the war, the bomb, and the Japan's Westernization. Mishima, who wrote the "script" for this sequence and played the central character, created in conjunction with Hosoe an autobiographical allegory of spiritual and cultural death and transformation.
As previously noted, there appears to be a particular affinity for the grotesque in Japanese art and culture. Thus it is not surprising that this quality has also flavored other of Hosoe's sequences, including his suite, Man and Woman (page 107), and his Kamaitachi sequence, a staged piece based on a Japanese folk tale.
Like Hosoe, both M. Richard Kirstel and Duane Michals tend to work in sequence form, as well as directorially. Stylistically, however, the differences among their images are apparent and considerable.
Of the three, Michals tends to be the most strictly narrative in approach. That is, his images are conceived, created, and arranged to convey a series of events so specifically that it is usually impossible to rearrange them at all. Narratively, they are so sparse and tightly edited that they lose their intended meaning if shuffled around. This is obviously the case with "Stefan Mihal's Suitcase" (pages 96-99). According to Michals, Stefan Mihal is his alter ego.
The sequences of Hosoe and Kirstel, by contrast, are less specific in their narrative and thus open to a much wider range of interpretation. Whereas Michals often works with what appears to be autobiographical material, Kirstel, like Hosoe, probes cultural psychosis through the use of archetypal symbols. In Kirstel's case, one of the central symbols for almost a decade has been the doll.
As symbols of "the forsaking of childish things," abandoned dolls have become photographic clichŽs. Kirstel perceives and presents them quite differently. First, there is an obsessive overtone to his collecting, playing with, and photographing these artifacts as extensively as he does. This is part of the impact of the three sequences from which this sampling (pages 130-135) is drawn: "Karen's Party," "Water Babies," and "Projections." Second, Kirstel is not concerned with the potentially nostalgic connection between these dolls and their now-grown former owners. Wherever he finds his plastic friends originally, he places them in settings and configurations that transform them from discarded toys into totems. In these new contexts he photographs them in such a way as to make them look and feel lifelike, using them to create macabre epics. What is grotesque about these beings is not only the bizarreness of the events in which they are engaged but the almost imbecilic innocence with which they respond to those events.
It is surely not coincidental that, as Kayser indicates, "Among the most persistent motifs of the grotesque we find human bodies reduced to puppets, marionettes, and automata, and their faces frozen into masks." Kirstel has much more in common with such other devotees of this totem as Pierre Molinier and Hans Bellmer than with the camera crew in Vietnam that reportedly carried a broken doll along for all location shooting in order to film it in the rubble of napalmed villages as a sure-fire spot-news "grabber."
Some of the photographers already discussed share with Kirstel an awareness of the grotesque implications of non-living humanoid artifacts: Meatyard, Tress, and Laughlin use such totems directly, while Michals insinuates in his sequence the conversion of a man into a disassembled object. To this group I would add Erich Hartmann, whose "Mannikin Factory" sequence is a grim metaphor of totalitarian society, and Inge Morath, who photographed people wearing masks designed by Saul Steinberg (the latter falling, like Weston's nude with gas mask, on the comic end of the scale of grotesquery).
Ellen Carey (pages 90-93) creates what might also be considered masks: additions to or substitutions for the usual facial appearance of her models. In some instances she achieves this by utilizing organic material such as spinach. In others she employs man-made objects like knitting needles. And in still others she literally "draws with light" in a darkened room, selectively illuminating portions of her subject's face.
Insanity is another theme essential to the grotesque. "The encounter with madness," according to Kayser, "is one of the basic experiences of the grotesque which life forces upon us." Certainly that is the force underlying Max Waldman's images (pages 140-147), although the emotional violence and hysteria they reflect are not real but theatrically generated. Waldman specializes in phetographing performances -- dance troupes, for example, and the casts of produced plays. This he does not simply for the record but in an attempt to re-create the feeling of the performance. In effect, he restages and redirects selected portions of these productions. This is necessary because, while it is obviously possible to convert the camera into a symbolic proscenium arch and utilize the photograph as a stage, the change in vehicle necessitates a change in vocabulary and point of view.
For his studies of the primal rituals of the Performance Group's Dionysus in 69, Waldman left the writhing knots of blood-smeared bodies in a gray, cavernous gloom. In his interpretation of the production of Peter Weiss's savage Marxist/Surrealist psychodrama, The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat As Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, Waldman spotlit the cast in harsh, brutal light, surrounding them with infinite, detailless darkness -- a fit setting for paranoid lucidity. Even his grainy print style suits the occasion perfectly, evoking the grimy surfaces and fetid vapors of ancient dungeons.
The staged tableaux of many photographers whose imagery touches on the grotesque -- including such other diverse figures as Angus McBean, Walter Chappell, and Christian Vogt -- reach their audience only through the imagery. This is also true of the work of Leslie Krims. As indicated earlier, Krims has pursued his consistently grotesque vision along two main lines: the more peculiar manifestations of "real life," and the outpourings of his own fertile imagination. The images in this section (pages 76-89) are from the latter branch of his work. These are all preconceived scenarios -- or, as Krims calls them, "fictions" -- staged by the photographer more or less elaborately and acted out by various combinations of professional models, relatives, and friends.
These images refer intentionally to many vernacular and na•ve forms of photographic grotesquery: medical photography, for example, in the "Macaroni Cures Cancer" series, and forensic imagery in The Incredible Case of The Stack O' Wheats Murders. They are often quite pointedly directed at aspects of our culture that are generally thought to be sacrosanct or taboo, yet they defy reduction to any single programmatic meaning. Frequently they manage to be simultaneously hideous and humorous.
Krims's work requires the viewer to clarify his or her own attitudes by presenting a steady flow of inexplicable, extremely abnormal but clearly articulated situations. These provoke, and indeed often demand, a response from the viewer. But since these are photographs, that response in its most appropriate form is an internal self-definition. One function of Krims's work for his rapidly growing audience is as a tool for testing the limits of one's own tolerance and locating one's sore spots.
These are difficult images to live with. No matter how unconventional one's attitudes may be, there are almost certainly images Krims has created that each viewer would consider excessive. Frequently his photographs arouse intense anger. Indeed, in 1971 a viewer in Tennessee kidnapped the child of a gallery volunteer during an exhibit that included Krims's work, and demanded the removal of Krims's pictures as ransom for the boy's safe return.
