Touching Surfaces

General Editor: Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe

Editorial Board: Anna Bonshek, Per Brask, John Danvers,

William S. Haney II, Amy Ione, Michael Mangan, Arthur Versluis,

Christopher Webster, Ralph Yarrow

&

Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”.

ISBN: 978-90-420-2513-4ISSN: 1573-2193©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009Printed in the Netherlands

Cover photo: Jacqueline Hayden, Ancient Statuary (1998).Courtesy of the artist.

Touching SurfacesPhotographic Aesthetics,

Temporality, Aging

ANCA CRISTOFOVICI

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009

In memoriam

Aurora-Stela Anghel

Aurora Anghel

Daniel Cristofovici

Carolina

Acknowledgements

This book had its earliest beginning at the Center for

Twentieth Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin-

Milwaukee, where I was a fellow in 1996-1997. My gratitude to

Kathleen Woodward, its director at the time, for providing me with

exceptional working conditions and a most inspiring intellectual

dialogue. I wish to extend my heartfelt thanks to the staff of the

Center, and especially to Carol Tennessen, associate director at the

time, who assisted me in many ways. I also want to acknowledge the

generous support of a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation that

made my collaboration with the Center possible.

In the absence of any other institutional support since then, I

would like to express my gratitude to those who helped me, over the

years and in diverse ways, to turn that project into a book. I am

particularly pleased to thank my friends, Doris Kiely, Yolanda Lalu

Levi, and Angela Jianu, who read fragments of the work in progress,

Juliet Bates, who kindly read the entire manuscript in its final phase,

Mark Carlson, Corrado Minervini and La Famiglia da Nizza, for

helping me solve details in the layout of images, and Serge Della

Monica, who, over time, showed me the light in the dark room.

My special thanks to the photographers whose work has

sustained this book, and in particular to those who generously

accepted to grant me the reproduction rights and made useful

comments on their work, to Christine Guibert for her permission to

reproduce the photographs of Hervé Guibert, and to Agathe Gaillard,

from the Gaillard Gallery, in Paris. I am also grateful to those who

provided me with high definition images to be reproduced in the book:

Kay Broker and Alexandra Batsford, from the Pace/MacGill Gallery,

in New York; Dan Cheeck, from the Fraenkel Gallery, in San

Francisco; Adam Harrison, from the Jeff Wall Studio, in Vancouver;

Christina Horeau and Marie-Eve Beaupré, from the René Blouin

Gallery, in Montréal; and Jonas Wettre, from the Steidl Verlag, in

Göttingen.

The library staff of La Maison Européenne de la Photographie

in Paris, my part-time home during the years when this book was

being written, has been of great help. My thankful thoughts to all for

Touching Surfaces viii

their competence, warm reception, humor, and to Henri Coudoux, in

particular, for his genuine interest in my project.

The first chapter of this book is an updated and revised

version of my essay, “Touching Surfaces: Photography, Aging, and an

Aesthetics of Change”, which first appeared in Figuring Age. Women,

Bodies, Generations (Kathleen Woodward ed., Bloomington &

Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), reproduced here by

permission. I have presented fragments from the chapters on Jim Dine

and Joyce Tenneson at the Annual International Conference on

“Literature and Psychoanalysis”, in 2004 and 2005, that were

published on-line in the proceedings of the respective conferences.

I wish to thank Dr. Daniel-Meyer Dinkgräfe, the director of

the Consciousness, Literature, and the Arts series at Rodopi, for his

interest in my manuscript, which was to come out with another

publisher in 2003 and then was mysteriously lost.

Paris, March 2008

Duration is to consciousness as light is to the eye.

Bill Viola, Statement 1989

It is a most recollected small painting. It thinks

that only one thing is necessary & this is

time. But this one thing is by no means

apparent to one who will not take the trouble

to look.

Thomas Merton,

on a painting Ad Reinhardt made for him

Contents

Plates xiii

Opening 1

1

The Visible:

Photographic Statements for an Aesthetics of Change

Argument: Visualizing Different Age-Selves 17

1. A Huge Body in a Small Frame: Jeff Wall 23

2. Long Hair on Older Women:

Jacqueline Hayden; Hervé Guibert 28

3. Images That Matter:

Terry Pollack; Cindy Sherman 38

4. A Space to Hold the Gaze:

Terry Pollack; Geneviève Cadieux 45

2

(In)Visibility:

Photographs that Make a Change

Argument: the Photographic Unconscious 57

Jim Dine

1. Mirroring Marginal Thought:

an Aesthetics of Doctored Images 67

2. Editing, Composition

and the Visual Reconstruction of Memory 78

Touching Surfaces xii

3

The In-visible:

Spectral Visions, Transformative Perceptions

Argument: Photography and Perception.

87 Thierry Kuntzel; Janice Tanaka

Duane Michals

1. The Fixation of Unstable Fields:

Movement, Change, and Temporality 95

2. Optical Thresholds:

Thresholds of change 101

Thresholds of movement 109

Thresholds of the visible 115

3. Of Pictures & Words: Flashes of Consciousness 118

4

Photographic Aesthetics and the Fabric of the Subject

Argument: The Inner Statue. Jacqueline Hayden 125

Joyce Tenneson

1. Transformations of the Self: Motion, Emotion, Repose 135

2. Photographic Diversions, Forms of Consciousness 146

3. Aesthetics and Cosmetics 151

5

Performing Corpo-realities

Argument: The Spectrum of Aging.

Francesca Woodman; Donigan Cumming 157

Francesca Woodman

1. Photographic Ambiguities and Formal Growth 167

2. Photography, Time, and the Body in Space 183

Coda 193

Works Cited 203

Index 213

Plates

1. Jacqueline Hayden. 1998. Ancient Statuary Series, “IX Mixing

Bowl”. Platinum/palladium print, 6.5 x 4.5 inches. Courtesy of

the artist.

2. Jeff Wall. 1992. “The Giant”. Color; transparency in lightbox,

15.1/4 x 18.3/4 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

3. Jacqueline Hayden. 1991. Figure Model Series (2A). Unique

silver gelatin print, 84 x 52 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

4. Hervé Guibert. 1979. “Suzanne”. Courtesy Christine Guibert.

5. Hervé Guibert. 1979. “Louise”. Courtesy Christine Guibert.

6. Terry Pollack. 1992. From the series Homage to Käthe Kollwitz.

Sepia; kallitype print on rice paper, 6.1/2 x 4.1/2 inches.

Courtesy of the artist.

7. Terry Pollack. 1987. “Death Mask”. Color; large format

Polaroid print, 20 x 24 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

8. Geneviève Cadieux. 1990. “Blue Fear”. Color cybachrome

print, 73 x 116 inches. Photo: Louis Lussier. Copyright

Geneviève Cadieux. Courtesy Galerie René Blouin, Montréal.

9. E. J. Bellocq. Ca. 1912. “Storyville Portrait”, Plate 41. Copyright

Lee Friedlander. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

10. Jim Dine. 1999. “Heart’s Door”. Digital pigment print, edition of

three, 68.3/4 x 48.1/4 inches. JD52 D. Courtesy of the artist.

11. Jim Dine. 1999. “North Crescent”. Digital pigment print, edition

of three, 48 x 68.1/2 inches. JD57D. Courtesy of the artist.

Touching Surfaces xiv

12. Jim Dine. 1999. “Nuptials”. Digital pigment print, edition of

three, 66.3/4 x 48 inches. JD59D. Courtesy of the artist.

13. Jim Dine. 1999. “The Veronica”. Digital pigment print, edition of

three, 68.3/4 x 48.1/4 inches. JD77D. Courtesy of the artist.

14. Duane Michals. 1972. “The True Identity of Man”. Four gelatin

silver prints each paper, 8 x 10 inches. DMI.S.243. Copyright

Duane Michals. Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York.

15. Duane Michals. 1978. “Now Becoming Then”. Gelatin silver

print with hand applied text paper, 16 x 20 inches. DMI.104.

Copyright Duane Michals. Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New

York.

16. Duane Michals. [1980] 1997. “My Old Age”. Five gelatin silver

prints with hand applied text each paper, 5 x 7 inches.

DMI.S.431. Copyright Duane Michals. Courtesy Pace/MacGill

Gallery, New York.

17. Jacqueline Hayden. 1997. Ancient Statuary Series, “IV Torso of

Boy”. Platinum/palladium print, 7 x 4.5 inches. Courtesy of the

artist.

18. Jacqueline Hayden. 1998. Ancient Statuary Series, “V Aphrodite,

Hellenistic”. Platinum/palladium print, 8.5 x 6 inches. Courtesy

of the artist.

19. Duane Michals. 1966. “The Woman is Frightened by the Door”.

Five gelatin silver prints each paper, 5 x 7 inches. DMI.S.27.

Copyright Duane Michals. Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New

York.

20. E.J. Bellocq. Ca. 1912. “Storyville Portrait”. Plate 67. Copyright

Lee Friedlander. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

21. Jacqueline Hayden. 1993. Figure Model Series (3B). Unique

silver gelatin print, 84 x 52 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

1. Jacqueline Hayden, Ancient Statuary Series, “IX Mixing Bowl”, 1998.

Platinum/palladium print, 6.5 x 4.5 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

Opening

I’m looking for a way to play this part where

age doesn’t make any difference. Age isn’t

interesting; age is depressing, age is dull, age

doesn’t have to do anything with anything.

Myrtle Gordon in Opening Night

Spelling out the subject of cross-disciplinary research is always

problematic because one mostly has to start with what the book is not

about in order to bring into focus such notions as contact zones,

relation, appropriation. I would therefore like to say from the outset

that this book is not about the consciousness of old age from a

psychological perspective in so far as the photographic work on which

it is based covers a much wider scope than that of elderly subjects.

Nor does it claim to present any conclusive definition of such complex

processes as consciousness and aging, but rather considers the varied

ways in which such processes are visualized in the field of art

photography. In his book ironically entitled Questions Without

Answers, photographer Duane Michals briefly defines consciousness

as “how we experience being”. How we experience becoming is, by

extension, central to the photographic material that has come to my

attention over the past fifteen years and prompted me to relate aging to

consciousness, temporality, and subject construction. And it is

paradoxically the aesthetic, as a rule at odds with representations of

aging, which has helped me articulate theoretical questions inspired by

the work of contemporary photographers. For what we learn from

writers and artists in this respect is that in trying to serve or use the

imagination one trusts in the organizing powers of inner life, namely

in the possibilities of form and structure to channel consciousness

toward direction and shape. Direction and shape is what our lives are

about, when we come to think of it, in time. This question is

embedded in the main concern of the book since I believe that part of

the contribution of studies in such fields as consciousness, aging, and

Touching Surfaces 2

the arts lies in measuring our theories and conjectures by “how we

experience being” in order to redefine the domain of the humanities,

and, in the process, to suggest conceptual frameworks adapted to new

realities.

Awareness of aging has come to public attention with the

demographic changes in Western cultures at the turn of the twenty-

first century. It seems to have taken cultural and social mediators by

surprise. This sudden interest in the old age fact marks a dramatic leap

from the youth culture of the 1960s to realities of old age that have

lacked appropriate cultural representations. Until very recently the

contrast between the visible signs of aging and the absence of their

representations in visual culture was striking. Hence the need for

models able to generate, as Kathleen Woodward puts it, “alternative

futures for ourselves as we live into lives longer than we had imagined

for ourselves, if we had even previously thought consciously about

aging at all – and many of us have not” (1991: 155). One of the

initiators of studies in aging, Woodward wonders about the form these

models might take. It is precisely such potential models coming from

the field of art photography over the past decades that the present

book explores. These models are not prescriptive but reflective. They

invite us to look closer into experiences of aging, to think of the many

– often contradictory – ways in which we relate to them, to consider

aging not only as an extension of our lives in time, but also as an

extension of our understanding of who we are and of how we relate to

the others. Significantly, my photographic material comes from the

field of art photography or, as it is also sometimes called, speculative

photography*. Instead of testimonies, these works present us with

fictions. Or rather – because of photography’s adherence to the real –

* Speculative photography has more recently come to name the category

of photographs whose intent is neither documentary, nor utilitarian. It refers to

photographs intended as artistic representations. Speculative photography concerns

the visualization of internal and fictional worlds, or the perception of certain realities.

It is distinct from “speculative photography” in the commercial sense. The term

testimonial photography is used here for all other categories of photographs

(documentary, family, archival) with a direct, specific referentiality. Testimonial

photography concerns the representation and/or exploration of the real world, of

objects, of people; although such works can be presented in the space of the museum

(as it is the case more and more), they have not been conceived intentionally for

artistic purposes.

Opening 3

with conjunctions between the real and the fictional, between

perception and convention. Instead of trying to find in these works

what old age looks like (which covers a wide spectrum of

manifestations in any event), I bring into focus the photographers’

gaze projected on the photographed subjects. And I also bring into

focus the responses these photographs call for. This aspect covers an

even larger spectrum of perceptions, some of which we have been

aware of, others that surface in the process of looking at them, and

also in the extended time of reflection.

In the late 1980s and 1990s, a few but decisive studies

opened up the exploration of aging, a category which had been

ignored in previous studies of difference devoted to race, ethnicity, or

gender. Works such as those of Kathleen Woodward (1986; 1991),

Anne Wyatt-Brown and Janice Rossen (1993), or Marilyn Pearsall (1997) highlight the “invisibility” of aging in Western culture and in

the domain of cultural studies. They explore complex psychological,

social, and cultural implications of aging and its representations

against both “negative” and “positive” stereotypes.1 These studies are

based on literary texts that incorporate representations of, or tropes for

aging in a variety of ways. That they mostly address the field of

literature is itself significant for the scarceness of images of old age in

the visual culture of the preceding decades. With one exception

devoted to painting (Covey 1991), it is only in the late 1990s that a

small number of works considered representations of aging in the

visual arts,2 none of them however devoted exclusively to a

theorization of the relationship between photography and aging.

1 For a more complete bibliography on the issue of aging from a feminist

perspective and from that of the social construction of age, cf. a recent issue of the

NWSA Journal (The National Women’s Studies Association) (Marshall: 2006).

2 These works include: a volume dealing with various forms of corporeal

difference, from obesity to aging in contemporary painting and photography

originating in a Channel Four program (Townsend and Coulthard: 1998); a study

devoted to theater (Basting: 1998); a seminal collection of studies on aging in

literature and the arts (photography and performance included) (Woodward: 1999)

and an overview of historical, psychological, and social aspects related to aging in

American culture (Featherstone: 1995).

“Time of Our Lives”, a show devoted to representations of aging was

presented at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, in 1999, curated by

Founding Director Marcia Tucker with Curatorial Associate Anne Ellegood (all art

Touching Surfaces 4

Yet, when we think of visual representations of aging,

photography naturally comes to mind as a device for “arresting” a

certain moment in time. A photograph is commonly thought of as an

object that triggers off memories, captures a state, one that documents

various stages of life. While in the 1980s photography was entering

academia in the field of cultural studies – mostly under the paradigms

established by the essays of Susan Sontag (1977) and Roland Barthes

(1980) – it was also growing more and more visible in the art world,

namely by reinforcing its place and role in museums and galleries – in

the United States, and developing it – in Europe. Progressively,

photography came to be part of a new paradigm of art history. By the

late 1980s, photographers such as Robert Mapplethorpe or Cindy

Sherman became well known both in the art world and in academia

for challenging the binary visible-invisible and established role

models. Both photographers have used cultural stereotypes in quite

intriguing ways to create powerful images of difference that document

aspects of race and gender without however being documentary.

In the mid-1990s, at a time when youth was still the norm in

the media, other works from the field of art photography came to my

attention. Without taking aging as a major theme, these works were

exploring its wide range of realities. Photographs such as those

discussed in this book by Jeff Wall or Geneviève Cadieux, Jacqueline

Hayden or Terry Pollack, derive aesthetic strategies from the

paradoxical dynamic of attraction and repulsion that we inevitably

media, from painting and photography to video as well as images in the media, such

as television commercials, were represented in this show).

Jacqueline Hayden’s work appeared in an exhibition devoted to the nude in

contemporary art at the Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, Ct., in 1999. The exhibition

catalogue highlights the variety of approaches to the nude as well as the fact that the

aging body is no longer such a taboo (Philbrick et al., 1999).

Phototherapist Rosy Martin in collaboration with Kay Goodbridge presented

their work on stereotypes of the aging woman in the show “Outrageous Agers”, at

Focal Point Gallery, Southern On-Sea, UK, 2001.

In 2008, La Panera Art Center, in Lleida, Spain, presented the exhibition

“The Gift of Life”, devoted to photographic and video works representing aging and

curated by Juan Vincente Aliaga.

The millennium has certainly brought the reflection on time into attention

with another important exhibition, one which did not however thematize aging but

rather movement and temporality as captured by photographs: “Photography and

Time” at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (Haworth-Booth: 2000).

Opening 5

associate with bodies marked by time or disease, instead of simply

documenting them. Other photographers – as, for instance, Joyce

Tenneson – engage the viewer, through emotional impact, into

reconsidering both art history models and representations of aging in

commercial photography. Unlike photographers who have addressed

the issue of aging frontally,3 in the works discussed in this book the

question of age is part of artistic projects of wider scope. A variety of

problems of representation are at the core of these projects: the

articulation between images and time; the metaphoric dimensions of

photographic techniques; or the temporality of perception, in a context

of predominant concern with time and the corporeal at the turn of the

twenty-first century. In compelling ways, these works lay stress on a

dynamics of change and becoming in which time is not only an

element of progressive degradation but also a formative category as

well as a source of creativity, a recategorization which shifts the focus

of aging from the condition of being old to a dense network of

perceptions and visualizations of change, movement, and temporality.

From the perspective of this shift in how we relate to time patterns, the

apparently obvious association between photography and aging turns

out to be more than meets the eye.

Aging is commonly thought of as a state, and, consequently,

photography as a means of recording it. However, what I have found

remarkable in the work of these artists is that the strategies they use

are largely transformative instead of reproductive. To the extent to

which they transform conventions of photography, they invite viewers

to reflect on how these images relate to both identity and diversity.

They also let us see how varied layers of time can be articulated with

the experience of the present. This aspect is particularly meaningful

for my argument here, since, together with the problematic

implications of exposing the changing body, it addresses the question

of the possibilities and limits of representation in photography. Such

photographic works visualize aspects of aging by other means than

simply documenting the realities of older bodies in crude or

sentimental ways. In them, perceptions of aging are turned into

resonant visual patterns. In the process, the physical realities of aging

3 John Coplans (1987; 2003), Nicholas Nixon (1988; 1991), Donigan

Cumming (1995; 1996), or Mario Giacomelli (1995), and, in very poignant series of

portraits of their parents in their old age, Richard Avedon (1993), or Nan Goldin

(2004).

Touching Surfaces 6

captured by the camera have been transformed not with an aim to

conceal them but to make them visible in significant ways. These

works explore, imaginatively, I would say, the possibilities of the

photographic medium not to delude but to construct visual analogs of

psychic space and inner experiences and thereby illuminate the

reciprocal relations between photography and aging. Significantly,

aging is not considered in these works as a fixed situation in time

(documented by the photographic image), but as a process of growth,

one that I read in relation to photography’s ability to record process

along with state, and therefore also in relation to subject construction.

Like aging, photography is inevitably associated with

various time dimensions.4 As a depository of private and collective

history, it prompts associations between the actual present of

perception and a fleeting moment in the past, which we mostly think

of as fixed, arrested within the frame of a photograph. Photography

has long been considered within the present versus past binary, which

is, indeed, a valid distinction for family or documentary photographs.

However, because of their ambivalent relation to the referent,

speculative photographs accommodate heterogeneous perceptions of

time by disturbing conventions in order to visualize different layers of

time or levels of perception. It is therefore the variety of the resulting

associations – and not the fixation of one specific moment – that

accounts for the rich figurative potential of these photographs. Artists

who make use of the photographic medium insist precisely on the

possibility of capturing or recreating images that are not directly

visible to the eye, but rather part of more or less remote areas of

consciousness.

It is along these lines that consciousness relates intimately

to my approach of the subjective and introspective dimensions of

photographs that represent the body as a site for varied perceptions of

the self. In such works, the physical body becomes either a signifier of

interiority or an instrument for exploring borderline zones between the

physical and the psychic. Through this very transcendence of the

physical, aging can be read in these photographs as an organizing

4 Symbolically, it is a way of measuring time (as in individual or family

portraits). But even before the invention of the photographic camera, the camera obscura was used in the fifteenth century to structure space in monocular perspective, and the pinhole appeared in sundials as a device of measuring time by way of the passage of light.

Opening 7

principle of the consciousness of the self. My focus on formal analysis

and parameters of perception calls attention to the possibilities of

composition to shape our consciousness of form in ways that relate to

subject construction. In this respect, consciousness connects to vision

from the perception of a shape or series of shapes to the progressive

perception of correlations that make up a larger picture, one that

corresponds to each artist’s personal idiom and reverberates in the

beholder’s experience. The field of consciousness has, like that of a

photograph, a focus and a peripheral constellation of shapes. In certain

photographic images discussed in the following chapters, the center is

not always easy to distinguish from the margins, the form from the

ground, or the sharp image from the blurred. From a perceptual point

of view, these images relate to certain states of semi-consciousness, a

fact which brings to light the tenuous separation between the

conscious and the unconscious in the creative act. Some of them

correspond to optical misperceptions, which are nonetheless keenly

visualized and can be associated with various degrees of

consciousness. From the perspective of fictions or fables of the self

that photography can create, multiple-focus images or images out of

focus say something about the motion of the subject in space and time,

about displacements, some of which are imperceptible, others

dramatic, many inherent to growth. How consciousness of form

resonates in us as consciousness of identity is a question that has

nourished my exploration of photographic works.

However, like aging itself, consciousness resists

theorization (as commonly understood in cultural studies, and

certainly not in the specialized approaches of philosophy, psychology,

cognitive sciences, or neurobiology). Perceptions of change in Duane

Michals’ photographs, for instance, or perceptions of inner

experiences in Francesca Woodman’s work, are as many ways of

looking at consciousness not as “a” state (a mental or photographic

image of a moment in time), but as a process that defines the living

self. Similarly, photographic equivalents of the unconscious, such as

we find in the work of Jim Dine, do not represent the unconscious in

the Freudian sense of specific repressed information of specific

symbolic scope, but rather as part of life experience accumulated in

layers of images (and time) made accessible through techniques

deviating from mimetic conventions. “What we are less and less as we

sink gradually down into dreamless sleep […] and what we are more

Touching Surfaces 8

and more, as the noise tardily arouses us”, the frequently quoted

definition of consciousness that George T. Ladd gave at the turn of the

previous century, epitomizes the visual and cognitive qualities of the

photographic works discussed in this book.

Although my corpus comes from speculative photography, I

have tried to avoid speculative sources to draw mostly on approaches

of photography by art historians or theoreticians of the visual arts

(such as Rosalind Krauss or Max Kozloff), and by scholars who have

more recently discussed photography within the wider context of the

history of ideas and visual representation (such as Geoffrey Batchen,

Patrick Maynard, or François Brunet). Although Rudolf Arnheim’s

Visual Thinking (1969) – which has recently come to its 50th

edition –

and his other studies in the psychology of perception are not quoted

directly, what I have learned from them in my formative years has

determined my understanding of visual art as a form of thinking, and

of composition as an instrument of structuring it. Given the prominent

role of new technologies in image-making today, the phenomenology

of perception has become indispensable to the reading of visual

works. Without elaborating extensively on theories of perception, I

have given priority to close readings of the photographs, to the

understanding of their visual logic, and to the ways in which they may

act on the viewer.5 Instead of placing the focus on the affective

relation that we establish with photographs generically, I highlight

emotional processes alluded to in the making and the perception of

photographs. The phenomenological perspective, that of Maurice

Merleau-Ponty in particular, seemed therefore the most apt to explore

these processes. The central role the body plays in Merleau-Ponty’s

investigation of the relations between the visible and the invisible, for

instance, calls attention to its status as both acting subject and object

of observation, an ambivalence which resonates with the photographs

discussed in the book. Other notions from psychoanalysis, from object

relation theories in particular, connect to such running themes in the

5 This approach has primarily been that of French photography critics,

Jean-Claude Lemagny (1994), for instance, or Régis Durand (1994) who places his

readings within the framework of a critical phenomenology of the photographic

image.

Opening 9

book as real and imaginary spaces, the corporeal, or the role of visual

works in the elaboration of subjectivity.

Few studies in current visual culture critique focus, when we

think of it, on the aesthetic quality of cultural representations as a

carrier of meaning. Paradoxical as it may seem, the association

between aging and photographic aesthetics enlightens the varied ways

in which our understanding of visibility, the visible, and vision have

been redefined by art photography. Instead of sentimentalizing or

merely documenting it, a perspective informed by photographic

aesthetics can, I argue, contribute to a creative thinking of aging.

Reciprocally, because of the zones of time engaged in the process of

aging, the exploration of aesthetic dimensions illuminates aspects of

temporality and subject construction intrinsic to photographic

representation and to our readings of photographs.

The following chapters unfold the steps of this journey from

the visible to visibility, from vision to interiority, and then to the

becoming of the subject in photographs that foreground what I call an

aesthetics of change. Each chapter is introduced by an argument

which connects a question of representation with a technical problem

or with a series of aesthetic strategies that subvert mimetic

expectations conventionally associated with photography. The issues

outlined in each argument then implicitly guide the readings of the

photographs in each chapter. The chapters connect through references

from one work or question to another, and mostly through associations

that are striking, either by way of likeness of purpose and form, or by

contrast. A particular progression evolved in the writing of the book,

one which is intently discontinuous – like our consciousness of aging

itself, and like our perception of photographs, for that matter –, yet

one which reveals a certain coherence of the subject. The search for a

coherent image of the self, in which change and time are inherent,

shows through all the photographs here as a moving image: constantly

eluding us yet persisting in our peripheral vision.

The first chapter sets the ground for the subsequent sections

of the book by presenting the scope of questions related to the

visualization of aging in speculative photography. Here I set in

opposition the invisibility of aging in the visual culture of the 1980s

and 1990s with photographic works that place realities of aging on

various levels of visibility and reveal a wide spectrum of modalities

Touching Surfaces 10

by which art photographs can formalize consciousness of aging. I use

alternatively the term speculative photography to emphasize precisely

the fact that these photographs meditate (speculate) on the becoming

of the self and present the viewers with an internal mirror (a

speculum): a visual echo of their own perceptions, recognitions, and,

in privileged moments, revelations of unfathomed spaces. The

emotional dimension of these photographs – which either avoids

sentimentalism, or uses it demystifyingly – creates such imaginary

spaces that come with life transitions and hold the gaze,

metaphorically, or, metonymically, the body itself, as in the case of

Geneviève Cadieux’s “Blue Fear” or in the photographs of Jacqueline

Hayden that address a wide range of emotions related to aging and

also illuminate its unexplored creative potential.

While the photographs considered in the first chapter

challenge limited notions of “the visible”, the works discussed in the

subsequent chapters belong to artists who explore and extend it along

with varied understandings of the invisible, to begin with the

unconscious, for which photography has provided metaphors since its

early days. In these artists’ specific uses of techniques of visualization,

I see the possibilities of photography to enlighten, modify, or enrich

our understanding of the unconscious as a continuation of these early

associations. From the domain of the visible, I therefore turn to the

visibility of internal spaces, from “an aesthetics of change” to

“photographs that make a change” in our understanding of

photography as index. In these works, the unconscious material is

considered – like memories – as inaccessible consciousness or, in Jim

Dine’s words “as a source of power and information about one’s own

self” (Dine 2003, vol. 4: 4). From this assumption, I analyze

photographic strategies through which the unconscious can be

visualized and thereby become accessible as formalized

consciousness, and I focus on Jim Dine’s exploration of such areas as

the unconscious, memory, and aging.

Memory is in more than one way associated with loss. And

disappearance or effacement can be considered as major anxieties

related to aging. Significantly, in a context in which many deplore the

excess of images in Western cultures, an important number of

photographers and video artists today are engaged in a meditation on

the transience of material as well as of mental images. This particular

aspect, discussed in the third chapter, intersects my exploration of

Opening 11

temporality in this book in a striking way, since it displaces the focus

from the common fear of seeing metamorphoses of the body recorded

in a photograph to more disquieting anxieties related to the effacement

of images as signifiers of identity.

In the third chapter, “The In-visible: Spectral Visions,

Transformative Perceptions”, I focus therefore on photography’s

potential to enlarge our perceptual and imaginative field by extending

the limits of the visible to capture the passage of time in an image.

The concern with movement, change, and temporality defines Duane

Michals’ photographic work discussed in this chapter. Early in his

career, Michals became concerned with aging as change, that is, as a

series of transformations related to the becoming of the self and not to

the state of being old. While Dine reconfigures common

representations of the past by means of photographs, Michals insists

on the present. In his work I read an invitation to reconsider our

attachment to photography as a signifier of the past, a challenge to

Roland Barthes’ nostalgic view of photography. From this

perspective, the loss of the index value of the photographic image is

seen as a gain in perception and also as an enlargement of

photography’s potential to expose a continuum of identity in the very

discontinuity of perceptions of change.

The last two chapters are more directly related to paradoxes

that articulate questions of aging with questions of aesthetics. Joyce

Tenneson, for instance, presents, instead of an ironic vision of subject

construction, a meditative one. In the fourth chapter devoted to her

work, we return to the ambiguous relation between aesthetics and

aging addressed in the opening sections. By contrast with the

overexposure of the body in commercial photography, the artists I

have chosen to discuss in this book represent the body as a visual

metaphor that reveals the subject’s positionings (and displacements) in

time and space. Tenneson’s working in both fields, artistic and

commercial, and the very progress of her vision over time bear out

more recent turns taken by relations between photography and aging

in the two fields that tend to diverge less than they did two decades

ago.

Within the logic of my argument, which relocates the notion

of aging from “being old” into “growing older”, the last chapter is

devoted to a young photographer who did not take the time to age, or

to come to old age (Woodman committed suicide when she was

Touching Surfaces 12

twenty-two). The discussion of her work allows me to develop the

hypothesis presented in the first chapter: that of aging as change and

process. Her work echoes in some respects that of Hervé Guibert,

whose photographs of his old aunts (evoked in the first chapter) I read

as a moving projection in future. Woodman’s photographs represent

indeed a strong argument for an extended understanding of time in

photography, namely, its relation not only to the past, but to the

present, and as I point out, to the future as well. The notion of a subtle

continuum of aging discussed in the first chapter acquires here new

dimensions since Woodman also places her work in a continuum of

artistic generations (Michals was one of her models). She transforms

aesthetic visions, reflects on technical ambiguities, and extracts from

them new metaphors for individual artistic growth. Since the visual

integration of realities of old age into an aesthetic circuit is a running

theme in the book, the close-readings of her work allow me to return

to the quality of the aesthetic and to place the issue of aging in the

larger context of the construction of subjectivity (and of the subject),

or of what I call the fabric of the subject, in time. By challenging

readings of her works which have focused on the physical body and

on signifiers of social or cultural inscriptions, I intend to displace the

attention from the domination of the corporeal to the interpretation of

the body as a metaphorical site for the consciousness of the self.

This book project was in many ways inspired by John

Cassavettes’ film “Opening Night”, released in 1978, a time in which

aging was not yet an issue in academia. In the film, Myrtle Gordon

(played by Gena Rowlands), a middle-aged actress, is experiencing an

aging crisis as she is unable to perform the role of an older woman in

a play suggestively titled “The Second Woman”, and written by a

sixty-five-years-old woman. Myrtle Gordon’s crisis reveals however a

larger spectrum of perceptions related to aging and creativity. In spite

of her being the protagonist, Cassavettes also unfolds the complexities

of growing older through her relationships with the other characters

(the male crisis, for instance, is subtly suggested in the roles played by

John Cassavettes himself and Ben Gazzara). Many running themes in

this book were first addressed in a paper on that film, “Imagining the

Older Woman”, which I delivered in 1996 at the Conference “Women,

Bodies, Generations” at the Center for Twentieth Century Studies at

Opening 13

the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. These were themes such as:

the generational continuum outliving generation conflicts; the

importance of physical and psychic holding; the role of images that

accompany transitional phases throughout one’s life; the difficulty of

aging with women and men; the relationship between aging and

creativity, between aging and photography.

“When I was seventeen, I could do everything. It was so

easy. My emotions were so close to the surface. I find it harder and

harder to stay in touch …” runs the “epigraph” of the film. Myrtle

Gordon’s conflict is dramatized by her being caught between the

image of a younger woman (Nancy, one of her fans run over by a car

after a brief exchange with her idol) and what in her is still a latent

image of aging, a dormant image that waits to be developed (for

which Sarah, the author of the play, who watches the younger actress’

crisis with condescending comprehension, stands as a standard that

Myrtle cannot identify with). Eventually, Myrtle overcomes her crisis

precisely by coming to terms with the younger – lost – self, embodied

by several violent apparitions of the dead girl, as many visualizations

of her younger self with which she is actually struggling to get back in

touch. “When I was eighteen my emotions were so close to the

surface…”, Myrtle says later in the film, “… I could feel anything

easily …”. Progressively (and paradoxically, through a series of self-

destructive acts), she manages to integrate that younger perceptual

body in her present, to connect with it. At the end of the film (and of

her journey through the night), she regains indeed her younger self,

once the loss has been exorcised (in a literal way, by her appealing to

a professional exorcist in order to liberate herself from the violent

visitations of the dead girl). From this haunting image that comes

unbidden to her mind, she reaches a perception of her self as a whole

in a moment of her life in which the fear of aging is, in fact, outdone

by her anxiety of losing her creativity (and of being stuck in the role

of an older woman: “I am looking for a way to play this part where

age doesn’t make any difference”, she says). Figuring the younger

body that haunts the older one helps her bring back that younger self

creatively, that is not as a contrasting image but as part of what she

has become. Upset and disturbed by a text with which she cannot

identify, Myrtle does not want to look younger or to be young again,

but to stay in touch with her younger self beyond conflict. In order to

cope with the realities of aging, she has to regain the emotional

Touching Surfaces 14

impetus of the teenager. At the same time, for her to accomplish the

passage, she has to be free, to sever the ties with adolescent traces of

incertitude, hesitation, revolt. She needs the young woman’s emotions,

which are “so close to the surface”, in order to invent the older

woman.

Following the hint in the title, the film has sometimes been

read as the night of aging opening up for Myrtle. However, her

remarkable performance at the opening night of the play at the end of

the movie – when humor and improvisation exceed both the original

text and the crisis engendered by it – shows, I would suggest, quite the

opposite, namely the potential that can open up in a different stage of

one’s life. The process of mourning the loss of the younger body

implies Myrtle’s integrating the image of the girl in a generational

continuum represented by all the women in the film. From that image

she extracts, instead of pain, creative energy (“… she is so open … on

top of everything emotionally …”, Myrtle says about Nancy). The loss

of that contact and the conflict with the younger self, at the origin of

her crisis, equals with a loss of meaning in the logic of the self. Only

when that emotional logic has been reestablished is she able to play

the role of the older woman in an authentic way. In her book

Motherless Daughters, Hope Edelman has described such need for an

encompassing consciousness of the self in the special case of

daughters whose mothers’ early death determines their coming of age

without a mirror image of the older mother and, thus, remain

suspended in time, as it were, in a gap between ages: “Sometimes I

want nothing more than the ability to spread my arms and grasp forty-

two [the age when her mother died] with one hand and seventeen with

another [her age at the death of the mother], and then to pull both ends

in tight, until they meet somewhere in between” (1994: 54).

Myrtle’s problem with the text of the play “The Second

Woman” is that it deals with aging in too literal a way and she will

only be able to play it when she has found the metaphorical access to

it. Similarly, this book has been inspired by works in which models of

aging are not literal (as they are in documentary photographs), but

figurative. In my readings of these works, I also have often appealed

to tropes in order to grasp realities for which an excessively

theoretical vocabulary seemed rather reductive. “Touching Surfaces”,

the metaphoric title of the book, plays on an ambivalence inherent in

photography as well as in our relationship to aging. In the sense of

Opening 15

moving, “touching” relates to the emotional work involved in the

creation and reception of the particular images of aging discussed

here. In the verbal sense, “touching” refers to the artists’ interventions

on photographic captures or photographic impressions that locate

older body textures into new imaginative spaces. In Jacqueline

Hayden’s photograph from her Ancient Statuary Series, where she

transforms the stone portraits of a woman and a man that have

outlived temporal and spatial displacements (1), I found a most

appropriate visual metaphor for what photographs have brought to my

understanding of aging over time.

For as it turns out, there is much more to surfaces when we

take the time to look at them. More that helps us stay in touch.

1

The Visible:

Photographic Statements for an Aesthetics of

Change

Argument: Visualizing Different Age-Selves

Just before the rain it seemed the body

lingered transparent,

had carried one out under the firs, set

one free under the rotating spheres.

Now flesh was a constant breath

at one’s ear, intoning

its litany of limitations. Yet how far the body

had to travel – when finally, after its shape

was fixed, and became one’s signature

in the world of forms,

then faithlessly, like a ship tide-persuaded,

it drifted, abandoning what it sought

to become, the body in youth lingering

only a moment in its own folds.

Ellen Hinsey

Photographs are strange creations. They are depictions of a

moment that is always passing; after the shutter closes, the subject

moves out of frame and begins to change outwardly or inwardly.

One changes. One shifts to a different state of consciousness.

Subtle changes can take place in an instant, perhaps one does not

even feel them – but they are perceptible to the camera.

Susan Griffin

Touching Surfaces 18

By custom, we conceive of aging as a separation – from youth and its

attributes. Or we think of aging, internally, as a split – between a

younger self and another self, a stranger, new self, yet a self that is

always getting older. But on the inner screen of aging, these shadows

– memories of younger selves, anticipations of older selves – meet,

conflict, interact. Separation and continuity are the source of a tension

that helps us accommodate change. Incorporating previous states of

consciousness of the self, we become the sum of what we have been.

It is, paradoxically, a permanently inchoate process. As a rule, loss

and mourning accompany the discourse of aging. Yet loss’s life-long

companion is accumulation – of imaginary selves as well as of

psychic objects, of all that we call the “baggage” of the past. How do

we then relate, in the psychic workshop of adult life, to what the

psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas has called our various “sequential

self states” and “idiomatic dispositions” (1992: 29-30)?

