The Grotesque in Photography

A. D. Coleman

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New York: Ridge Press/Summit Books, 1977

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Acknowledgements

Completion of this project was made possible in part by an Art Critics Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C., for which I wish to thank my fellow citizens. I hope it reflects something of their awesome diversity.

I am grateful to the various sources -- mostly the photographers themselves -- that have made these images available for reproduction, as well as to all those photographers, whether included or not, whose work has led to this study.

I'd also like to express my appreciation to Adie Suehsdorff, Al Squillace, and Jerry Mason, for tenacity (or faith) above and beyond the call of duty; and also to Ruth Birnkrant and Ronne Peltzmann for their assistance, advice, and encouragement.

-- A. D. C.

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Dedication

To T., my partner, for seeing me through another.

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Epigram

"All life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other."

-- H. P. Lovecraft, "The Silver Key"

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Introduction

By the end of the 1960s it must have been apparent to any alert observer that a generation of photographers was actively engaged in stretching the boundaries of their medium by overriding externally imposed limitations and violating all prohibitions in regard to technique, form, style, subject matter, and content.

Given the spirit of that decade, which embraced flux, experiment, innovation, and iconoclasm in all the arts, that was hardly surprising. In responding to their imagery in my role as a critic, I found myself provoked and stimulated in a variety of ways by much of it. Moreover, I found myself disturbed and left uneasy by encounters with certain photographs -- not because they were unpleasant on a purely sensory level, but because some relationship between style, technique, form, subject matter, content, cultural context, and the medium itself generated emotional and intellectual stress. These images aroused discomfiture, anxiety, anger -- feelings I did not associate with what was generally called "creative" photography.

It rapidly became clear that this was not the accidental effect of occasional images. Certain kinds of photographs -- and, significantly, many photographs by certain photographers -- evoked these responses consistently, not only from me but from others. There was no value judgment involved (at least not on my part), merely the fact of my reactions. The work simply existed; my problem was coming to terms with my response to it. Habitually, my solution to that problem is to seek the right questions. In this case, the questions that confronted me critically were: Why did this imagery have this effect? How could this phenomenon be described and defined?

In searching for a means of describing, interpreting, evaluating, and explaining these images, I came finally to the concept of the grotesque. Of all the terms I considered (and eventually discarded), it was the only one that effectively encompassed the diverse but related pictures that are discussed and in many cases reproduced in this volume.

The grotesque is a loaded term, one that carries a great deal of emotional and even cultural weight. That became evident not only during the course of my research into its origin and evolution but also in correspondence with the photographers whose work I believe exemplifies it. Many of those who are included in this collection were disturbed by the term, even when they themselves employed all its synonyms in referring to their work. Of the others who are mentioned here but not represented by images, a considerable number are absent as a result of their own refusal (or that of their representatives) to accept the application of that term to their imagery.

Yet the power inherent in the word is not inappropriate to the charged nature of these photographs. And of all the common synonyms for works of this sort, the grotesque is the only one with an extensive history of critical usage in the visual arts. Additionally, it has been utilized not only as a descriptive adjective but as a modality -- a distinctive conceptual framework, inclusion within which involves characteristic cognitive and performative operations. That is, works within the grotesque mode -- at least those deliberately created to evoke the particular response -- embody certain specific attitudes and understandings communicated by way of certain specific methods.

My intent in anthologizing and grouping these images has been to establish a groundwork for consideration of the grotesque as a mode of photography. I believe it is particularly pertinent to contemporary photography. In the next chapter I have attempted to indicate its historical antecedents within the medium itself. I have refrained from tracing its origins back into the history of the other graphic arts on the assumption that such connections can be easily made by the reader. To be sure, the images in this book have parallels elsewhere in the other visual arts, whether in ancient Greek frescoes, illuminated manuscripts, medieval bestiaries, or the works of such masters as Bosch, Breughel, Goya, Tchelitchew, Orozco, and countless others. The impulse from which the grotesque springs is ancient and deep. But rather than establishing "credentials" for such work in photography by belaboring its analogues in other media, I have been concerned with exploring its photographic evolution, variety, and volume.

This book, therefore, should not be considered a definitive study. For various reasons, a considerable amount of imagery central to this mode was unavailable for inclusion in this volume -- enough so that I hesitate even to call it comprehensive. Moreover, I have no doubt that there is much relevant work that has been overlooked. Certainly one consequence of this publication will be to acquaint me with the extent of my own ignorance of the field.

