Paradoxically, although the camera must always address something in front of the lens, there are some photographic images that portray events that never happened.
Many photographic images in the grotesque mode are even more blatant in their outright illusionism than those defined as representing "constructed realities." In constructions, it is the event depicted that has been created or altered by the image-maker. The image itself is a more or less faithful rendering of the negative describing that event. But the images considered here are quite different in nature. In virtually all of them the unreality of what is depicted manifests itself rapidly, if not immediately. These images are not documents of any single moment of external "reality." Indeed, they deliberately undermine themselves in that regard. Sometimes they achieve that by presenting violations of the natural order of things so drastic as to be, simply, incredible. Sometimes they declare their multiple or hybrid origins more openly.
The creators of these images share an obvious lack of devotion to any realistic imperative connected to photography. A few of them take pains to manufacture deceptively seamless images that at first, and even second, glance may be perceived as literal documents. But their purpose is not to delude the viewer into the permanent conviction that that is how things really looked. Instead, they are setting the viewer up for a delayed perceptual double take. By thus contradicting the viewer's assumptions concerning the predictability and literalness of the photograph, they redirect attention to the specific image itself. This heightens awareness of its artificiality and evokes important questions in regard to its purpose.
For the others -- those who leave the seams of their reconstructed worlds showing -- the intent is less to create an effective illusion of reality than to refer to different aspects of reality by combining portions of different photographic images, which encode the surface appearance of those aspects. It is in the nature of photographs to particularize. But when fragmented, mixed, and reorganized, they can be made to generalize as well, to symbolize classes of things in addition to representing the single instance that is their subject.
Regardless of approach, images in this form declare themselves to be unrealistic. They are descriptions of inner states rather than external phenomena. Of all the images in this book, these come closest to the traditional meaning of the grotesque in art-historical terms: non- or anti-literal evocations of dreams, fantasies, visions, and hallucinations.
It is possible to group these image-makers in any of several different ways. For example, they can be differentiated according to the sources of the raw material they use as components in their images. Some use only "found" photographic imagery from newspapers, magazines, and other such sources, and thus are not themselves photographers. Some work exclusively with their own images. Some combine the two.
They may also be distinguished by the choice of technique. Some are photo-collagists. Some are photomonteurs or combination printers. Some employ other methods altogether, including direct manual manipulation of the print or negative surface. There have even been grotesque photograms -- cameraless images made on light-sensitive paper -- by Man Ray, George Obremski, and others.
None of these distinctions is hard and fast, and more important than any such divisions is what these image-makers have in common. They all use photographic imagery either exclusively or primarily in their work. They alter or combine it in ways which require a healthy irreverence for the documentary integrity of the original negative or the inviolability of the print. (As Man Ray once wrote, "A certain amount of contempt for the material employed to express an idea is indispensable to the purest realization of this idea.") Yet though they may fragment or otherwise manipulate that imagery to a great extent, its photographic origin is obviously important to them. Thus, although their methods and intentions vary widely, it is apparent that they are all aware of and actively utilizing the peculiar psychological effect of the photographic image, whose factuality and temporality always refer the viewer to its source in a specific time and place.
The works by Weegee, Paul Diamond, Jerry Uelsmann, Ad‡l, and Todd Walker involve the most specifically photographic techniques.
Weegee's brash, humorous inventions (pages 172-173) were created by way of a wide range of methods and devices. Some of these -- kaleidoscopes, patterned glass, and distorting lenses -- were utilized during the exposure of the negative. Others -- mirror reflection, easel tilting, photomontage -- he used in the darkroom. These are generally whimsical images, obviously a form of play for Weegee and perhaps a release from some of the grimmer aspects of his professional work.
The superimposition of one image on another is called montage. Sometimes that term is used interchangeably with collage, but they are not identical. Sometimes photomontage can be achieved simply with collage techniques -- i.e., by gluing one image on top of another. Often, however, it requires more elaborate photographic methods. One of these is double exposure, done while the negative is still in the camera. That is how Paul Diamond created "Victor's Faces" and "Half Lost" (pages 160-161). There are also other darkroom montage processes, such as multiple printing or the "sandwiching" of negatives (printing two superimposed negatives simultaneously, as in Emmet Gowin's image on page 37. In such cases both the image components and the techniques involved are purely photographic in nature.
The latter techniques are among those employed by Jerry Uelsmann (pages 184-193). Combination printing, one of the methods he employs most consistently, was originated in the nineteenth century and brought to a peak by such masters as Henry Peach Robinson and O. G. Rejlander. Even in its early days it was controversial. With the rise of the purist camp in photography early in this century it fell out of favor. A few creative photographers continued to use it -- Edmund Teske, Val Telberg, and Clarence John Laughlin among them -- and were consequently relegated to limbo by hidebound historians and critics.