Instead of thinking of old age as a discrete element in a

linear narrative or in a hierarchy, I will focus in this chapter on

continuity, on the possibility of bridging our different age-selves, of

creating a space of communication between one’s own ages and

between generations. While aging may indeed encompass a “subtle

continuum” of generations, in Kathleen Woodward’s phrase (1991: 6),

we mostly experience it as a discontinuous flux of psychic images, of

discrepancies between different age-selves. Psychic space embraces

the multiple transformations that make up the imaginary unity of the

self. But the very multiplicity of these psychic images blurs our vision

of this imaginary unity. Thus aging itself poses a particular challenge

to the very possibility of its representation in visual terms. Yet, in fact,

does not the very indistinctness and indeterminacy of such blurred

images – the elusive possibility of seizing the contours of the state of

being old within the process of aging – seem more faithful to our

actual perception and experience of aging? For at what age, actually,

can we situate the borders of aging? Who decides the age of aging?

As medical research has proved, our body begins to age at infancy.

Cellular tissues, the eye’s crystalline, the nerve cells of the brain all

diminish starting with the fifth year of our life as Paul Virilio reminds

us in his Aesthetics of Disappearance (1991: 13-14). Even before our

body has acquired a distinctive shape, it seems to start vanishing

owing to biological and chemical transformations, many

imperceptible, off focus in our consciousness. Aging equals change,

The Visible 19

everybody seems to agree; yet the ways of reading these changes and

the direction of these changes are richly diverse.

Our Western cultural tradition understands age in terms of a

binary system. Old age is defined in relation to youth and thus

essentially by what it lacks. In keeping with this negative definition,

one of Western culture’s ways of dealing with old age has been to

bring it into alignment with the model of youth. In an attempt to

“combat” the aging process, contemporary practices such as cosmetic

surgery and hyper-fitness regimes have in fact contributed to the

cultural denial of aging through an artificial aestheticization of the

body designed to approximate depersonalized canons of youthful

beauty. The premise of this book is that we need, individually and

culturally, appropriate images of aging, just as crucially as we need

ways of mourning, ways of dealing with loss. To deny aging results in

psychic and cultural dysfunction, a kind of anesthesia of both the

personal body and the cultural body. To hypervisualize it, on the other

hand – as recent images circulating in the media do – often results in

too offensive a rhetoric.

In the art world of the 1980s and 1990s, more and more

photographic images appeared that challenged the artificial and frozen

aesthetics of aging which had for a long time placed youth at its

center. Recently, aging has gained attention in cultural studies

primarily by exploring the sociological and psychological dimensions

of growing old. Work has focused on the cultural stereotypes,

ideological underpinnings, and theoretical deadlocks in which images

of age have been confined. But the aesthetics of aging – one of the

most frequent standards by which we measure the realities of aging –

is still very much ignored. In the following pages I would like to

suggest that the photographic works which I discuss may represent a

decisive creation of new forms of expression and new aesthetic

conceptions that integrate conventionally negative categories into new

visions, very much like the negative categories introduced into

modern aesthetic forms throughout the twentieth century.

Given what has been often called the double standard of

aging for women, research on aging has focused mainly on the

position, perception, and representation of older women. Here,

however, as well as in the following chapters, I will focus on

photographic images of older women and men made by both female

Touching Surfaces 20

and male photographers, images that disrupt that binary division

between youth and age in an effort (more or less explicit, more

intuitive than programmatic) to challenge the devaluation of aging. As

I hope to show, these images foreground multiple visions of old age,

exploring the rich potential of this period of human life, one that is in

fact in the process of extending further and further into the future. The

creative possibilities offered by these art photographs help make up

for our culture’s devastating lack of imagination with regard to this

domain of our lives. It is important to note that many of these

photographers are younger than their models. Their photographs

reveal, in many ways, images of the other we feel growing in us as we

grow old, explorations of what has been called “the gray continent”

(Lapierre 1983). Yet they are also fictions of what we can hardly

visualize as a stable form of consciousness: our own aging.

In its vernacular* uses, photography is associated with

representations of identity and plays indeed a significant part in the

construction of our personal or collective narratives. It has also to a

large extent molded our perception of aging. Family albums, or more

recently blogs, but also journalistic or archival photographs document

our relation to time. Photographs accompany us in mourning losses of

so many kinds. They fill in gaps in our memory, help us build family

narratives, and create a continuum as we move through generations,

one that functions as a mirror to our growing older. The question I

raise here, however, is how can speculative photographs help us think

of aging in different ways, since the images I discuss can express both

idiosyncrasies related to aging and also possibilities of changing them.

In this chapter, then, I will look at photographic techniques and

metaphors used by artists to accommodate tensions between the state

of being old and the process of growing old. For a writer it is easier to

create alternative spaces that account for the ambiguities and

uncertainties we are faced with when we think of aging. But how does

the photographer account not for the signs of aging (signs that up to

recently have been quite invisible in visual culture), but rather for

inner realities, realities that are inevitably relegated to the domain of

* Since the terms low, mass, or popular culture are heavily connoted by

the theoretical paradigms of the 1970s and 1980s, I have preferred here the term

“vernacular”, as used in linguistics or architecture to designate other uses of

photography than artistic: family, documentary, commercial and journalistic.

The Visible 21

the invisible? Rather than insist on old age as static, the authors of the

photographs that inform my argument in this chapter, and throughout

the book, reflect precisely on paradoxical process of physical and

psychic change, as well as on the visual configurations that can evolve

from them.

How does photography visualize aspects of aging that do not

merely correspond in a documentary way to visible realities? How are

such complex psychic structures as those related to aging translated

into visual patterns? If accumulation of the stuff of one’s own psychic

life can be as problematic as loss, what are the photographer’s ways of

dealing with such accumulation? These are all questions that relate to

the modalities of translating inner life into visible patterns. As Bollas

suggests in his book Being a Character. Psychoanalysis & Self

Experience, we function in the awaking part of our existence in

accordance with the psychic mechanisms of condensation and

displacement, of symbolization and overdetermination that Freud read

in the dream work. We ourselves “become a kind of dreaming”, he

states by extension and insists on the similarities between inner world

and actual experience rather than on their differences. “Although the

internal world registers the multivalent factors of units of experience,

rendered into textured condensations of percepts, introjects, objects of

desire, memories, somatic registrations, and so forth”, Bollas writes,

“in fact we become a kind of dreaming: overdetermined, condensed,

displaced, symbolic (1992: 52; emphasis added)”. Bollas uses the

terms of dream functioning as a model of articulation of individual

character based on the capacity “to devolve consciousness to the

creative fragmentations of unconscious work” (53), one that

contributes to the build-up of what he calls “a human form”, which

emerges from fragmentary perceptions and disseminations of

consciousness routinely grasped as a chaos of forms.

Photographs deviating from the mimetic reproduction of

reality bring to light precisely such tensions between external

perceptible form and internal chaos of forms by creating a peculiar

sense of space which relates to temporality as a process instead of a

fix moment in time. In that space, different age-selves, or different

images of aging exist in simultaneity. Most of the works I discuss

below suggest indeed an intermediate area between reality and illusion

(an adult equivalent of Winnicott’s “transitional space”) by

Touching Surfaces 22

imaginatively exploring the possibilities of the photographic medium

not to delude but rather to construct visual analogs of unstable

perceptions and of their possible development into patterns. Focusing

on the intersections of the psychic with the corporeal to approach

realities of aging, they run against photographic conventions and also

against conventional ways of looking at aging.

2. Jeff Wall, “The Giant”, 1992.

Color; transparency in lightbox, 15.1/4 x 18.3/4 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

The Visible 23

1. A Huge Body in a Small Frame.

Jeff Wall

[...] she is not an old lady but simultaneously a young

girl and a child and all of them. Czeslaw Milosz

[...] people are not just their own age; they are to some

extent every age, or no age…

D.W.Winnicott

In his photographic work “The Giant” (2), Canadian artist

Jeff Wall boldly addresses the delicate subject of the female nude.

Through a series of reversals of sizes that make up the illusionary

space of this photograph, Wall suggests a psychic space that can

simultaneously contain multiple ages. A naked woman on the landing

of a library staircase is reading a scrap of paper while other readers go

about their own business. The confusion in the perception of space,

suggestive of Escher’s architectural puzzles, is counterbalanced by the

poised pose of the woman – modest yet unashamed. Another paradox

results from the dimensions of the picture. In spite of its title, “The

Giant”, this is a small format photograph (15.1/4 x 18.3/4 inches), an

otherwise unusual size for Wall’s work. The relatively small size of

the image replicates metaphorically the boundaries and closures

imposed upon representations of the elder body. A huge body in a

small frame. A visual pun as it were: a condensation of growing old,

which is figured as maturing (growing in size) and getting older. But

this is also the naked body of a woman placed in an open, public

space. Size functions here as a visual metonymy for age. Magnified,

overexposed, the woman is self-absorbed in her own private world,

one that remains secret to us. Denuded of any other signifiers of her

identity, she simply gains respect for the human being in its most

genuine – and most vulnerable – appearance. The monumental

architecture of her body defies the structure and size of the public

space. The fact that the naked body is located within the space of the

library suggests a syncopated overlap of the world of experience with

the world of knowledge. In an uncanny way, this image bridges the

large and the small, a sense of openness and a sense of confinement

Touching Surfaces 24

(and perhaps of self-contentment), the geometry of rationalized space

and the unpredictable habitations of the unconscious. Incidentally, in

the 1995 Jeff Wall retrospective at the Jeu de Paume Gallery in Paris,

“The Giant” was placed in a corridor, a space of transition, surprising

the viewers as they rounded the corner with its very discretion. And

discretion is precisely what is so odd about this bold photograph, so

unlike many inauthentic recent photographs of middle-age female

nudes in popular magazines.

As in Lacan’s reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Purloined

Letter”, the mystery of “The Giant” lies in its very openness. It is an

openness that paradoxically suggests interior corridors, flights of

stairs, meanderings and hidden corners of the psyche – knowledge

contained within the covers of books and passing into the body.

Significantly, the photograph is not printed on paper but on a

transparency framed in a lightbox that intensifies the illusion of a third

dimension. The multiple sources of light contribute to the dazzling

effect of the photograph. There is the light in the photograph itself,

there is the impression of light that made the photograph possible, and

there is the light in the box coming from behind the image. Another

space is thus created, one that radiates light from a hidden (inner)

source. Physically and metaphorically, the photograph converts the

unseen into (visible) matter. Yet, at the same time, the image acquires

a transparency that enables us to see through the body into another

space, into another dimension. There, this older woman, the Giant,

probably entertains a dialogue with the younger – smaller – figures in

the picture. And in fact, the geometric center of the composition is

occupied by the small figure of a young woman situated on the same

staircase landing, walking, as it were, in the direction of the figure of

the older woman whose presence she seems to ignore. There are other

characters on that staircase whose structure recalls the centuries-old

pyramidal model of the ages of man and woman: our going up from

childhood to maturity and from there on down to the grave. Its

broken-angle geometry together with the presence of the small figures

definitely belonging to a different reality than that of the Giant (and to

actual photographic captures of different spaces) disturb however that

hierarchical pattern. We might, then, read this image of an older

woman’s body framed by an irregular pattern as an ironic

transcendence of age, for despite the unabashed display of her naked

body, the composition of the work turns the viewer’s attention

The Visible 25

towards inner spaces. Its syncopated visual rhythms echo the conflicts

between internal and external perceptions of age.

Wall uses computer manipulation to obtain effects of

displacement and condensation that unsettle conventions of the nude,

as well as traditional representations of the aging body. Like many art

photographers today, he is known for working across the boundaries

that separate documentary from art photography. He has chosen, in the

words of photography critic Vicki Goldberg (1997: 32), to

“manufacture a reality that has the effrontery to look real”. For most

of his photographs, Wall brings in actors or performers who

reconstruct real-life scenes. He puzzles the convention-laden viewer

by making use of the very conventions he attacks and thereby

visualizes confusions between reality and fiction that clichés coming

from vernacular visual culture can create. Where then can one

psychically situate “The Giant”? In the realm of fantasy? Of desire?

For, to its owner, the aging body is always a reality, always a fiction –

a composite made up of past or prospective images, a portable set of

generational images. Like the Rilkean angels alighting on the reading

tables in a library in Wim Wenders’ film Wings of Desire, the Giant is

a powerful archetypal presence, one whose meaning, however,

remains suspended in ambiguity. As Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in a

letter in 1915: “Everywhere space and vision came, as it were,

together in the object, in every one of them a whole inner world was

exhibited as though an angel, in whom space was included, were blind

and looking into himself (1963: 16; emphasis added)”.

Do we not sometimes notice in people who are older (our

grandparents, friends, passersby) this sense of looking into oneself, of

detachment and abstraction from the real that Freud associated with

the death instinct?1 With time, it is true, we seem to turn the world

into ourselves. It is probably not (only) because of the limitations of

our body that we tend to move or travel less, but (also) because of a

self-containment that prompts us to pursue longer journeys within

ourselves. Like giants in fairy tales or in myths, we eventually contain

so much space.

Most commentaries on Wall’s “The Giant” have in fact

focused only on this mythic quality of the woman’s body as a fixed

1 For a reassessment of this position, cf. Woodward 1991: 47-51.

Touching Surfaces 26

image, thus rebuffing it as a potential vision of inner experience about

the changing body over time. Discussing enigma in Wall’s work,

photography critic Jean-François Chevrier (1995), for instance,

dismisses this otherwise quite enigmatic photograph as simply

“allegorical” and “funny”, thus voicing, even if unconsciously, the

common attitude of keeping our eyes closed to the exposure of older

shapes.2 Aging can trick an eye trained in conventional readings for

conventional signs. Even more reductive is Richard Vine’s decoding

of the mytho-poetic figure of “The Giant” as a “geriatric amazon”

who “though somewhat withered in her extremities, retains a

powerfully sexual torso and breasts, suggestive both of the physical

losses that accrue with age and of the erotic self-identity which may

nevertheless stubbornly persist” (1996: 91; emphasis added). Vine

interprets the relation between knowledge and experience in the

photograph in consonance with linear narratives of age. He views

pessimistically and, shall we say, dramatically, “the goddesslike

idealization of the cultural pursuits that engage the surrounding

students” as a representation of the futility of those pursuits that “will

not save them from time’s insidious devastations of the flesh” (1996:

91). Is not this reading of the nude as mythical figure in contradiction

with its being a sign of the decaying flesh? For if the fear of one’s

mortality is what probably prevents the viewer from seeing this nude

as a beautiful, accomplished body, is it not also the fear of one’s own

immortality likely to provoke the denial of such images? For eyes

used to idealized representations of the naked body, is the openness of

this image blinding?

Yet, if classical art forms or modern advertising have made

it possible to artificially fabricate youth, one could also imagine the

reverse, namely fabricating old age, and thereby introducing such

images into varied aesthetic circuits. In her article entitled “Photos

That Lie – and Tell the Truth”, Vicki Goldberg (1997: 32) seizes on

the productive nature of this paradox that confuses the relation

between the natural and the artificial. “The most direct way to the

2 Wall also comments about humor in this image in relation to the

discrepancy of sizes. He considers “The Giant” and “Abundance” (one of his other

images representing an old woman) as visual equivalents of a “philosophical comedy”

(Jeff Wall 1996: 21). In his own words, “The Giant” is an “imagery monument” (21)

expressing his intention to magnify “what has been made small and meager, what has

apparently lost its significance” (78).

The Visible 27

visible”, she writes, “is to make it up”. The re-created, illusionary

location of “The Giant” suggests such reversals owing to which the

confusing perceptions of the psychic body turns into physical

stabilized shape. Yet, instead of aestheticizing the body, Wall exposes

it as it is – not as a youthful body, but as an accomplished shape. The

body as significant form. Fiction documents here a reality that sees

beyond the visible, beyond habits of perception.

3. Jacqueline Hayden, Figure Model Series (2A), 1991.

Unique silver gelatin print, 84 x 52 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

Touching Surfaces 28

2. Long Hair on Older Women.

Jacqueline Hayden; Hervé Guibert

Paris, August 12, 1978

Suzanne

The letter that I would write to you

might seem indecent: for it would be a love

letter.

You seem to be talking to me, and I

to you, we seem to communicate through these

photographs much better than through words.

With the same love that I wash your hair,

depilate your chin or massage your tender

muscles, my dream would be, of course, to

photograph your body.

Don’t ever be afraid. If you turn

blind, I will come and read to you. And

when you feel yourself dying, call me, I will

come to hold you in my arms.

Hugs and kisses: Hervé

Hervé Guibert

In her essay “Visible Difference. Women Artists and Aging”,

Joanna Frueh (1997: 197-220) discusses the discrepancy between the

formal norms established by the female nude in Western art and

popular culture and the real female body in terms of the opposition

between the norm embedded in cultural icons and what appears as the

shapeless reality of the body. “Aging women”, she insists, “are

excruciatingly aware of the visible changes in form that occur before

their own and others’ eyes, the ‘shapelessness’ that makes them, even

more than young women, unable to be the incarnation of perfection”

(212).3 Important art shows such as “Feminin-masculin” or

3 In Lacan’s description of the throat of Freud’s patient, Irma, we are

reminded that it might be, in fact, the form (as fixed, definitive, that is, not alive) that

we might fear together with the formless (which, involving transformation, is life):

“The flesh one never sees, the foundation of things, the other side of the head, of the

face, the secretory glands par excellence, the flesh from which everything exudes, at

The Visible 29

“Formlessness: A User’s Guide” presented at the Centre Pompidou in

Paris in the late 1990s have explored this problematics in modernist

and contemporary art works, one in which the shapeless takes its place

in the alphabet of forms. Of course, a chain of diverse shapes informs

the history of the nude from archaic Venuses to cubist figurations of

the body. But the primary variable in the history of the nude is the

binary fat/thin. If each period reinvents the feminine, the photographic

images that explore the rich texture of the aging body will, perhaps, in

time reshape the category of beauty.

This seems to be the intention of Jacqueline Hayden in her

compelling series entitled Figure Model (1991-1996) (Woodward

1999: 227-231), a project involving the creation of a gallery of

photographic nudes of older men and women (3; 21). Ranging in age

from sixty to eighty-four, they picture either their own versions of

classical poses or they simply improvise. The fact that her sitters have

worked as professional models in art schools (all but one were still

active at the time of this project) contributes to Hayden’s notion of

challenging canons of beauty in Western art that have informed our

sensibilities for centuries, shaping what we see. As Hayden puts it:

“Our public view of the body is much edited, whether conditioned by

the ideals of classical sculpture or the images of modern advertising”

(1996: n. pag.). Placed on a dark background, the nearly life-size

black-and-white figures of the Figure Model Series are abstracted

from all social context. The pictorial quality of the photographs (the

result of the artist’s direct intervention on the emulsion) foregrounds

the shapes of the models’ bodies and sustains the intense tactile

quality of the photographs. A dripping effect seems to cradle the body.

The light Hayden uses softens the texture of the skin without however

intending to efface the signs of age on the body, only placing them in

a different perspective. For the lighting gives the flesh of the models

the translucent quality of marble or alabaster. They are – as the size of

the works indicates – statuesque. But the effect is double. The soft

light brings the surface of the skin closer to the eye. In the

transparency of these bodies, we also read their frailty. The figures in

the very heart of mystery, the flesh in as much as it is suffering, is formless, in as

much as form in itself is something which provokes anxiety” (1988: 154-55; emphasis

added).

Touching Surfaces 30

these photographs are both art-like and life-like. That Hayden went to

nursing school and worked in a hospital is relevant here. Her

experience of holding, washing, and watching over the elderly shows

in the gaze she projects on her models, a gaze that seems to envelop

them as it places them in a creative space. Where Wall uses distance

as a form of modesty and even pride to protect the exposed body,

Hayden uses closeness, a sensual approach that breeds a space in

which the models act out the realities of their bodies within the forms

and fantasies of art history or of their own imagination. I should add

that these photographs are shown unframed, a fact which enhances the

fragility of the art image and, implicitly, that of the represented aging

self. That they are unframed also points to the human body’s

resistance to being framed by restrictive categories, to being

immobilized into fixed forms. Sometimes the models have brought

along canes or bandages, thus incorporating accessories of the aging

body into its aesthetic reconstruction.4 Each of them has her or his

version of the aging body. That the prints are unique, stresses the

singular qualities of their interpretations of aging.

Hayden’s choosing models of both sexes is an implicit

reconsideration of the relationship between gender and aging, one that

echoes Woodward’s interesting suggestion that “in advanced old age,

age may assume more importance than any of the other differences

which distinguish our bodies from others, including gender” (1991:

16). Makeup and costume discarded, the resemblances in the aging

bodies are more striking than are their differences. Yet, as the large

format of Hayden’s photographs suggests, so is their potential

monumental quality, a quality that symbolically redeems the

diminishing that may come with time.5 Images such as these are

crucial to the visual integration of the realities of old age into an

aesthetic circuit, especially because Western art has mostly relegated

images of old age to the domain of the caricature. Real without being

either cruel or sentimental (as documentary photographs of the elderly

4 In his recent choreographies, Merce Cunningham also wonderfully

incorporates the incapacities of his own elderly body into the performance. Dancers

such as Cunningham, and also Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, or David Gordon have

contributed significantly to a repertory of creative representations of the older body. 5 I am reminded here of Richard Avedon’s dramatic close-ups of his

father’s almost androgynous expression (1993).

The Visible 31

can sometimes be) and fictive (set in an art studio context and placed

against neutral, pictorial backgrounds) without being unfaithful, these

art photographs present the viewer with an aesthetics of expressivity as

opposed to the aesthetics of effacement that we find in the in shape

contemporary icons of aging in the media. Unlike these media clichés,

in which women and men tend to be either idealized or objectified, the

nudes in Hayden’s work appear rather as representations of internal

objects, each of them one among many “sequential self states” (Bollas

1992: 29-30) that negotiate tensions between actual and internal

realities and address in a complex way, in Hayden’s words, “our sense

of identity and our immortality” (1996: n. pag.). In a different way

than family photographs do, these images can function – for both

spectator and models – as transitional objects that accompany rituals

of passage from one age to another. Her models are, Hayden has said,

“professionals who are working to be translated and transformed

through the pictures” (Flynn 1994: n. pag.; emphasis added).6

The effect these photographs can produce on the viewer

compares to a moment of instant recognition – of the phantasmatic

unitary self or of a generational code one is part of. If these figures

can be looked upon as objects of desire, desire has a wide spectrum

here. “The experienced body is deeply erotic”, remarks Frueh, “for it

wears its lusts and (ab)uses of living” (1997: 212). But as she also

notes, the experienced female nude “contradicts the sex object status

of most female nudes” (212). Frueh’s understanding of this

unconventional – or until recently, unrepresentable – form of desire

shows in Hayden’s photographs. “Perhaps the aged and aging female

body”, as Frueh puts it, “can become an object of love, for the old(er)

woman herself to have and to hold” (212; emphasis added). What is

then seen conventionally as a sign of aging could be read as a sign of

the woman’s changing attitude towards herself – her self-esteem, her

desire or, as Germaine Greer sees it, her coming to possess serenity

and power (Pearsall 1997: 363-387).7

6 Hayden has pursued her unconventional exploration in the field of art

canons and art models in her digital photography series Ancient Statuary (1997). Cf.

“Argument”, Chapter 4. 7 We find qualities similar to those I have discussed in Hayden’s work in

a series of photographs that the British artist Melanie Manchot took of her mother:

fifty large-format photographs printed on canvas and processed through painterly

techniques. Manchot also examines the aging body with a protective, inquisitive gaze,

and, like Hervé Guibert, she “projects her own identity into the future”. Manchot

Touching Surfaces 32

Still, the association of eroticism, or of any form of positive

affect with the old body, is indeed against the norm. The photographs

of French writer and photographer Hervé Guibert – I am thinking, in

particular, of his portraits of his aunts Suzanne and Louise – have

been received with reserve at the opening of the exhibition in which

they were first presented in 1979. Their scope belongs however to an

entirely different area than either eroticism or overexposure of aging

figures. Diagnosed with AIDS, Guibert created most of his works of

fiction and his photographs in the 1980s with the awareness of the

impending approach of his own early death. Characters in some of his

novels and in his book Suzanne et Louise. Roman-Photo (1980; 2005),

the two sisters – they are in their eighties – appear to be an important

affective and visual site of prospective identification early in his work,

even before the onslaught of his disease. A strange foreshadowing.

Guibert’s photographs are radically different in tone and

intent from those of either Wall or Hayden. Different too is his highly

charged emotional involvement with his photographic subjects, one

from which he gains distance through mise-en-scène. In both his

fiction and in his essays, Guibert repeatedly refers to his love and

affection for the people he photographed. Like beauty or the aesthetic,

these categories resist definition. For Guibert this vaguely defined

form of love exists in a larger realm of creativity shared between

aesthetics (as in love of beauty) and ethics (as in care for the other).

Combining affectivity with sensuality, this form of love saturates the

artist’s entire visual field, extending from people to objects and to

habitats. Paradoxically, it is this very attachment that enables the

photographer to take distance from his subjects (most of them close

friends). For in turning them into objects of vision, Guibert is aware

that the photographer always betrays them. His passion for

photography originates, therefore, in his very resistance to it. What he

documents then is not a material reality but an affect. And bearing

witness to his love for his subjects has been, as he notes in the

introduction to his collection of photographs Le Seul visage (1984),

the aim of his entire activity. However diffuse or effusive this may

seem theoretically, it is an aesthetically powerful argument.

“shows the female body removed from time and place”, notes Katja Blomberg, and

she monumentalizes age “with modesty and distance”, “shattering the boundaries of

shame and taboo”. Blomberg in Manchot 1998 (n. pag.).

The Visible 33

4. Hervé Guibert, “Suzanne”, 1979. Courtesy Christine Guibert.

Touching Surfaces 34

In his photographs, Guibert does not intend to efface the

signs of old age, but, on the contrary, to make them visible, even to

enlarge them. In one of these photographs, for instance, Suzanne is

pictured holding a huge magnifying glass in front of one of her eyes

(4). A daring project: to see both behind and beyond the signs of old

age! One a widowed pharmacist, the other a former nun, Suzanne and

Louise are Guibert’s protagonists in his scenarios of aging. He has

them pose in their domestic environment, one in which he stages, with

affection and humor, an intermediary phantasmatic space where his

own anxieties and fantasies liberate the two women’s world of

subdued desire. This is also a touching story of mutual love, one that

unfurls the imaginations of the two sisters and engages them in the

creation of the poses. Like the active participation of Hayden’s models

in the composition of the poses, this collaborative project documents

the powerful creative potential of old age, one that still awaits further

exploration.

In indirectly reflecting on his own aging by projecting it

onto the two older women, Guibert also transcends sexual difference:

the two women pose as objects of his own inquiry into the textures of

older age. But the two women are also mirror images to each other, a

detail that brings up questions of difference along with those of

resemblance. As sisters, they are naturally likenesses of each other.

Yet one is more pensive, while the other more inquisitive, as in the

photograph that shows them contemplating their own images in their

bathroom mirror. Like Guibert’s prose fiction, these photographs are a

mixture of authenticity and reconstruction. They have a ceremonial

aspect. They also have an ironic and a playful dimension and so hover

wonderfully between reverence and daring. At the same time and in

spite of their theatrical character, these photographs are also marked

by a nakedness of style similar to Guibert’s writing – a directness in

the treatment of the image, a desire to spend it all, a passion for

looking at the world as if the intensity of the gaze itself might coat the

real in a thin film, one scarcely visible yet indelible.8

In contrast with the portraits of Suzanne and Louise,

Guibert’s photographs of young people – in Le Seul visage, for

8 Guibert has developed this motif in his short fiction “Roman posthume”,

published posthumously in La Piqûre d'amour et d'autres textes suivi de La Chair

fraîche (1994).

The Visible 35

instance – are often idealized; some of them adopt romanticized poses.

Between his self-portraits or the portraits of friends and those of the

two old women there is a gap.9 In his work, as in his own life, Guibert

skips middle age. Yet, in following the two old women he loves into

imaginary death, Guibert traces his own destiny as a human being and

as an artist. A series of images actually stage Suzanne’s death, casting

her as the main actor. Unlike Hippolyte Bayard’s famous 1840

photograph, “Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man”, or, closer to him, his

friend Duane Michals, Guibert does not perform his own death in

front of the camera. Instead, he displaces anxieties related to it onto an

other while frustrating the plot of photography as a conveyor of

factual truth, as Bayard did in the early years of the medium. In the

texts accompanying the picture, we learn that Suzanne wants him to

photograph what happens to her body at the medical school after her

death, and he gives a long account of what he imagines will happen.

For Suzanne, accepting to pose for her nephew is to come to terms

with death as possible reality. Yet, in having Suzanne perform her

own death, Guibert posits it as possible fiction. In the way she poses,

she seems to dream herself out of life. She enacts her death with a

playful sense of complicity. It is turned into a joke, a wink behind

death’s back. This is Guibert’s signature of shamelessness and

modesty, the same mix with which he boldly recorded the last months

of his own life in the video piece, entitled significantly, La Pudeur ou

l’impudeur (1991).

Modesty, or decency, or delicacy (“la pudeur”) is not

dictated by social norms but rather by a respect for privacy. It suggests

an attitude imposed by intuition rather than rule. One of the most

stunning images in the series is the unbraiding of Louise’s long, long

hair (5). Liberated in 1945 from the Carmelite convent where she had

spent eight years, Louise (not to be confused with French women

whose heads were shaven for being suspected to have “sinned” with

the enemy) had let her hair grow, decently coiled and pinned atop her

head. By convention an erotic symbol, long hair is not part of the

public visual idiom of the older woman, if not as a caricature. It is

seen as obscene because erotic, hence inappropriate to old age.

9 With the exception, perhaps, of two photographs of his parents, where

the portrait of the middle-aged mother holding a picture of herself when young is an

overt and parodic commentary on aging. Cf. Guibert 1984: 18.

Touching Surfaces 36

Casually entitled “Une transformation”, this sequence of

elegantly unbridled portraits results in an actual transfiguration of

Louise’s gloomy face, one from which emerges the hypostasis of a

new self. A self which to the protagonist’s eyes is also old (that is,

reminiscent of a younger self). As in a fairy-tale, she suddenly turns

into a resplendent woman. When she looks at these pictures of herself,

Louise experiences a moment of derealization. Divested of her

habitual image of herself, she thinks she sees the other, that is, her

sister (and this is an interesting dramatization of what is a common

reaction to one’s own aged image in the mirror – a fear of what

Pearsall (1997) calls “the other within us”). As Guibert writes:

Isn’t what happens on Louise’s face at the moment of the picture taking,

an actual transfiguration? When I showed her the latest photographs of

herself where she appeared with her hair undone, her face relaxed;

exceptionally beautiful, and having suddenly lost her age, Louise does not

recognize herself, she first thinks she sees her sister: “it is not I”. (Guibert

1980: n. pag. emphasis added; all translations from Guibert mine).

Once “transfigured”, once transformed into a photograph, an

art object, Louise is estranged from her own image of herself. Whom

she sees instead is somebody familiar (her sister), not a stranger but

not exactly her, either. Loss of age (of the conventional masks of age)

can mean liberation. However, this is a form of freedom that can also

be experienced as confusion, as loss of identity – hence a form of

death. (Not long after these photographs were taken, Louise actually

did cut her hair short, “as if photography were a sacrificial practice”,

glosses Guibert.)

Louise had, in fact, been deprived in another way from her

own image – “separated from my image”, as she puts it – during her

years in the Carmel convent: “There was no mirror at Carmel, not

even the right to suspend one’s reflection in a window, or in the wash

basin, in the morning. For eight years, I had not seen myself” (Guibert

1980: n. pag.; emphasis added). And she comments strangely: “But I

don’t regret anything. When I think of it, these eight years were the

most wonderful of my life ...”. There is yet an even larger gap in the

two old women’s images of themselves that comes from the common

idea that, in Guibert’s words, “as we grow old we become ugly, old

age is not showable” (1980: n. pag.). The two women had no

photographs of themselves taken after the age of thirty. It is no

The Visible 37

surprise, then, as Guibert reports, that “they were surprised by this

image of themselves that I was giving back to them, after a gap of

forty, fifty years”.

5. Hervé Guibert, “Louise”, 1979. Courtesy Christine Guibert.

Guibert’s aesthetic reconstruction of the two women’s

femininity transforms the obscene (what is offensive to accepted

standards of decency and modesty) into the erotic, his erotic, that is,

his love and desire for life, which, paradoxically, he documents not far

from the threshold of death. A logic in which Eros and Thanatos are

not in struggle with each other (as in Freud’s scenario), but strangely

intertwined and ultimately both absorbed into Guibert’s aesthetics of

love. By undoing an artifice – the braided crown of hair – that had

frozen the eighty-years-old woman into a portrait of a schoolgirl,

Guibert restores Louise’s chaste figure her sensuality. At the same

time, he grants himself something very important: an image of old

age, one that in his later photographs he seems to anticipate the

mourning of. In the posthumously published volume, La Piqûre

d’amour (1994), several of Guibert’s texts contain that possibility of

anticipated mourning through which he paradoxically extended his

own life by “stealing some years, some months to write against death

not only the books of his anticipated maturity but also, sending them

Touching Surfaces 38

out like arrows into the future, the very slowly ripened books of his old

age” (Bianciotti: 1994).

While Guibert looked gently and patiently both at and after

the two sisters, while he thought of them as photographic images of

another life, the very slowly ripened books of his old age were in the

making. Suzanne et Louise was published in 1980. Hervé Guibert died

at age thirty-six in December, 1991.

In more than one way photography has always been linked

to death or to mourning. Related to our perception of aging,

photography can also trick time by effacing traces of aging through

technical cosmetics. Yet the superb way in which Guibert associates

affection and erotic signs with old age here makes of these

photographs not only compelling aesthetic objects but creative

elements in the self’s long combat for preservation and reinvention.

3. Images That Matter.

Terry Pollack; Cindy Sherman

She is looking at something visible, distant,

but perhaps coming slowly closer.

Susan Griffin

There was age in her hand.

Dawn Raffel

The photographs that I have discussed in the previous

sections share a concern with the phantasmatic realm of aging. The

artists create settings, stagings, photographic fictions that make the

changing body visible while emphasizing its relation to dream,

knowledge, experience, art, death. Instead of faking or effacing signs

of aging, they explore the expressivity and creativity of old age. The

gaze of the photographers is gentle without being sentimental. Instead

of idealizations, we are faced with alternatives to both artificial and

The Visible 39

negative portrayals of aging. Other art photographers have addressed

aging as matter and enhanced artifice to incorporate contrasting

images of the self over time that resist representations of the body as

the exclusive locus of cultural and discursive practices related to

aging.

We have seen with Guibert that rendering old age in

photographic works can place one in imaginary spaces in future time.

To accommodate the passing of time the subject tends to project itself

as a whole. Yet, to the extent to which that sense of wholeness borders

finitude, it is fixity of form that we might actually fear and not

deviation from form or shapelessness. That very fear of fix images of

old age entails a necessary disruption. Disjunctive images of the body

are, then, not only enactments of the phantasms of fragmentation that

accompany old age.10 Created by younger artists on the mode of

meditation, these images also map out a matrix of freedom, ways of

creating metaphors of temporality.

In photography and film it is harder to fake old age than

youth (although digital photography makes now possible any shift in

time and space). In her series entitled Homage to Käthe Kollwitz

(1992), Terry Pollack experiments with such reversible traveling from

old to young age. In Pollack’s remakes of some of the German artist’s

self-portraits (a process of introspection and representation that spans

Kollwitz’s life in her drawings and prints), it is highly significant that

she uses younger models to play out a wide range of contradictory

emotions related to aging. In this series about our tenuous relation to

time, aging is used both referentially and metaphorically. It constitutes

the very matter of these images, all kallitypes11 printed on rice paper.

Pollack uses alternative processes to integrate elements of

time (of another time) into her work – the aging of the paper, of the

pigment. The images are evocative, nostalgic. Enacted by a younger

model, a phantom self (companion in our journey in time), the aging

figure in Kollwitz’s originals is sublimated in Pollack’s photographs

into a diffuse yet dominant presence.

10 For an analysis of literary representations of the relationship between

the fragmentation and the wholeness of the body in old age, cf. the chapter

“Phantasms of the Aging Body”, in Woodward 1991:167-91. 11 A kallitype is a photograph resulting from an iron and silver printing

process used in the nineteenth century. Contemporary photographers use it owing to the richness of tones that this contact printing-out photographic process provides.

Touching Surfaces 40

6. Terry Pollack, Homage to Käthe Kollwitz, 1992.

Sepia; kallitype print on rice paper, 6 1/2 x 4 1/2 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

The Visible 41

In one of them (6), significantly, the face takes refuge from

the spectator’s gaze. The viewer’s attention is displaced from the body

to the background. We are projected into the future by going back in

time. Individual aging is placed here in the perspective of a larger time

framework. We are invited to step out of our bodies, into a costume,

into a pose. Photographer and model collaborated closely in creating

this sense of temporality through the plastic conception of space.

During the preparation of the setting and the discussion of the poses,

Pollack declares to have literally witnessed the model’s “taking on

age” in order to convey what to her was crucial for the work, “going

into another space.” (2006)

At the opposite pole are Cindy Sherman’s photographic

images of old age in her History Portraits (1988-1990), her Sex

Pictures (1992), or the Horror and Surrealist Pictures (1994-1996).

Her reconstruction of well-known Renaissance portraits (1988-1990)

– some of which suggest caricature by exaggerating the aging of the

originals – addresses idealizations of beauty and the authority of

canons in an approach which differs from Hayden’s observant gaze at

her subjects. Like in the other impersonations Sherman has created, to

fake old age she uses makeup, postiches or false body parts. Attached

to these representations is also a desire to go beyond layers of paint

and time in search of human forms transfigured by the artists. Like

Guibert, Sherman unbraids her models, yet not gently, but rather with

a kind of childhood cruelty that undoes the toy to see what it is made

of. She cunningly explores the creative potential within that

destructive impulse through pictorial devices by using enhanced color

effects, contrast, texture. As in her sex series (which allude to Hans

Bellmer’s dolls), in the portraits Sherman attacks taboos or clichés of

representation frontally and stages wild fantasies by expanding the

limits of what photography can show. While deconstructing the

Western canon of beauty, Sherman’s grotesque depictions of aging,

which are actual character compositions performed in front of the

camera, ironically refer to clichés about visual representations of the

elderly (the crone, the witch).12 Yet by making use of these clichés,

she also addresses some of our visceral fears related to the

12 For a historical and sociological analysis of the origin of these

representations, cf. Herbert C. Covey’s book Images of Older People in Western Art

and Society.