From my standpoint, this book is a critical survey -- a foundation, a beginning. Certain lines of inquiry merit much further investigation. For example, why have so few women worked extensively in this mode? Why has it been so persistently slighted by critics and historians? What impact is it having on its culture? What are the connections between and influences on these particular artists?

The issues raised by this body of imagery are not only crucial to photography and to contemporary art generally, but reach into psychology, sociology, and history. It is my hope that this initial survey will stimulate others to add their own perceptions and questions to mine.

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In exploring the concept of the grotesque as it applies to photography and as it manifests itself in various kinds of photographic imagery, a dilemma that is essentially semantic must be acknowledged.

The term grotesque has several established meanings and an even larger number of accepted vernacular usages.¹ Unlike much of the descriptive vocabulary applied to the visual arts, the word grotesque actually originated as a description of a particular form of visual art. Its source is Italian: la grottesca (noun) and grottesco (adjective) are both derived from grotta, meaning "cave," and were "coined to designate a certain ornamental style which came to light during late fifteenth-century excavations, first in Rome and then in other parts of Italy as well, and which turned out to constitute a hitherto unknown ancient form of ornamental painting."² That style of painting was distinguished by its emphasis on unnatural, biomorphic mergings of plant and animal features.

At its birth, then, the word had a quite narrow and specific meaning, restricted to a certain genre of graphic art. Over time, however, its meaning multiplied and expanded. Other forms of visual art were grouped under its aegis. Applied to music, it was utilized to describe certain melodic and harmonic structures. In literature, it was employed as a classification including several sorts of language, settings, actions, and protagonist.

Even within the comparatively narrow confines of the creative media, therefore, the word was gradually put to diverse usages. In that context, the grotesque implied, among other things, dissonance; exaggeration (beyond the point of mere caricature, which was seen as a separate though related category); anomalousness; and major physical and/or spiritual deformities. Consistently, too, whether implicitly or explicitly, the term carried metaphysical and philosophical connotations; it was used to suggest that the proverbially beneficial natural order of things had been subverted or had even had the lie given to it.

As the word came into the vernacular its meanings were broadened even further, to such an extent that it now covers not only severe physical abnormality but even inappropriate though not particularly uncommon human behavior. Thus diluted and defused, it is not surprising that the word entered into British adolescent slang in the 1960s in a tolerantly diminutive form -- "grotty" -- as a synonym for the merely peculiar, unpleasant, and unhip.

Yet these distinct and considerable shifts in the meanings of this word are more than simply those inevitable changes that all language undergoes in popular usage. I would suggest that something more significant is represented thereby: a gradual but profound alteration of western culture's world view, a major change in our perception of "normality." And I would further suggest that much of that alteration can be traced to the impact of photography on that culture.

Consider the word's evolution. Originally it is used exclusively to describe imagistic fantasies whose impact on their viewers is due in large part to that audience's recognition of the biological impossibility of those forms,. The effectof that art is therefore largely attributable to an awareness of the artist's intentional violation of natural laws in conceiving those visions. Though that meaning remains operative, another comes to join it, seemingly its antithesis: those demonstrably possible and even documentable natural phenomena and forms of human behavior that are only divergent from the norm.

Is this simply coincidental -- that a word should come to mean such different things? Or have the attitudes behind the definitions shifted? And if so, why?

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The descriptive verisimilitude of photography -- its capacity for arresting permanently the light reflected off the surface of small segments of reality -- had no precedent among the graphic arts or in any form of visual communication. Camera optics continuously reaffirm, in a most reassuring manner, the Renaissance perspective in which we have been trained to see. In a culture addicted to "reason" as exemplified by the scientific method, photography's technological and mechanistic premises are sufficient proof of the unimpeachability of photographic images as accurate and trustworthy documents.

Most early writings on photography encapsulate those responses. The enchantment of the medium was its credibility, which in turn was based on its automatic verification of the highly arbitrary strategies of Renaissance perspective, which are deeply engrained in Western culture. The uncanny accuracy and exquisite detail of the imagery was cited repeatedly in those writings. The camera (a construction of wood, metal, cloth, and glass) was frequently referred to as a "witness," while the photographer tended to be relegated to the position of "operator," as though he or she were not actually the maker of the images but only the impersonal servant of the machine that made them.