Uelsmann devoted a great deal of study, experimentation, and energy to reviving the process in the early 1960s. Surviving severe criticism and outright rejection of his initial efforts by his peers, he has forged a major body of work in this form over the past decade.
There are consistently grotesque motifs throughout Uelsmann's imagery. These include apparitions of disembodied human parts and the merger of human beings with various natural objects -- rocks, trees, and the like. These are traditional grotesque themes, used here to convey the feeing of subconscious states of awareness.
A similar effect is achieved by Ad‡l, whose disorienting images also present photographically credible visions although their information cannot be reconciled with common sense. This young Puerto Rican artist dissects some of his photographs precisely and replaces parts of them with bits of other images (pages 196-199). His symbology is highly personal, often autobiographical, and his attitude ironic. Self-contained and authoritative, his images seek to provide, in his own words, "the evidence of things not seen."
The ghostly female figures in Todd Walker's images (pages 194-195) appear always to be on the verge of fully materializing -- or dematerializing, as the case may be. These figures seem to exist in the half-light of some limbo that can only be glimpsed. Walker achieves this by employing the Sabattier effect (often called solarization), which involves exposing prints or negatives to light during development. This causes a reversal of tones in areas of the print and can be controlled with considerable precision. Walker often translates the resulting images into offset lithographic color prints, a conversion that further heightens their eerie effect.
Though all five of these photographers utilize one form or another of post-exposure manipulation of prints and/or negatives, their work is devoid of overt signs indicating the physical alterations of optical reality. The same is true of other photographers who have explored the grotesque Fredrich Cantor, KuniŽ, Henry Holmes Smith, Cecil Beaton, and Mario Giacomelli among them. Others, however, have allowed their hands to show, both figuratively and literally.
Brassa•'s "Transmutations," for example, self-evidently combine photographic elements with hand-drawn imagery. These works were created by another nineteenth-century technique called clichŽ-verre, whereby a drawing was actually scratched into the emulsion of an unexposed glass-plate negative, which in turn was used to make photographic prints of the hand-drawn image.
In this instance, however, the negatives were some of Brassa•'s already-exposed nude studies, portions of which he left intact and portions of which were reworked. In writing of these images (pages 166-169), which he made in 1934-35, Brassa• says, "[T]hat which attracted me in this adventure was not the process itself . . . but the possibility of introducing something indefinable which belongs only to photography. . . . Unlike my predecessors, I discarded the virgin plates, which suggested nothing to me, to tackle negatives which were already impressed with a subject which tempted me." Best known for his photography, Brassa• is also a sculptor, writer, filmmaker, and graphic artist. His kinship with his close friend Pablo Picasso can be felt in these works.
William Mortensen also reworked his negatives manually, adding hand-drawn graphic elements and sometimes even words and titles to the image itself. He functioned directorially in relation to his models, then altered the resulting images (pages 162-165) by the above means and also through a diversity of printing procedures. Madness, satanism, and the occult are frequent themes in his work. His was an almost medieval sensibility, which met with little sympathy from a modernist- and purist-oriented photographic establishment during the 1920s and 1930s, when his finest work was done. He has been seriously neglected by historians and critics. Although he was also an influential teacher and writer his name appears in none of the standard reference works on the medium.
If Mortensen's sensibility can be described as medieval, that of Lucas Samaras is surely Renaissance. Samaras works in many media -- tapestry, writing, sculpture, and photography among them. His photographic work is exclusively self-portraiture, employing only Polaroid materials. By now Samaras has created hundreds of what he calls "autopolaroids," using both the older Polaroid system and the new SX-70.
The SX-70 print is composed of a chemical "batter" sandwiched between two sheets of plastic. In exploring this material, Samaras (along with many other photographers, including Les Krims) discovered that this batter remains malleable for several hours before it hardens permanently. Consequently, the image can be altered by pressing firmly on the surface of the print in order to move parts of the image around. That is how the peculiar, horrific distortions of his face and body in the images reproduced here (pages 174-179) were generated.
Although they embrace relatively unorthodox methods for doing so, the image-makers discussed so far in this section -- and, indeed, in this book -- are employing techniques which are, by and large, essentially photographic. The Sabattier effect, the clichŽ-verre process, combination printing, indeed, even the manipulation of SX-70 pigments, are all based on phenomena that are intrinsic to the medium of photography. And the images they produce thereby, in their nature as objects, are undeniably photographs.