Touching Surfaces 42

visualization (that is, the materialization) of old age or of the body in

pain.

In her 1993 Fashion Series,13 Sherman has wonderfully

incorporated the very materiality of age into her photographs by

creating a subtle optical illusion, one at the limit of visibility

(“Untitled # 276”; “Untitled # 282”). This is what I would call a grain

effect, one that she had used in some of her early Untitled Film Stills

series in order to veil the image, to enhance its suspense, to delay the

decoding of the figure. In two of the fashion photographs, the hands of

Sherman-the model are foregrounded, touched by age spots*. Given

the large format of her photographs, the grain of the paper is

extremely magnified and especially visible on the close-up of the

hands. The age spots read as paper grain. Transposed on paper, a

surface as fragile and resilient as skin, the age spots are not only

preserved, but also in a visually provocative way, celebrated. Here,

age provides the texture of Sherman’s work as it provides the rich

textures of our lives. Exploring the becoming of the body is in fact

only natural within the logic of Sherman’s entire work, since over the

years she has always used only her own body as a model. However, or

precisely because of this travesty of the corporeal, her reconstructions

of aging extend beyond the body. The only time when Sherman uses

non-Sherman and non-human models for her photographs (before she

turned away entirely from her own body to use mannequins from

medical supply catalogues for the Sex Pictures) is in a series of

relatively abstract compositions evoking decay and death (1985-

1987). Very pictorial, shot with dramatic lights and intense color

filters, these images that seem to dodge the body represent, in fact,

diverse rotting matter that Sherman had collected in her studio and

studied as it changed, metamorphosing over time. What becomes of

the material stuff of our lives? How is matter affected by the passage

of time? How can we integrate such stuff into the psychic and material

economy of our lives as we do with the residue of everyday life that

pass into our dreams only to unravel deeper, hidden patterns? Referred

13 More recently, Sherman has worked for fashion designers, in the style

of her more recent typological studies, by deconstructing the fashion canons of beauty through the caricatural overemphasis of all markers deviating from those canons.

The Visible 43

to as the “bulimic” (or the “disgust” series, Krauss 1993; 200614),

these images come close to the unstable balance between lack and

excess, between fascination and rejection relative to what eludes the

form of our bodies. The force with which they play on that ambiguity

strikes at a threshold of sensibility. The pictorial distribution of these

elements in the photographs does not coat the real with a cosmetic

layer. It shifts our perspective on a common reality, since by placing

the actual organic degradation of matter into an aesthetic environment,

Sherman reveals the transformative possibilities inherent in that

process – a cycle instead of a dead end. The fact that the shapeless

portions of matter in her photographs are aestheticized does not

necessarily make them more agreeable to the eye. Some viewers

might still consider them ... disgusting, others (to the great surprise of

the former) ... engaging. It is a matter of taste, one could say. But it is

mostly a matter of point of view. To the realistic viewer (the one who

is tricked by the mimetic power of photography), these uncanny “still

lives” will appear as mere detritus. To the imaginative viewer, they

will appeal as possibilities of life. In them time is incorporated, not

denied. So is the possibility of form.

The very popularity of her work and the counter-canon that

the Sherman pictures came to represent is itself a manifestation of the

culture’s need of representations deviating from both role models and

canons of beauty. Sherman enjoyed great popularity in academia in

the 1980s and 1990s particularly because of her ironic impersonations

of conventional roles of women. What explains, however, Sherman’s

success as an artist is her personal and daring use of the art of

photography in ways that unsettle mimetic photographic conventions

and thereby unsettle readings of the real. In her analysis of Sherman’s

History Portraits series, Rosalind Krauss argues that Sherman’s

approach to images works precisely against “the sublimatory energy

of Art” (1993: 174). In this sense, given the degree of entropy they

entail, both the “bulimic” series and the art history portraits have a

definite anti-aesthetic character. Yet, Sherman creates disorder by

forcing the limits of her craft. In both subject and form, her series call

on a wide range of modes of representation – cinema, painting,

14 For a recent selection of articles on Sherman in which the essays in the

1993 volume are reprinted, cf. Krauss 2006; and, in French, Durand et al. 2006.

Touching Surfaces 44

fashion, fairy tale, history, and, more recently, a gallery of

contemporary typologies which she impersonates. She destabilizes the

mimetic function of photography by staging entropy through a

sophisticated system of aesthetic strategies borrowed from other

modes of representation. In elaborating what Krauss calls “the field of

a desublimatory”, Sherman’s subversion of the geometry of beauty

bears witness to the fact “that behind the façade there lies not the

transparency of Truth, of meaning, but the opacity of the body’s

matter, which is to say, the formless” (1993: 174).

It is, however, arguable that the strategies Sherman uses

represent what Krauss calls a “transgression against the form” (109)

since Sherman’s understanding of form is, I would hold, rather

generative. Form as mutable, dynamic, perishable: a perfect analog to

the art of photography itself. Yet her images also explore the potential

of form in disorder. Although her work presents figures, both the

historical series and the sex series (the images of old age included)

have a non-figurative dimension. Fragmentation and shapelessness are

not the exclusive avatars of old age.

Sherman refers indeed to idealizations of the body and to

stereotypes of feminine mystique. At the same time, through the

aesthetic codes that she disrupts and then reconfigures, her work also

questions materialistic reductions of the body. Laura Mulvey sees in

what I would call Sherman’s “matter” series (what other critics call

either the “disgust” or “bulimic” series), “a monstrous otherness

behind the cosmetic façade” (1991: 148; Krauss 1993: 192-93). Yet, I

would suggest that what we find there is, in fact, a part of the human

that eludes discourse, but not significance. Few commentators of

Sherman’s work address its tactile sensibility, its aesthetic qualities.

While illuminating an important aspect of Sherman’s complex project,

most of the ideologically oriented readings of her work support, even

if in an unconscious way, our culture’s fear and anxiety related to

matter, to some of the stuff we accumulate, to detritus, to a part of our

humanity that is not framable by social discourse. Similarly, the image

of decaying flesh, one recurrent in the discourse of aging, is an

example of the poverty of metaphors our culture has for representing

the transformations of the body.

The Visible 45

4. A Space to Hold the Gaze.

Terry Pollack; Geneviève Cadieux

I realized that, while I was writing about my childhood,

about a certain year of my childhood, I was writing from

everywhere, writing about my whole life, all years

confounded, of this life, as I had never done before.

Marguerite Duras

In a composition entitled “Death Mask” (7), Terry Pollack

superimposed a slide representing a portrait of her grandmother on a

photographic self-portrait. Part of an installation piece that included a

taped narrative where the grandmother tells the story of the loss of her

first baby, this photograph creates an intricate pattern of

identifications and projections that are made visible in simultaneity.

The grandmother’s wrinkles show on the young artist’s face from

another space, a sense of depth conveyed by the different qualities of

the superimposed images: the transparency of the slide, the

opaqueness of the initial self-portrait, and the fluidity of the Polaroid

print. The uncanny character of this combined portrait shows precisely

in the textures enhanced by the lighting Pollack has used and by the

contrast between the figure and the ground. All add to the density of

the photographic matter, and also to the extent of the photograph’s

temporality. This double portrait can be read as a memorial to the

grandmother, a search for identifications, and also, as a projection in

time. Unlike the journey backwards that we see in the Kollwitz series,

here past, present, and future are framed together. It must be added

that Pollack’s work has developed in directions that are often at a

distance from the body and rather deep into the habitations of the soul

or the archeology of emotions (“The Archaeology of Fear” is, for

instance, the title of a series of photographic meditations on violence

that she created in 2003). Throughout her varied projects, her

exploration of actual spaces or recreations of imaginary ones revolve

indeed around questions of temporality, like a melancholic echo that

her use of the camera and her thinking of images places in a lucid

perspective.

Touching Surfaces 46

7. Terry Pollack, “Death Mask”, 1987.

Color; large format Polaroid print, 20 x 24 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

As in Pollack’s visualization of a generational simultaneity,

we can experience the physicality of overlapping generational

features, just as our old and new selves intersect, or various places we

have inhabited or traversed are superimposed in our mind to

The Visible 47

compensate for disruptions in space and time. As Bollas remarks,

redefining D.W. Winnicott’s notion of a true self (the vague site of a

wholeness of being as opposed to various fragmentary false selves), it

is hard to conceive of the self as phenomenologically unified. The

difficulty resides in the fact that “the true self is not an integrated

phenomenon but only dynamic sets of idiomatic dispositions that

come into being through problematic encounters with the object

world” (Bollas 1992: 30). Similarly, I would say that there is no true

old self but a permanently fluctuating relationship between a younger

and an older self, perceived now as bracketing (in time: hence the

sense of closure, even of claustrophobia or of estrangement from

one’s chronological age), or as suspension (out of time: hence the

sense of insecurity). These different forms of being or of experiencing

being, also associated with different ages, can at times be perceived as

glimpses of a posture, a feature, or a tone of the voice. In a short

conversation with a friend my mother’s age, for instance, I can see

through her to others, as in sequences of different photographs

projected rapidly on an imaginary screen. In her gestures and words I

read visitations of my mother; in the impatient zigzagging of her

hands, I see her daughter’s; in the undertones of her voice, her own

mother’s idiom. In such ways we are able to grasp our lives as a

continuum, ways so different from the sense of hierarchy presupposed

of old age.

As in the case of the cubist unfolding of the different sides

and facets of an object or figure not visible to the eye, the

photographer’s conundrum is how to represent as a plausible (that is,

visible) form of reality the different forms of being and the different

states of consciousness that inform our sense of identity. Our desire to

see our selves as a whole, to see the histories of our bodies as an

unfolded scroll meets what Jean-Pierre Nouhaud has called “the

photographer’s renewal of the panoramic desire” (1987: 26), namely

his idea that the part of the real shown in a photograph is not a

fragment; that what it shows equally contains what it conceals thus

enlarging the photographic perspective from the visible to the

invisible.15 In making visible those “dynamic sets of idiomatic

dispositions”, in Bollas’ phrase, speculative photographs present us

15 The fragmentation and reconstruction of a linear perspective in David

Hockney’s photocollages also expresses such panoramic desire. Besides his

landscapes, one might think in particular here to his mother’s portrait in photocollage.

Touching Surfaces 48

with new modes of visibility, with new ways of relating to the real, to

time passing.

Double or multiple exposure is a common photographic

error. It is a visual reverse of a slip of the tongue, one that makes

latent images surface, instead of vanishing, unexpectedly. The same

effect can be obtained by superimpositions that visualize a physical

impossibility: that of being in two or several places at once.

Metaphorically, these double or multiple images visualize in fact the

many places we travel within ourselves, or phantasmatic selves who

inhabit us. We all host within ourselves dormant images of aging,

invisible prints on a film that waits to be developed, one in which

various age-selves connect (or, as in Myrtle’s case, struggle to

connect)

In Pollack’s intriguing composition of superimposed images,

one form shows through another, as if by looking at a single image we

could have access to many images, the familiar as well as the unseen,

the conscious as well as the unconscious. This materialization of the

condensation and displacement processes of dreams produces an

uncanny effect: the recognition of patterns of thought that bring us to

remote or yet unknown facets of ourselves. It is owing to such images

that we keep in touch with different forms of the self, that we travel in

time back and forth. They give glimpses of the mind’s probing into

the chaos of mental images, attach them to material forms.

Double images can also give form to transient perceptions of

the self, to forms of double consciousness that we experience in the

dream, and sometimes in actual life, often in relation to perceptions

the aging self, when one takes distance to observe, to look closer into

the emerging self. Such divide shows in the photographic composition

entitled “Blue Fear” (1990) by Canadian photographer Geneviève

Cadieux (8). Here, the superimposure is not between images of two

generations, as in Pollack’s mask, nor is it between two age-selves.

This is an altogether uncommon mirror image of old age. In this large

format photograph printed on masonite, the torso of an elderly man

seen from the back is superimposed on a frontal close-up of his eyes.

The enlarged image produces a contradictory effect of both attraction

and repulsion, a pair of affects not unlike our ambivalent relationship

The Visible 49

to our own aging or, sometimes, to old people themselves. The

spectral portrait is, as the title suggests, deeply disquieting. Blue fear

– to be scared to death – is the fear of death.

8. Geneviève Cadieux, “Blue Fear”, 1990.

Color cybachrome print, 73 x 116 inches. Photo: Louis Lussier.

Copyright Geneviève Cadieux. Courtesy Galerie René Blouin, Montréal.

Immersed in blue (the color of the man’s eyes, perhaps the

only physical attribute that does not change over time), the whole

composition appears as an emanation of his vision, of his emotions in

relation to his old age, to death. In the transparency of superimposure,

consciousness dissolves, vacillates in the instability of forms and

Touching Surfaces 50

colors. This exorbitant surface of skin-cum-gaze disturbs the

boundaries between the physical and the psychic body. The

photograph itself seems to dissolve under the beholder’s gaze, like

time that passes, like light eating into the paper, into the skin. The

work expresses a fear stronger than that of the precarious image of our

changing bodies: it is the fear of our very vanishing to which the

photograph alludes. Recreated in this transparent photographic reality,

however, fear is transformed into an indefinite and diffuse feeling. It

becomes almost fear tamed, something soothing. This effect results

from the paradoxical spectral area created within the image by the

superimposure of two photographs. It is an analog to that inner space

Rilke describes, that of a blind angel looking into itself. (The project

was initially entitled “Blind Faith”, and blindness is the intriguing

subject of other works by Cadieux.) Here, the image includes inner

space. The photographed subject’s gaze, one that uncannily mirrors

that of the viewer, creates an interstice, an area filled up with air, as it

were, between the two simultaneous images of the same person, a

buffer space to hold that metonymic body, to abide the crisis of aging.

Such photographs can be considered as transformative holding

objects. They go further into the perception of aging than

documentary photographs precisely owing to their aesthetic effects

and create, I would argue, an illusion of vision as a modification of the

sense of touch in a more enhanced way than painting can do, and

thereby, an uncanny closeness to the photographed subject. Larger

than life, “Blue Fear” participates in this exacerbation of touch to

create a powerful holding environment. The disturbance in outlines

and conventions in this composition helps us imagine spaces in which

one can experience concomitant forms of consciousness of the self.

Like Hayden’s pictorial fields in which naked bodies are displaced

from the usual habitat of images of the elderly, the puzzling

perspective of this work not only expresses but also sublimates the

fears and anxieties related to aging by placing them in an appropriate

aesthetic environment. For as they question classical or current public

images of the elderly, such photographic works pose the problem of

the representation of the body by using the metaphoric potential of

optic deviations.

In his essay on Cindy Sherman, Norman Bryson (1993: 219)

reminds us that the constructionist understanding of the body as a

social and historical representation faces its limit with the problem of

The Visible 51

pain. Perhaps even more so, an understanding of the aging body

confronts that same limit, what Bryson calls “the boundary of the

discoursive empire”. This raises fundamental questions about

representability and knowledge. If as psychic images, ages – like time

– do not exist in isolation but rather simultaneously (so that we can

read the younger woman through the older woman, the mother

through the daughter) is it at all possible to isolate aging as a sign?

How is it visually possible to symbolize the contradictory experiences

of the changing body? Bryson’s articulation of the conflict between

discourse and the reality of the body is suggestive in this respect: “the

body is exactly the place where something falls out of the signifying

order – or cannot get inside it. At once residue and resistance, it

becomes that which cannot be symbolized: the site, in fact, of the real”

(220).

The very de-figurations of the reality of the body that the

images I have discussed here present – be they grotesque (Sherman),

lyrical (Cadieux) or, both lyrical and ironic (Hayden) – address the

limits of representation. They do so by placing the focus not on limits

imposed by convention but on limits that evolve naturally from the

relationship the photographers establish with their models. In the

photographic works I have discussed here, the artists do not figure the

human body overtly mapped by social discourses with assigned

meanings. Nor do they isolate their models from social contexts in any

essentialist way. Instead, these artists capitalize on the metaphorical

potential of a body on which inscriptions of varied natures coexist in

different degrees of visibility (hence, for instance, the focus Cadieux

places on “concepts of vision, both ocular and extra-perceptible”)

(Pontbriand 1990: 82).16 The images that we see bring evidence about

both physicality and its sublimation.

Consider this important detail in “Blue Fear”. We see the

body of the man from above the shoulders. Part of his body has been

left out of the frame. The viewer has to “restore a body to the vision”,

as Régis Durand has pointed out in connection with one of Cadieux’s

16 Cadieux makes an important statement in contrast with the

marginalization of the aesthetic in the cultural discourse of the 1980s and 1990s:

“When an artist (particularly a woman artist) works with images of women, questions

of sexuality, politics, voyeurism are discussed. However, as far as I am concerned, the

most important aspect of this installation [“The Shoe at Right Seems Much Too

Large”] deals with concepts of vision, both ocular and extraperceptible” (Pontbriand

1990: 82).

Touching Surfaces 52

other works (1990: 124). The space that holds the blue gaze is

symbolic for a gaze that holds the whole body. The poetic body.

Inspired by these photographic works, I have come to think of the

poetic body as a form that ensures the connection between the

physical and the psychic self, one that eludes rationalizations of

discourse or hierarchies of narrative. In a single vision, it brings

together imaginary age-selves, not with the constancy of the phantasm

but as fleeting images, like photographs themselves. The poetic body

as a mental (and here) photographic construction helps keeping in

touch with one’s different ages or different age-selves. As an unstable

form that represents the subject’s all-embracing consciousness, it

structures multi-layered experience, and creates a generational

continuum within the self. Yet the poetic body is elliptical. It contains

and is comforted by loss. Volatile, it nonetheless has a particular

inconsistent persistence. The consciousness of the poetic body is not a

mental image, but rather a diffuse retinal memory, now intense, then

evanescent. It participates in a fiction necessary to the slow and often

painful process of internalizing aging, a fiction that brings us from one

age space to another to see our life as from everywhere in both space

and time. It is both a displacement and a condensation of ages. From

that privileged perspective that bridges past, present, and future, ages

do not exist in isolation. We are not stuck in time. We ourselves create

such metaphors of continuity, metaphors that provide a link between a

larger past and a more extended (yet, with time, vanishing) future, as

if these metaphors were, literally, vehicles that transport us from one

age destination to another, now backward, then forward.

As I approach the end of this chapter, an after-image persists

in my visual field. It comes from E. J. Bellocq’s “Storyville Portraits”

dating from ca. 1912, found by accident and restored to paper form by

Lee Friedlander from the original glass plates in 1970. The image is

that of a young woman from a brothel in the Red District of New

Orleans (9). Posing unsophisticatedly in front of a big wooden bed,

she is nude except for her black stockings. On some of Bellocq’s

plates, the faces of the women have been covered by mysterious

scratches, as if to conceal their identity or to erase some vital part of it.

But in this particular re-photographed image, there is also an intricate

network of accidents on the surface of the glass plate that looks, on the

smooth surface of the paper print, like a piece of unweaving lace

The Visible 53

partly covering the naked woman. Shapes emerge from these

accidents. A constellation of dark spots frames the woman’s body

placing it further in space. And where once the scratches were, the

plate is now also cracked, broken. A dark cavity opens in place of the

face. The image of the woman has come to us fragmented,

deteriorated, touched by time. Attractive yet phantomatic. In its

fragility, the aged photograph restored to new form evokes what is

most moving and also most disturbing in our difficulty to envisage the

shapes of our own aging. Enigmatically enclosed in it lie the

unpredictable configurations that it may take, along with its

paradoxical aesthetics.

Touching Surfaces 54

9. E. J. Bellocq, “Storyville Portrait”, Plate 41, ca. 1912.

Copyright Lee Friedlander. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

10. Jim Dine, “Heart’s Door”, 1999.

Digital pigment print, edition of three, 68.3/4 x 48.1/4 inches. JD52D.

Courtesy of the artist.

2

(In)visibility:

Photographs that Make a Change

Argument: the Photographic Unconscious

The camera sees even beyond the visual

consciousness.

Ralph Eugene Meatyard

In the previous chapter, I have addressed the problem of the

invisibility of the aging body from two different viewpoints. First, as

an absence of the aging body in current cultural representations up to

the 1990s. Then, in relation to perceptions and representations of

aging in the work of art photographers of the 1980s and 1990s in

whose engaging, often provocative visions I have read an articulation

of physical and psychic aspects. From those photographic images that

challenge the cultural notion of visible signs of aging, I will now turn

to artists who explore and extend our understanding of visibility by

showing perceptions and mental processes that are invisible to the eye.

How can photography render mental images and processes visible?

How can such “visibility” redefine our understanding memory, or of

the unconscious, and bring into consciousness various age-selves?

Since its early days, photography has indeed been associated

with psychic processes. Photographic operations, the mechanisms of

the camera, and the dark room itself have, over time, supplied

suggestive metaphors for the functioning of the mind precisely where

the language of rationality was facing its enigmas. Modern theories of

memory and of the psyche emerged at the turn of the twentieth

Touching Surfaces 58

century in parallel with the development of photography and other

optical devices, though, as Frances A. Yates has shown in her seminal

history of representations of memory (1966), mnemonic devices have

since ancient times been associated with visual methods of organizing

material to be remembered. More recently, in Metaphors of Memory.

A History of Ideas About the Mind (2000), Douwe Draaisma1 brings

into focus the metaphors provided by technologies of all times to

facilitate the understanding of mental processes. These include

technologies of image-making (from wax-impressions and the camera

obscura, to photography, cinema, and holograms) and, more recently,

computer hard disks, all of them devices that serve memory systems.

The very difficulty to define elusive memory processes

philosophically, he argues, has called for these metaphorical models

that try to grasp the processing of experience in the mind’s dark room

and are inspired by devices used to preserve it. Similarly, in an essay

comparing photography with other recording supports (tape, or the

film used in cinema), Max Kozloff holds photographs for “a class of

objects that comprise a sophisticated and rather mysterious memory

system” (1984: 19; emphasis added).

Such models – photography and cinema among them – have

also been used in order to make consciousness and the unconscious

graspable. In his Creative Evolution (1908), Henri Bergson associated

the mechanism of thought with the emerging form of cinema (“The

Cinematographic Mechanism of Thought and the Mechanism of

Illusion”). In his book Matter and Memory, he describes the body as a

“conductor” in order to highlight the solidarity between memory

images and movement and that between mental and body memory. In

discussing the question of corporeal memory “in the form of motor

contrivances”, Bergson notes that the body “can store up actions of the

past”, the body itself being “never more than one among these

images” (1896; 1910: 77). “The faculty of mental photography”

belongs for him to subconsciousness rather than to consciousness,2 a 1 In his recent book, Why Life Speeds Up as You Get Older (2004),

Draaisma explores the nature of autobiographical memory and its relation to the

passing of time.

2 For his study on matter and memory, Bergson makes extensive allusions

to the photographic device, in particular in the chapters: “Of the Survival of Images.

Memory and the Mind” and “The Delimiting and Fixing of Images. Perception and

Matter. Soul and Body” ( [1896] 1991: 133-178; 179-224).

(In)Visibility 59

space in which actions of the past are being retained much like light

impressions on a sensitive plate. In his “Interpretation of Dreams”,

Freud employed the metaphor of the photographic device to illustrate

the functioning of the psychic apparatus. Other theories of memory (as

corollary of the unconscious) and of dreams (as its expression) have

often used analogies with photographic processes,3 yet mostly by

considering photography a replicative rather than a creative medium.

It is to a large extent photography’s capacity to “fix” an image that has

called for the understanding of memories as precise and static, stored

in the mind like photographs in an archive. “Photography imitates

memory”, stated George Santayana around 1912 in his conference,

“The Photograph and the Mental Image”, “so that its product, the

photograph, carries out the function imperfectly fulfilled by the

mental image." (Goldberg 1981: 260; emphasis added). For

Santayana, the function of photography was definitely that of fixing

the image of things or beings in order preserve and potentially bring

back the memories we have of them. Although, in his view,

photography was to ensure a continuity between actual and internal

experiences, he was placing it among the mechanical and not the

creative activities, and the “irrevocable mental image” (260) was for

him rather a question of memory than one of imagination.

However, over the past decades we have learned to consider

memory as a dynamic, creative process in which imagination

recategorizes stored images. Cutting-edge medical technology has

made it possible to see into the human body and brain. Advanced

research in neuropsychology and cognitive psychology has indeed

refined – and will, in the near future, considerably modify – our

understanding of the unconscious precisely by means of technologies

that visualize mental processes.4 Rather than elaborating on these

issues, which are the subject of current debates among philosophers of

3 In his strangely eclectic book Les Rêves et les moyens de les diriger,

Hervey de Saint Denis notes: “Our memory is, to use a comparison borrowed from

the discoveries of modern science, like a mirror covered by collodion, which

preserves instantaneously the impression of images projected onto it by the objective

of the dark room” (Saint Denis [1867]1977: 73; tr. mine), or “In the depth of memory,

cliché–memories are recorded infinitely” (74).

4 For an approach combining psychology, philosophy and science in the

interpretation of the unconscious in connection to figural operations of thought, see

Bert O. States, The Rhetoric of Dreams (1988).

Touching Surfaces 60

the mind, I will discuss in this chapter photography’s possibilities to

grasp, as American photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard puts it,

what is “beyond the visual consciousness”, in order to point out how

our awareness of mental processes of aging – such as processing

memories, connecting time levels, or associating registers of

perception – is being shaped by art photographs.

My exploration takes as a starting point a question suggested

by photography critic François Soulages in his article “Photographie

avant analyse” (Photography Before the Invention of

Psychoanalysis),5 in which he discusses the reciprocal relations

between photography (as an emerging technology in the mid-

nineteenth century) and the study of the unconscious (prior to the

invention of psychoanalysis). Soulages does not explore photography

for its capacity to document and to inform but rather for its formative

dimension. To what extent, he asks, did a new technology such as

photography enlighten, modify, or enrich the understanding of the

unconscious? And, conversely, how did what he calls “the hypothesis

of the unconscious” allow for a better understanding of a new

technology (1986: 31)? These questions, inherent in the beginnings of

photography and essentially linked to its role in the understanding of

the visible and the invisible body, have gained considerable

importance today in the context of an extensive use of image-making

technologies.

In her book, The Optical Unconscious (1993), Rosalind

Krauss transforms the term in her title – one coined by Walter

Benjamin – into a concept which she uses in order to disrupt the

modernist understanding of human vision as “master of all it surveys”

in order to see it “in conflict as it is with what is internal to the

organism that houses it” (Krauss 1993:180). In his “Small History of

Photography” (1931), Benjamin had pointed to the “unknown” which

lies in wait for the photographic act. “We have no idea”, he writes,

5 Soulages’ article primarily deals with the beginnings of photography and

its paradoxical uses in psychiatry. The photographs done for psychiatric use by

Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne, in France, and by Hugh Welch Diamond, in

England, are treated in the context of their institutional destiny. One can consider the

significant detail that once the theories they were meant to support became obsolete,

from testimonial, their value became aesthetic; Boulogne’s photographs, for instance,

are now housed by the Ecole de Beaux-Arts, in Paris.

(In)Visibility 61

“what happens during the fraction of a second when a person steps

out”, a phrase he uses precisely for sequences of movement which the

naked eye cannot perceive (Benjamin [1931] 1979: 240). Inspired by

the chronophotographs of Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules

Marey – which record, by successive shots, the physical logic of

movement – and also by montage and enlargement techniques

practiced in the 1920s and the 1930s, Benjamin notes that

photography can, in fact, reveal what remains secret to the eye. The

camera can visualize imperceptible physical elements, he argues, and

it can also introduce us to the unconscious: “It is through photography

that we first discover the existence of this optical unconscious just as

we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis”(240;

emphasis added).

In his less known short prose pieces, Benjamin shows indeed

more concern with the optical rather than with the instinctual

unconscious. In these pieces, he often frames internal and external

spaces elliptically or articulates fragments of thought by juxtaposition,

as he does in his Arcades Project. In his short texts on childhood

memories collected in the volume Berlin Childhood ([1938] 2007), the

ways in which Benjamin edits material of the unconscious (memories

of actual things together with memories of dreams) recalls indeed the

photographic curiosities and the avant-garde cinema of the 1920s,

their extensive use of framing, enlargement, juxtaposition, or

superimposure. Like his dream memories, his childhood memories

emerge as a series of configurations in which internal and external

spaces are reversible, time levels versatile, and both respect the only

imperative of coherence of vision.

Krauss shows how in the works of surrealists the “optical

unconscious” was very much linked to the “instinctual unconscious”

and had to struggle its way out from a system based on the repressed

as embodied in the logic of modernism, so that the visual field

becomes, instead of a latency, “a field that is already filled, already –

to say the word – readymade” (1993: 54). If surrealists have turned the

conception of space, as Krauss puts it, “inside-out”, under the

dramatic technological changes of the second half of the twentieth

century, the refinement of optical techniques has contributed to an

extension of our field of vision, from the inside of the body (and

mind), to cosmic and virtual space. Relations between such notions as

the corporeal and the mental, or inner and outer space have been (and

Touching Surfaces 62

are being) considerably redefined. Many contemporary artists use

medical technology, for instance, in order to question notions of

identity or redefine conventions of representation.6 As a consequence

of these new possibilities of image-making, the juxtaposition of

various registers of reality (conscious or unconscious, physical or

mental, present or past) takes a variety of new forms which think of

human vision neither as a “master of all things” (as Krauss discusses it

in the logic of modernism), nor as the locus of conflicts between the

mental and the corporeal (as in the logic of surrealism). Whereas in

the surrealist collage, for instance, the seam between different spaces

is still visible, the computer collage is able to smooth it, if not to

completely efface it. As the use of digital manipulations7 in

photography shows, inner space can no longer be conceived of as a

discrete unit (a separate space, a dark room, as it were) but as a

reactivation and conjunction of zones that we inhabit mentally in

simultaneity. The visualization of such conjunctions of various

physical and/or mental spaces produces uncanny effects, as in Jeff

Wall’s “The Giant”, or in Jim Dine’s compositions that I will discuss

in this chapter. These effects do not (or not exclusively) represent the

emergence of something repressed. Instead, they reveal dimly known

shapes or emotions from the more or less distant past to insist on how

we experience the consciousness of these shapes and emotions. Such

works bear witness to the fact that changes in techniques of image-

making entail changes in the parameters of perception that compel us

to reconsider, if not to reinvent, theoretical frameworks. A more open,

less deterministic view of the unconscious evolves from these works,

6 Medical visualizations of the body have been a source of inspiration for

many avant-garde artists. In the late 1960s, for instance, Robert Rauschenberg had X-

rays taken of his entire body and included images of his skeleton in the lithographs he

made. However, besides the embodiment of a desire to go beyond the visible, medical

imagery seems to play now the role anatomy once played for painting even before it

became a legal practice, that is a cognitive role. X-rays, MRIs or DNA diagnosis have

modified our view of the body, a view that a large number of artists have been

integrating to their work during the past decade. Cf. Barbara Pollack, “The Genetic

Esthetic: DNA, MRIs, and X-Ray Visions” (2000: 136-37).

7 The distinction should be made, I would like to insist, between the

manipulations used in journalistic or any other form of utilitarian photographs and

those used in art photography. In the former case, which is not my subject here,

manipulation serves entirely different purposes (and, as the history of photography

shows, is by no means a new procedure).

(In)Visibility 63

one recalling Christopher Bollas’ extended notion of internal objects

as imprints that shape individual idiom throughout life, and not only in

early childhood. In his book, The Shadow of the Object (1987)

(incidentally, a wonderful metaphor for photography), Bollas places

internal objects relating to remote memories in the mental area of

what he calls “the unthought known”, that is “the sense of being

reminded of something never cognitively apprehended but

existentially known” (emphasis added; 17). From a variety of

technological devices, Dine derives, as I will suggest, a photographic

method that enables him to redefine the scope of the consciously

known within the context of “the unthought”, namely, in the

spontaneity of the creative act.

From the perspective of a philosophy of representation,

Patrick Maynard has defined photography as “a technology which we

can see progressively thematized as meaning” (1997: 309; emphasis

added). In his book, significantly entitled The Engine of Visualization.

Thinking Through Photography, Maynard addresses the controversial

question of what kind of reality photography represents by

highlighting the complementary relation between the creative and the

epistemic functions of photographic technology, which amplifies, as

he puts it, “our powers to imagine things and our power to detect

things” (1997: x; emphasis added). Instead of providing equivalents

for mental processes from the domain of photography, Maynard is

concerned with the formative dimension of photographic modes of

representation. He looks at how photographs inform our thinking.

And, most importantly, he also looks at how they can shape our

thinking as well as at the impact photographic procedures might have

on our perceptions and thought patterns. Similarly, I read in the

photographic techniques and aesthetic strategies of speculative

photographs possibilities of reshaping our understanding of corporeal

and mental realities. Such imaginative projects participate, I would

argue, in what Richard Wollheim has called “the corporealization of

thought” (1993, x). In spite of photography’s being largely associated

with fixing the present fugitive moment, underlying our phantasmatic

rapport with photographs is the concern with reading interiority

through visible shapes. In the specific case of aging, exposing signs of

aging can be turned into a means of restructuring our perception of it

and, consequently, our relating to it.

Touching Surfaces 64

“Photography”, writes philosopher Mario Costa, “is not the

memory of an instant, but the memory of a shape” (1990: 17;

emphasis added). If the image perceived by the photographer in his

viewfinder is a promise of a photograph, the resulting photograph

stands out not only as a record of what the camera has caught but also

as a hypothesis of a mental image, or of an association of several such

images. In turn, how often doesn’t a photograph itself become a

memory – participating to more or less faithful restorations of

memory? Or how often isn’t it read – unconsciously – as a perception

of time formalized in a shape we can speak of, describe, relate to other

shapes, to other perceptions in which experience is stored, invisibly?

We can think of such perceptions, I will suggest, as forming patterns

that sustain the wholeness of the self in time.

The photographic works I will discuss in this section

participate in our understanding of memory, the unconscious, and our

consciousness of time passing in a paradoxical way since, like

Benjamin’s prose pieces, they do not imply disclosing unconscious

images specifically encoded into symbolic meaning in the

psychoanalytical sense. Instead, they present us with visual analogs of

inner life perceptions and experiencings in a variety of puzzling

formal patterns whose disclosure of meaning is cunningly deferred.

These images are neither transpositions nor narratives of inner life, but

forms of visual experience that inform our understanding of varied

forms of consciousness of the self. Unlike documentary, informative,

or testimonial pictures, speculative photographs require from the

viewers a form of “willing suspension of disbelief”, that is to say a

bracketing of their belief in the photographic reproduction of reality,

since these photographic images bring into visibility shapes which our

eyes cannot perceive but which we experience rather synaesthesically.

Photographic equivalents of such shapes or configurations of shapes –

that surface only dimly into consciousness – derive from elaborate

photographic technique. They can also derive, as I will show in the

following chapters, from what we normally consider to be accidents,

or technical errors, such as the blur. By turning the mirror inwards,8

8 On the occasion of photography’s 150th anniversary, Andy Grundberg

reviewed two major shows: “On the Art of Fixing a Shadow: 150 Years of

Photography”, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and “The Art of

(In)Visibility 65

art photographers create what elsewhere I have called “la cassure

photographique”, a chasm in our mimetic understanding of

photography, or, perhaps, in an understanding of photographic

mimesis limited to retinal impressions (Cristofovici 1996: 186). As

Dine’s photographs suggest, the visual model of the unconscious or of

mental life as photographic9 is linked to the common understanding of

photography as a mimetic form in a problematic way. To the extent to

which a photograph may disturb the contours of visible realities in

order to reconstruct a picture of a thought, of an emotion, of a dream,

or of a mental image, it can be indeed faithful to an invisible reality. It

can be, not or not only, a faithful image of a specific object, person,

place, but also an image whose referent is a synthesis of spaces, of

time moments, of fragmentary perceptions of an object, or of a person.

From this perspective, photographs appeal to our senses as fixed

images of fugitive perceptions or emotions. Like imaginary referents

in the rhetoric of literary texts, a photographic fiction can be the result

of a juxtaposition of different iconic objects and metonymies of

mental images.10 The computer editing or doctoring of images ensures

the seamless representation of mental space. Instead of discontinuity,

it highlights reconfigured continuity as an essential element in the

construction of subjectivity. Such formal aspects call our attention to

the formative character of aesthetic objects, an approach that has

somehow fallen into oblivion in much of the current visual culture

critique.

Photography, 1839-1989”, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas. His review

is significantly entitled “Now, the Camera’s Eye Turns Inward”, (1989: 18-19).

9 In his essay “Une technique de l’instant ou la machine à clicher”, Daniel

Sibony draws an analogy between photography and psychoanalysis based on the

hypothesis that: “Our dreams function on the photographic principle”, (1990: 69-73;

tr. mine).

10 Philippe Hamon studied this fascinating aspect of the interference

between photography and other visual systems of the nineteenth century on the one

hand, and literature on the other. He paid particular attention to the ways in which the

various aesthetic codes in the vernacular visual culture of the time forced literature to

redefine itself. Hamon analyzes the juxtaposition of various iconic objects in

nineteenth-century French literary texts and mentions a detail that supports my

hypothesis here, namely that the objects juxtaposed in the rhetoric of texts were the

result of mental images which had already operated a synthesis of various visual

codes (2001).

Touching Surfaces 66

In its artistic uses, photography relies extensively and

increasingly so on mental processes rather than on mental states.

These processes are sometimes imperceptible moves crystallized into

figurative or abstract forms. But are, in fact, the mimetic and the anti-

mimetic impulses opposite or rather complementary visions? For, yes,

speculative photography is indeed replicative, but in a different sense

than testimonial photography can be, since speculative photographs

visualize such minimal inner processes that Nathalie Sarraute called

“tropisms”: indefinable movements which penetrate consciousness

very rapidly and represent, as was her belief, the inner source of our

existence ([1939] 1957). And then, of course, this aspect does not

exclusively concern speculative photography, but also our affective

relation to family or documentary photographs. Don’t we carry

throughout our lives the memory of images – actual, imagined, or

dreamt of – together with reminiscences of art works? Mental images

which are actually rather unfaithful to the original, since we certainly

see the photographs that we have once taken or hold in view more

often in our minds than we actually look at them, so that they act on

the mental shape we have of them, unknowingly, as much as they act

on our imagination.