Western culture's first and strongest commitment to photography, then, was to its ostensibly accurate, impartial function as a visual recording system. The reasons for this are complex and beyond the scope of this study. But this commitment was (and still is) widespread -- indeed, almost unanimous within that culture. It was also profound, and not at all limited to the visually naive. As recently as l953, for example, so sophisticated a theorist of the visual arts as William M. Ivins, then Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, called photography the first visual medium "without syntax." By that he meant that under normal operating conditions there supposedly was no human interference between the event in front of the lens and the image that resulted.

With a belief in the photograph's objectivity so prevalent, it is hardly surprising that one of the first applications of photography was the visual exploration of the external world, particularly its more remote and exotic aspects. Thus employed, one of the medium's earliest effects was to amplify the truth of Hamlet's admonition to Horatio: "There are more things in heaven and earth . . . than are dreamt of in your philosophy." This has been one of photography's continuing contributions to the perception of the world. Presenting as it does a reasonable two-dimensional replication of its subjects, photography opened up to members of a photographic culture a variety of vicarious experience whose range and quantity was inconceivable prior to the medium's invention. Suddenly it became possible to observe objects, creatures, people, and events from all parts of the globe, in all the astonishing and unimaginable diversity of the real world -- far more than any single human being could encounter in person in the course of a lifetime.

Photography, then, can be said to have generated a major alteration of world view. In doing so, it led to an inescapable conclusion. There was little the creative imagination could conceive, no matter how apparently absurd or extreme, that did not have its parallel somewhere in the natural world or in the panorama of human behavior. And there was much in reality beside which the most seemingly exaggerated imaginative projections paled by comparison. In this new context the concept of the grotesque required revision. Within a homogeneous society whose world view is restricted, abnormality can be a fixed and even absolute idea. In a fluid society able to see beyond its own perimeters, abnormality becomes relative. People who pierce their noses with pieces of bone are grotesque only among those who do not.

Consequently, in coming to some definition of the grotesque in photography, two often contradictory sets of guidelines must be considered simultaneously . One of those circumscribes the traditional meaning of tne word as applied to the visual arts, aimed here at its specifically photographic manifestations: certain kinds of hallucinatory, visionary works that violate common knowledge of the workings of the natural world. Because that meaning is comparatively exact, it is relatively simple to determine what imagery is appropriately categorized thereby.

But another set of guidelines must also be taken into account. They outline the newer meanings of the term as a synonym for nonfictional phenomena (and images thereof) that exist at or beyond the edges of our cultural and psychological norms -- violations of the social order rather the natural order of things. Those are not one and the same, and descriptions of real events that force us to a recognition of the arbitrariness of beliefs, standards, and value systems reassert that distinction.

The latter is a much looser gauge than the former, for those norms are constantly changing. The commonplace events and behavior of one culture, social stratum, or era may become the grotesqueries of another. As far as possible, I have attempted to compensate for my own subjectiveness and biases by including in that second category images whose grotesqueness is not solely a matter of my own opinion. In most cases, either the general subject matter of the images or the images themselves have been elsewhere defined as grotesque.

In concluding his study, Wolfgang Kayser offered three hallmarks of the grotesque. "The grotesque is the estranged world. . . . The grotesque is a play with the absurd. . . . The grotesque is an attempt to invoke and subdue the demonic aspects of the world." Keeping those in mind, an examination of the images that follow may lead to some clearer and more precise understanding of the grotesque -- and may also reveal something about the enormous shaping influence of photography on the perception of the world and the lives lived within it.

Notes

¹ Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary gives the following definitions:

1. grotesque: n. 1. a piece of decorative art characterized by fanciful human and animal forms, often interwoven with foliage or similar figures that may distort the natural into absurdity, ugliness, or caricature. grotesque: adj. of, relating to, or having the characteristics of grotesque: as (a): fanciful, bizarre (b): absurdly incongruous (c): departing markedly from the natural, the expected, or the typical. Syn.: see fantastic.
2. grotto: 1: cave. 2: an artificial recess or structure made to resemble a natural cave.

² This quotation is from The Grotesque in Art and Literature by the late Wolfgang Kayser (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957, p. 19). I have drawn extensively on this classic study, as references to it in the text will indicate. Kayser's propositions have been invaluable to my understanding of the mode. His analyses of the grotesque -- particularly its metaphysical implications -- were grounded in a modernist sensibility; he was highly sympathetic to the philosophical issues underlying this "comprehensive structural principle of works of art."