But this survey could not even pretend to comprehensiveness within its medium or its mode if it failed to consider a remarkable group of image-makers who share a high degree of photographic content and awareness although they often use methods that are not essentially photographic, and equally often produce works that, strictly speaking, are not photographs.
Some of these image-makers are nominally categorized as photographers. Some are not. The technique on which they rely most heavily is photocollage. They approach it in a variety of ways.
Like photomontage, photocollage can be traced back to the nineteenth century. The terms themselves were originated early in this century by the Dadaists in Europe. Often used interchangeably, the terms are difficult to separate. Even practitioners of the same method frequently define their process differently.
For our purposes, let us simply say that photocollage involves the cutting up and reassembling of parts of photographic prints or reproductions of photographs. In itself, this does not necessarily require any specific photographic activity. All that is consistently photographic in such images is the origin of the component parts.
Some of those who work in this form conceive of the original collage as a matrix from which to derive photographic copy prints with a unified surface. Some conceive of it as the finished work. Some incorporate parts of images they did not generate themselves, or even non-photographic elements -- paint, colored paper, objects, and so forth -- into their works. Suffice it to say that, again like photomontage, photocollage is not a medium for purists.
Because some forms of such imagery can be generated without the use of a camera or a darkroom, it has attracted many visual artists from outside the perimeters of photography, ranging from Max Ernst to Richard Hamilton and Robert Rauschenberg. Indeed, it is perhaps not altogether coincidental that the form of the grotesque mode in photography that is most akin to the tradition of the grotesque in art is also the form that has been most accessible to photographers and non-photographers alike.
Hannah Hšch is often credited -- along with Raoul Hausmann -- with being the co-inventor of photocollage. Though argument still rages among historians over the precise lineage of the form, there is no question that Hoch was among the first and most influsntial of photocollagists. Grotesque elements have appeared in her works from the very beginning, as can be seen in those reproduced here (pages 206-207). Color plays an increasingly important role in her more recent collages, no doubt an echo of her concerns as a painter; and her imagery has grown more abstract. In contrast, these early works seem stark and spare. Hšch is still living in Germany, and continues to makeand exhibit a diversity of work.
Erwin Blumenfeld, whose work also appears in the previous chapter, died in l969. A photographer and writer, Blumenfeld was a German Jew who fled the Holocaust and came to New York City. Here he carved out a triumphant career as a fashion photographer. A technical virtuoso, Blumenfeld -- not unlike Man Ray -- explored all photographic processses without inhibition: collage, solarization, and (as in "Face in Mirror," on page 171) multiple printing as well. Much of his personally motivated work is highly political in orientation -- witness "Minotaure (or The Dictator)" on page 95, and "Hitler Skull." The latter image (page 170) is a rephotographed collage, made on the occasion of Hitler's election. Distributed in large quantities as an anti-Nazi poster, it earned Blumenfeld a place on the Gestapo's "most wanted" list.
Allen Dutton and Robert Heinecken are collagists who, by their own choice, are usually grouped with photographers. The grotesque is also a central theme for both of them. Heinecken, from California, is an influential teacher and theorist. He indicates that "everything I've done is grotesque." His images (pages 200-205) incorporate collage, drawing, and painting. Additionally, some of the pieces illustrated are three-dimensional, sculptural works, jigsaw puzzles made up of segments of human figures that can be rearranged at will.
Often his two- and three-dimensional works combine his own imagery with vernacular photographs from magazines and newspapers. The themes of sex and violence are recurrent in his work, much of which is directed toward exploring the connections between pornography, brutality, and a consumer society.
In terms of technique, Allen Dutton (pages 152-159) can be considered a transition figure in this form. Some of his imagery is directorially oriented but technically "straight." The work represented here is collage in origin, primarily composed of images Dutton generates himself but also including fragments of "found" photographs. From these he reconstructs a visionary's universe, reflected in outlandish dreamscapes populated with remarkable creatures. These collages are then rephotographed, so that what Dutton presents to the viewer is, literally, a photograph. Its unified surface suggests that it has not been tampered with, but this is belied by the impossible incongruities encapsulated therein. This conflict between object and image is consciously exploited by Dutton for its emotional impact.
Robert Delford Brown is a representative example of the many twentieth-century artists who, though not actually photographers themselves, have worked with photographic imagery in a variety of ways. Delford Brown's interest has persistently been directed toward the more bizarre manifestations of the vernacular photograph -- particularly forensic and fetish photographs, which he enlarges to life size and laboriously hand-tints in lurid colors, and such collages as those reproduced here. Like Samaras, Delford Brown is a Renaissance sensibility, working in many different media of which photography is only one.