Significantly, the questions addressed in this chapter were

prompted by the work of Jim Dine, an artist who has come to

photography quite recently, and to a quite special use of it, one that

unsettles categories of mimesis as well as boundaries between art

media. “I feel in photography it’s part of the challenge, to bring that

which is dead to life” (1998: 7; emphasis added). This is how Dine

sums up his approach of photography in an interview, a statement that

openly privileges the creative dimension of photography over its

traditional reflective function. For Dine does not understand bringing

“that which is dead to life” in the sense of monumentalizing the

instant, the event, or in the sense of making images that represent life

stills. On the contrary, his creative efforts focus on reaching what

photography critic Andy Grundberg has called a “latent metaphoric

potency” (1999: n. pag.), a dimension which has, in fact, emerged

progressively in Dine’s work with other art media.

(In)Visibility 67

Dine’s photographic work11 came to my attention in

connection to reading patterns of memory as sites of creativity in

speculative photographs. It struck me for its potential to bring mental

processes into the visual field as well as for its open and intentional

relation to the unconscious. In almost every interview, Dine associates

his use of photography as an artist with his exploration of what he

explicitly calls his unconscious, highlighting it as a major theme in his

photographic work. At the same time, he uses his own unconscious, as

I will try to show, as a source for his innovative technique and

aesthetics. Instead of relocating vision in the opacity of the body and

the invisibility of the unconscious, as Krauss does, my focus here will

be on the materiality of the body on which fleeting mental images are

projected, even as the body – Dine’s very first instrument of

expression, in the field of art – is only metonymically present in his

photographic compositions.

1. Jim Dine

Mirroring Marginal Thought:

an Aesthetics of Doctored Images

In inner life, time plays the role of space.

Simone Weil

Jim Dine is known as an artist who has experimented since

the 1960s with a wide range of materials and techniques, in a variety

of art media, from drawing with the body in space (in his happenings),

11 The Guggenheim Museum presented Dine’s early work in 1999, and a

retrospective of his drawings was shown at the National Gallery of Art in Washington

in 2004. His photographic work has been shown in Europe and the United States.

Dine has lived for many years in between Europe and the United States. Significantly,

he donated the entire set of his photographic work to the Maison Européenne de la

Photographie in Paris and made the same donation to the Davison Art Center at the

Wesleyan. His bent for layering and associating images in his recent photographic

work can be read as an echo of his living in various contexts, in different cultural and

visual landscapes.

Touching Surfaces 68

to pencil or ink drawing, printmaking and painting, sculpture, and

mix-media assemblages. His work in various art media has been

described as a glossary of recurring images that make up “an aesthetic

journey into a personal world” (Dine 1995: n. pag.). Dine started

working on his first series of photographs in 1995 precisely as a

means of investigating psychic material more in-depth, or, as he puts

it, as “a way to translate my unconscious into the medium” (Dine

1998: 6).12 That the theme of the unconscious comes up with

surprising persistence in his commentaries on his own work is perhaps

not so surprising since his photographs are not actual pictures that

record, in Henri Cartier-Bresson’s often quoted phrase, “the decisive

moment”. Instead of the term photographs, it is therefore more

appropriate to use that of photographic tableaux or compositions, for,

as I will show, his strategies of processing and printing photographic

images are varied and complex, from his first heliogravures to the

subsequent photogravures, and to the more recent digital ink prints.

Fields of memory, dream, and emotion are explored through the very

processing of these works that combine plastic and poetic images (in

many of them, words, lines, or sentences, written on blackboards or

paper, often smudged, add up to the visual layers). These

preoccupations can be traced as far back as his early work (the last

performance Dine held in 1965 was suggestively entitled “Natural

History (The Dreams)”). Evocatively, an exhibition of his early works

(1959-1969) hosted by the Guggenheim museum in 1999 was entitled

“Walking Memory”, a title suggestive of that solidarity Bergson

referred to between body and images in the dynamics of memory.

Why then has Dine chosen to turn to photography so late in

his life, around the age of sixty? What types of latent images do his

camera works bring into visibility?

In his essay on Dine’s photographic work, “Assaying the

Photographic”, Andy Grundberg suggests that he has not been

attracted to photography until recently “because it cannot break down

the surface of appearances as can the intervention of the hand”

(Grundberg 1999; n. pag.; emphasis added). Yet Grundberg points out

that it is precisely the wide range of technical possibilities he resorts to

that allows him to “refashion the consequences of the camera lens”, in

other words, to modify the impressions recorded by the camera. 12 Dine had in fact already “practiced” photography in a series of Polaroid

portraits and self-portraits he made in the 1970s, cf. Dine 2003, vol. IV.

(In)Visibility 69

Significantly, the resulting photographs are not always reproduced

from negatives, but either from printing plates (in the photogravures)

or from larger computer files of digital captures (more recently Dine

has largely explored the possibilities of the digital camera and printing

techniques). By using these possibilities to associate images of

different visible textures, Dine unsettles what Grundberg has called

the essential tension of his art: the one between rational space and “the

floating arena of the subconscious” (1999: n. pag.). The memory of

the camera is thus being articulated with the memory of the computer,

enhanced by it. Both the photogravures and the digital images are

carefully processed to infinitesimal detail, refined and redefined so as

to render approximations that may come closer to fleeting mental

images. Such photographic images suggest their sensory dimensions,

their transience, and the variety of patterns mental images can create.

As a result, the photographic tableau becomes a more accurate

representation of mental processes and of emotional experience. “All

my photographs”, declares Dine, “are as accurate descriptions of a

thought I’ve had, or a passion I’ve had, or a sorrow I’ve had, as

anything I’ve ever done” (1998: 10). There is however nothing static

about these “descriptions”, which, in being faithful to the dynamics of

mental life and to the ambiguities of perception, recall Benjamin’s

notion of “figures of thought”. Paradoxically, photography – the art of

the real – enables Dine to pursue a concern he has shown since his

earliest works with exploring the imaginative reaches of the real. A

new category of representation has emerged in his camera works, one

for which Grundberg – borrowing from an earlier text by Krauss

(1990) – uses the term the photographic. Grundberg defines it as “a

hybrid analog of photography per se”, a category that subverts the

mimetic association with photography to enlarge its understanding in

the sense suggested by Maynard: as a category of thought. Yet for

Dine, photography is also very much a medium among other art media

whose possibilities of expression he has been exploring over more

than four decades.

In his photographic works, Dine displaces the focus of the

viewers’ visual habits of reading photography from the real to the

mental by insisting on the potential of the camera to record thought

and emotion. In his commentaries, he parallels the speed of the

captures with the speed of dreams and with that of the eye blink. For

him, photography “mirrors the marginal thought – every frame – and

Touching Surfaces 70

it can be done so very quickly, not as quickly as the human mind can,

yet very quickly, so that one could have many, many thoughts on a

roll of film” (Dine: 1998: 8; emphasis added). However, his

photographic images are not snapshots of sudden associative flashes

(in the sense of the surrealist free association). They catch the

viewer’s attention as very exact compositions that combine

spontaneity with minuteness to create an intermediary space in which

the separations between the unconscious and consciousness are shaded

off, smudged. As James L. Enyeart notes: “the apparent incongruity of

meaning helps to induce a dream-like opportunity for conscious

exploration of what is an otherwise fleeting aspect of reality” (Dine

1999: 8; emphasis added). In light of his work in other art media, it is

important to note the material aspect of Dine’s approach which

reflects back on his understanding of the unconscious as part of reality

processed either in peripheral vision or in the margins of thought.

Consider an accurate technical note made by the Adamson

Editions, in Washington – where some of his pigment prints on canvas

have been produced – which presents us with a detailed description of

one of the procedures Dine has used for these prints:

The Dine pigment prints on canvas utilize several key

technologies. […] The images, although created entirely digitally, are not

in fact manipulated. Each capture can take up to seven minutes, a fact

that Dine uses to create a visual paradox.

The digital capture (photograph) is a carefully orchestrated

tableau. Dine uses layer upon layer of these captures that are subsequently

printed as large format images. The images are then placed into the

tableaux as new elements; these new elements are captured along with a

combination of actual objects, i.e. dolls, birds, skulls, etc.

This process is constantly massaged by Dine until a final digital

capture is created. This image is then proofed out at the studio by a high

resolution digital printer using a refined six color pigment process on

canvas. Finally, Dine may make minor adjustments in terms of color,

contrast, and overall tonality before the final large scale image is printed.

(Dine 1999: 35)

As in the case of Jeff Wall’s digital processing, which I have

discussed in the previous chapter, the use Dine makes of a specific

technical operation or of a technological device contributes to

enlarging the figural field of the image. The manipulation or doctoring

is not, in this case, a factor of misinformation (as it can be in the case

of photojournalism), but a device that turns psychic material into

(In)Visibility 71

visual effects, channels it in new patterns. Doctoring devices can

indeed intensify the metaphoric dimension of photography as well as

its formative dimension. Though different in their artistic purpose, as

well as in their actual use of digital technology (Dine’s is, in a

captivating way, closer to older techniques used in the visual arts,

more of a craftsman’s), both artists appeal to “forgery” in order to

recreate paradoxes of inner visions in which memories of actual

objects occur in a variety of patterns that define their respective

aesthetic idioms.

Dine combines photography, computer, and traditional art

techniques to doctor the images recorded by the camera in various

ways. The pictures of actual images (showing referential objects, or

figures) become elements of virtual spaces (by way of displacement,

condensation, and association, we might say, as many of them – the

raven, the self-portrait, the Pinocchio – appear in diverse

combinations suggestive of a variety of mental configurations). The

processing of the photographic captures enables Dine to objectify

inner life in a more direct way than in the other art media he has

worked with. It allows him to recreate inner space from a series of

objects of perception that can fit into many patterns. While the objects

are actual (a stuffed raven, a Pinocchio toy, a photograph, a shell, a

skull, an old mattress, a blackboard, a bunch of candles, a metal

ladder, tools), their assemblages present us with various hypotheses of

inner landscapes. Stabilizing the perception of inner landscapes relies

on leaving behind the logic of binaries to bring opposite categories –

such as the conscious and the unconscious, memory and forgetting –

together within the same space of representation, quite as they often

appear in the logic of life. Accordingly, the effects produced by such

images are ambivalent. In his photogravures, the positive

transparencies printed on a copper plate are then processed in a way

similar to printmaking techniques, which implies that the plate

undergoes the intervention of the hand. The resulting images retain

something of the roughness, of the apparently unfinished, sketchy

character of his other work. By contrast, the possibilities of visual

accuracy provided by the inkjet prints, which combine sharp with soft

tones, render a more evocative or approximate precision, one that

creates an uncanny illusion of depth and transparency.13 The elaborate

13 An interesting technical detail needs to be mentioned here for its

metaphorical connotations: the printing technology used by Dine “delivers a droplet

Touching Surfaces 72

processing of various captures, as well as the grain of paper they are

printed on produce an intense tactile effect that is enhanced in his

recent series of large-scale pigment photographs printed on canvas.

Paradoxically, such an effect alludes to the ungraspable character of

mental images, and also to the multiple sensory ways in which they

may touch us. Dine uses a specific program that allows him to “paint

in” elements coming from several captures, to vary the contrasts and

consistencies of the images, and to layer images coming from

different spaces and corresponding to as many degrees of

consciousness, to as many forms of memory. However, his intention is

not to create metaphors of mental life, but to highlight it as a process

and, I would say, as a presence, that is, as part of the reality of the

subject who constantly processes images situated on different levels of

consciousness.

The association of objects evocative of different spaces is

central to most of Dine’s photographic work. Only occasionally do

these spaces assembled in a composition directly refer to different

chronological levels, as in “North Crescent” (11), a digital pigment

print in which a photograph of Dine the child is actually the

background against which a raven projects its shadow. However, his

photographs relate to varied layers of time associated in one image, as

well as to the passage of time in many ways, and I would say,

increasingly so. First, thematically. Dine’s early large format black-

and-white photographs represent objects and human presences in

isolation or in various associations of recurring elements, some of

which can be connected to the pictorial genre of the vanities, a

reflection on the transience of life, on the passage of time, and on

death – all themes unavoidably relating to photography, to aging as

well. Some of the texts, usually written on blackboards, some partly

effaced, refer to the passage of time in a direct way. Then, time is also

present technically, unavoidably so, given the role of time-length in

the capture and processing of photographs. But also because of his

conjugating procedures of capture and impression drawn from a

history of artistic representations originating in printmaking, a history

that photography belongs to.

the size of 10 microns (the size of a human blood cell), the droplet size is variable and

therefore able to deliver an image of continuous tonality and richness with an

apparent resolution of 1.800 dots per inch” (Dine 1997: n. pag.; emphasis added).

(In)Visibility 73

11. Jim Dine, “North Crescent”, 1999.

Digital pigment print, edition of three, 48 x 68.1/2 inches. JD57D.

Courtesy of the artist.

Thematic and technical associations with temporality in

Dine’s photographs are as many ways of working with time. And then,

there is the constant reference to memory work, to bringing the inert

matter of inner life into the visual field, into the consciousness of a

shape, of a figure, or an object. These are as many ways of working

against time in a creative, formative way. For Dine, visualizing

territories of past and present experience involves exploring the past

as a set of fragmentary, transitory mental images. His photographs

challenge the viewer, as Grundberg puts it: “to comprehend camera

pictures not as ready-made frames but as images constituted by the

sum of their parts” (1999: n. pag.; emphasis added). By incorporating

Touching Surfaces 74

a stock of images from his own past work into his photographic

tableaux, Dine works with referents that have been already formalized

and function in the new work as landmarks of memory. Such

reminiscences from what he calls “my own dictionary of my own

works” (1999: n. pag.) pass from one medium to another, and are

often combined in various patterns in the photographic compositions.

When compared, the figures recurring in his photographs and in his

other works show how each of these elements contains an infinite

potential of association, and therefore of meaning construction. This

is, for instance, the case of a figurine representing a cat embracing an

ape. Dine has explored the expressive possibilities of this object

(which he found in an antique shop in 1992) in various media, with an

emphasis on the tension between object and medium: from the

smudged, elusive shapes in the drawings, to the rough ones in casts he

has made of the figurine and then incorporated into several

photographic compositions, such as “Ape and Cat in Focus”, “Love in

the Everglades”, “The Madonna of the Future”, or “Two of

Everything”, all digital inkjet prints dating from 1997. The serial

character of his entire work relates to the Pop Art tradition. Dine’s

interest is however not in the repetitive character itself but in the

transformative potential of serial work, in the changes or variations

that can occur by transposing a visual motif into another medium, or

into a different configuration, a process during which the origin of the

object is progressively lost, as it often is in the dynamics of memory.

If one considers the entire body of Dine’s work, his

permanent reshaping of recurring elements in various patterns bears

striking similitude to the memories of dreams or to the memories of

memories replayed on the mind’s screen. Metamorphosing a stock of

images prevents the artist precisely from veering into a repetitive or

obsessive use of unconscious motifs or patterns. Dine actually notes

that for him “photography seems a more accessible road to bring

down the unconscious and channel it: as grist for my mill” (1998: 8).

He seems to have chosen the photographic medium precisely on an

anti-mimetic impulse. Consequently, objects and figures in his

compositions are not illustrations of the unconscious but, like the

camera itself, instruments to access it. These elements, which can be

referred to as analogs of internal objects, of spaces of memory, and of

layers of time, structure the space of the composition to represent

(In)Visibility 75

memory not as replicative, but as constantly changing, growing even

from its own gaps.

The recurring objects in the photographs become themselves

residual memories of Dine’s past artwork. In the ironic vein of his first

Pop works, he integrates such archetypal icons as the raven, the owl,

the skull, into a personal vision that opens up the field of meaning

instead of freezing it. Serial work provides him with a means of

conjugating time (and even measuring it against an emotional

backdrop) without articulating a specific life narrative. On that

account, he uses elements coming from a personal vocabulary (and

from associative time patterns), yet he also casts new light, so to say,

on stereotypes that are part of our imaginative routine, or on elements

of commonly shared cultural codes. The irony in his titles often adds

to his demystifying icons and unsettling mental habits related to the

symbolic value of objects (the skull, the raven). For Dine cunningly

makes sure that even as we read through these associations imprinted

on our cultural unconscious we are, in fact, undoing them. In some of

the photographs the raven is, in fact, given a name, one that ironically

alludes to Dine’s first name: “Jimmy” (1997), or “This Guy, Jimmy”

(1996), a cute stuffed pet (one of the three Dine actually had in his

Berlin studio when he first engaged in photographic work). In other

compositions, this lighter register is sustained by the presence of a

Pinocchio toy simply and touchingly introduced as “Portrait of the

Boy” (1997). By varying the angle or the position and the visual

weight of these elements within the composition from one

photographic work to another, Dine also creates a displacement of

images in time and space, and thereby, a continuum of his own work.

The recurrence of images and his specific use of serial work relates to

the passing of time and, most importantly, to a way of conjugating

time levels that resist narrative closure. Significantly, the catalogue

raisonné of his photographic work, published in 2003, is entitled The

Photographs, So Far.

Bringing to consciousness images coming from varied forms

of experience creates an imaginary continuum of the self. Dine’s

actual treatment of photographic material, as well as the commentaries

he makes of his photographic experience are indeed suggestive of an

urgency of processing unconscious material as past experience and

also as a form self-scrutiny: a way of re-evaluating or redefining (or

rehearsing) one’s place in time and space. We can notice this search

Touching Surfaces 76

for more encompassing images of the self coming with the maturation

of the creative process in the work of many artists. In his essay on

memory and the imagination in later life, “The Makeup of Memory in

the Winter of Our Discontent”, Herbert Blau refers to the power of

such writers as Marcel Proust and Samuel Beckett not only to bring to

surface accumulated memories but also to transform what he calls

“reruns of repression” that are likely to accompany the habits if not

the anxieties of the aging self. He insists on the fact that these two

writers decondition habits of perceiving memories by relocating them

in the conscious experience of the present. “What we see in Proust as

in Beckett, who studied Proust and Freud”, writes Blau, “is a powerful

drive to bring into consciousness all of what belongs to it. So long as

it remains in a primary or inaccessible state it constitutes part of our

life which, in its essence, remains unlived” (1986: 26; emphasis

added).

The vocabulary of elements reworked by Dine in various art

media can be considered instead as reruns of expression: a strategy in

the economy of time. In his work over the past four decades, visual

elements are not recycled by way of routine. They do not stem in an

exhausted imagination. Nor do they appear as obsessive reruns, but

rather as playful access to fresh perception carried out through

incremental repetition and variation. As a consequence of such

repetitions and formal variations, his scenarios of memory do not fall

into the category of linear life narrative. Even when technically

juxtaposed, they are figured as images on transparent mental screens

that symbolically meld time lines in the space of a photograph. The

serial character of Dine’s work enhances this effect of superimposed

reminiscences. The viewer’s own memory is then called to play an

active part in the processing of the perceived image as in the case of

the series of photogravures of the raven, or of the cat embracing the

monkey. Like the memory of the artist, the memory of the viewer has

been stimulated by the partial recognition of elements from past work,

rehearsed by their migration into different art media and by the variety

of their associations owing to computer doctoring.

(In)Visibility 77

12. Jim Dine, “Nuptials”, 1999.

Digital pigment print, edition of three, 66.3/4 x 48 inches. JD59D. Courtesy of the artist.

Touching Surfaces 78

2. Editing, Composition,

and the Visual Reconstruction of Memory

As we grow older, our youth silently expands

in time, while old age conversely contracts

[...]. I and others like me live in a kind of

eternal middle age, and no wonder; for no

matter where we are in age, we are always in

the middle of time, and must weigh our future

equally with our past.

Robert Grudin

How are these elements coming from different time levels

organized and in what ways does composition participate in the visual

reconstruction of memory? We have seen that, in his first digital

works, Dine combined diverse digital captures in a seamless

composition in which images taken in different physical spaces

were brought together in a hybrid photographic composition, in a

synthesis recalling the ways in which memory networks function (or

what we know of them). In his subsequent work, he has used a

different procedure. For a series of photographs made in 1999, he

recreates mental scenes in actual compositions of objects, which he

arranges before the photo session, and then photographs with a digital

camera, as in “Nuptials” (12). Unlike his previous digital work, these

photographs are not doctored; they are not the result of several

juxtaposed or superimposed captures. In this case, Dine simply creates

the scene, builds it up like a still life, and then photographs “what’s

there”, as he puts it (2001), that is, already edited. In the first digital

works, the staging done by computer manipulation resulted into a

similar smoothing of different spatial planes. Editing enables Dine to

bring together the conscious and the unconscious, or the present and

the past, instead of placing them into a binary relation.

In his specific use of photography, Dine did actually find a

way of “breaking down the surface of appearances”, as Grundberg put

it (1999: n. pag). The compositions of these pictures of the mind are

rigorous yet – now more radically, now more subtly – de-centered,

abstracted from a well-balanced frame through his use of low angles,

contrastive lighting, or dramatic close-ups. Among his photogravures,

for instance, “The Ear” is a huge visual ellipsis of a portrait. It shows

(In)Visibility 79

just a crop of grayish hair and an ear cornered on the right side of the

composition, and then the immense shadow of the same head

projected on a wall. The composition is so extremely decentered, as if

the human presence were perceived only in peripheral vision (as an

expression of “a marginal thought”). Foregrounded here is not the

image itself but rather its double, the shadow: a light impression on a

white surface. However, like his other work, these images on the edge

of abstraction (in which the human figure seems to have “stepped

out”, as Benjamin put it) are still figurative, since they retain the

passage of objects, of human presences, or of their shadows not “like a

bug in amber”, in Eugenia Parry Janis’ metaphor for photography

(1989: 9-30), but rather like its trace only dimly recalled by the amber.

In some of his color photographs, Dine explores a new

dimension of the photographic blur produced by the computer in the

form of a geometric smear, a series of horizontal lines which deface

the figure slightly. This unsettling of the contours of the image records

physical movement and simultaneously represents minimal changes in

position, imperceptible to the eye, as in “Heart’s Door” (10). Like the

lines scribbled on the backgrounds of his compositions, the lines of

the digital blur are intermittent and roughly sketched. The lines in the

blur record as many instantaneous perceptions as the written lines. On

the significance of the latter as a form of poetry, Dine comments

dryly: “They are just lines!” (2001).

Because of its capacity to capture the fugitive instant,

photography is commonly read as an object that can preserve the past.

But the compelling question in Dine’s photographs is: how can

photography record time levels and modes of perception – verbal,

visual, sensory – that coexist in the fugitive instant of the mental

image? How do they formalize varied forms of consciousness, the

unconscious and memory among them? And what kind of knowledge

about inner life do his photographic compositions propose? For Dine,

it needs to be underlined, that knowledge is not of narrative nature.

While photography in general largely participates to the construction

of narratives of identity, Dine capitalizes on the non-narrative forms

of subject construction. The events that happen in his photographs are

purely visual, even when in the form of partially effaced words written

on a blackboard or on torn-up rolls of paper. As in his work in other

art media, the elements recurring in various combinations in the

Touching Surfaces 80

photographs do not present definitive scripts but only possibilities of

narrative. The forms that unconscious mental life can take are here

visual happenings recalling the spontaneity of Dine’s earliest work.

The free association of sets of objects in different patterns –

either in individual series (the raven, for instance), or in varied

combinations – allows for a wide range of possible configurations of

memory, an aspect which I consider fundamental for what we can

learn from Dine about the visualization of the unconscious. As in the

dream (or in the child’s global perception, for instance), there appears

to be a narrative, but it constantly escapes us. Time as a factor of

narrative development is thus deeply embedded in the image (it

represents, so to say, the very matter of the image) yet the passage of

time is cunningly bracketed in a skillful visual suspense that compacts

past, present, and future in one tableau and defers the exposure of

meaning. Doesn’t such suspension of time through narrative freeze

bring to consciousness, in fact, common ways in which we perceive

the passage of time, namely that it passes without notice?

By disrupting linearity and unsettling linear perspective,

Dine transposes photographically a visual journey from the present to

the past, from the real to the imaginary, and vice versa. The result is a

strange familiarity (the vague recognition of certain elements

recurring from one photograph to another, from one medium to

another). In a recent series (2004), mostly made of rephotographed

photographs, Dine has edited various images that refer more explicitly

to the past seen from the perspective of the present. Some are self-

portraits in which two images are brought together: the older Dine

with the younger, a photograph with a drawing. In others, his present-

day self-portrait appears against the background of family

photographs. The compositions highlight the fact that the camera does

not only record the past. It is also an instrument for reconstructing

memory by recategorizing elements that go in and out of the visual

field, in and out of the field of consciousness. As in the other series,

the oblique angle, the play with the contrasts between sharp and soft

focus, the subtle variations of light intensities create a visual dynamic

that enables him to deconstruct the very fantasy of the photographic

unconscious and of photographic memory understood as replicative

processes even as he makes use of this fantasy.

“Bringing that which is dead to life” is dramatized in Dine’s

photographic compositions as beating inert matter into life. He retains

(In)Visibility 81

on film the capacity of the mind to retain – in time – parts of life

faithfully, that is creatively, by permanently reworking and

recombining sets of elements. This particular approach makes it

possible to accumulate visual experience selectively, so that one

object, one figure, one impression can be used in several

combinations. By being alert and faithful to process – to the mind in

progress, to the eye in movement – Dine’s photographs integrate

fantasies and realities of time passing, of light changing, of texture

gaining in expressivity or becoming fragile on the verge of extinction.

Dine works and reworks certain elements, as Grundberg has

remarked: “to transform them, from one state to another, altering their

meaning in the process” (1999: n. pag.). By disturbing the conventions

of photographic time and space, Dine invites the spectator to look at

the images otherwise. Displacement, association, and condensation of

space and time levels help him access and use images emerging from

his unconscious as material and not as a reductive set of symbolic

signifiers. Significant detail expands the sense of the unexpected or

the uncanny to create new visual realities that reflect and structure

thought through vision, and also communicate with larger collective

cultural patterns of thought. The symbolic openness of the images

calls for further reading and contemplation. It seems to block

interpretation and to reveal forms of what Anton Ehrenzweig has

called “the hidden order” of the unconscious that we can read in art

forms (1967).

The apparent playful visual dynamic of Dine’s compositions

reveals indeed a highly organized perceptual field, one which,

however, resists symbolization. And it does so owing to elaborate

photographic processing that enhances the aesthetic configurations

inherent in mental images. Composition provides fleeting images with

frames within which meaning oscillates between one shape and

another before it builds up into a relatively stable configuration.

In Dine’s photographic compositions, we have seen how

figural expression can be obtained not by completely abandoning

mimesis but rather by baffling its temptations. Now, the question is to

what extent are, in fact, Dine’s photographs about aging? A question

that seems easy to answer if we consider the photographs at their

literal level, namely that some of them – more and more with time

passing – do represent aging figures together with a stock of objects

Touching Surfaces 82

associated with classical symbols of the passage of time, and of death

(the skull, the raven), in association with childhood’s transitional

objects (the Pinocchio toy). Yet Dine’s cutting answer to this question

clearly points to the fact that aging represents for him – like the

unconscious – material for his work, in other words, life in terms of

visual experience: “If I make photographs now that move anybody,

it’s because I’m 63 years old and I’ve had 63 years of looking” (1998:

11; emphasis added).

Approaching Dine’s photographic work in terms of

representations of aging brings us naturally to the role of photographs

in the construction of subjectivity. Yet, it also alludes to the very

question of the subject of photographs, of what a photograph is about.

As Philippe Le Roux has noted in his article significantly entitled

“L’irréel photographique”: “the image itself is the ‘matter’ of

photography” (1987: 71; tr. mine; emphasis added). What are, for

instance, Sally Mann’s photographs of her children but only images

and hypostases of childhood, visual interrogations on the universe of

early life? They are not about childhood, but instead seize a glance

into the puzzling world of childhood. Like Dine, in her photographs of

children she stages a silent dialogue between ages, between different

images over time, between various visual textures of the growing

body, which is – like the aging body – so revealing in its surprises and

unexpected associations of shapes and expressions. And isn’t it

saddening – if not dangerous – that they have been subject to

controversies that are so much outside the artist’s concern?

Following that line of argument, we understand that Dine’s

actual photographic subject is in fact vision itself and the mental

workshop seen from the perspective of the older artist, in which

growing old is an experience the artist digs into as into any other form

of reality. Dine’s staging of visibility by degrees structures

photographic space in a non-hierarchical perspective. It is, in fact,

precisely by combining perspectives that he can bring together diverse

visions (as he does, for instance, when he superimposes various

captures on the same print, or when he flips the positive into the

negative). It is certainly interesting that Dine has come to use

photography in his late career as a relatively new experience but also,

in a sense, as a synthesis of his own work and as an expression of a

panoramic desire to encompass life, a desire that photographs can give

the illusion of. Some of his work looks further into the paradox of

(In)Visibility 83

time passing and of the perception we have of it by using instead of

visual images of aging, verbal images, as in “The Veronica” (13),

(incidentally a title suggestive of photographic impression). When

images of aging do appear, the question of aging is placed the margins

of the composition in a way that does not suggest avoiding it but

rather as a consequence of his preoccupation with capturing marginal

thought, as in a more recent self-portrait in soft focus and decentered

composition identified as “Untitled (Old)” (2001). And also, in a

chromatically and emotionally galvanic series of three digital pigment

prints, bearing the mysterious title “Keeperess”, which refers to aging

by way of metonymy, showing a pair of relatively old legs hanging

over a pair of old shoes placed in a pool of cadmium red. In the third

image of the series, simply called “The Letter”, the legs have

disappeared; the empty worn out shoes have now become a studio still

life, a signature.

In his previous work, Dine has used various tones of color,

from somber to psychedelically vivid, in the Pop Art tradition.

However, in his photogravures and in some of the digital prints, he has

chosen black and white based on a rich play with light effects that

actually enable him to shade off the contours of the images, so that he

passes from chiaroscuro to very fine ranges of grays, and then to thick

and charcoal-like blacks, as a mark of truthfulness of perception.

“There is ... yes, there’s a lot of darkness in the photos”, comments

Dine, “So what? There’s a lot of darkness in the unconscious” (1998:

10).

In a series of sculptures and mix-media assemblages dating

from the mid-1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, Dine displays an

apparently disconnected number of elements on platforms, shelves or

tables. Cast in bronze and some of them painted in intense colors,

others more somber, these pieces that seem to be disposed in space

casually stage the fantasy of peering into a mental factory of images.

Dine’s making use of assemblages prefigures his photographic editing

and juxtapositions. Among these assemblages, “Feral Air” (1992) is

particularly powerful, fascinating, unsettling. A series of objects –

ranging from the domestic universe to remainders of art history, from

the mineral to the vegetal – are displayed here in a seemingly chaotic

way, reminiscent of a hardware store (a significant childhood memory

often evoked by Dine). In the chromatic context of the muffled tones

Touching Surfaces 84

of this work (rusty browns, charcoal grays, grim whites), though

placed in an eccentric position, a parrot dominates the view. It is

painted in glaring red veering on the margins into bright yellow. Its

vivid colors catch the eye of the viewer while its head leaning towards

the right side engages the viewer’s gaze in a circular movement from

the heavy matter lying on the ground to that of the tools and ropes

placed on the table and the chairs, and then to wires and branches

raised like thin arms in the air. As an isolated element in such a visual

environment, the parrot actually participates to the paradoxical unity

of the random-dominated composition, since it links its heavy material

aspect with a more imaginary one. Like a red bulb suddenly turned on

in the dark room, the parrot (that we remember from Dine’s previous

work) throws momentary light on the workshop of the mind. The

scene it illuminates is messy, full of surprises, of unexpected

memories, of unbidden images: chipped, obliterated, yet abiding. Just

like the unconscious. In it share lodging tools, dismembered objects,

disjunctive mythologies: odds and ends with which one has to make

do.

The works I have discussed in the previous chapter belong to

younger artists who use older models to explore old age in varied

ways. In Dine’s case the camera work focuses on the artist’s own

world, on its alphabet of objects and human presences transformed

into visible analogs of time passing. Even when decentered by

asymmetrical framing, as in his most recent work, the rephotographed

photographs do not appear like disintegrating memories but rather like

parts suggestive of a whole. As such, they are also reminiscent of the

metonymic patterns of our lives sustained by objects and metaphors,

by miniature or fragmentary histories of personal or cultural

representations. As they loom in chiaroscuro, these shapes recall

perceptually the immediacy of mental flashes. For with time, our sight

might diminish, but we are drawn deeper, further back into the past.

The various images brought together in these photographs seem to

meet the viewer’s eye in remote corners of early life memory, where

thought and vision are in the process of being structured, where the

unconscious is a way of editing our selves, and clear liquid thought is

what we see, unthinkingly (“Clear Liquid Talk” is the title of one of

Dine’s photographic compositions). While philosophers of the mind

wonder whether consciousness might bear resemblance to a series of

(In)Visibility 85

photographs, psychologists speculate about the baby’s perceiving its

environment between rapid eye blinks by which reality is integrated

into its consciousness very much like a series of photographic flashes

that contribute to the early construction of the self. Intuitively and

independently of models of the unconscious and of consciousness,

Dine’s photographic works create moments of “aesthetic bliss”

(Bollas 1987: 28-29), fugitive images of integrity, which are – in their

sometimes grotesque somber atmosphere and their playful aspects –

evocative of that exciting element of fear contained in fairy tales. The

images of remote memories superimposed in the space of one

photographic tableau do not belong then to the notion of the repressed

in the Freudian sense. Instead, they are suggestive not so much of

childhood traumas but rather of early childhood inarticulate bliss, or

of what Bollas calls “psychic genera” (1992: 66-100). Subliminally,

they function as connectors of different age-selves (a possibility

ironically suggested in Dine’s “Me Dangling”, representing a

Pinocchio toy placed upside down and superimposed on a self-portrait

of the adult artist). In Dine’s photographs, memory is reactivated not

through a narrative but via its gaps, not exactly within the frame of an

image, but in its margins. The viewer’s attention is bidden by the

unexpected associations in his photographic tableaux, and also – most

importantly for my point here – by the suggestive way in which they

bring inner life work into visual consciousness. Like the enlarged

shadow in the background of some of Dine’s compositions, memory

itself might be vague or diminishing in consistency with time, but the

sudden surfacing of mental images into consciousness and into the

structured vision of a photograph may contain – in privileged

moments – the possibility of making us see clear liquid thought.

Touching Surfaces 86

13. Jim Dine, “The Veronica”, 1999.

Digital pigment print, edition of three, 68.3/4 x 48.1/4 inches. JD77D.

Courtesy of the artist.

3

The In-visible:

Spectral Visions, Transformative Perceptions

Argument: Photography and Perception

Thierry Kuntzel; Janice Tanaka

My face froze with the vast world of time in a smile

That has never left me since my thirty-eighth year

When I skated like an out-of-shape bear to my Chevrolet

And spun my wheels on glass: that time when age was caught

In a thaw in a ravelling room when I conceived of my finger

Print as a shape of fire and of youth as a lifetime search

For the blind.

James Dickey1

The question of the invisible is closely related, as I have tried to show,

to a variety of photographic formalizations of the consciousness of

subject construction over time, making of photography an instrument

of exploration that has structured, since its invention, private and

collective perceptions of identity. In Dine’s work, lost or hidden visual

configurations come into visibility as metonymies of the uncanny

coherence of the subject in the course of time. In this chapter, devoted

to the photographic work of Duane Michals, I will consider 1 Dickey’s poem “False Youth: Two Seasons (Winter)” refers to a blind

woman caressing the speaker’s face.

Touching Surfaces 88

photography as an instrument, a function, and a workshop of

perceptions helping us reconsider the notion of invisibility alongside

with that of reflexivity. In Michals’ approach of the invisible I read an

exploration of the limits of representation – of change, movement, and

disappearance – which he transcends by using techniques deviating

from mimetic photographic practices, techniques whose effect

highlights the dematerialization of images. Two works, which are

significantly not photographs but video pieces making use of them,

will be my guides in discussing the possibilities of speculative

photographs to represent paradoxical perceptions related to the

consciousness of time and identity.

In an installation piece created in 1995 for the Cartier

Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris, French video artist Thierry

Kuntzel staged a disquieting aspect of our bond with photographic

images as repositories of memory and witnesses of our selfhood,

which is, like photographs themselves, simultaneously built up and

eroded by time. Nostos III is the third work in a triptych devoted to the

remembrance and forgetting of images as visual objects, but also as

mental traces of one’s past selves. The only piece exposed in a large

room, the installation is composed of three elements that enhance

perceptually our mental hold of photographs. Two large format

screens face each other at a considerable distance. On one of them a

family photograph recorded on video is projected: the classical three-

quarter pose of a child – the artist himself – between his parents, in

black-and-white slightly turned into sepia. The facing screen shows an

adolescent photograph of the author. As we watch the former, the

contours of the image are fading away at a pace perceived as

extremely slow. An essential element of photographic impressions,

light seems to be now, slowly, under the spectators’ gaze, eating up

the image. To its extreme vanishing point. In the physical interval of

this process – about ten minutes long, yet experienced as a much more

extended space of time – the screen has become blank: a white surface

invaded by light, now turned into a signifier of dis-remembering.

The retinal shock produced by this vanishing image evokes

the imperceptible nature of physical and psychic transformations for

which photographs serve as landmarks. In its fading away, the

photograph projected on the screen recalls the fleeting and yet

persistent character of mental images as signifiers of both the frailty

and the endurance of our physical and psychic selves. The

The In-visible 89

disintegration of the image has a powerful impact on the viewer. Yet,

after a short pause, the image suddenly looms up on the screen. A

cycle of moving into and out of visibility and consciousness seems to

be now underway, one which is unlimited in time, since the

installation is based on this rhythmic effacing and coming back into

sight of the image. The effect of dissolution of the photograph is

intensified by the material presence of three piles displayed on the

ground, in the space between the two screens, in three large trays.

Black, white, and blue pigments (charcoal dust, starch and cobalt

powder), these are material metaphors of the light and shadows

captured by the camera and of the sensitized paper photographs are

printed on (the complete title of the installation is, in fact, “Nostos III,

powder, gelatin”).

This work engages the viewer in a meditation on the

transience of material and mental images, on our changing perceptions

of them, an aspect that intersects my exploration of visualizing

temporality here in a striking way. The cyclical dissolution of the

image displaces the focus from the common fear of seeing

metamorphoses of the body to more disquieting anxieties related to

the disappearance of images as signifiers of identity. Kuntzel’s staging

of the articulation between photographs, memory, and temporality

brings us back to the question of the invisible in quite a literal way.

That a photograph can reveal the inner side of the visible to go

“beyond visual consciousness”, as Meatyard put it, was my

preoccupation in the previous chapter. Here, I would like to focus on

photography’s potential to enlarge our perceptual and imaginative

field by expanding the limits of the visible. At the core of the present

chapter are the modalities whereby photography fixes that which is

either leaving or escaping our field of perception in the present

moment. I will explore in particular the photographic representation of

processes of moving into or out of visibility, a zone of shifting

contours, which I call, following Merleau-Ponty’s suggestion, the in-

visible.

In a restricted sense, the invisible is the contrary of that

which we can perceive, as in its dictionary definition: “that which

cannot be seen by the eye, either by nature or because it is hidden”.

However, in the dynamics of perception, the unseen is not the

opposite but the very correlative of the visible, in the same way in

which the photographic positive printed on paper is the material

Touching Surfaces 90

correlative of the negative recorded on film. In his unfinished work,

Le Visible et l’invisible, Maurice Merleau-Ponty approached the

subject of the unseen from his phenomenology of perception opening

towards a phenomenology of the imaginary and the hidden (invisible

life forms, communities, other human beings, cultures) (1964: 282).

Referring to meaning as invisible (in the sense of its being placed at a

vanishing point in contextual and connotative fields), Merleau-Ponty

calls attention to the problematic separation between the seen and the

unseen. Significantly for my point here, he does not consider the two

categories as opposites, but rather as complementary elements of a

process of meaning construction:

Meaning is invisible, but the invisible is not the opposite of the visible; the

visible itself has a membrane of invisible, and the in-visible is the secret

part of the visible [...] we can see it therein, yet all efforts to see it make it

vanish. (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 269; tr. mine)

We infer from Merleau-Ponty’s suggestion that, in fact, like

meaning itself, objects or figures can come into the field of the visible

without however being at all times graspable. This implies that what

appears as immediately visible can also act as a screen, not in the

sense of something repressed, but literally, as a hindrance to sight or

to the perception of more latent patterns of memories or cultural

imprints.2

The disquieting effect in Kuntzel’s installation results from

the slow dissolution of the image perceived as a memento of loss of

memory and also of our own slow effacement from the world. Yet, in

the progressive vanishing of this effigy-like family portrait, only its

iconic dimension is effaced. There persists an after-image, a form of

energy, which, though strictly dependent on it, is no longer articulated

into a visual object (a photograph). As the screen turns blank, the

effacing image is being stored in the viewer’s mental space. It has

become a mental image. Within the dilated duration of perception, the

viewer has traveled sensorially, in fact, not only in the future –

2 In this respect, consider a remark made by Brassaï in the preface to the

catalogue of a series of cubist photographs he created between 1934 and 1935, and in

which he made graphic interventions on the negative: “My aim was to reveal the

latent figure existing in each image. The photograph was thus turned into raw

material, the point of departure for mutations and transmutations which had nothing to

do whatsoever with the initial image” (1967: n. pag. ; tr. mine; emphasis added).

The In-visible 91

towards the moment when the image will no longer be – but also in

the past, in search of some relation to the image or to the self therein

framed. When the family portrait re-emerges suddenly on the screen,

it strikes us as identical and yet different from the photograph whose

dissolution we have witnessed. In the process, the photograph appears

as both a visual object and as the remembrance of a visual object: it

has been turned into experience, into reruns of expression (the term

that I have used for Dine’s transformative resort to a specific set of

elements).

Indeed, the transient and repetitive time structure of this

work generates a new contact with the image with each rerun. The

same image thus embraces different values of the present and it is also

a reminder of persistency, of the fact that some transparent substance

of images still survives even when they have fallen out of the optical

field or into oblivion. Due to the cyclic recurrence of the photograph

(which had been recorded with a video camera and then projected on

the screen on the fading away mode), its perception is being

transformed and it is, in turn, transformative.3 Significantly, this

elaborate composition based on the affinities between memory-work

and photography cannot be fixed photographically precisely because it

is conceived as the representation of a process. It is, as many of

Kuntzel’s works, an ephemeral fiction.4

One of Janice Tanaka’s video pieces, suggestively entitled

Memories from the Department of Amnesia (1990), is based on a

similar reflection on images as a factor of identity processing, on their

paradoxical transience and persistence in the vacillating stock of

memory. Part of a diptych,5 this work is a reconstitution of family

history from gaps of individual and cultural memory. In this piece

devoted to her mother, American video artist Tanaka blends actual

3 One might think here of a similar visually arresting moment in Federico

Fellini’s movie Roma, where a film crew accompanies the team digging for the Rome

subway. At a certain point, they fall upon a wall behind which they discover a Roman

room with frescoes. As the air enters through a hole they are breaking in the wall, the

painted images enclosed for centuries dissolve under their gaze.

4 Shortly before Kuntzel’s death, in April 2007, a bi-lingual (French and

English) collection of his texts came out together with a DVR–ROM of his works,

Title TK (2006).

5 Tanaka’s second video piece, Who’s Gonna Pay for These Donuts Anyway

(1992) is devoted to her father and is more documentary oriented.

Touching Surfaces 92

photographs of her mother with reconstructions of mental images to

explore the role of visual memory work in the process of mourning.

Some of these sequences appear literally under the form of visual

blanks which precede the surfacing of visual associations

corresponding to forgotten events or to events beyond conscious

memory (such as her own birth). As in the case of Kuntzel’s

installation, the blank screen creates a powerful effect. Here too, the

absence of image dilates, in fact, the psychological time of perception,

since in actuality the lapse of time during which the screen remains

blank is not so extremely long (a few seconds). Images function in

both works as a time-measuring device, and also – by alternating

visibility with invisibility – as metonymies of the spatialization of

memory. Like Kuntzel, Tanaka explores the expressive power of the

white screen (not a non-image but an alternative visual field).

However, instead of operating on the disappearance of the image, she

works, on the contrary, on the slow surfacing of mental images. As

equivalents of blanks of memory, the vacant screen sequences are

progressively shaped into such figures as fog or snow, which

formalize a visual potential slowly transformed into an actual

environment. In this piece, Tanaka displaces the focus from

autobiographical narrative to an account – as accurate as it might

perceptually be rendered – of the role of various types of images in

memory-work and identity construction. However, it is important to

note that this displacement of the personal originates precisely in her

failing to reconstruct her family history in a linear way. This echoes

other displacements in the history of her family of Japanese

extraction, such as internment and relocation. The effaced images or

the blank screens are powerful visualizations of “the silence which

was the key of my own memories”, as she puts it in the voice off

commentary, suggesting that forgetting might link us to much larger

communities than memory itself.

In his preparation notes for Nostos I, Thierry Kuntzel refers

to the content of his work as to a void filled up with a potential

activated by the dynamics of the installation:

Almost nothing. Almost nothing in terms of representation, of narrative –

of naming objects, actions. [...] Almost nothing. It was only that almost

nothing that allowed me – and allowed the viewer – to access another

The In-visible 93

space: the one working under, or between the image. Another space: that

is to say, simply, time (Kuntzel 1988: 149; tr. mine; emphasis added).

In Nostos III, the alternation between the slow disappearance

of the image and its subsequent surfacing accommodates time with

movement by suggesting the varied layers of temporality that exist in

the memory of an image (the recording of the photograph on video

tape being itself a way of processing visual memory). “The time that

space takes to be shaped”, adds Kuntzel (1988: 149). And, it is

significant to note that the spatialization of time in Nostos III is also

sustained by his having the photograph migrate from one support to

another: from paper to the video tape, then to its projection on the

screen. By contrast with a film camera, which records space with

more fidelity, the video camera renders time with more accuracy.

Because of its capacity to record the temporal flux more minutely, the

video camera defers the perception of sequences. It slightly segments

the fluidity of movement. The two installations are suggestive of the

possibilities to visualize the relation between movement and

temporality in video works that use photographs to evoke the

processing of mental images and their role in the fabric of the subject.

But in what ways can still images be records of temporality

as a process? How can one temporal condition coexist with another

within the frame of a photograph? And how can reflections of

temporality and movement in speculative photographs participate in

the visualization of physical and psychic change?

In his essay introducing the artists presented in the

exhibition suggestively entitled “Vanishing Presence” (Walker Art

Center, 1989), Adam D. Weinberg points to what artists coming from

different traditions, such as the Americans Ralph Eugene Meatyard,

William Klein, Duane Michals, the Canadian Michael Snow, or the

Europeans Anna and Bernhard Blume, Dieter Appelt, or Thomas

Keith, have in common: their use of “time-bending techniques to

produce images that are seemingly caught between the past and the

present and imply the future as well” (1989: 74; emphasis added).

Weinberg employs the interesting term “evolutionary images” to

characterize these varied ways of representing movement and of

drawing the unseen into the visual field. Such images capture what

Merleau-Ponty had called “the invisible membrane” (1964: 269) of

imperceptible processes of change. Weinberg’s argument regarding

the tension between the fixed and the fluid dimension of photographs

Touching Surfaces 94

suggestively intersects with my discussion of speculative photographs

that represent aging as part of a continuum of transformative

processes. The extension of visibility and of temporality through a

variety of non-conventional photographic techniques plays an

important role in these images which, as Weinberg points out, “do not

describe parcels of time corralled in a frame and clearly denoting the

past”. Instead, he insists:

They are pictures suspended in the perpetual process of becoming and

concerned with change itself. They urge us to consider the experience of

time not as interchangeable, digital segments, but as a continuous,

disturbing, overwhelming, and wondrous whole. (1989: 74; emphasis

added)

Duane Michals is part of that family of artists who seem to

work with but also mostly against conventional photographic images

to extend our field of perception as well habits of relating to time

aspects in photography. His aesthetics of change concerns discrete

moments that pass unnoticed to the eye and consequently escape our

field of consciousness. Michals’ is an aesthetics of the ephemeral that

places the question of aging in the perspective of an enhanced

awareness of the transitory. The following chapter is devoted to the

photographic paradox of producing a fixed image of a flowing

moment, that is, a passage, a transition. Something that we see and we

don’t: a visual event which emerges into visual awareness as an

interaction between different forms and levels of space and

temporality shown on the flat surface of a photograph (as Michals

does in his book of photographs and texts, The House I Once Called

Home (2003), where he superimposes on old family pictures recent

photographs he took of the house in which he grew up).

How then does the photographer bring these different time

levels into a coherent, plausible visual field? In what ways can such

deviations from conventional photographic perceptions as the blur or

the sequence represent perceptions of time? And how can the

photographer show what we normally perceive through senses other

than sight (or just within peripheral vision) with the accurate,

relentless eye of the photographic camera? How can a visual fallacy

such as the blur be turned into an optical argument?

The In-visible 95

1. Duane Michals

The Fixation of Unstable Fields:

Movement, Change, and Temporality

the fixation moves from left to right as time goes on it

becomes clockwork you will have your way and i will make

do in the end we can double back and play the field

i don’t want to deny you your own flesh and blood who

am i but a figure of speech free standing in advance of a

broken arm these things can happen when one gets

ahead of themselves

Garry Hill

A fixation that moves clockwise is a paradox which

epitomizes Duane Michals’ artistic adventure in the fields of

movement, change, and temporality. Since his early work, Michals

went against the grain of mainstream American photography of clear

and precise vision by exploring the capacity of the photographic

medium to enrich our understanding of reality through visual fictions.

His photographic work holds in balance fixation and change, and

thereby places the instant within a larger time-frame in trying to deal

with, as he puts it in his photo series Real Dreams, “one’s total

experience, emotionally as well as visually” (1976: 4; emphasis

added). And he does so mainly by using devices that run against the

common characteristics of photography: double-, multiple-, and over-

exposures, or series of pictures associated along potential narratives.

Instead of referring to a specific moment in time, these photographic

fictions lay out the question of change and that of the subject’s

evolving over time as a preoccupation with representing physical

movement and subliminal perceptions and emotions associated with

change.

If, in the history of representations, photography is the

accomplishment of a desire for a faithful fixation of moments and

forms of life, it is only through change in the creation and perception

of an image that it can record movement, as it is also only through

change that we exist. That a device producing a fix image can record

Touching Surfaces 96

The In-visible 97

14. Duane Michals, “The True Identity of Man”, 1972.

Four gelatin silver prints each paper, 8 x 10 inches. DMI.S.243.

Copyright Duane Michals. Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York.

Touching Surfaces 98

movement is a paradox which I will explore in this chapter. One

whose visual effects enhance our consciousness of the passage of time

wittingly, lightly, instead of sentimentally.

In Michals’ world, to move is to create a space of time in

which the self crosses infinitely small areas, a passage perceived as a

disturbance in outlines producing – somehow like overstated facial

expressions in still movies – the suggestion of a visual noise, or of a

visual echo.6 To move is also to touch, and to be in touch with one’s

vulnerability in the face of change.7 The tactility of the ethereal

presences in his photographs functions as a rhetorical argument for

this ambiguity. For the visual impact Michals’ work has on the viewer

originates precisely in his attempt to catch images of impalpable,

imperceptible change. Rather than focusing on the results of change,

he explores its large figural spectrum and creates corresponding visual

metaphors. Instead of representing the rational and the emotional as

separate areas, his photographs show how we think, unknowingly,

with our bodies, echoing Merleau-Ponty’s belief that experiencings

can have as much consistency and expressivity as forms of positivist

or rational thinking. In revealing – or imaging – experiencings that are

less, or not at all, graspable to the eye, Michals’ reflections on the

multi-layered nature of reality are, visually, refractive. They run, that

is to say, against common perceptions of what photography can do

and, as a result, against how it relates to time patterns, to aging in

particular.

In order to render an awareness of “total experience” in a

moment, for instance, Michals creates photographic sequences –

moving pictures, as it were – assembled in a composition, or in a book

of photographs often accompanied by texts. Many of these images

combine various visual consistencies by bringing together figures in

sharp and blurred focus. His technical and rhetoric use of what is

conventionally considered as a photographic error supports his

concern with incorporating negative experiences within our staying

6 An echo is a signifier of extension in space; inevitably one might think

here of the mythological association between Echo and Narcissus. 7 The vulnerability of the photographic image is linked to the frailty of the

self, while at the same time Michals acknowledges the unavoidable need to go along

with it: “It is important”, he states in his handwritten introduction to Real Dreams, “to

stay vulnerable. To permit pain, to make mistakes, not to be intimidated by touching.

Mistakes are very important, if we’re alert” (1976: 7).

The In-visible 99

alive: a process of taming contradictions which enables the individual

to become, to grow through change. His serial compositions are

comparable to brief fictional forms: a representational continuum

within discontinuity. By disturbing the contours of images and by

overlaying other forms of discourse on the photographs (short texts,

and, in some cases, engravings), Michals diverts photography from its

reflective dimension (even as the texts are often reflections on its

nature and paradoxes).

Considering the body of work Michals has produced within

a span of more than forty years one is, indeed, struck by his

increasingly working against the photographic medium to visualize a

subtle spectrum of forms of change: transformations of the self, of his

own vision, of ways of looking at the world. Michals works at a

vulnerable junction point of several surfaces of visibility. His

objective is half “turned inwards”, in Grundberg’s phrase (1989: 9),

since his philosophy associates the notion of external appearance to

appearances in the sense of extrasensory perceptions: imaginary fields

emanating from the real.

The body evolves in time through movement. Yet Michals

does not look at the becoming of the body in terms of an accumulation

of shapes. Nor does he look at the becoming of the self as an

accumulation of mental images, as it was the case with other

photographers whose works I have approached in the previous

chapters. He does not see the body in motion as a precise addition of

photographic sequences that document motor processes, as, for

instance, in the nineteenth-century photographic analyses of

movement done by the American photographer Eadweard Muybridge

and in the chronophotographs of his contemporary, the French

physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey, or in those of the American painter

Thomas Eakins. Michals regards the moving body as a corporeal

structure fading away. Within one picture frame or within a sequence

of images, a figure represented in sharp contours often appears

together with a double which represents the moving self, the latter

being shown as a body made of variable degrees of transparency

instead of opaque corporeality, like a shadow either partially

superimposed on its solid counterpart, or detaching itself from it. As

manifestations of the tensions between the physical and the

phantasmatic body, these photographic couples have complementary

Touching Surfaces 100

visual functions resulting in an effect of double consciousness: that of

a solid figure and of its invisible counterparts, that of a stable identity

and its shifting hypostases, or that of perception and its delusions.

Jim Dine’s photographs relate to the unconscious, as we

have seen, precisely by accumulating varied captures in the same

composition, a strategy which enhances the consciousness of shapes

related to mental images and processes of memory. Conversely,

Michals dematerializes the physical body to express – and sublimate –

anxieties related to change over time. Neither Dine nor Michals

illustrate or document perceptions of older bodies. However, where

Dine reflects on the self’s journey in time as a collection of past

moments and objects, Michals addresses the diverse aspects of change

as a series of volatile moments in the present. His visual question does

not relate to what the body was, but to what it is and what it becomes

as it moves in the instant. The body he explores the limits and

potential of is situated neither totally in the realm of the physical nor

exclusively in that of the psychic. Both metaphorically and, through

its photographic deformations, quite literally, the changing body

shows as a plastic body. Equivocal imagery, visual ambiguities and

optic puns sustain the tension between the awareness of actual

transformations and the simultaneous difficulty to grasp them even as

they happen. Accordingly, his reflection on the becoming of the self,

on how discrete moments relate to larger time streams intersects the

technical aspect of the fixation of unstable fields of perception and

optic energy.

Michals’ photographic work destabilizes fix, fixed, or

fixated images to highlight what in his novel, Three Farmers on Their

Way to A Dance, Richard Powers calls “a shifting ambiguous place of

possible meaning” (1985: 212) in a reality dominated by the instability

of signs. The technical corollary of such an understanding of

photography implies stabilizing the singular sample in a mass of

factual and sensory experience. That sample will act as the signifier of

a field of consciousness informed by imperceptible variations in the

photographed figure which might suggest more considerable

variations in perceptions of the self. The photographic fixation of

unstable fields metaphorically opens up questions of subject position

to the extent to which the plastic body moves, changes, and by

extension, acts on its own symbolic position as well as on

conventional subject representations. Without falling back on any

The In-visible 101

form of social constructionism, by treating the issue of movement in

photographic terms, Michals’ images act on our habits of seeing, and,

through their meditative aspect, on our habits of thinking.

2. Optical Thresholds

Thresholds of change

Michals is known for his use of the blur and of overexposure

as technical means of converting the energy of the physical presence

into optical illusions that can convey imperceptible transitions.

Proceeding from the common observation that signs of change are

perceived a posteriori, he displaces the focus from the fix image (the

fix position of the figure in a photograph and, by extension, that of the

subject in space and time) to a field of unstable signs perceptible

beyond the limits of the eye. The photographed figure consequently

appears in two temporal perspectives from which Michals considers

perceptions of the self’s becoming: actual time and imaginative time.

From the perspective of the former, change is ungraspable. As he

suggests, visually and textually, in the photograph “Now Becoming

Then” (15), the moment is only an illusion of a present – “a long

‘now’,” as he calls it – which is imperceptibly “radiating and

expanding and changing and flowing to itself” (1971: n. pag.). In

“Now Becoming Then”, Michals embodies this fluent time experience

in a transparent silhouette of a man about to leave the present instant

to become – within the very moment of the photographic capture – a

form of time that has passed away, namely an image. Significantly,

the figure is advancing towards a fireplace on which a mirror in a

wooden frame was placed and then touches its own double going in

the opposite direction. A white wall shows in the mirror, that is a non-

image, a mise-en-abîme of a sensitized photographic support ready to

capture a unique and elusive moment that can only be revealed by way

of discrete elements, in sequences taken at different time stations. For,

as Michals puts it: “Change is invisible. It is linked to time and we can

only perceive it in the past. We never recognize the exact moment,

despite the fact that its signs are everywhere. But change cannot hide

itself from photography” (1981: n. pag.; emphasis added).

Touching Surfaces 102

15. Duane Michals, “Now Becoming Then”, 1978.

Gelatin silver print with hand applied text paper, 16 x 20 inches. DMI.104.

Copyright Duane Michals. Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York.

The double figure represented in “Now Becoming Then”

seems to be suspended in the inner, imaginative time of the optical

illusions created by the blur and by the apposition of the two identical

images. Instead of escaping the logic of temporality, the figure seems

to move along with the vanishing present moment, an “event”, as

Michals calls it, or a “construction, an invention of the mind”.

The In-visible 103

Looking at the present moment as a mental construction makes of the

photographic image a privileged intersection of temporal planes.

Michals disturbs the contours of shapes, ripples the surface of the

photographic space, gives us to see less sharpness and more depth. His

photographs are not remains of the past, or reliquaries of remote

experiences. At a time when the discourse on photography was

dominated by the testimonial value of photographs and by the

melancholic attachment to past states retained on film, Michals draws

from the possibilities of photography to enlarge our optical field an

empiric theory of mental life in which various time planes exist

synchronically. This is a way of looking at time in photography

which, in his novel prompted by a photograph by August Sander,

Richard Powers calls “synchroneity” (1985: 235; 257; 350). Rather

than objects hackneyed by mechanical reproduction, as Benjamin’s

devotees have too often regarded them, photographs can be looked at,

Michals seems to suggest, as instruments for traveling in time, back

and forth. They enclose past experience, but also what I would call

anticipative or expectative memory, potentially contained within the

image and, one should add, given his insistence on perception,

possibly reactivated by each viewer, with each viewing, reaching

across conventional temporal partitions.

If Michals places his focus on the instability of signs of

change by visualizing temporality through movement, in his book,

Changements, published in France (1981), he addresses the issue of

change and aging as temporal processes in a more direct way. The

sequences of photographs included in this book as well as the

accompanying texts (originating from an interview taken by his friend

Hervé Guibert, in 1978) document age transitions of various kinds in

an apparently anecdotic way. The first section of the book shows a

series of photographs that Michals had taken of a friend’s first and

then second child over a lapse of time of ten years: a choice of one

shot for each year span. In the following sections, he combines

photographs of himself (taken first by others, then by him) at different

ages with those of friends and family, including two pictures of his

grandparents on their deathbeds.

From the remote moments of his past life shown in the first

photographs in the book, up to this extreme vanishing point in the

future, the images in Changements do not relate an actual life story,

but, as the title suggests, a series of changes at various points in life,

Touching Surfaces 104

through images which account for physical presence and movement in

parcels of time. Rather than structuring his book on narrative

development, Michals seems to be concerned with what develops

perceptually and mentally when images taken at different moments in

time are brought together. He is “more interested”, as he puts it, “in

documenting the facts of the invisible” (Diamondstein 1981: 119) than

in documenting physical change. In Michals’ book on varied forms of

change, the awareness of different age-selves that photographs convey

addresses the family of visible facts only indirectly, namely as visibly

plausible facts. From such a perspective, we can consider that

Michals’ photographic fictions – like speculative photographs in

general – do not reject the referential function of photography but, on

the contrary, they enlarge its scope.

For his self-portrait taken on his 47th birthday (the occasion

on which he began the project for Changements), Michals adds the

following notation in which he isolates the self from the young versus

old binary to locate it in a transitional space of age consciousness: “I

am not young, but I am not old yet” (1981: n. pag.; emphasis added).

He thus places himself in an intermediary zone of age in time, one that

brings along the awareness of its passage even as time is bracketed

within the space of the image. In many photographs, the imperceptible

passage of time is made visible in a rather anecdotic way as part of a

continuum that extends the representation of the self beyond the

present moment in a future projection. This uncanny other sense of

time is explicitly visualized by the blur.

The actual and the imaginative time dimensions are

suggestively represented in two types of images Michals placed at the

two poles of the pseudo-autobiographical narrative he constructed in

the second part of Changements. At one pole, in the past, are the

typical childhood family photographs of Michals taken by different

people: they present remote images of the growing self. At the

opposite pole, in the future, are the photographs of projections into old

age and death: fictional representations of the self. In these sequences,

actual time is embedded in the imaginative time dimension through

short fictional episodes, or events, photographic happenings, as we

might call them. Two of these photographic episodes, which Michals

introduces as “two small sequences of my old age and my death”,

openly upset the association of photography with the past. As

The In-visible 105

Touching Surfaces 106

The In-visible 107

16. Duane Michals, “My Old Age”, [1980] 1997.

Five gelatin silver prints with hand applied text each paper, 5 x 7 inches.

DMI.S.431. Copyright Duane Michals. Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery,

New York.

Touching Surfaces 108

projections into a potential future, the staged photographs locate

referentiality in the mental domain.

Section six, referred to as “My Old Age”, is composed of six

sequences which show middle-aged Michals acting as an old man. In

an almost empty room, he is moving, sequence by sequence, towards a

chair placed by the window (16). A younger man accompanies him in

this brief journey into the immediate future. Though not a blurred

figure before the last image of the sequence (as the double of the self

appears in other images), this younger presence suggests the shadow

of a former, younger self that holds the older body. When he has

eventually sat “the old man” in the chair, the young man effaces

himself in the last sequence, fading away from the frame, like a dim

silhouette in the old man’s memory. The last section of the book

touches a limit of representability. Here Michals stages his own

fictional death in four sequences.8 In a Pieta-like pose, a naked young

man is placing the dead body impersonated by Michals on a plain

board. In the following sequence, the young man is covering the body

gently with white linen. The light coming from the window on the

right is slowly getting dim. In the last sequence, the viewer only

guesses the volume of the body under the now dark cloth.9

The childhood photographs as well as the fictional

photographs of old age and death embody Michals’ philosophy of

existence as ungraspable other than as a series of illusions, implying

that at a certain level of perception we might exist only as images. In

this respect, the childhood photographs suggest here a chasm in

identity experienced when we look at images of ourselves that escape

our memory. As a consequence of their being not outside but beyond

the field of consciousness we can have of our own past, such

photographs seem somehow separated from our adult identity (the

photograph opening section 5, shows Michals one year old).

8 Michals’ photographs undoubtedly had a powerful effect on Hervé

Guibert (who wrote on Michals and sometimes posed for him) and it is interesting to

note how the uncanny preoccupation with photographic fictions translates into

Guibert’s own work, particularly in the series which I have commented in the first

chapter, where he stages the fictional death of his aunt, Suzanne (cf. Chapter 1).

9 Although Michals has transposed these sequences in a one-minute-long

video piece, the paradox of having a fixed image of an immobile body is more intense

in the photograph.

The In-visible 109

This fabricated, pseudo-life narrative in Changements

ironically suggests an omniscient photographic narrator who could tell

the complete visual story of his own life: from its beginning to its end

… and further to its perpetuation under the form of an image. The

very fact of visualizing one’s own mortality incorporates the fact of

death into the facts of life as yet another form of change. “That’s all

there is, change”, comments Michals dryly in his book Real Dreams

(1976: 4). A sense of coherence, of duration spins out of the discrete

image-units in Changements that build up an awareness of change. In

the paradoxical continuum that develops from photograph to

photograph, change is fleshed out by the awareness that each image

contains the possibility of another. Cyclic growth (suggested, as we

will see, in other sequences as well) is epitomized in the photograph

that opens the book: a baby’s wrinkled face, which, like that of a fetus,

is an emblem of life and death potential. This image heralds the last

sequence in the book and also addresses the question of how far

photography can go beyond the self’s consciousness?

Thresholds of movement

Within the chronology of Michals’ work, the photograph of

his fictionalized death is not situated in the beginning. I have however

chosen to place it at the outset of my search into his creative process

precisely because it helps me look at the plot line of his work in terms

of the tensions between state and process. Moving away from a

particular state runs against common perceptions of the photographic

image. Technically, movement produces an effacement of the image,

it renders it literally transparent. From the beginning of its history, this

has been considered as a shortcoming of photography.10 Due to the

lengthy exposure time required to capture an image, anything that

moved was rendered invisible as a shape with well-defined outlines.

Michals’ photographs of moving figures recall the ambiguous effect

10 Upon the official recognition of photography, patented under the name

of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre in January 1839, La Gazette de France reported

that “Nature in motion cannot reproduce herself, or at least can do so only with great

difficulty, by the technique in question” (Newhall 1980: 17).

Touching Surfaces 110

produced by nineteenth-century photographs in which moving bodies

appear as brush strokes even as we know that these are shapes wiped

out not by the intervention of the human hand, but by the time that has

passed over the duration of the capture. The effect is ambiguous.

While these images can be visually captivating, owing to their ethereal

character, their depth of field, and their enhanced tactile quality, the

fading bodies show a physical presence extended and diluted in space

and thereby suggest a sense of loss that resonates deeper, further into

our consciousness of identity.

We remember the progressive fading out of a portrait of the

artist as a young boy in the work of Thierry Kuntzel; its unsettling

effect and along with it the hypothesis that the loss of one’s own

image might be a signifier of the self’s passing away. This anxiety is

exorcised in Michals’ photographs narratively or through the comic

effect produced by many of his sequences, and also visually, through

the insistence on movement rather than on state. Movement is treated

by Michals as a condition of permanent becoming and also as a way

of looking at the self beyond the very limits of representation, as in the

impossible photographic image of his own death: yet another form of

change. Vanishing images, however, can be instead of reminders of

the disappearing self, reparatory objects of mourning, as in Tanaka’s

video piece, which inscribes transformed images of loss in the

continuum of life. To engage the viewer into imaginative, projective

mourning, Michals has to let the body go. And he does so not by

abandoning it, but by extending the movement of the photographed

figure in space, plastically and imaginatively. The physical body is

sustained in this process by a series of optical illusions evoking

private, imaginative rituals that may accompany the processing of loss

in mental space. Detached from its material existence as it moves, the

corporeal self re-emerges into visibility under the guise of a series of

immaterial presences. Unlike testimonial photographs, which focus on

the particular presence of a person, these photographs foreground the

body of the image as a unit of experience, with its variety of textures

and consistencies, with its visual weight turned into lightness by

degrees. Reaching out for space, the moving self becomes part of a

larger picture, it is absorbed by it.

The In-visible 111

In fact, at the outset of his creative photographic work11

Michals had evacuated the human presence from the picture

altogether, if we think of his 1965 project, Empty New York, inspired

by the abandoned street scenes of the nineteenth-century French

photographer Eugène Atget. From that initial project of urban setting,

he then turned towards public and private interiors. First photographed

as empty spaces, the interiors soon became the setting for uncanny

happenings recorded in photographic sequences representative of the

casual ways in which more or less dramatic turns in situation may

occur. The interiors then slowly became signifiers of inner spaces.

These early works (Michals was thirty-four when he undertook the

New York project) show his concern with displacing the subject of

photography from external appearance to the inner world, to “anxiety,

childhood hurts, lust, nightmares” (Michals 1976: 10). This shift from

the present to the past, or rather to psychic spaces in which past,

present, and future interact will be a constant preoccupation in his

work that sublimates the dark side of the self into fictions of the self,

an operation which puts a doubt on the reality shown in a photograph

to place it, against the medium, beyond the domain of the visible.12

Considering the various types of visual displacement in his

photographs, or even some of the titles of his books – such as Real

Dreams. Photo Series (1976), Sleep and Dream (1984) – the influence

of Surrealism on Michals’ vision is significant as the series of

photographs he took at René Magritte’s home in Brussels also

suggests. Yet, rather than a free association of symbolic elements, the

unconscious is for him, as it is for Dine, a form of energy, a domain

made of light and darkness accompanying life, fuzzily.

Although death is the subtext of many of his photographs,

their temporal and spatial treatment suggests Michals’ concern with

other aspects of immobility. One particular photograph in

Changements, which precedes the two sequences explicitly related to

old age and death, indicates that for the creative self mental lethargy

and imaginative annihilation can be more menacing than physical

11 Michals started in commercial photography, which he subverts in his

own way, a significant detail for his attitude against visual and ideological clichés. 12 Significantly, in 1986 Michals took part in an exhibition entitled

“Apparitions and Allusions: Photographs of the Unseen” at The San Diego State

University Gallery of Art.

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demise.13 This photograph shows a double portrait: one figure lying

on a board as an inanimate body, the other standing by it and

contemplating the possibility of one’s ultimate state of immobility. In

Michals’ world, not to move imaginatively is not to be alive. In many

of his works Michals explores the passages of the body into various

phantasmatic states (visualized as phantomatic) by showing figures

which are, in Max Kozloff’s plastic description, “dissolved in light or

enveloped into darkness, which allows them to slip away under

external cover” (1989: 55).

In order to visualize the juxtaposition of actual and

imaginary experiencings as part of an enhanced sense of reality,

Michals borrows from a history of photographic representations that,

since the early days of photography, have attempted to bridge such

dualities as matter and spirit, consciousness and the unconscious, life

and death, presence and absence. I refer here in particular to the

tradition of spirit photographs, which emerged in the United States in

the 1860s and soon became extremely popular (in Europe as well). As

Tom Gunning has pointed out, spirit photographs appeared in a

context – similar to that of the turn of the twenty-first century – of

increasing emphasis on visual evidence (1995: 42-71). However,

whereas within the perceptible faith of the nineteenth century, spirit

photography was perceived by many as evidence of an afterlife, for

Michals it is an exploration of imaginary possibilities, a flight from

the body which connects the self to forms of experience that go

beyond corporeal limitations. What he has retained from this tradition

– which adds a supplementary time dimension to his photographs – is

the modern conception of the spirit as a correlative for the

imagination, one which, in his work, is embedded in the reality of a

photograph under the form of uncanny perceptions of the real.

Still, as in the tradition of spirit photographs, ghost images

can play in his work a particular function of mourning, namely the

mourning of former configurations of the self. In this sense, these

images relate to the past by giving visual shapes to the consciousness

of what one has been (a consciousness sustained, to a large extent, by

13 The photograph in question actually follows a commentary on what he

calls “loops of comfort” which maintain the self in a state of lethargy thus

representing a hindrance to experiment, that is, in Michals’ understanding, a

hindrance to experience.

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our common perception of photographs). However, given his

melancholic approach tamed by humor in both images and texts, and

his insistence on movement and change, on not being stuck in one

position in time and space, for Michals the ghost figures seem to be

predominantly projective. They figure the becoming of the self. And it

is precisely in this respect that they refer to forms of anticipative or

expectative memory. Yet, instead of physical evidence of one’s

becoming over time, these photographic images tap on inner

resources. Michals eludes the traces of time from the physical body so

as to shift the focus (literally, through the double- or over-exposures)

on the psychic body. He smoothes the contours of the figure to catch

the gaze through visual surfaces and textures with which the viewers

can identify, mentally or perceptually. The nebulous corporeal selves,

taking off, so to say, from their material counterparts represent tropes

for invisible changes. They are fleeting effigies of the survival of the

self or of private and cultural icons that preserve it. Even sequences

such as “My Old Age and Death”, or “Death Comes to the Old Lady”

(1969) which openly refers to spirit photographs, do not insist on a

state but on a performative aspect. They anticipate a series of events,

physical and mental, that are part of an imaginary coherence of the

consciousness of the self.

Rather than intimations of another world, Michals’ modern

versions of spirit photographs are spatial and temporal extensions of

experience. These airy double or multiplied figures trigger off

alternative optical fields, synoptic perceptions placed at the

intersection between the material and the immaterial. Max Kozloff has

interpreted Michals’ spectral photographs in terms of change and

becoming “as a form of eventual extinction” (1989: 55). However, one

could argue that Michals’ vision takes into account the

transformations of the self as a whole, the spectral images playing in

this respect a significant role in the formal growth of the image, an

aspect that I will develop in relation to Francesca Woodman’s

photographic work. The evanescent doubles in Michals’ photographs

shed the shadow of a doubt not only on the common expectations that

photography mirrors reality but also, most importantly from a

cognitive perspective, on the very question of what type of

information we include within our understanding of the domain of

reality.

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The sequences entitled “The Spirit Leaves the Body” (1968),

“The True Identity of Man” (1972), or the photographs published in

his book The Journey of Spirit after Death (1971) dramatize Michals’

notion of change and motion as functions of thought and of emotional

energy. “The Spirit Leaves the Body” is a sequence of seven

photographs showing a double-exposed, airy figure detaching itself

from the body of a naked man lying on a bed. From one sequence to

another, the shadow sits up, stands, and then starts walking. The more

it is foregrounded, the larger, the more aerial, and the more impalpable

it becomes. The last of the seven sequences reduplicates the

photograph which initiates the series – that of a flesh-and-blood,

sharply outlined, solid figure – as if to suggest film stills from a

journey of a sleep-walking double who eventually returns to his own

body. Yet, as in Kuntzel’s Nostos III, from the perspective of the

viewer’s experience, the initial photograph re-presented in the seventh

sequence can no longer be perceived as identical to the first, since the

recurring photograph has itself become an ocular spectrum of the

former image. Time has passed between the contemplation of the first

and the last image. Time passes through the image under the form of

the specter.

“The True Identity of Man” (14) humorously displays

matter-and-spirit transformations by degrees in a different way. Four

hypostases of a naked young man are shown in this series, each

photograph being accompanied by an ironic caption. The figure in

sharp contours in the first sequence, “Man as animal”, dissolves

progressively in the subsequent sequences into three shadowy

presences figuring a series of transitions: “Man as spirit”, “Man as

energy”, “Man as God”. In the latter, the entire body is dressed up in

light. There is no “true identity” other than that of a becoming self, a

series of “sequential self states” in Christopher Bollas’s phrase (1992:

29–30). The very irony in the title undermines essentialist

understandings of subject construction.

Similarly, in his book The Journey of the Spirit after Death,

Michals presents the spirit as an incarnation of various phantasmatic

transitory states in keeping with his philosophy of change. Michals’

interest in eastern philosophy (like that of video artist, Bill Viola, for

instance) places him outside current critical views that oppose

technology to spirituality. However, unlike Viola’s more lyrical and

metaphysical vision, Michals’ photographs express and exorcise

The In-visible 115

anxieties related to physical change and death by means of humor and

derision. The narrative of an accident presented in the sequences of

The Journey of the Spirit after Death is, for instance, wittingly

transferred from the domain of the actual into the domain of the

immaterial. A man stumbles and slides down a steep flight of stairs as

if he were sliding along a dark tunnel. Progressively, the sharp

contours of the figure are also dissolved into blurred or superimposed

images. The subsequent sections visualize – in a mode reminiscent of

fairy tales but also of comic strips – the transformation of the body

into a source of energy projected into cosmic time, then its

reincarnation and its visitations of various sites from its previous life.

The journey is, in fact, circular. The spirit eventually returns to its

origins, a return represented by the photograph of a baby, which is the

last image in the book. Rather than expressing an attachment to

spiritualism, these hypostases of the figure are witty embodiments of

perceptions and of varied forms of consciousness. Michals’ work

engages the reader in a meditation on transience, permanence, and

appearance that sustains his view of subject identity as one which

unfolds over time and in relation to a variety of mental constructions.

It is important to underline this particular aspect of his creative work,

since his interest in visualizing mental constructs corresponds to a

subversion of social constructions that are likely to undermine the

individual’s identity. It is probably why, current studies of visual

culture focusing mostly on the social and historical constructions have

paid little attention to the work of Duane Michals, who addresses

directly the limitations of cultural critique as well as the recent

deviations in the market of photography in his book Foto Follies

(2007).

Thresholds of the visible

In Michals’ spectral photographs, his technical allies are

precisely the accidents of photographic technique that allow him to

alter, namely to extend time, by having the figures step out of the

visual field, as Benjamin put it, and thus capturing something of the

fluid perception of time. These accidents (the blur, overexposure or

superimposure) make it possible for Michals to show the

Touching Surfaces 116

photographed figure as a figure attempting to escape its iconic status.

His rhetorical allies in this journey into the afterlife of the self as

image are irony and the repetition of the ghost trick itself. By the mere

fact of its recurrence from one piece to another, the dissolving figure

no longer produces – as was the case with Kuntzel’s installation – an

anxiety for the loss of the image. Instead, it can be looked upon as a

remedy against it, since the dematerialization of the figure is part of its

evolving in time. The repetition of the dissolving figure device fixes –

be it only vaguely – a series of transitory impressions which are thus

incorporated into duration, and, symbolically, into a process of

becoming. For viewers familiarized with Michals’ photographs, the

recognition of the ghost trick structures the perceptual field into a

game-like space in which the deviation from form – the blurring of

contours, the overlapping planes – opens up the speculative potential

field of the image. It also produces, owing to its recurrence, a comic

effect.

In contrast with other photographers whose work I have

approached in the first chapter, rather than incorporating signs of

aging into an aesthetics, Michals focuses on visualizing smaller scale

changes. He neither eludes physical transformations, nor does he take

on an aesthetics derived from the physical changes in the texture of

the body as metaphors of inner transformations. Instead, he explores

the release of the body from the fixation within a frame of time,

unbinding, as it were, from the laws of gravity. Max Kozloff has

suggestively described the link between time and the movement of the

body in Michals’ photographs as a kind of progressive extinction:

“Each time action is taken a bodily zone is visibly aerated, and since

the figures were originally discrete, their stock of substance is

exhaustible. To move, in Michals’ world, is to be depleted (1989: 55;

emphasis added)”.

Yet one could argue that there are, in fact, two visual fields

in Michals’ photographs that interact like communicating vessels of

perception: the field of what we see, and the field of what only the

camera can see. The full bodily area (the one with sharp contours)

seems to be vampirized by its transparent counterpart (with blurred

contours), one that overwhelms the gaze of the viewer with the

surprise of change. As a result of the representation of motion in the

physical space of the photograph, the physical body dissolves from its

present state to reach an indistinct future. For its memory to persist as

The In-visible 117

an after-image the physical body has to be visualized as a series of

unstable fields of optic energy.

“What I cannot see is infinitely more important that what I

can see”, writes Michals in Real Dreams (1976: 4). However, his

immaterial, dim, blurred figures appear, photographically, as

extensions of matter rather than as signs of absence. In the history of

the medium, the blur has made its way slowly into the photographic

vocabulary, from Julia Margaret Cameron’s soft focus portraits,

considered as a drawback according to the late nineteenth-century

aesthetic expectations of photographs, to an acceptable use in the

experimentations of the twentieth-century avant-gardes, to become

then quite a common practice among photographers of diverse

orientations in the 1970s and the 1980s. The blur is, as photography

critic Jean-Claude Lemagny has remarked in his article “Le Retour du

flou” (The Return of the Blur), not the mark of an absence, but “the

paradoxical sign of matter regained” (1985: 21). By justly considering

it within a history of pictorial and photographic representations,

Lemagny elaborates on the paradoxical materiality of the blur:

In photography, the blur leaves behind a permanent shape, which can be

examined at leisure. The blur has a body, a texture, a certain extent, and a

depth, and even (photographically, it is indeed very possible) a sharpness.

(1985: 21; tr. mine; emphasis added).

If, as Lemagny holds, “in photography the blur, which in

reality is an elision of matter, becomes objective and present matter”

(emphasis added), the fact that the blurred images rely on the

extension of the exposure time allows the photographer to record

movement and also, both technically and symbolically, to act on time.

By using what Kozloff has called “time-bending techniques” (1989:

74), Michals shifts, in fact, the focus of his photographs from the

actual changes of the body to the larger problem of temporality and its

visualization in photography. Time is thus incorporated in the

physical, photographically representable body as a substance that

passes through it, leaving behind unstable configurations of full

shapes that alternate with empty shapes. In them, one sees surfaces of

time made of infinitely small particles which add up in volume like

pyramids of sand. On a small scale, they mirror a condensation of

varied forms of temporality: physical, historical, and metaphysical.

Touching Surfaces 118

Egypt as a symbol of such condensation of time levels was

actually the object of a series of photographs Michals took in 1978,

published in France with accompanying texts in the volume

Merveilles d’Egypte (1978). “Like Egypt, we as well are time”, writes

Michals in this book in which he associates images of the Egyptian

monuments with snapshots showing inhabitants of the land that he met

on his journey. The microscopic dimension of instant encounters and

snapshots is placed on the backdrop of the monumental time signified

by the pyramids, themselves a memento of mortality (and of

immortality as well). Although Merveilles d’Egypte is not a book

devoted to change, the photographs are all about permanence and

transience, a couple epitomized in Michals’ text accompanying the

photographs, “The Sand Man”, which strikes the reader as a metaphor

reminiscent of Biblical dust, and also of Jorge Luis Borges’ Book of

Sand (1975). Like Borges, whose work had an important impact on

him, Michals believes that no matter how precarious images might be,

their imaginative use is an important function of survival. He also

shares with Borges the belief that fictional patterns can reveal

historical patterns. It is why questions related to the persistence of our

private and cultural memory through images in image-dominated

cultures underlie his preoccupation with the limits of visual

representation at a distance from speculations on the death of

photography or on the crisis of the visual.

3. Of Pictures & Words: Flashes of Consciousness

The apparitions are manifest,

their bodies weigh less than light

lasting as long as this phrase lasts.

Octavio Paz (tr. Elizabeth Bishop)

In addition to the nominal sense of blur, that of “dimness” or

“confusing effect”, the verb to blur means literally to smear with ink,

to sully, to disfigure, to efface. American photographers such as Ed

Ruscha in the 1960s, or Robert Frank in the 1970s, have associated

words and photographic images – words that frame the image or,

The In-visible 119

often, words written on the image – to reveal, perhaps, more than

photography can show. We have seen that in Dine’s late photographic

work, lines are placed on the background of photographs (frequently

written with chalk on a black board, and partly effaced, resulting in a

visual effect close to that of the blur, while most of his photographs

are sharp). It was in his book The Journey of the Spirit after Death,

published in 1971, that Michals first introduced captions to

accompany his images. However, in Michals’ work words do not

actually seem to reveal much more than images do. Within the logic

of his approach, the text – rather transparent, reflective, explanatory –

appears more like an echo of the image, a kind of verbal specter. The

text does not represent a closure of meaning, but rather – like the

photographic image itself – a search for more open formal

configurations. Like the image, it epitomizes what escapes rational

understanding in a simple gloss or a brief story whose intentional

naiveté mocks rationalization. The texts up-end the traditional role

that captions play: that of directing the viewer’s attention toward a

specific message conveyed by the photograph (speculative

photographs resist by definition the notion of message, limited to

advertisement or propaganda photographs). Yet, words, phrases, or

sentences accompanying photographs, may bring into consciousness

flashes of thought, doubts, or reflections on their making. In mixing

words and pictures, Michals highlights what might be the

simultaneous emergence of thoughts and mental images into

consciousness.

It was initially Michals’ distrust in the capacity of

photography to mirror reality that led him to use words in association

with photographs. Captions or brief texts accompany many of his

photographs often collected in photography books. Some of these

notes suggest the difficulty to capture and fix images

photographically, thus reinforcing his vision dominated by

appearances, that is by the instability of signs. Given their reflective

character, the texts also seem to be a way of extending the possibilities

of representation, of relating to photographic images discoursively. If

the photographic blur can be associated with poetic ambiguity and the

double exposures with certain forms of narrative juxtaposition, in the

texts adjoined to, superimposed on, or completely replacing the

photograph, Michals’ expression is quite direct, explicit (unlike

Dine’s, which is mostly elliptic, and, usually with no reference to the

Touching Surfaces 120

photograph, appearing mostly as yet another visual element). Some of

Michals’ texts read indeed like inner monologues, contemplative

complements of the photographic act understood as a momentary,

spontaneous gesture. In “A Failed Attempt to Photograph Reality”

(1975), for instance, he transgresses another threshold of visual

perception by abandoning the image altogether to substitute it with a

verbal reflection on the nature of reality. In this photographed text, he

denies photography’s capacity to retain any essence of reality, since

there is none for him if not in appearances. However, in this piece

Michals does not altogether abandon photography, since what the

spectator contemplates is, in fact, a silver gelatin print of the

photographed handwritten text, signed and indicating the number of

prints. The lack of image appears here as a sudden access to

consciousness: a realization of what the photographer can do, or a

brief argumentative development of a mental snapshot:

How foolish of me to have believed that it would be that easy. I had

confused the appearances of trees and automobiles and people with

reality itself and believed that a photograph of these appearances to be a

photograph of it. It is a melancholy truth that I will never be able to

photograph it; and can only fail. I am a reflection photographing other

reflections within a reflection. To photograph reality is to photograph

nothing.

In rejecting photography as a replicative device, Michals has

created a visual universe in which actual perceptions together with

relics of dreams and phantasms of the moving body play against the

conventions of rationality. “To photograph nothing”, means to him to

photograph “one’s total experience” in an instant, or, as he does in the

sequences, in an accumulation of instants. It means working on the

possibilities of the camera to create a consciousness of infinitely small

displacements and transformations, which the human optical apparatus

cannot perceive.

Michals’ attitude shows a disbelief in the aesthetics

governing the photography of the 1970s and the 1980s, with its

emphasis on exploring the real rather than on the imagination, a

reason why he has been dissociated from the tradition of American

photography. His affinities go rather with a subsidiary – yet no less

noble – American tradition of speculative photographers of the mid-

twentieth century, such as Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Clarence John

Laughlin, or Thomas Merton, who were looking for alternative

The In-visible 121

photographic forms to document landscapes of the mind rather than

social scenes. Theirs are visual meditations on the dynamics of natural

forms, on how the camera may capture larger patterns of time and

configurations of natural forms (as, for instance, in Laughlin’s

“Massive Dance”, or “The Tree as Visual Movement”, 1953).

Significantly, Michals’ work – in which revolt against conventions of

various natures is sublimated in aesthetic transformations – emerged

in a context of important shifts in the post-World War II American

society. Michals belongs to a generation for which youth became an

important locus of social, political, and cultural change and, in spite of

his entire work being dominated by his reflection on temporality and

becoming, he has chosen to stay young in his vision and, as he puts it,

to be surprised – in his mid-seventies – every single day, every single

moment, by what it is to be alive (2006).

From projections into the immediate or more far-reaching

future, either by means of dissolving the figure or by placing it in

sequences to suggest movement, in the late 1980s and 1990s, Michals

moved towards a certain form of intentional and ironic regression. In a

series of picture books, in playful words and images, the older artist

addresses children, or the remote child-self in adults. His 1989 show

“Slow Upside Down Inside Out and Backwards” (a title otherwise

indicative of motion in words!) is presented as “Fairy Tunes for

Children”, and composed of even more hybrid material than his

previous work. The book that followed, Upside Down Inside Out or

Downside Up Outside In and Forwards (1993) develops the playful

approach of scales and ages. In this book, Michals superimposed on

the photographic images photographed texts reminiscent of Edward

Lear’s limericks together with engravings typical of Victorian children

books. Here, photography represents only a part of the work, the same

way in which it is only a part of our lives. Significantly, as he

advances into his life journey, his own work expresses – lightly – the

vulnerability of aging, as for instance in Sleep and Dream where the

ingenuous form of nursery rhymes captures an affective charge in

words, discretely yet with the immediacy that photographs can

convey. One of these points to old age wisdom touchingly and at the

same time mocking sentimentality:

Touching Surfaces 122

Some day, someone may

Touch you on the shoulder with affection

a timid indiscretion

And you may flee

Flustered and frightened by what you want

Be brave and touch and hold

For you may need these memories

When you are old.

(1984: n. pag.)

Haunted by the ghosts of time from the early period of his

creative work, Michals seems to retreat progressively from

photography, or at least, from a mainstream understanding of it.

Interestingly, while Dine has resorted to photography later in his life,

Michals has taken distance from it quite early in his work, but even

more so with time. Like Nicholas Nixon in the series of photographs

he had been taking of the Brown sisters year after year since 1975,

Michals has tried to cope with physical change photographically (as in

Changements, for instance, or later, in Eros and Thanatos, 1992). And

yet, there is a resistance in Michals’ work to reveal the textures of the

older body. His self-portrait as an old man evoked earlier is not a

close-up but only a silhouette bent by time. At the end of a video piece

he made on his own work, he is applying dark paint over his

photographic portrait, painting it out of the screen, as it were. Unlike

Nixon’s other project, in which he photographed old people in

hospitals and asylums (1988), or AIDS patients (1991), and unlike

John Coplans’ photographs of his own aging body (1987; 2003),

Michals prefers to maintain reserve, discretion over the realities of the

changing body. He can address them with humor, as in a recent

sequence titled “Who is Sidney Sherman” (2003), in which, wearing

the mask and wig of an older woman (as Cindy Sherman does in her

photographs), he mockingly addresses the hypervisualization of aging,

and, in the captions, the fetishization of photography and of academic

discourse. Or, for instance, in his book Questions Without Answers

(2003), in which the question of aging is – like that of consciousness –

part of a longer list of unanswerables: “what is beauty/the

universe/magic/trust, happiness, pleasure, consciousness, the mystery

of the sphinx, dreams, memory, youth and old age, time, humor, grief,

desire, love, music, god, life, death, nothing, who am I” (n. pag.). The

middle section of the book is significantly entitled “the seven ages of

man”, borrowing from Shakespeare’s legendary soliloquy, and it

The In-visible 123

catalogues the seven states in words and images with the same

oscillation between affect and irony.

Alongside this ironic approach of aging, the lyric tendency is

increasingly present in his more recent work. Like Robert

Mapplethorpe’s late work, or Hervé Guibert’s idealized photographs

of young friends, rather than documenting the frailties of the aging

self, Michals condenses a maze of conflicting feelings in fictional

images or in photographs of idealized beauty (as, for instance, in Eros

and Thanatos, 1992). With bold modesty, he catches the viewer’s

gaze and also protects it to suggest that the vanishing physical body

needs an aesthetic shape to abide by. For Michals to protect emotion

and privacy, the shutter seems to close slowly, silently.

4

Photographic Aesthetics

and the Fabric of the Subject

Argument: the Inner Statue

Jacqueline Hayden

The photographers I have chosen to discuss in this book

displace the focus from the physical body (which has been the center

of attention for the past decades in the critique of visual culture) to the

psychic body, whose photographic representations deviate from

technical conventions and habitual perceptions of photography (of

aging as well). Releasing the photographed subjects from detailed

identity markers or abstracting them from references to the quotidian

liberates space in the photographic representation for other dimensions

of the real. Hence, the camera is drawn to record unstable perceptions

of change, and also of conflict between images of the physical body

and internalized corporeal images, or between realities and memories

of the body. It is therefore important to note that optical distortions

and deviations from conventional representations and perceptions of

photography are not exclusive signifiers of interiority. They are also

markers for contacts and passages between external and internal

spaces. Like the figures represented in these works, the body of the

photograph itself is plastic in its pictorial treatment but also – and,

most significantly so – in its capacity to transform routines of seeing.

Rather than an instrument more or less adapted to the necessities of

life, the body is seen in terms that are close to what in his book, Le

Corps. Essai sur l’intériorité, philosopher Marc Richir refers to as “an

inner statue”. Considering the Western philosophical history of the

body, his phenomenological perspective (in the tradition of Husserl

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and Merleau-Ponty) transgresses the classical dualism between body

and soul by considering inner life (sensations, affects, emotions,

thoughts) as an excess of the physical body. Richir’s suggestion,

which supports my argument on the figural dimensions of the body in

speculative photographs, is to look at the physical body from the

inside, as it were, that is from the angle of what he calls “the inner

statue”, one which he describes, phenomenologically, rather than

immobile, “infinitely labile and moving, ephemeral and changing in

its manifestations” (1993: 11). From this paradoxical perspective

situated at a threshold between movement and immobility, between

fix and fluid identity markers, between perception and figuration, we

find in the art works considered here a different understanding of our

consciousness of aging to the extent to which, by unsettling

photographic conventions or unmediated mimetic expectations, the

artists create visual equivalents of subtle transformations that

participate in the elaboration of interiority.

Passages, intersections, or reciprocations between physical

and psychic body schemes in these photographs are therefore not

formulated in terms of referential bodies, but in terms of corporeal

figures, in the sense of tropes (the word figure, I am reminded, derives

from the Latin figura, meaning “form”, and was first used in the sense

of external shape mainly with reference to the body). Such stylization

– which has by no means essentialist undertones – extends the field of

interpretation of the image. The reconfigured corpo-realities evoke

imagined configurations, mental spaces in which the subject can take

momentary refuge from determinations of various natures – social,

historical, and cultural –, then adapt them to new situations to enter in

resonance with larger communities of thought and sensibility.

Representations of the figure as a mediator between the physical and

the psychic body therefore engage the question of difference in a

direction cultural studies might take in the future. We can think of this

area as one of complementary relations and exchanges between firm

group identity markers, on the one hand, and, on the other, shared

patterns of thought or experience among all the categories that aging

brings together.

The various forms of indeterminacy created by the liberation

of the body from the referential dimension – forms in which one reads

open cognitive spaces – leave room for the viewers to bring in their

own experience, their own perceptual spaces, and also their own

Photographic Aesthetics 127

mental representations of age consciousness. Relating to other

imagined configurations, to other forms of consciousness, being in

touch with images that call for the imagination as a factor of

processing ordinary experience participates indeed in the elaboration

of alternative (as opposed to informative) forms of cognition and may

create such new shared patterns. Though by far a new idea in art

history, the critique of visual culture has however very much

bracketed this aspect, as much as the question of the aesthetic. And

yet, if the historical and social grounding is indispensable in the study

of visual culture, how can the construction of the subject be separated

from the individual’s elaboration of interiority, or from the aesthetic

distillations that are part of this process? As we see in all aesthetic

idioms of the works discussed here, the issue of subject growth is

addressed metaphorically, an approach which, in fact, extends the

scope of questions concerning the social and cultural body that we

find in testimonial images of aging, since by eluding the referential

they speak to larger audiences, across differences of various natures.

In her series Ancient Statuary (1997-1998), Jacqueline

Hayden addresses some of these questions precisely from the vantage

point of the aesthetic. Here, Hayden brings together actual

photographs of elderly subjects (coming from her Figure Models

series discussed in Chapter 1) with pictures she took of Roman and

Greek statues in Rome, by grafting fragments of the former into the

latter (1; 17; 18). This perfectly computerized surgery enlivens the

ancient art figures that have been amputated by time with the

imperfections of live models. An ironic inversion is at work in this

series: the living grows into a prosthesis of the artistic while the

remain(der)s of Ancient art are given new life in a photographic form

that recalls nineteenth-century photographic travel diaries (the digital

composites are presented as small format platinum/palladium prints).

The aesthetic transformation seems to drape the body, protecting its

vulnerability and veiling its nudity even while it exposes it. “When

conceiving Ancient Statuary Series”, declares Hayden, “I was intent in

subverting the association of the aged body with decay and the

grotesque. […] Re-presenting the statuary fragment/torso blended

with an aging mortal being, my work questions the terms that define

culture and knowledge” (1999: n. pag.; emphasis added).

Touching Surfaces 128

17. Jacqueline Hayden, Ancient Statuary Series, “IV Torso of Boy”, 1997.

Platinum/palladium print, 7 x 4.5 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

Photographic Aesthetics 129

18. Jacqueline Hayden, Ancient Statuary Series, “V Aphrodite, Hellenistic”, 1998.

Platinum/palladium print, 8.5 x 6 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

Touching Surfaces 130

In this series, Hayden creates a new aesthetic idiom drawing

from the conjunction of the aesthetics of ancient statuary with that of

nineteenth-century photographs used to represent such works. Layers

of time are thus brought together, but also layers of perception, since

our knowledge of ancient statues has been based on fragmented,

color-bare representations, which rarely our imagination places in

their complete, colored, and contextual situation. If the much evoked

postmodern proposition that the simulacrum overruns the real has

been used in relation to contemporary photography perhaps more than

to any other art form, the paradoxical displacements that we find in

Hayden’s series suggest, however, that the reverse can also be true.

Fictions that inform the real are a form of the real.

Hayden’s photographs, which help me articulate the

argument of this chapter, hold two significant suggestions: one

concerning the aesthetic, the other, the construction of the subject. The

conjunction of two aesthetic modes in this series creates a new

physical body, one that challenges both stereotypes of perception (of

ancient statuary) and of representation (of elderly bodies). Yet, as in

Dine’s photographs discussed in the second chapter, in Hayden’s

moving statues there is no suture. Two representations, coming from

different cultural moments in this case, are blended. By bringing

together in one composition images coming from different individual

and collective zones of memory, the new work recategorizes forms of

consciousness or perceptions related to the past. In them, temporality

shows as shape. A shape turned into a figure, in the sense of trope, by

virtue of its relating to a variety of time moments as opposed to an

indicial reference. Hayden’s series appears to us as an archeology of

the persistence and fragility of the body in time, an archeology of its

perceptions as well. “The platinum prints”, she comments, “through

their scale and materials, lend an intimacy and timelessness to the

interpretation” (1999: n. pag.). Significantly for my point here,

Hayden relates intimacy (a question of subjectivity) to timelessness (a

question of persistence in time, which itself, as we see in the statuary,

is subject to time, hence, like aging, persistence falls into the category

of process rather than state). This association reinforces the ironic

reversal of the relationship between art forms and life forms: while the

intimacy of the elderly nude is made durable in its association with the

ancient statues, frozen perceptions of broken (or, in Hayden’s terms,

“amputated”) statues are enlivened by grafts coming from

Photographic Aesthetics 131

photographs of actual models. Paradoxically, the exploration of

subjectivity in larger temporal and cultural patterns calls for an

abstraction from time (and, implicitly, from other referential

elements). Although in the on-line version the photographs are

accompanied by placard buttons that give specific indications for each

historical or mythological figure and the period each statue belongs to,

these references only intensify the mimetic illusion. Hayden’s

“operations” are passed under silence in these captions. The pact

between the living model and the statue is thus reinforced, if it were

not for a more fluid wrinkle here, or a fold of skin there. And when

the graft has reached consciousness of form (more subtle in some

photographs, more visible in others), an echo of the real life models

comes to us through time, and with it, a projection of what we may

become over time. Hayden’s association of fragments from her

previous series (actual elderly art models) with already formalized

referents (the statues) relies precisely on archetypal echo. It looks at

forms of art as forms of life, and intimates, without idealization, a

potential reverse. The inner statue is given visible shape.

The body in question in the photographs I approach here

questions the dominance of the physical even as it counts on it as a

carrier of figurative propositions that redefine our understanding of

the corporeal.1 Deviating devices redefine in turn notions of

photographic aesthetics (along with the category of beauty) by rooting

it in subject experience and in personal ways of processing

determinations, instead of relating it to cultural convention. For the

photographs to foreground temporary configurations or arrangements

between external and internal realities, the authors rely on a

renunciation to “the bodily ego”, a term I am using here as a signifier

for non-referential modes of photographic representation (or rather,

not directly referential) that capture infinite variations of images of the

1 A recent exhibit from the collection of la Maison Européenne de la

Photographie, Le Corps aujourd’hui, histoire d’une métamorphose (The Body Today:

A History of Its Metamorphosis), was explicitly based on a transformative

understanding of corporeal realities in contemporary photography. Significantly, the

exhibit brought together testimonial and speculative photographs, and was structured

in three sections entitled: “Transparence”, “Transformance”, and “Transmutation”

(Lille, Hospice Comtesse, May 2004).

Touching Surfaces 132

self in one frame.2 As a result of the abandonment of conventional

indications of identity, the corporeal becomes a metonymic reference

of experiencings turned into skin textures, or of emotional

configurations that relate to body zones and shapes. The corporeal

involvement of the viewer is equally solicited in quite a literal sense in

the case of mix-media installations that include photographs. In many

of these, for instance, the circulation of the viewer within the space of

the installation, or the physical and perceptual accommodation of

distance in front of the photograph, participates in the construction of

meaning. As James Lingwood has shown in his essay “Different

Times”, the implication of the viewer as well as the layering of times

is not the exclusive prerogative of photographs that create fictional

images. In contemporary photographs which explore the real world,

objects, people we find the same “instantaneity of the image […]

superseded by the enduring experience of the art work”, an aspect

which affects perception literally and metaphorically. They “give to

the viewer, and ask back, a longer time” (1994: 20; emphasis added).

In speculative photography, however, those parameters are

considerably enhanced. Restructuring perceptions or ways of

understanding reality requires distanciation as a necessary step in

enlarging the perspective. Some photographers use art models or art

vestiges (Jacqueline Hayden), others use actors or performers to pose

in actual or reconstructed settings (Jeff Wall), or else, ordinary people

who pose as models (Geneviève Cadieux, Joyce Tenneson), and yet

others are their own model and performer (Cindy Sherman, Francesca

Woodman). The poses captured by these photographers recall either

classical figures in the history of painting or statuary (Hayden,

Tenneson), or more or less known images from the repertory of

photographic art forms (Woodman). Other artists stage narratives

(Duane Michals), or reshuffle images from a mental kaleidoscope (Jim

Dine). Even when the body is mostly absent or present only

metonymically (as in Dine’s photographs, or in those of Cadieux), the

emphasis of these works is still on its metaphoric potential. From

figurative the body becomes figural, in the process shifting the focus

2 Borrowed from Freud (The Ego and the Id), the term is used by Richard

Wollheim in his essay “The Bodily Ego”, in which he discusses the body-mind

question and the corporeality of representation. Wollheim reconsiders Freud’s striking

phrase “the bodily ego” to insist that a mental act is not only equated with a body

state, but – essential for my point here – with a process (Wollheim 1993: 64-78).

Photographic Aesthetics 133

from the indexical value of photography to its metaphoric dimensions

(and not to the symbolic ones, which would involve relating to a

unique term of reference). Accordingly, the human figure in the

photograph ceases to be the indexical signifier of a specific person, of

a fixed identity, or state in a specific moment in time, to become an

impersonation, an embodiment of variable patterns that foreground

external and internal realities and suggest a larger spectrum of

relations.3

These photographers who use actors, models, settings, or sui

generis narratives, rely on a manifest performative character, one that

embodies the lability of the inner statue in varied degrees, without

however following the sense given to the body as language in the

performance art practices of the 1970s. The performing character of

these photographs consists in exposing the body as a zone of

resonance and articulation of wide-ranging forms of experience, subtle

degrees of consciousness formalized in constellations of shapes and

textures that only borrow naturalistic shapes. In addition to aesthetic

parameters (or to addressing the question of the aesthetic in specific

ways, as I will try to show in the work of Tenneson, and then in that of

Woodman), the performative character in such photographic works

has an equally important pragmatic consequence since it involves the

subject’s active participation in the construction and perception of the

image. I refer here in particular to a dimension which implies neither

acting as old (i.e. adopting a convention), nor acting as young (i.e.

effacing the markers of old age), but rather acting on perceptions,

changing habits of seeing, and hopefully, subtly, in the process, habits

of looking at aging, our own and that of older people of various ages.

Acting can signify an active form of contemplation (as in the extended 3 Jacqueline Hayden’s most recent work, Cuerpos Voluminosa y Vieja, a

series of flesh tone photographs that bring together voluminous bodies and older

bodies, relates to several aspects that I have highlighted here: the combination of two

hypostases of the body that deviate from canons; the emphasis on texture (in contrast

with her Figure Models and Ancient Statuary); the performative aspect; and,

significantly, the question of identity. With regard to the latter, the tightly cropped

frames of these photographs (in which the face of the models is left out) displace the

attention from the identity of the model to the perception of the viewer, “encouraging

the viewer”, as Hayden puts it, “to imagine living in that body or seeing large bodies

and older bodies in a different possibility, for example, as beautiful and desirous”

(Hayden: 2008).

Touching Surfaces 134

time of exposure or perception required by the works). It also calls for

forms of empathy that relate, instead of specific situations, to more

complex configurations of experience. This is not only the attribute of

speculative photography, if we consider how art works affect us when

consumer-, or simulacrum-oriented discourses have been consumed.

However, in the case of photography used as an art medium, this

pragmatic aspect is highlighted by its ambivalent position, crossing

borders between several types of referential categories: the literal and

the figural, the replicative and the creative, the reflective and the

refractive. Seen from such pragmatic aesthetic perspective, these

photographs relate to reality in other ways than testimonial

photographs do: instead of exposing its diverse aspects, they insist on

how we think of the varied natures of reality and how we relate to

them.

Over thirty years of activity, American photographer Joyce

Tenneson has developed a body of work in which aesthetic

preoccupations meet important aspects of the position and

construction of the subject, since she works both in the field of art and

in that of commercial photography and, in her art photographs, she

combines models or stereotypes of beauty with bodies deviating from

all canons. Her work, I suggest in what follows, shows the shapes “the

inner statue” may take in the course of time. It also brings interesting

suggestions concerning the ways in which aesthetic preoccupations

can be related to larger cultural questions.

Photographic Aesthetics 135

1. Joyce Tenneson

Transformations of the Self: Motion, Emotion, Repose

Reality is ungraspable. [...] The

real reality is something else – only

the strangeness of it can be taken in

and that’s what interests me. ...

The real reality, the flickering of

seen and unseen actualities, the

moment under the moment, can’t be

put into words; the most that a writer

can do – and this is only rarely

achieved – is to write in such a way

that the reader finds himself in a

place where the unwordable happens

off the page.

Russell Hoban

Recall, reader, if ever in the

mountains a mist has caught you,

through which you could not see

except as moles do through skin ...

Dante Alighieri 4

Duane Michals’ photographs persistently perceive transformations of

the self through forms of visual energy in which the body dissolves

into a plastic shape. Blown out of the frame, as it were, the body is

4 Quoted by James Merrill in a commentary to Charles Singleton’s prose

version of Dante’s Inferno, these lines are wonderfully evocative of the misty visual

effect in Tenneson’s photographs. On the subject of moles, Merrill comments: “Those

moles, to resume, are just one filament in a web whose circumference is everywhere.

They presently mesh with an apostrophe to the imagination, which also sees without

using eyes”. And this is fragment’s original texture:

Ricorditi, lettor, se mai ne l’alpe

ti colse nebbia per la qual vedesti

non altrimenti che per pelle talpe [...] .

(Merrill 1986: 89-90).

Touching Surfaces 136

thus projected into the imaginary space of infinite variations of being.

At about the same time Michals was experimenting with the blur and

the photographic sequences – in the late 1970s and early 1980s –

Joyce Tenneson, a young photographer based in Washington, a

striving professional, wife, and mother, considered today among the

major contemporary photographers, was working out in her own dark

room possibilities of visualizing transformations of the self. Her

concerns focus on the possibilities to fix these transformations

photographically in ways quite opposite to those of Michals. It is, in

fact, the visual result that diverges from Michals’ preoccupation with

physical movement as a signifier of inner motion. Visually,

Tenneson’s photographs are static. The poses of her models mostly

suggest attitudes related to repose: stillness, tranquility, peacefulness.

They seem (at first sight) to have a soothing effect on the viewer. Yet,

behind their composure or ease of manners, behind the harmonious

combinations of forms, more disquieting patterns emerge, patterns that

relate to the ambiguities of the “inner statue” as a trope for

paradoxical corporeal and psychic realities.*

From her early reflections on images of the self, rituals of

passage, or motherhood, Tenneson has opened up in the late 1980s

and 1990s to a wider range of generative relations and transformative

processes, and then to her most recent direct exploration of aging in

her books of photographs Wise Women (2002) and Amazing Men

(2004). Over the years, her work has imposed itself as a personal inner

journey of self-discovery in which the forms of energy and

consciousness that sustain the self in time play an increasingly

important part. Though different in their formal propositions, the two

artists share an anticipation of visual research on perceptions of

change before aging became a significant issue in American culture.

Either by exploring the body’s operating on various time scales or

simultaneous consciousness of time levels (as Michals does) or by

visualizing states replete with complex emotions (as in Tenneson’s

photographs), these photographs transcend the focalization on the

physical precisely by appealing to a form of double consciousness

visualized in Michals’ work by means of superimposing images or

associating texts to images.

* I refer the reader to the gallery of Joyce Tenneson’s work: http://www.tenneson.com

Photographic Aesthetics 137

In discussing Michals’ work, I have used now the term

change, then transformation, in an indiscriminate way. Yet, on closer

scrutiny, there seems to be a slight variation in the two almost

synonymous notions, one that might point to the difference in the two

artists’ approaches. As I have read it in Michals’ photographs, change

implies movement in space, the emphasis being on the depletion of

contours that extends the reaches of the body in space (and time).

Transformation (which incorporates the word “form”) highlights

instead an integrative alteration of shapes. It relates more closely to

metaphoric displacements within a field of relatively stable

configurations. The title of one of Tenneson’s books is, in fact,

Transformations (1993), a volume of photographs showing both a

wide range of possibilities of recasting older pictorial or photographic

forms into new ones and a sense of growth over time in relation to her

own vision.

Tenneson’s work has been described as haunting, ethereal,

pensive, disturbing. Her photographs do not relate so much to what we

see directly as to forms of perception likely to trigger off inner

scrutiny. “To me”, she declares suggestively, “the larger reality has

always been internal reality, those emotions that are not visible to the

naked eye” (1986: n. pag.; emphasis added). Either caught in unusual

postures or outspokenly posing in front of the camera in classical

poses, her models partake of a pictorial iconic dimension that allows

her to suggest inner motions and emotions through physical

immobility. Although from one photograph to another gradual

transformations are quite noticeable, in each individual photograph

her focus seems to be not so much on the process of transformation

itself as on its startling result. Visualizing a state of being is a major

concern for Tenneson. In the baroque statuesque contortions of bodies

and in the folds of cloth, she seems to seek the bewildering surprise

that accompanies imperceptible transformations of the self (we need

to remember here that though usually associated with immobility, the

art of sculpture implies, in fact, a variety of kinetic factors, the

perception of the figure from different angles among them). While the

pose is still, the variety of pictorial devices she uses create an

impression of movement. Capturing process within a statuesque pose

is, as I will show, a striking paradox in Tenneson’s work, one that has

also caught my attention in Jacqueline Hayden’s Figure Model and

Ancient Statuary Series.

Touching Surfaces 138

Among all the photographic work I approach in this book,

Tenneson’s has been the most openly and most persistently devoted to

the various metamorphoses of the body over time, from childhood into

old age. In her essay “Unwritten Myths”, prefacing the photographs in

Transformations, Vicki Goldberg sums up Tenneson’s concern with

representing the emotions related to change by referring to her

portrayal of “pregnancy, the heavy flesh of middle age, and emaciated

old age with grace, acceptance, affection” (Tenneson 1993: 7). She

reads Tenneson’s use of the veil – a dominant formal element in this

series – as a significant thematic aspect of aging. “The varied shapes

and states of the human form”, Goldberg remarks, “are covered but

not hidden by thin veils”, accessories in which she sees “a kind of

reminder of the veils of custom, limit, and discretion that obscure so

many mysteries when we are young (and when we are not so young as

well)” (1993: 7; emphasis added). It could be added that, in

Tenneson’s photographic syntax, these mysteries become visual sites

in which aging appears as the source of a compelling interaction

between realities surfacing behind other realities, between images

hidden under the veil of other images.

The strangeness of her “real reality” (in Hoban’s phrase

evoked in the epigraph) relies precisely on the problematic question of

beauty, a question inherent in transformations of the body. Unlike the

models of photographers that I have discussed in the first chapter –

whose beauty seems to emanate mostly from the inside and in clear

opposition to the standards circulating in the media – Tenneson’s

models radiate an uncanny canonic beauty. Whereas Jeff Wall,

Geneviève Cadieux, or Cindy Sherman create an aesthetics that runs

outspokenly against the clichés in vogue, Tenneson works within the

limits of several kinds of stereotypes. An eclectic aesthetics emerges

from the association of these stereotypes, one that highlights the odd

character of common places when displaced from their context and

looked at from a different perspective.

The intriguing aspect of Tenneson’s work, especially of her

color photographs since the late 1980s, lies in her combining images

inspired from different sources – ranging from religious and secular

art history models, to current clichés of the beauty industry – which

appeal to a variety of visual registers and ways of relating to an image.

Her reflection on the psychological or historical constructions of the

varied notions of beauty (many of which are indeed conflicting)

Photographic Aesthetics 139

interacts with other dimensions that have generally been repressed or

eluded both in contemporary photography and in the current critical

discourse, and I have to name them: myth, transcendence, spirituality.

Tenneson’s work engages the intriguing question of how photography

can show these dimensions. Far from representing a form of nostalgia

for past paradigms, her visual treatment of these categories

incorporates the past into a personal search, one that is symptomatic of

the twentieth century in which, as Ann Roiphe points out in her

introductory essay to Tenneson’s collection Illuminations, the

relationship to the sacred has been “no longer easy and communal but

rather private and uncertain” (Tenneson 1997: 5; emphasis added).

The first two sections of this chapter are devoted to an

analysis of formal patterns in Tenneson’s photographic work by

means of which she reconsiders the question of beauty in the history

of pictorial representation in a context of a culture dominated by

heterogeneous imagery. Her association of aging with aesthetics, I

will suggest, can be instrumental in exploring our thinking of time

structures and of the notion of beauty in time. In the last section, I will

refer to her commercial work. Underlying my argument in this chapter

is the question of the aesthetic modes her photographs propose not by

way of deconstructing the category of beauty but rather by bringing its

scope and contradictions into focus.

The composed expression of Tenneson’s models that comes

forth almost as a retreat from expression is part of these significant

contradictions. Their statuesque poses render the photographed figures

rather unreal yet intriguingly palpable. In fact, on closer examination,

the expressions of the figures oscillate between peace, tranquility, and

a certain unease, as if the models were uncomfortable in their pose,

enshrined in it. The women and the men, the children, the young, and

the elderly she photographs have in common an immobility relating to

forms of endurance. The calm, apparently flat expressions of the

models seem to intimate misty disquieting inner climates dissimulated

in the folds of the drapes that cover the bodies or beyond the veils that

catch the slow pace of light, like tropes in a coherent rhetoric of

wrinkles. What at first contact appears as smooth surface or tranquil

demeanor turns out to be the expression of something disturbing, as if

the figures were actually caught in the trap of their own beauty, which

is shown as something they have to suffer and expiate, to surpass and

Touching Surfaces 140

perpetually reproduce. I am intentionally using a vocabulary

suggestive of the various areas of beauty Tenneson combines in her

work: the clinical domain and death, along with a mythic dimension

that transcends actuality only to expand, photographically, our

experience of the real. Rather than mourning the loss of the spiritual

dimension, her photographic rhetoric engages it provocatively in the

creative process in the form of a dialogue with personal and cultural

memories.

The varied visual references combined in Tenneson’s

photographs appear as revelations of cultural or private latent images

articulated into a new aesthetic syntax whose uncanny effect invites us

to reconsider our relationship to forms of representation belonging to

different time periods, to different areas of experience that engage

layers of personal and collective consciousness. Both in her early

black-and-white photographs (1983) and in her subsequent color

work, the body is shown as a solid, persistent presence, yet seen

through a kind of screen materialized under different forms. What we

see is nude figures partially covered by thin, transparent cloths,

representing men and women of different ages set up in individual or

group compositions. They are placed on painterly backgrounds mostly

devoid of concrete references. The body is both exposed and

concealed by textures of various kinds: gauze, veils, drapes, and later,

as we will see, light. In the color photographs, the expressivity of

white cloth, which Tenneson had explored in her early work, appears

as an impression of mist (to obtain this result Tenneson uses various

devices such as netting or powdering in association with special

lighting). Monotonal, bleached, dusky, her color work plays down the

sharp tonal contrast and the glamour of vernacular photographs to

create an illusion of depth. The textures themselves participate in that

illusion of depth of field, which insures a certain distance from the

body, even as they capitalize on tactile effects.

In her first black-and-white photographs dating from 1977 –

self-portraits and group compositions – Tenneson had developed a

personal printing technique, whereby she would apply silver emulsion

into soft-textured rag printing stock which merged with the print

surfaces. This developing process was meant to enhance the tactile

qualities of the film as well as the tonal contrasts, and to reveal in the

printed image symbolic dimensions that can be located in an area of

religious representations neighboring a sanative sensibility (Tenneson

Photographic Aesthetics 141

spent her childhood next to a convent her parents were working for).

In her association of the religious and the clinical spheres, the former

is neutralized, desacralized by the latter. Reminders of the “fearful

symmetry” of the mythological characters in William Blake’s

etchings, Tenneson’s figures seem however to slightly step out of

canons. In the dissolving contours, in the purified setting of her

photographs we read a hesitation of form, as if the ambiguities of

beauty opened up the surface of the image like a wound. The soft

values she obtained in these prints smooth the body and invest the

figures with an ethereal, sensual quality. At the same time, the figures

seem to be placed in a visual purgatory, as it were, suspended between

suffering and healing, performing rituals of purification and

regeneration. As in Sylvia Plath’s metaphoric fields, for instance, the

ambiguity of the color white combines clinical with lethal tones even

as it plays a cathartic role.

Surprised in their intimacy (as in the classical genre of bath

scenes) and at the same time ceremonial, statuesque (reminiscent in

their postures of Greek statues), the figures in Tenneson’s

compositions reach however more down-to-earth shapes as they

deviate from the poses they recall, be it by showing pregnancy, aging

at different stages, heavy flesh, or skinny silhouettes. “Carol and

Mirror” (1987), for instance, shows the profile silhouette of a woman

of round, full shapes and long gray hair (all details differing from the

conventional aesthetics of the nude). She holds a small round mirror in

her left hand and is placed against a background of painted arches that

gives depth of field to the flat photographic image. Her nudity is

discretely protected by her extending arm, by her long hair covering

her back, and by a white cloth unfolding down her waist. Like Wall’s

“The Giant”, her posture reveals modest pride. The painted arches on

the background of this photograph convey a sense of harmony

between the actual image and the image the woman seems to behold

in the mirror. Because of its angle, we do not see the reflection in the

mirror other than as it mirrors back on the model’s face. The older

woman is not made beautiful, but is brought, through the visual

dynamic of the composition, within an optical field that highlights the

“grace, acceptance, affection” pointed out by Goldberg in relation to

Tenneson’s approach of variations of the physical body. With

discretion, the model evokes a layered body memory of private and

cultural reminiscences, of changing paradigms of beauty.

Touching Surfaces 142

In other photographs Tenneson breaks with stereotypes even

as she makes use of them, as for instance when she explores a

repertory of romantic or Pre-Raphaelite imagery (wings, wedding

dresses, angels, or dolls that look like painted saints) in order to

visualize the ambivalences in rites of passage and processes of inner

transformation that she shows as actual trans-figurations. The

emotions these photographs evoke are ambivalent, if not

contradictory: both pleasure and fear, expressing excitement and

anxiety in relation to the unknown. The future seems to lie out in front

of the models like a white page they have to deliver themselves to, a

white dress awaiting to be inhabited, a deserted nightgown hanging by

the blind window of a cathedral (all images from Tenneson’s early

black-and-white work). In many of the black-and-white photographs,

embroidered veils also allude to an indefinite past. The portions of

time contained in the stitch bring to mind fabrics of memory passed on

by such frail tokens of anonymous past lives. Time shows through

these modest aesthetic codes like a spider web in which generations of

women’s hands have been caught.

In the photographs I have discussed in the first chapter, a

sense of generational continuum was suggested by younger

photographers whose projection into older age suggested an

exploration of as yet invisible sides of the self (such was the case with

Hervé Guibert’s photographs of Suzanne and Louise). By contrast, in

some of her photographs, Tenneson brings together generations in the

same photograph, thereby highlighting visually both the likeness and

the difference of shapes and expressions, an association which results

in an uncanny effect. In “Man and Two Women” (1989), for instance,

a profile composition, the silhouette of an adolescent is placed

between that of an older woman – his right arm gently encompassing

her hip – and that of a younger woman leaning on his back. The

draperies covering their bodies, the rounded geometry of the leaning

figures (the older woman’s head reposes on the young man’s chest)

convey a sense of reciprocal physical and psychic holding.

In “Peter Holding William” (1989), a Pieta-like composition,

a young man tenderly holds the frail body of an old man, a photograph

in which Tenneson relied extensively, as she confesses, on the two

models’ spontaneous reaction and emotional input. “Old Man and

Deanna” (1986) recalls Geneviève Cadieux’s piece “Blue Fear”,

which I have analyzed in the first chapter. Tenneson’s photograph

Photographic Aesthetics 143

shows the silhouette of an older man, his back turned away from the

camera and apparently ignoring the girl shown in profile, who seems

to be whispering something into his ear. However, unlike Cadieux,

Tenneson’s photograph is not based on a metaphor of self-

examination but on an odd interaction between different age- and

gender-selves. The gaze projected on the body of the old man seen

from the back is not a reflection of his own (as was the case in

Cadieux’s “Blue Fear”) but that of the partly devilish, partly angelic

girl seen from profile, whose silhouette is covered by a thin veil, out

of which the wing of a bat surfaces: such mixture of innocence and

wickedness that childhood can sometimes project against old age. In

spite of the soft tones of the image, of its lyrical mode, this

combination of emotions dodges sentimentality, a feature which

emerges in Tenneson’s more recent work as a means of addressing the

issue of an aesthetics of aging to a larger audience.

Significantly, Tenneson considers this picture of contrastive

emotions as being very much about herself: an allegory of growth

(Deanna is actually a model that Tenneson has followed in her bodily

and emotional progress at different ages in several compositions and

portraits). The lyrical approach prevailing in most of her photographs

does not prevent Tenneson from looking into the conflicts between

generations or into the contradictions of subject construction. Some of

her black-and-white photographs from the 1970s and 1980s, for

instance, dramatize the taboo conflicts between the pleasures and the

anxieties of motherhood, as in “Mother Holding Her Child” (1983),

where the baby’s capped head obliterates the mother’s face. In this

photograph, strangely, the baby’s head looks like a mask on her

eyeless, mouthless face, a detail that conveys a powerful sense of

suffocation.

While in Tenneson’s black-and-white photographic work

different textures of cloth cover parts of the body, in her color

photographs the fabric becomes more transparent, it dissolves into thin

gauze, as in “Three Women” (1987), reminiscent of a shroud, organic

tissue, or placenta. The slight out-of-focus effect produced by these

materials does not result from the manipulation of the time of

exposure. Technically, it is not a blur and it does not relate, as in

Michals’ photographs, to movement in the physical space of the

photograph. While the body is mostly stationary, statuesque,

Touching Surfaces 144

movement unfolds from thin fabric or lighting effects. Bringing

together the sensuality with the immobility of the body produces a

disconcerting effect on the viewer. It confers a threatening connotation

to beauty when fixed in the photographic image (as, for instance, in

“Suzanne in Contortion”, 1990). Either statuesque, or placed in the

company of fragmented statues or monuments, Tenneson’s models

have something of the immobility of lasting relics.

We remember that Roland Barthes associated photography

to mourning while in the middle of writing Camera Lucida he was

experiencing the death of his own mother. Yet photography has been

linked to death in very specific ways since its early development and

sometimes, in fact, for mere technical reasons. Before double or

multiple exposure were intentionally used to create varied aesthetic

effects, with a few exceptions (such as the intention implicit in certain

spirit photographs to extend the boundaries of the visible into an

image of afterlife), in the early days of photography, unfocused

images were considered a flaw. Resulting from the model’s movement

during the process of the picture-taking (quite a long one at the time),

the mysterious auras surrounding the figures or their soft contours –

part of the aesthetic vocabulary of photography since at least the

1950s – provoked at the time great dissatisfaction, especially in the

case of portraiture.

Nineteenth-century photographers were faced with a

conundrum concerning the inverse proportion between the long speed

of the exposure and the natural air of the picture. In other words, the

less the model moved to allow for the time of exposure, the more

artificial the picture. As Geoffrey Batchen notes in his book, Burning

with Desire: The Conception of Photography, some critics objected

that the effort to maintain the pose “made the subject’s face look like

that of a corpse” (1997: 208). It seems indeed that the emaciated

features in the portraits done by Julia Margaret Cameron were partly

provoked by the actual exhaustion of the models due to the strain of

the pose, their melancholic attitude being therefore the result of the

extended duration of the exposure. However, Cameron turned this

technical drawback into an aesthetic device by using the sfumato-like

effect due to the long exposure time to convey a sense of

otherworldliness to her figures. In a letter to Sir John Hershel, dated

December 31, 1864, she expresses her anger against the critics who

Photographic Aesthetics 145

deplored her disrespect for conventions of photography understood as

a mechanical reproduction of nature:

I believe in other than mere conventional topographic photography –

map-making and skeleton rendering of feature and form without that

roundness and fullness of force and feature, that modelling of flesh and

limbs, which the focus I use only can give, tho’ called and condemned as

“out of focus.” What is focus – and who has the right to say what focus is

legitimate focus? (1989: n. pag.; emphasis added).5

In order to obtain the “roundness and fullness of force and

feature” that she associated to truthfulness of character, Cameron had

to go against “conventional topographic photography” by way of

using costume, mask, and deviating technique. Ironically, a prop had

been invented in order to help photographers to create more lifelike

effects in agreement with photographic standards, a device which, like

other technical developments of her time, Cameron refused to use.

This contraption was meant to support the heads of the models to

prevent them from moving in order to ensure the production of a

portrait without failure! Clearly, for a more natural effect of the

photograph, the figure had to be frozen and the photographer had to

avoid the most minimal movement over the duration of the picture

taking. As Batchen justly remarks: “This device transformed the lived

time of the body into the stasis of an embalmed effigy. In other words,

photography insisted that if one wanted to appear lifelike in a

photograph, one first had to act as if dead” (1997: 208; emphasis

added).6

5 Cameron’s statement is strikingly similar to another outspoken declaration

of freedom of form expressed by photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard in the 1960s.

In an unpublished lecture delivered around 1961 and entitled “No-Focus”, Meatyard

refers to his series of photographs with the same title in which he had deliberately

used the blur in order to explore new forms of vision: “As for what No-Focus had

done and can do – it is freedom [...]. It is an art of visual acrobatics which result in

acrobatic emotions and misgivings. No criticism has ever seemed as valid as the

reasons for the importance of the being of No-Focus” (Unpublished typed ms, c.

1961, n. pag.; quoted in Tannenbaum 1991: 35; emphasis added). 6 Actually, in spite of her revolt against the critics’ displeasure with her

focus, later in her life Cameron came to acknowledge that movement was indeed in

the way of a perfect picture. She writes to one of her models: “All the others are

prevented from being quite perfect by movement and if I could only get at you again I

would make you repeat it all till you were perfect in the still sitting and then the

pictures would be perfect” (Gernsheim 1975: n. pag.).

Touching Surfaces 146

It is a “melancholy truth”, in Michals’ ironic phrasing, that

in photography beauty cannot be fixed as an ideal iconic form but only

as a momentary state, as the impression of a shape. And that the

dazzling sight of beauty is reminiscent in its immobility of the

dazzling sight of death. Even as they show the frailty of beauty,

Tenneson’s photographs of younger women are unsettling in that a

pleasing sight of the human figure can be experienced as false, unreal,

or uncanny because of its excessive perfection. Tenneson’s skill

consists precisely in her displacing the viewer’s attention from

surfaces to interior spaces. Stripped of its everyday references,

covered with drapes or seen through a foggy screen, the nude body

itself becomes a signifier of interiority, enigmatic in its economy of

movement. The minimal indications given in the titles of the

photographs do not add much to what one can see at a first glance.

Instead, they invite the viewer to look for the image under the image,

to observe the movements of a visually reconstructed interiority. The

sfumato-like effect smudges the frontiers between physical

appearance and psychic experience, between actual and imaginary

spaces, between time dimensions and angles of vision. It creates the

illusion of a possible coherence of the subject in a visual world that

relates to reminiscences of heterogeneous imagery.

2. Photographic Diversions, Forms of Consciousness

Transformation (of bodies), transgression (of canons), and

transparence (of shapes) are articulated in Tenneson’s vision as terms

by means of which she questions our relationship to images that

formalize degrees of consciousness related to different states or age-

selves. Her own history as an artist highlights this very important fact:

there is no transformation without transgression of conventions. In

some of her photographs, she has indeed reached a threshold of

photographic representation which transforms the figure more

radically than in the works I have discussed previously, namely by

partially dematerializing the image of the body and then using light to

materialize forms of consciousness, to show them as an integral part

of the corporeal presence.

Photographic Aesthetics 147

Her book Transformations, for instance, includes a series

significantly entitled “Light Writings”, in which figures similar to

those in her previous photographs are surrounded by light materialized

as lightning, auras, or luminescent globes. Turned into bodies of light,

these shapes give the impression of emanating from the human figures

and, as a result, seem to liberate them from the forces of gravity. The

dematerialization supports the release from the bodily ego, from a

particular state of being. The photographed figure becomes the

metaphoric site of complex or subtle experiencings.

Literally invading the image, light also unifies diverse forms

of psychic energy to convey something about the creative alliance

between the photographer and her models.7 If in this series, Tenneson

still shows the bodies as protected by thin veils. Yet, given the

luminous quality of the photographs and their effect of transparence,

she seems to use nudity here even more explicitly than in her previous

work “as a kind of window on the psyche, the inner self” (1993: 91).

In Illuminations, a book that combines representations of

figures with photographs of architectural and sculptural details or

fragments of Neo-Gothic monuments, Tenneson explores the

emotional interaction between individual and historical time. The

relics of the past are contrasted here with the energy of the human

presence, a contrast enhanced by her using the same device as in the

previous series, namely light as an actual instrument, that is an optic

fiber laser wand which she manipulates very much like a flash light

during the process of capturing the image. This allows her to control

as well as to release energy in order to create new shapes, to literally

write with light (to create a photo-graph). As in Dine’s use of digital

camera and printing devices, for Tenneson’s aesthetic purposes the

laser wand combines the sharpness of vision provided by leading-edge

technologies with the intervention of the hand. At the same time,

although this specific technology she utilizes suggests the possibility

of control over a natural element, the laser wand – rather difficult to

manipulate because extremely quick – is as unpredictable as the blur

so that it leaves room for accident, namely, for the spontaneous

7 Like Jacqueline Hayden, Tenneson talks about her models’ input in the

compositions, about the inspiring exchange of emotional energy, and about their

creative participation in the choice of the postures.

Touching Surfaces 148

emergence of shapes in the making of the image. Instead of

consuming the body, light sublimates it into new configurations in

which figurative and abstract shapes are combined, as, for instance in

“Woman with Light Hat” (1997). By giving light actual shapes,

Tenneson illuminates graphically the imaginative extensions of our

lives. In her earlier photographs, light allowed her to explore varied

textures of the body. In these series, Tenneson transforms the

battlefield of the destructive effects of light on the skin – one that, in

fact, cosmetic industry is fiercely contending with – into a creative

field in which different textures generate intriguing optical illusions,

expressions of the self in other registers of visibility. Skin is a “raw

material” in Tenneson’s phrasing: “I love it when light passes onto

skin”, she notes, “transforming it. The play between, is it skin, is it

stone, is it fabric, is it light? – when they meld into each other,

fascinates me” (Dunas 1987: 102; emphasis added).

These effects of light recall Kuntzel’s installation, that

intense moment in which the photograph projected on a screen effaces

itself to materialize the imperceptible passage of time. Here however,

the various degrees of white produced by Tenneson’s use of light

dissolve the contours of the figure and create the optical illusion of the

figures moving slowly back and forth, in a space that seems to escape

the laws of perspective, and that in spite of the models’ frontal

position. The resulting images read like a metaphor for photography

itself, one of the instruments we have devised and developed in order

to fix a moment – and not only to escape the destructive effects of the

passage of time upon memory – but also to better understand the

formative value temporality may have in the becoming of the self.

“Woman Holding Cloth” (1988), for instance, is one of Tenneson’s

photographic images which can be regarded as an allegory of

photography: the torso of a young woman, her arms bent in square

angles holding a thin cloth in front of her face, the arms somehow

framing the cloth. Her face vaguely shows through this rather

unorthodox veronica, yet not one printed on the cloth – as in the

Biblical allegory – but emanating, as it were, from the inside (and in a

different vein than Dine’s evocation of the Veronica in his digital

composition).

“The search of transcendence with a camera” has become, as

Vicki Goldberg puts it, “unfashionable in a secular climate and

difficult in any event” (Tenneson 1993: 9). Goldberg also notes that:

Photographic Aesthetics 149

“transcendental ideas in the photography of the last 50 years tend to be

coached in terms of abstraction (Minor White) or allegory (Clarence

John Laughlin, Duane Michals) but seldom translated onto barely

disguised flesh” (1993: 9; emphasis added). In the materializations of

light accompanying the physical bodies in Illuminations, we can see a

source of psychic sustenance that transcends the physical. In other

photographs, this source is figured by an angel, a worn-out image to

which Tenneson gives new wings, so to say, a stereotype that she uses

in order to visualize, as she puts it, “just another form of

consciousness” (1993: 122; emphasis added). Many of her

photographs explore such different forms of consciousness that

synthesize a wide range of individual and cultural memories.

Where substance encounters consciousness and the fragile

surface of gauze the thick lens of the objective, an inner clarity

emerges, a personal vision keeping in touch with uncanny

configurations of time lodged in our memory. While matter is

dissolving into transparency or luminescence, the immaterial takes on

shapes that become visual metaphors. The emotion has the slippery

consistency of photographic emulsion. Ethereal as they may seem,

these photographs are a tactile compendium to ways of staying alive.

Instead of representing a retreat from the world, the otherworldly in

them is, on the contrary, a result of Tenneson’s keen observation of

human nature, of her reflection on matter, which, as physics sees it

today, is but another form of energy.8 Interestingly, with regard to

Tenneson’s paradoxical treatment of spiritual or transcendent

dimensions through bodily shapes, the photography critic Claude Nori

has associated her not, as one would expect, with a spiritualist

tradition but, on the contrary, with the great tradition of naturalist

photographers “who questioned matter in looking for an answer to

their interrogations” (1983: 78).

By way of displacement or stylization (as, for instance, in

some of the photographs in which she has used head caps to neutralize

8 About this aspect in relation to images, photographer Tom Drahors notes:

“The reading of an image cannot be exclusively conceptual, visual or aesthetic. It is a

much more complex question. An image reflects a reality. But that reality is matter,

and as we know in our time matter has become an extremely vague concept, since

from the point of view of physics, matter is above all energy”. (Drahors 1987: n. pag.;

tr. mine).

Touching Surfaces 150

the figure), Tenneson takes her models out of actuality – but not

completely out of time – to project them, inquisitively, into larger

dimensions of temporality. These misted, risk-laden images of

condensed time seem to question the possibility of adhering to myths

in an era when the abusive uses of imagery have rendered the very

mythology of image-making banal. Tenneson capitalizes on the

cognitive and affective qualities of photographs even while alerting us

– through her ambivalent view of beauty – to ways in which the

seduction of images can freeze perceptions of the self into stereotypes.

Her layering of images combines the concern for the individual’s

relation to images with an interest in how Western visual culture is

changing and growing, with the directions it takes.

The aesthetic idiom Tenneson has created over time can be

instrumental in addressing conflicting theoretical views in visual

culture precisely because of her attempt to surpass common

dichotomies in order to reach what William H. Gass has called “a true

community of ends”. Commenting on Catherine Wagram’s

photographic compositions inspired by laboratory instruments, Gass

notes that such a community implies:

giving each dimension of the medium its due, its full and fair share:

matter, mind, imagination – trope, thought, thing – function, form, feeling

– use, design, dream – percept, concept, precept – theory, fact, fiction; and

to allow the various elements of the composition [...] an uncoerced

allegiance to the whole (1996: 43).

That as a philosopher and a fiction writer, Gass uses ternary

groups in his commentary on the relationship between art and science

is a significant conceptual move away from patterns of thought based

on binaries, a move inherent in the creative work of many

photographers today. The lyrical undertones of Tenneson’s work

(which, in turn, have called here for a more evocative discourse) do

not preclude over the questions she addresses. Their theoretical scope

relates to current concerns about the role of heterogeneous images in

subject construction in a critical context mostly focused on the

destabilizing effect of images.

Photographic Aesthetics 151

3. Aesthetics and Cosmetics

My mother wore lipstick until the day she

died. […] Her hair thinned and grayed for all

the brushing, but as I look at her image now

it’s only the photographs that age.

Herbert Blau

The heterogeneous references in Tenneson’s photographs –

religious, artistic, or vernacular – are, I would like to point out, not

only domains of representation, or aesthetic versions of the subject.

They embody areas of the subject’s life experience, as many zones in

which the psychic body circulates. Similarly, the combination of two

photographic practices, the artistic and the commercial, allows her to

circulate conventions from one domain to another and explore the

category of beauty and that of the aesthetic from the glossy rhetoric of

magazines to art history canons back and forth. Despite its apparent

transparency, her way of understanding beauty unveils hidden twists.

If she conjures the aesthetic within the area of commonplace – “to

show that even lovely women have inner lives”, as Vicki Goldberg

puts it (Tenneson 1993: 8) – she also reveals what can be repulsive in

canonized forms, namely how, by being fixed into stereotypes, beauty

can become a dead form (or, a form of perceptual death).

Transgressing the boundaries between the two approaches of beauty

allows Tenneson to explore transformations of the individual body

along with its visual constructions in the history of representations.

Indeed, her commercial work does not, in fact, diverge very

much from her fine art work in that she uses sometimes the same

models, similar settings, atmosphere, and lighting. However, as she

remarks, her commercial work rarely reaches “the psychological

edge” of her personal work (1993: 109); it does not possess the same

haunting strangeness, which her clients unequivocally avoid.9

Ironically, however, her commercial work (commissioned portraiture,

9 “Clients want something pleasant and beautiful, a little bit unusual but

not too strange”, notes Tenneson (1993: 109), and she remembers by way of anecdote

the reaction of a client before taking his portrait: “Remember, no death or dying,

nothing disturbing [...]” (1993: 112).

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fashion, advertising) addresses the religion of beauty, which carries

the promise, as a Vogue advertisement informs us, “to erase time, alter

perception, create a new reality” (2000: n. pag.),10 an effect which

actually her art photographs produce.

Two modes of understanding the performing self (the

cosmetic and the aesthetic) are at work in the two fields. Where her

commercial photographs show idealized states in normalized bodies,

the pictorial performances in series such as Exposures (1986), or

Transformations (1993) incorporate varied realities of the body as

expressions of the becoming self. Instead of placing them in conflict,

Tenneson explores the tensions between the two fields creatively and

looks into the many ways in which they interfere with issues of

subject construction and cultural determinations.

A particular relation emerges from Tenneson’s photographs,

as discussed in the previous sections. While the allusions to art models

or the constructed poses convey a statuesque character to the figures,

the techniques that insist on dematerialization deconstruct it by

degrees. The effects she uses carry a wide range of affects that

integrate conventional and non-conventional forms of beauty into a

continuum of subject perception. Round, emaciated, wrinkled, or too

smooth bodies become touching precisely because of the inner logic

suggested in the composition, one which combines varied emotions

associated with the complicated, discrepant, conflicting perceptions of

the changing body and to the images we have or are making of it.

Where testimonial photographs of older people can generate particular

forms of affect, speculative photographs bring together complex,

sometimes contradictory forms of emotion that are part of conscious

or unconscious processes related to the construction (and expression)

of subjectivity and to that of the subject, in time.

Blinding, like the fact of figuring death, the embodied light

caught in these photographs also represents, perhaps, just the

transformation of ways of seeing. By effacing the contours of the

10 The photograph, an advertisement for the cosmetic product MAGIC by

Perspectives, represents a woman holding a bowl of light in her hands very similar to

the technique Tenneson used in “Light Writings”. MAGIC is presented as “an

extraordinary new concept that optically transforms the skin” (Vogue 2000: n. pag.).

Signifiers of the fierce battle with time in cosmetic industry, terms such as “time

stop”, “optic illusion”, or even “mimesis” [of natural processes] are frequent in the

recent rhetoric of cosmetic products.

Photographic Aesthetics 153

figures, Tenneson transgresses current canons of beauty in order to

direct the beholder’s gaze elsewhere, not – or, not only – inwards, in

the sense of deliberately visualizing particular psychological states,

but into areas of transition, of processing emotions, and of formalizing

them into aesthetic idioms. The uncanny formal similarities between

her commercial work and her art work suggest that the glowing shapes

and the glossy photographic surfaces that circulate in the current

commerce of images might also be turned into instruments which can

help us consider common place representations otherwise than mere

manipulative objects.

Tenneson’s ambivalent aesthetics shows the human being in

its frailty – as a momentary monument – and our consciousness of

human experience in its variety of forms or versions. The association

between personal relics of childhood and images of erotic seduction,

or that between myth and contingent reality, integrates conflicting

aspects of the self in a world dominated by paradox. By the very

special use of light she makes in Transformations and Illuminations –

light as metaphor and as technology – Tenneson explores the non-

human sources of human energies. In the depredations of time

(difficult to locate and to accept) and in the frail instruments we have

devised to escape them – photography among others – she finds

sources of energy. Her elegiac formal approach has such holding

effect that other photographers working with aging models insist on,

while the models bring in a transformative power that incorporates the

alterations of time into a larger, different understanding of beauty.

Hence the difference of intent between her commercial photographs,

in which she insists on the illusion that we can have some control over

time, and the creative, generative dimension of time patterns in her art

work, where gauze or mist covering the body are also tropes for skins

we shed, for debris of former selves that add up into perpetually

transforming patterns of the subject.

The two aesthetic modes come very close to converging in

her recent work collected in two volumes of photographs and

interviews, Wise Women: A Celebration of Their Insights, Courage,

and Beauty (2002), portraying women aged 65 to 100 from all walks

of life and parts of the United States, and the subsequent Amazing

Men: Courage, Insight, Endurance (2004), meant to give a new vision

of masculinity and aging today. The two books continue questions of

subject identity, difference, and aesthetics from her Light Warriors

Touching Surfaces 154

(2000), in which she had explored the lives of women of varied ethnic

appearances, aged between 20 and 55. More outspokenly rhetorical

than her previous work, these recent books crystallize aesthetic

preoccupations that intersect with questions present in a larger current

cultural landscape in the Western world. With these photographs

Tenneson hopes to provide new models of aging, alternative answers

to the fear of growing older, “a new vision, a revelation” (2002: n.

pag.), as she admits to have been herself transformed in the making of

Wise Women, a book that she considers as the logical development of

her thirty-years long career as a photographer. Many of these

photographs were a revelation for the subjects themselves, since many

of these women, like Guibert’s Louise, had not been photographed in

many years and were “startled to see their current image” (2002: n.

pag.). As in the photograph “Three Women” I have referred to in the

previous section, the women in her new book express, in Tenneson’s

words, “a new collective yearning for compassion and relatedness”. In

2003, Wise Women was the subject of a six-part Today show special,

serialized in The Oprah Magazine11 and in Modern Maturity. It has

quickly become a cultural phenomenon. In her introduction to the

book, Tenneson actually remarks that in was a 1990s phenomenon

that many artists do commercial work. These two books bring

Tenneson’s preoccupation with redefining the category of beauty from

the domain of art into that of actual life and express a significant turn

in more recent perspectives on aging, to the emergence of which

photography (both testimonial and, as I have tried to show,

speculative) has contributed in many ways.

In some respects, aestheticizing aging in these new books is

evocative of a larger American social and cultural history of defeats:

“aging is our final frontier”, says Tenneson in the preface to Wise

Women. However, because of her skill and her reflection on the

notions of beauty which intersect with notions of difference, her work

brings up seductive, inspiring, and provoking questions which leave

behind that very rhetoric. The critique of visual culture has, for

instance, focused on the influence of the media on the construction of

models of physical identity. Little has however been said about the

11 In an interview given on that occasion, Tenneson refers explicitly to

her concern with redefining the notion of beauty, not only in art, as she did with her

previous work, but in life as well: “One of the things I hope to do with this book is to

open a discussion about what real beauty means” (Raffel 2002: 264).

Photographic Aesthetics 155

intersections between these models and those coming from other

registers of visual culture; or about new notions of beauty that can

emerge from such intersections. Tenneson’s work in what are often

considered as opposite fields, art and commercial, invites us to

meditate on these questions. Her own idiom of combined aesthetic

approaches reflects back on the variety of factors that contribute to

fugitive revelations of “the inner statue”, to the diverse forms it can

take. That her visual research has, like that of Hayden, somehow

archetypal connotations is suggestive of a new stage in the study of

difference in cultural contexts that become more and more

heterogeneous, as a consequence of which identity markers common

to different groups are being sought for. At the same time, Tenneson’s

bridging artistic and commercial visual registers speaks of the fact

that, at the turn of the twenty-first century (and since the outset of my

research on the subject in the mid-1990s), the discrepancies between

the photographic treatment of aging in the two domains tend to be less

and less striking. It is not so much the technical and aesthetic

strategies that make a difference now, it seems. The difference lies

rather in the uses made of the images, in their intent, and their

emotional input. Tenneson’s aesthetics – even in its getting closer to a

certain sentimentality which her earlier work avoided – strikes a

balance between documenting and imagining, between sentiment and

distance, thereby drawing attention to the ways in which photographic

aesthetics can relate to issues of aging and becoming of the self in a

culture undergoing significant transformations.

5

Performing Corpo-Realities

Argument: the Spectrum of Aging

Francesca Woodman; Donigan Cumming

It is an irony of sorts to end a book on temporality, consciousness, and

aging with a chapter devoted to a young photographer, one who did

not take the time to age. Francesca Woodman was thirteen years old

when she started photography. Between 1972 and 1981, she produced

a huge amount of work: more than 500 photographs, mix-media

projects, and an artist book. Her life ended short in 1981, with her

suicide at age twenty-two. The undeveloped films she left behind

contain so many latent images, the contact sheets so many sequences

of potential enlargements, croppings, prints, which have not yet, or

might never become a photograph, and yet exist as “many, many

thoughts on a roll film”, in Jim Dine’s phrasing. With the exception of

a few minor shows, Woodman’s work enjoyed little recognition

during her lifetime. Her work and figure came to public attention

posthumously, in academic circles of feminist and psychoanalytical

orientation, as well as in art circles, and have also turned to be

inspirational for many young artists, largely owing to the strategies

she developed in her formative years. Her work has also been

seductive for the public, yet not so much for the precision and

distinction appreciated by artists, but probably rather for the non-finite

character of her destiny, for the mixture of spontaneity and

theatricality evocative of adolescence, for its intensity as well as for its

indeterminacy. As many spaces of thought that viewers can identify

with and whose gaps or missing links invite them to participate,

Touching Surfaces 158

respond to, develop … and, perhaps, project on the fantasy of growing

up without ever growing old.

It is only at the turn of the century that a few new readings

have brought into attention aspects of Woodman’s work related to the

innovative dimensions of her photographic thinking in the context of

the artistic preoccupations of her time, Minimalism and experimental

video in particular (Baker et al. 2003: 52-67).1 More recently, we have

also become aware of the highly edited character of her work, which

intersects obliquely with my concerns here with the role of creative

photographs in the construction of the subject (and of images

representing it, of their accessibility, or editing). Interestingly, it is not

theory that brought into attention critical aspects concerning the

circulation and reception of Woodman’s work, but a video piece, The

Fancy (2000), made by American experimental filmmaker Elizabeth

Subrin. The Fancy is presented as “a speculative, experimental work

that explores the life of Francesca Woodman evoked by the published

catalogues of and about her photographs”.2

Subrin’s introduction to the video piece mentions the fact

that all catalogues existing at that point draw from three sources (the

catalogues published in 1986, 1992, and 1998). She calls attention to

the fact that the public image of Woodman’s work has been highly

edited and limited to the circulation of 107 printed images from the

500 existing negatives, out of which only about 30 are repeatedly

1 A first version of this chapter was completed in 2001. The subsequent

discussion of Woodman’s work at a roundtable that brought together art historians

and artists concerning some of the points that are at the core of my argument in this

chapter – the question of performance and subjectivity in particular – confirmed the

intuition that prompted my approach of her work (Baker et al. 2003: 52-67). Peggy

Phelan also hints at this issue (Phelan 2002). 2 The catalogue of the Video Data Bank of the School of the Art Institute

in Chicago notes on this video piece that it “radically reorganizes information from

the catalogues in order to raise questions about biographical form, history and fantasy,

female subjectivity, and issues of authorship and intellectual property […] in an

attempt to uncover the traces of a seemingly suppressed history embedded behind the

photographer’s pictures”.

A new book devoted to Woodman’s photographs came out after the

completion of my manuscript. Two hundred-fifty images are printed in this book

together with unpublished extracts from her journal selected by her father (Townsend

2006). In his essay “Scattered in Space and Time”, Townsend also places Woodman’s

work in a larger context of art history as well as in that of the art practices of her time.

As for whether this new book reveals more of a “the seemingly suppressed history”,

as Subrin puts it, this is a question beyond of the scope of my study here.

Performing Corpo-Realities 159

reproduced.3 These catalogues mostly present Woodman’s

photographs in isolation, leaving behind the importance of serial work

in her approach to photography. Suggestively, Subrin isolates two of

the meanings of the word fancy that she uses as a title for her film,

namely “to visualize”, and “to suppose/ to guess”, hinting at the fact

that the body of Woodman’s photographic work – that carries so much

creative potential – has not been entirely developed.

Of small (and mostly square) format, Woodman’s black-

and-white photographs come into the viewer’s visual field with force,

not to say with violence. We are compelled to cast off preconceptions

and habits of seeing and adopt her angle, to shrink in age

imaginatively, to get in touch with that period of our lives when

creativity was within striking reach and the past appealing because not

ours, not yet the heavy stuff of our lives. Woodman restores a lost

innocence to the beholder’s gaze and, thereby, an all-sensory

perception that time accumulated in layers has the tendency to vitrify,

one recalling the freshness of perception Myrtle Gordon summons in

Opening Night: “When I was eighteen my emotions were so close to

the surface …”.

In adolescence, the awkward age of multiple physical and

psychic transitions in which we create our own potential spaces, our

personal idiom, we become aware not of aging but of age, an ever-

shifting notion that is to change over time. The visible is then a space

one traverses to grasp life lines, to reach out for new spaces, for new

areas of experience, and to find out how to deal with them. In the

process, a consciousness of the self develops as a physical and psychic

body opening up to new physical and mental environments. Hence, for

the adolescent – for as much as that age of contradictions holds

generalizations – the borders between the phantasmatic and the actual

world, between intuition and rationality, are more fluid, not yet stuck

into binary categories. The interiors in Woodman’s photographs are

devoid of the paraphernalia of everyday life and rather resemble

intimations of dreams, of imaginary spaces. They are unprotected,

open. The past is alluring because it is anonymous, perceived in the

eagerness of a future. Rather than a critical gaze projected onto the

real, we read in Woodman’s deflections of the photographic medium

3 A photographer’s work will always be the subject of editing (by the

author and/or by others, or, simply, by time itself, as in the case of E.J. Bellocq).

Touching Surfaces 160

questions related to how far photography can go to encompass

immediate realities as well as realities beyond visible reach. Her

photographs formalize the boundless potential of adolescence and the

concomitant need to find guide marks, to break ground in order to

experiment with various locations of the self, to create one’s own

inner space. Moving away from stereotypical images of the teenager,

Woodman does not show adolescence from a narcissistic perspective

(an aspect I will elaborate on farther), but as a way of addressing its

problems creatively. The stakes of her performing a wide range of

corporeal realities in front of a camera are related to the

transformations of the physical and psychic body and also to the

possibilities of the camera to capture them.

At the opposite spectrum of aging, we can find photographs

that are more closely related to performing realities of the changing

body (in old age), such as those of the Canadian photographer

Donigan Cumming collected in his book of photographs Pretty

Ribbons (1996). Cumming met Nettie Harris, a former journalist, then

artist, in 1982, when she was in her seventies. For nearly ten years,

week after week, he photographed her in her apartment, in poses that

very openly discard superficial standards of beauty. Working with his

model’s spirit of improvisation, dramatization, and humor, Cumming

places Harris either in her everyday environment or in compositions,

some of which show an old Nettie lying on a flowery carpet in a fetal

position, or enacting a moment of sleep (or perhaps death). In one of

them, she is surrounded by instantaneous portraits of herself

displaying a wide range of emotional impersonations. Other

photographs in this series are provokingly close to caricatural images

of old age. Although it addresses the relation between the

consciousness one can have of aging and the external perception of its

realities, Cumming’s series belongs to a different field of photography

than the one I have approached in this book, namely the social

documentary, a genre which “records and documents” to express an

outspoken attachment to external reality. Like Nicholas Nixon,

Richard Avedon, John Coplans, and more recently Nan Goldin, in a

series of photographs of her parents, Cumming “stares”, as he puts it,

into the realities of old age (1999: 2).

Adolescence and old age are critical moments of transition,

of dreaded thresholds, as we well know! It is not unusual (as medical

Performing Corpo-Realities 161

inquiries into patients’ perceptions of age confirm it) to perceive the

puzzling changes in the older body as a memory of the adolescent

body and thus relate to that identity in the shaping, or to that other

age-self, as I have called it at the outset of this study. Performing

different age-selves may be a reaction of defense, but also, or perhaps,

mainly, one of accommodation to new realities. One coming from the

need to explore the contrasts between external realities and their

perceptions. These contrasts can be either softened (as Tenneson does

with her models), or overacted (as Nettie does in Cumming’s

photographs). Adolescence and old age can be seen, as I have

suggested earlier in the book, as extensions of the transitional

processes theorized by D.W. Winnicott in his Playing and Reality, an

extension used by Christopher Bollas to refer to the transitional

objects of adulthood (Bollas 1987). Similarly, performing can help

recategorize aspects of the consciousness of the self in ways which are

comparable to the role that “playing” has in the maturational process

of the child: namely by facilitating the subject’s relating to the

environment via a network of illusions and enactments of mimetic

selves (equivalents of what Winnicott called “false selves”). Instead of

exposing physical appearance, photographers who explore the

spectrum of aging creatively integrate conflicting perceptions and

emotions into an elusive coherence of the physical and the psychic

body.

If I have preferred to discuss in more detail Woodman’s

work in the context of aging, it is precisely because of the distance the

adolescent body provides to the understanding of the older body.

Cumming’s photographs of Nettie call for empathy in a direct,

immediate way. Their performative aspect is related to the phatic

dimension and to an unambiguous message, as Cumming points out:

“[Nettie’s] was about being an elderly woman. Nettie understood the

impact of what she was doing on other elderly women of her social

group and she was prepared to risk criticism” (1999: 4). On the other

hand, Nettie’s poses relate to phantasms of the body in relation to

different age-selves, but they also hint at their limited scope in

vernacular visual culture. Cumming has indeed called attention to his

use of theatrical metaphors in his social work, as well as to the

importance of the Performance Art of the late 1960s on his training as

a photographer.

Touching Surfaces 162

Instead of that direct approach, the ambiguities in

Woodman’s photographs relate to my point here as a different kind of

provocation, precisely because she works not so much the poses but

the distance we can take from them through optical illusions that can

provide subtle accommodations to imperceptible realities. Her

exploration of the consciousness of aging is rooted in possibilities

provided by the camera at once to expose, to screen, and to transform

the tropes or broken narratives of inner growth (very much like the

photographer in Opening Night who reads the wrinkles on a 90-year

old woman’s face as tropes for experience “every wrinkle [is] a joy

she has had, a sorrow”).

What can an aging perspective bring to a reevaluation of

Woodman’s work? How do the questions it raises help our

understanding of aging as an ongoing process of building up

configurations of a consciousness of the self in the ongoing

temporality of subject growth? By displacing such specific questions

as adolescent narcissism or the gaze projected on the female body

onto problems of visualizing internal spaces and positioning the

subject in physical space, I would argue that Woodman operates a

series of shifts in categories. Recently, Ann Daly has highlighted the

importance of taking distance with the limitations of feminist readings

of her work by suggesting the necessity to “open up the discourse

around her work, maybe by placing more emphasis on her interest in

categories of representation and the disruption of the categorical”

(Baker et al. 2003: 56; emphasis added). Within the context of my

argument, I understand this disruption of the categorical as a series of

visual recategorizations (mainly by means of “playing” with

photographic conventions and modes). Theoretically, the performative

effects of the corpo-realities in Woodman’s photographs come close

to the understanding of aging and consciousness that I have acquired

from other photographers discussed in the book. Some of them more

obliquely, others more directly, not only create an accrued awareness

of images of aging circulating in Western cultures, but also propose

imaginative expressions of realities of aging and their perceptions.

Cumming, whose work I situate at the opposite spectrum of

visualizing aging (and in a different photographic genre), also insists

on the necessity of working in between categories. “In my work”, he

notes, “I address issues of categorical confusion and transgression”

Performing Corpo-Realities 163

(1999: 3). Where Cumming addresses these issues in the domain of

social attitudes and individual response, in Woodman’s photographs

these aspects appear in the context of self-exploration and

development of a personal aesthetics.4

Suggestively, Cumming has accompanied his model beyond

the photographic project and to the end of her life, by making his first

video piece, entitled A Prayer For Nettie (1995), which he presents as

“a transitional work, originally conceived as part of an installation

with photographs and seven monitors”. An “Elegy to Nettie Harris”,

as he calls this piece about “mourning and memory” (1999: 4), this

tape was made the summer before Nettie died, as a continuation of

their collaborative project for Pretty Ribbons. I have earlier underlined

the quality of holding in Jacqueline Hayden’s work with elderly art

models, in Hervé Guibert’s photographs and texts about his eighty-

year old aunts, or in Geneviève Cadieux’s “Blue Fear”. In them, I

have read an opening up to the models’ creativity and a holding gaze

when the body becomes too frail to even be touched. At the other pole

in the spectrum of transitional processes, it is perhaps such holding

gaze that Francesca Woodman created for her own growing self in the

extended space of the photographic image.

4 The concern with recategorization in the fields of documentary and art

photographs that relate to aging is itself an engaging topic, yet one which does not

encompass the scope of this book, where the focus is on the affective, cognitive, and

formative role of the aesthetic.

Touching Surfaces 164

Performing Corpo-Realities 165

Touching Surfaces 166

19. Duane Michals, “The Woman is Frightened by the Door”, 1966.

Five gelatin silver prints each paper, 5 x 7 inches. DMI.S.027.

Copyright Duane Michals. Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York.

Performing Corpo-Realities 167

1. Francesca Woodman

Photographic Ambiguities and Formal Growth

Perception of an object costs

Precise the Object’s loss —

Perception in itself a Gain

Replying to its Price —

The Object Absolute — is nought —

Perception sets it fair

And then upbraids a Perfectness

That situates so far —

Emily Dickinson

What is more precise than precision? Illusion.

Marianne Moore

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions

Whatever I see I swallow immediately

Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.

Sylvia Plath

In the sequence entitled “The Woman is Frightened by the

Door” (1966) (19) opening his book Real Dreams, Duane Michals sets

up a suspense story in five sequences with anxiety as a featured

character. Sequence 1: naked woman reading on a couch. Sequences

2, 3, and 4: door opens tentatively (a gust of wind?); woman turns her

head in the direction of the door. Sequence 5: her gaze fixed on the

door, her body, her face, and the book in her hands loosen their shape.

In the short interval between these sequences, nothing has happened.

Only the contours of her body have been disturbed. The woman has

been swept along by a fear unknown, an unseen visitor. Here, Michals

turns once more to the tradition of spirit photographs, yet, like in

“Death Comes to the Old Lady” (1969) (which is more literal), on a

visual tone that is half lyrical, half ironic. This distance allows him to

displace the focus (symbolically, and visually, by the use of the blur),

from the body-spirit question to that of the imperceptible, which for

him is the very substance of photography. Duane Michals was one of

Touching Surfaces 168

the photographers Woodman admired, although one could talk more

of elective affinities rather than direct influences, as it is the case with

other photographers that Woodman crossed paths with.

The hermeneutics of literary works is based on the

supposition that each text contains the inscription of the interpretative

moves to follow in partially decoding its enigma. Similarly, the formal

and energetic patterns of a photograph are carriers of patterns of

meaning as well as of a larger dimension that encompasses its

morphology and its visual syntax. From that vantage point, Francesca

Woodman’s work can be said to capture the unstable balance of

growth suggested in Richard Powers’ novel, The Gold Bug Variations,

through the metaphor of “the threshold effect” (a phrase inspired by

René Magritte’s painting “Threshold of Liberty”), a metaphor which

he places at the core of the logic of life and of systems of knowledge

and representation:

the accumulation of small variations that transform a change of degree

into a change of nature. Life stands on the threshold of some new twist it

will never be able to name but must live through all the same (Powers

1991: 616).

An untitled photograph by Francesca Woodman from the

series Boulder, Colorado (1972-1975)* functions within the range of

that same problematics. This particular photograph shows a blurred

silhouette crawling through the cross-shaped orifice of an old

headstone. The figure (a child? a teenager? a girl or a boy? or, most

likely a self-portrait) seems to dissolve into thin air as it is moving, yet

its blurred palms are firmly rooted in the grass on the one side, as are

its knees on the other. Caught between two zones of air separated by

solid stone, the figure has vacillated at the moment of the capture to

grow into a different body, one shown in a state of visual confusion, a

chaos of material particles (in a digital photograph, this is the actual

form that the fluid, transparent blur of the analogical image would

take). In spite of the location (a cemetery), the becoming body is not

* Unfortunately, I was not able to secure permission to reproduce

Woodman’s photographs here. I refer readers to the sites: “A Francesca Woodman

Gallery”, http://www.heenan.net/woodman; Francesca Woodman, “http://www.

artnet.com”, and “’Cesca’ Francesca Woodman”, http://www.arrangedmonster.com”,

the latter particularly highlighting the serial aspect of her work.

Performing Corpo-Realities 169

symbolically located between life and death, as it has been suggested,

but at the threshold of two stages of life, whose boundaries are

difficult to draw but emblematically. The date of the series itself does

not situate the photograph in a specific moment in time. Sometime

between 1972 and 1975, when Woodman was fourteen to seventeen

years old. Three years that count for so many more at a stage when, in

its groping for experience, the psychic body observes, dodges, and

often outgrows the physical body. The blur suggests here a galaxy of

changes, the confusion accompanying their apprehension even as the

subject has already developed into something else: a consciousness of

the self captured as vanishing presence shown in intermittent motion,

from outer shapes towards inner constellations of images developing

into visual patterns.

The distinction between the conscious and the unconscious

in such perceptions of the self is, like in the creative process itself, not

as clear-cut, as strict as we have the habit to think of it. Woodman’s

work raises two engaging questions in relation to my exploration of

photographic aesthetics. How much of the creative process (as a trope

for the construction of the subject) relies on the organizing powers of

inner life turned into consciousness by the controlling sense of form,

in the context of unconscious spontaneity? And, conversely, how does

her work – accomplished during her formative years – articulate inner

psychic structures into photographic forms as a way of accessing

consciousness (very much like Jim Dine does when he uses

photography to grasp inaccessible forms of memory as areas of dim,

dream-like consciousness of the self).

Critics have discussed varied influences on Woodman’s

imagination, ranging from Victorian novels to surrealist photography

(Posner 1998: 157-58; 167-171), and more recently, to Minimalist and

art video strategies developed by her contemporaries (Baker et al.

2003: 52-67; Townsend 2006). The photographic or pictorial

references in her work are numerous, and their intelligent weaving

into a personal idiom is striking. In a personal way, she combines

memories of Italian painting or sculpture, and other artistic references,

with a selective history of American photography ranging from her

contemporaries Duane Michals or Diane Arbus to the older generation

of visionary photographers still active in the 1960s and early 1970s,

Clarence John Laughlin and Ralph Eugene Meatyard, in particular.

Her references also include the turn of the century mysterious E.J.

Touching Surfaces 170

Bellocq, whose partly defaced glass plates of women from a brothel in

New Orleans, taken around 1912, were first brought into public

attention in 1970 by the book composed of Lee Friedlander’s

photographs of the plates. The book became very popular in the

photography world by the mid-1970s when Francesca Woodman was

being trained as a photographer at the Rhode Island School of Design,

in Providence.

If the identification of references is by no means essential

for the viewer’s response to Woodman’s aesthetics, it proves however

instrumental to our understanding of her photographic thinking in

relation to my I focus here. Consequently, such references do not call

our attention as a form of anxiety of influence (in passing, more of a

critic’s problem than that of an artist’s), but as a question of method.

Many of Woodman’s photographs are, indeed, what Rosalind Krauss

has called “problem sets” (1986),5 that is the result of various

assignments during her years at the Rhode Island School of Design.

These photographic versions of the academic studies in drawing

classes are responses either to a technical question or to varied

categories of representation. In Woodman’s creative use of

photographic models, the source work becomes part of her formative

dialogue with visual forms. “Two women, one in slip, one in robe,

New York, 1979”, for instance, reminiscent of Pompeii frescoes and

also of a photograph by Ralph Eugene Meatyard (“Untitled [Two

ghosts with a fireplace]”, ca.1969), is suggestive of her combining,

like Tenneson, visual codes of different art forms coming from

different historic moments. At once melancholically alert and

technically skilled, her photographs are all thought in process,

intuition, and meditation merging into one fugitive image. If

consciousness functions like the photographic device (which is, as we

have seen, but a theoretical supposition), we can say (metaphorically),

that the multitude of its forms unfolds here on the surface of the

photograph: witty, subtle, playful. A repertoire of states embodied in

puzzling configurations associated to the developing body.

Although speculations on Woodman’s suicide have been

avoided in the catalogue of her first posthumous exhibition (1986),

commentaries on intimations of death in her photographs come up

5 “Problem Sets” is the title of Rosalind Krauss’ essay in the 1986 catalogue.

The quotations here are from the version reprinted in Krauss’ collected essays

Bachelors (1999).

Performing Corpo-Realities 171

now and again, partly on account of her early departure, and partly

owing to the ghostly apparitions in many of her photographs.6

However, what strikes the viewer is rather their powerful creative

energy so skillfully balanced between expression and reflection,

between identifying the problem within the given image and trying to

find a new visual solution for it, between the constrictions of the

imposed form and the search for a liberating energy within these very

limitations.7 As Kathryn Hixson remarks in her essay “Essential

Magic: the Photographs of Francesca Woodman”: “The work has an

effective presence that is not dependent on death, but rather on a full

exploration of the possibilities of depicting through the photograph the

essence and vitality of life” (Woodman 1992: 28). The phantom

presences in her images, disembodied by light, hovering like white

fabric or smoke between patterns of matter and patterns of spirit might

indeed support associations with death. Yet, made between early

teenage and full-shape adolescence, Woodman’s photographs seem

more precisely related to life forms8 and life transitions: from one

space to another, from one area of time to another, from a state of

wonder to a state of dimly intuitive or suddenly sharp understanding.

The lens of her camera catches knots of contradictions whose

unresolvedness accounts for their truthfulness. In many photographs

she combines blurred with sharp focused zones to catch the

paradoxical association between confusion and clarity that

6 Peggy Phelan has a peculiar position with regard to that subject, considering

that Woodman “invites us to see her suicide, like her art, as a gift” (2002: 1002). I am

not discussing here this hypothesis that seems to me problematic. The article can be

consulted on-line and it contains illustrations of works that I discuss here: the

photograph from the Series Boulder, Colorado, 1972-1975 (986), “Then at one point,

[…]” (996), On Being an Angel (989), an image from Some Disordered Interior

Geometries (998), and “Study for Space 2” (1000).

7 A relatively comparable case is that of Abigail Cohen, who died in 2000 at

age 27, and recorded her experience in a series of photographs entitled One Cycle of

My Journey, published by Light Warriors Press, in 2003. In her statement about her

work, she also mentions being interested in freeing the photographic image from its

limitations. 8 Incidentally, “Life Forms” is the title of a video dance piece created by

Merce Cunningham in the 1990s, in which he combines computer-designed

choreographies with actual improvisations. This fleeting association with performance

art relates to my discussion of the performative character of Woodman’s photographs

at the end of this chapter.

Touching Surfaces 172

accompanies the passage from one zone of time and space to another

with the precision epitomized in Dickinson’s lines evoked in the

epigraph.

Blurred and sharp outlines create a disturbance in geometries

(to paraphrase the title of Woodman’s artist book, Some Disturbed

Inner Geometries). Shapes appear in the visual field with outstanding

clarity, while others disappear. Requiring both optic accommodation

and restructuring the perception of photographic space, this dynamic

determines the progressive emergence of another visibility, of layers

of reality other than the immediately visible, which coexist or interfere

with it.

Woodman belongs to a family of photographers who

express, in Max Kozloff’s phrasing, “a pictorial protest against the

solidity of things” (1989: 45) to reveal something of the immediacy of

perception and of the textures of the psychic body. However

dematerialized or illusory the matter of her images may appear, it

reveals the potentialities that inner shapes hold, the possibilities of

doing and undoing them in the photographic process so as to match

perceptions of these inner shapes with changing corporeal realities or

with diffuse, not to say confuse, perceptions of them. Optic

accommodation triggers off psychic plasticity. In such photographs,

the dissolving figure creates, instead of the illusion that we are in front

of a body which has moved at the moment of the capture (in the past),

that of a displacement which seems to occur at the very moment of

perception (in the present). “Perception in itself a Gain”.

In his essay on the power of photographs to increase

emotional knowledge, entitled “The Etherealized Figure and the

Dream of Wisdom”, Kozloff has pointed out this contrast of “time

zones” (a notion which recalls the solidarity between metaphors of

time and space in photography). What he calls “the figural dissolve” –

resulting from various uses of the blur – signifies precisely an effect

which calls up the viewer’s emotional participation in a very specific

way, representing, as he puts it “a somehow live transit at the viewer’s

moment of contact with the image” (1989: 45). “As it simultaneously

dissolves and leaves some trace of itself”, concludes Kozloff, “the

figure comes to seem like an alter-ego of our condition” (1989: 61;

emphasis added). As a complementary volet to the chapter devoted to

Duane Michals’ use of spectral visions to create images of movement

and change in time, I would like to approach here the figural dissolve

Performing Corpo-Realities 173

in Woodman’s photographs with added emphasis to the spatial

dimension.

Starting from the most striking feature of her work, namely

her treatment of bodily sensations in spatial terms, I will suggest that

her use of the dissolving figure (like that of photographic models) is,

in fact, a matter of formal growth, since it results in an extension of

the perceptible photographic space. Woodman works with the fluidity

of forms, with their plasticity, with the possibilities they hold to be

transformed and, in the process, to transform the subject and to

explore, as I will show in the following section, its positioning in

space. The principle of the figural dissolve however does not only

operate on the possibilities of the camera to represent change in the

physical and psychic body. It is also a principle of inner growth

according to which bodies of knowledge (art history models,

photography included) are distilled into the process of self-knowledge

and self-representation. These bodies of knowledge formalize states of

consciousness in her development as an artist.

Most of Woodman’s black-and-white photographs engage a

visual dialogue with the nature of shapes, of the body and the object

world surrounding it, with the environment in which it acts: small

variations of form. Accordingly, her own body, or that of the few

models she has used, becomes part of the environment. This fusional

relation with the environment is metaphorically suggested in the

images in which the body of a girl or that of a young woman merges

with or emerges from the peeling wallpaper of an abandoned house

like the sudden materialization of a figure in the carpet. In other

photographs, the body becomes a misty presence; it seems to pass

through a fireplace, through a wall, or through a window (as in

“House #3”, “House #4”, Providence, Rhode Island, 1975-1976).

Woodman catches the possibilities of a shape even as it is dissolving

under the gaze of the camera. The light silk dresses with small flower

patterns accord with the faded wallpapers in these anonymous houses.

In many photographs, however, the body is uncovered, in wait for its

own shaping, the skin is a sensitive plate capturing the variations of

light, a workshop of instantaneous pictures.

In his book, Marcel Proust sous l'emprise de la

photographie (Marcel Proust Under the Impact of Photography),

photographer Brassaï described Proust in terms close to those of

Bergson mentioned in the argument of Chapter 2. Brassaï imagines

Touching Surfaces 174

Proust as a kind of mental photographer, one who considered his own

body to be an oversensitive plate that captured and recorded in its

youth thousands of impressions which, as he set upon his journey to

recapture time, he developed and fixed in writing, thus rendering

visible the latent image of his entire life in that huge photographic

composition which is his Remembrance of Things Past (Brassaï 1997:

20).9 In Woodman’s photographs, the physical presence is actually

difficult to separate from a larger time and space dimension, as if it

were part of an intricate continuum that resists to be fixed in one

image. She places the body at the center of her observation, be it in the

portraits, in the compositions, or even in her still lives. In contact with

the environment, the body becomes a receptive, sensitive vehicle,

reminiscent of the turn-of-the-century tradition of “manifestations”, a

continuation of the trend of spirit photography (and, in some respects,

intersecting with ephemeral, process-oriented performance art

practices popular in the mid-70s). In some of these photographed sui

generis performances (as, for instance, those of the medium Florence

Cook impersonating the spirit of Katie King), a woman medium

would retire into a dark chamber to produce a double of herself

standing for a deceased person and emerging physically as sublimated

form, one which was actually produced by quite simple technical

devices.

In many of her photographs, Woodman takes herself as a

model, mainly by necessity or for commodity reasons, as is the case

with many photographers at the beginning of their career (Cindy

Sherman started her self portraits for similar reasons, and earlier on, in

the 1920s and 1930s, the French photographer Claude Cahun based

her work on impersonations of the self across gender boundaries).

However, as in the case of Cahun and Sherman, the emphasis is not on

self-consciousness but on the transformation of personal emotional

material, on the distance taken from mere autobiographical report to

reach larger patterns of consciousness of the self, some diffuse, others

emerging into view with stunning clarity. A concise working note for

one of Woodman’s compositions, for instance, highlights her

exigencies in terms of detachment: “For photographing Pilgrim Mills:

9 Woodman was reading Proust at the MacDowell colony in the summer of

1980.

Performing Corpo-Realities 175

1) Keep distance in photography. A) memorial to a place aspect”

(Woodman 1998: 38).

Commenting on her working out the requirements of the

problem sets, Krauss relates the question of self-consciousness in

Woodman’s approach to “a sense of self as a medium” (1999: 173),

one which, as she points out, does not stem from a narcissistic

impulse. As in her utilization of models, in her responses to technical

problems Woodman also works with another type of given elements,

stereotypes of representation (such as the mirror or the angel) in this

case, in order to explore ways in which, within the technical

constraints of the photographic device, a visual problem can turn

space inside out or vice-versa. The strategies she develops pertain

therefore to the broader question of how our ongoing experience of

the real (and our consciousness of it, in Michals’ terms) can be turned

into a visual approximation of perceptions situated on varied levels of

reality (and of visibility).

Photographers of the past decades belonging to a wide

spectrum of orientations, from the more documentary (such as Lee

Friedlander) to the more speculative ones (such as Geneviève

Cadieux), have used mirrors and other reflective materials not as

forms of narcissistic figuration, but simply to create more space, more

material surfaces, and, as I am suggesting throughout the book, as

matter to reflect on the possibilities of photography to bring together

different registers of reality.10 As Woodman puts it in one of the texts

accompanying the photographs made for her artist book, Some

Disordered Interior Geometries (a collage of photographs she placed

on the pages of a geometry primer): “This mirror is a sort of rectangle,

although they say mirrors are just water specified” (1981: n. pag.).

Significantly, in Woodman’s photographs there is no perfect

symmetry between the figure and its reflection in the mirror or its

image reflected on silver coated surfaces or placed under glass panels.

The latter (the double) is a version developing from the former (the

original). In most cases, the image in the mirror (usually a cropped

body, a torso) appears as a blurred shape. As a consequence of what in

Tenneson’s case I have called a release of the bodily ego, a different

double appears in the reflection, a new self emerges in the mirror, so

10 For a more extensive development of this aspect in relation to Geneviève

Cadieux’s work, cf. Cristofovici 1996.

Touching Surfaces 176

that we can see two versions of the self or two hypostases coexisting

in two spatial planes of the same picture (and in the extended time unit

of the capture). The otherness (or otherworldliness) of the reflected

figure is both fascinating and unsettling since it often appears more

naturalistic than the model. As a result of this reversal, the body in the

mirror seems to be not so much a reflection but rather another image,

a fiction, as in “Self-Deceit, Rome, 1978”, where it has sharper

outlines than the figure that looks into the mirror (and whose gaze, as

a result of the framing, is out of our visual field). One of the

photographs in the series Untitled, Providence, 1975-1976, for

instance, shows a blurred nude torso kneeling on a mirror, posed on

the floor, which reflects only the knees in sharp contours and,

strangely, a hand (too blurred to be perceived in the torso above the

mirror), as well as parts of the room not caught in the photograph. The

different visual consistency in the two figures suggests indeed two

different (yet related) levels of reality, an impression increased by the

fact that each space (that of the room and the one seen in the mirror)

has its own vanishing point. The torso, blurred in the former, is

drastically cropped in the latter to show more space than body (a towel

partially covers the mirror). In photographic vocabulary, “cropping”

actually implies trimming off the edges of an image to remove

unwanted areas so as to improve the composition. It eliminates

unwanted details caught by the camera that distract and helps focus on

what the photographer wants to frame. My slightly inappropriate use

of it for the reflected figure hints at Woodman’s use of the mirror both

as a framing device (to delimit a portion of space) and as an

enlargement device (to extend the area of visibility limited by the fix

position of the camera). Focusing is obtained here by subtracting from

the actual figure and adding to the mirror figure which appears, very

much as in Michals’ photographs, as a complementary side. In another

untitled photograph from the series Providence, Rhode Island, 1976-

1977, the mirror device is left behind altogether, the double being just

a negative impression left by a body on a floor covered with a white

powder-like matter (a detail which brings forth the relation between

visibility and tactility in the awareness of form, an outstanding feature

of most of the photographs discussed in this book).

For Woodman, the mirror is therefore not a device she uses

to duplicate an image but rather to extend the space of the photograph

and also to orient the gaze of the viewer in at least two directions in

Performing Corpo-Realities 177

space whose simultaneous existence (at the time of the capture and at

that of perception) creates a disturbance in the category of reflexivity.

And it does so, both in relation to the mirror as a trope, and to

photography as a reflective – and reproducible – form. Instead of

reproducing a woman looking in the mirror, the ambiguity resulting

from such illusions of bifocal vision grasps different spatial levels,

different visual textures, ranging from physical appearance to

introspection. Metaphorically, they highlight the photographic image

as a multilayered surface (as opposed to a flat surface), one in which a

device meant to reflect or to record physical reality reveals instead its

flip-side, or both sides, in a simultaneity tending to get as close as

possible to actual perceptions of physical and psychic realities, or to

diffuse states of consciousness related to the location of the subject in

space. The impression that we witness the conscious and the

unconscious visually side by side (as we do, through different effects,

in Jim Dine’s photographs, or in those of Duane Michals), as well as

the bifocal perspective underscore the ambiguities of subject locations

in physical and mental spaces. Rather than unstable or tenuous, the

subject positions Woodman creates in her photographs are visibly

flexible, plastic, working within the interstices of the visible. It is

owing to these ambiguities that her work outgrows feminist readings

of the 1970s and the 1980s, which pose the female figure as unhinged

from conventional frames. The plasticity of the body and Woodman’s

visual reflection on notions of displacement can indeed be read as

indicative of a more flexible understanding of subject position, one in

which solutions are being worked out within given frames (very much

like the imposed assignments of the problem sets). These are solutions

that subvert systems of geometry, optics, and other, from the inside, as

it were. Or from an intermediary perspective imagined within a series

of given elements. Woodman uses ambiguity of perspective not only

as a challenging technical device for photography, but also as a

signifier for one’s positioning both in a known, confined space and in

space unknown. Instead of a flight from reality, this device suggests

ways of reaching it, imaginatively.

The associations between the blur as a photographic form

and the unconscious are multiple, as we have seen in the previous

chapters. A technical accident which can reveal latent potential

(visually, at least, if not symbolically), the blur has been used by

Touching Surfaces 178

Michals to record the body’s fading away over infinetisemal portions

of time. Instead, Woodman uses this form of dematerialization of the

image to underscore the progressive appearance of visible forms, to

give another visibility to the body, to test, reveal, and enlarge its

possibilities of expression.

Whereas Michals focuses, as we have seen, on time, on

“now becoming then”, Woodman’s photographs seem to be all about

space. Bodies or objects traversing spaces produce the visual effect of

time being compressed. But is that indeed possible: to trick time?

Technically, in photography (not unlike in actual life) the spectrum of

possibilities at hand is rather limited. Through a photographic

paradox, however, visually, they can be very diverse. Several time

units are in fact incorporated in the blurred image due to a simple

technical imperative: the longer the stretch of time the photograph

covers (the exposure time), the more dissolved the silhouette, and

consequently, the more extended the space the figure occupies in the

photograph. With Michals, we have seen to what extent the camera

can bringing movement into visibility. Woodman has drawn from

such uses of the blur the possibilities of the figural dissolve to figure

passages between external and internal realities, mingling metaphoric

and literal references to explore not only changes within the subject,

but also how the subject (the figure) can change in relation to space.

Instead of staring at a subject performing in a familiar space, as

Cumming does by photographing Nettie in her apartment, Woodman

combines several spatial planes in a photograph (mirror, glass case) to

engage the viewer into following a figure reaching out for space,

moving, drawing a repertory of possibilities. A puzzling perception of

time results from this combination of spaces, one in which future and

past are condensed in a fleeting image. Though unsettling,

somnambulistic, her way of dramatizing the space and time continuum

through discontinuity is perceptually close to actual time experiences

which simply do not emerge into awareness because of their speed. It

also recalls more or less common optical illusions requiring

accommodations in the perception of objects or sometimes figures by

means of progressive referential recategorizations.

Significantly, Woodman’s photographs are not doctored.

She photographs what is there. Consequently, the blur effect results

exclusively from the capture of the (often deliberately intensified)

speed of the moving presence (figure, clothes, tissue) and from the

Performing Corpo-Realities 179

prolonged time of exposure. However, the powerful fictional character

of these images comes from her inventive use of the possibilities of

the photographic device, often combined with a preliminary rough

staging of the elements to be photographed. Woodman therefore

intervenes not on the taken photograph but on the real. Although the

corporeal latitudes (the body released from gravity, or its metonymical

presence: a dress, a scarf floating within a door frame) seem to be

flattened as a result of the figural dissolve, a new sense of volume

obtains from this optical illusion. This sense of volume results

precisely from the inversion of foreground and background. It is a

consequence of the paradoxical visual relationship between depth and

surface produced by the juxtaposition of different portions of space, or

by the combination of different spaces and various tactile textures.

Regarded from this perspective, photographic ambiguity becomes a

tool for precision. The less consistent the body, the stronger the

illusion. As if to prevent the figure from complete dissolution,

Woodman uses a series of framing devices: door frames, window

panes, museum showcases, or geometrical figures drawn with the

marker on the discrete images of contact sheets, all of which bring

forth the contrast between solid and soft tactile surfaces. As Ann Daly

has pointed out, Woodman explores “the palpable and ruinous

properties of space – its potential to disrupt and dissolve gestalt or

form through an extravagant dissipation and annihilation” (Baker et al.

2003: 60). It is precisely the physical gestalts or forms she disrupts, I

would argue, that smooth the progress of inner forms or gestalts into

visibility. As Krauss notes, “she internalized the problem,

subjectivized it, rendered it as personal as possible” (1999: 162). The

particular technical question of the series On Being an Angel

(Providence, R.I.), being, as Krauss suggests, to photograph

something that does not exist. Drawing from Italian statuary

representations of angels, Woodman materializes in this series that

particular problem through various enactments and embodiments

(postures of her own body, but also tissues floating in the air). Instead

of re-presenting a canonic figure in art history which, we recall,

Tenneson referred to as “another form of consciousness”, Woodman

figures out optical and tactile possibilities of relating to it through a

variety of positions in actual space evocative of mental images

(memories of such representations as already formalized referents;

mental images associated, or not, to them; fictional constructs stirred

Touching Surfaces 180

by them or emerging spontaneously from the situation of the

photographic session).

The perceptual mode proposed by Woodman’s photographs

originating in visual ambiguities does not reproduce the logic of the

directly visible. Instead, it foregrounds the alliance of eye, body, and

brain cells at work in the optical sensory mechanics. This mode

equally animates the photographs in which she produces an optical

illusion of puzzling spatial planes by means other than the figural

dissolve. A photograph in the series New York, 1979-1980, evocative

of the enigmatic scratches on Bellocq’s glass plates, translates a

historical enigma into a visual interplay of figure and ground, volume

and flatness. The photograph shows a young woman placed off-center

in the composition in the corner of an empty room, at the angle of the

wall and the door. She is on her toes, arms uplifted and stretched

towards an upper plane (the ceiling is framed out of the picture). The

visual weight of the composition is carried by two dark parallel

irregular shapes hanging somehow loosely in the picture, one of which

seems to be cut into the nude body. At a closer look, the two abstract

dark shapes or accidents that catch the viewer’s gaze by way of

contrast with the soft lighting in the rest of the photograph turn out to

be two black fox furs hanging on a rope (they were red, we find out in

Subrin’s film, when she takes long shots of the collection of objects

Woodman was working with). Though placed on the foreground,

because of the light coming from a window on the left side (no

artificial lighting in this photograph) the two irregular elongated dark

shapes appear flattened and thus they create the illusion of two non-

figurative hollows, one of which seems to be cut into the nude, the

other into the wall. Through this optical reciprocation of full and

hollow shapes, Woodman interprets here the enigmatic layers of

cracks and scratches on Bellocq’s “Storyville portraits”11 that I have

evoked earlier (20). What in Bellocq’s photographs was the result of

11 Woodman reconsiders another Bellocq photograph in her “Polka Dots,

1975-1976”, where she displaces the visual enigma of the erasure on the woman’s

crop of hair in Bellocq’s photograph and refigures it as a non-figurative dark scratch

on the wall. The blurred figure in a flower dress suggestive of wallpaper recalls the

butterfly the woman in Bellocq’s photograph is scratching on the wall. Incidentally,

the same Bellocq photograph has been used by Geneviève Cadieux in a diptych

entitled “La Blessure d’une cicatrice ou les Anges” (The Wound of a Scar or the

Angels), 1991.

Performing Corpo-Realities 181

various accidents and of the much speculated on mysterious malefic

intervention of a hand on the glass plate, becomes here only the

illusion of a hollow which turns out to be just another form of

substance that adds volume to the photograph.

Here the subject writes its own presence in space as the two

dark shapes unfold like openings into an unfathomable interiority.

Metaphorically, this inversion between surface and depth alludes to

the photographic process itself, to its revealing latent images through

the inversion of the negative. The dark shapes come forth with

intensity not by virtue of their position in the foreground but rather

owing to the optical effect they produce, an effect which is intensified

by the possibility of decoding them as figurative referents. In order to

decode these shapes literally (as two fox furs hanging on a rope in

front of a nude placed eccentrically at a certain distance), the viewer

has to get closer to the photograph (the photographs, we remember,

being of small format, when exposed, they necessarily require the

viewer’s moving back and forth in space, accommodating various

perceptions of the image). An entire remote fabric of unseen,

imperceptible or diffusely identified shapes zooms into view engaging

the corporeal subjectivity of the viewer who has to follow the

displacement and restructuring of elements operated by Woodman in

this photograph, which, like her other work, turns out to be more than

a simple formal academic exercise.

“The problem set”, notes Krauss, “has become a medium in

which to think” (1999: 177). Thinking through photography gives

Woodman the possibility to create images of the becoming self at a

distance from the clichés of adolescence as split or divided, to the

same extent to which Joyce Tenneson’s photographs diverge from the

tropes of fragmentation commonly used with reference to perceptions

of the older body. The space of the photograph extended by way of

visual ambiguity is also a metonymy of larger spaces in which the

subject develops, grows up. How do such disruptions of photographic

conventions and categories as those operated by Woodman inform us

about the role images may have in locating the subject’s own idiom,

and also in outlining the subject’s place in more extended

frameworks?

Touching Surfaces 182

20. E.J. Bellocq, “Storyville Portrait”, Plate 41, ca. 1912.

Copyright Lee Friedlander. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

Performing Corpo-Realities 183

2. Photography, Time, and the Body in Space

Pretend you are made of air.

Joanna Scott

It is essential to underline that in Woodman’s work the

exploration of the self is concomitant with her investigation of the

photographic medium, of its representative and imaginative

possibilities. Cultural studies oriented readings of her photographs

have underlined the unsettling quality of her viewing positions in

terms of gender roles (Solomon-Godeau in Woodman 1992 and

Chadwick 1998). Art critics have however highlighted a more subtle

dimension of her treatment of the photographic medium. Adam D.

Weinberg, for instance, notes that “Woodman’s photographs also

undermine traditional temporal assumptions”, along with the fact that

she uses “the transparent, transitional, and transformational qualities

of time exposures, together with a host of symbolic and thematic

elements, to free the viewer from a single transcriptive understanding

of photography” (1989: 147; emphasis added). (Significantly,

Weinberg also points out that the blurring of time levels in

Woodman’s photographs affects the perception of time in the sense

that the viewer is “neither firmly rooted in the past, nor the present,

nor the future”).12

In working out solutions for mental questions, Woodman

does not simply reflect on time and space in photography, or in the

subject’s maturation. The constraints of the camera also compel her to

try out new patterns of the subject’s being in time and space by

combining technical skill with improvisation. The resulting

photographs bring in touch several surfaces of reality in which the

figure acquires varied forms of visibility. They relate to sharp or

diffuse perceptions of being or moving in time and space. I have

pointed out before the role of spontaneity which Woodman

12 Kathryn Hixson has also highlighted the fact that Woodman’s concerns are

not political and that “she unapologetically and unabashedly uses the female nude to

explore her own identity” – and I would add here, her identity as an artist. (1992: 29).

Touching Surfaces 184

incorporates in a method that allows her to visualize fugitive

perceptions in spaces that are either in “dissipation and ruin”, as Daly

points out (Baker et al. 2003: 57) or in staged, reconstituted,

improvised spaces. If we consider Woodman’s trust in spontaneity and

a certain lightness that gives such visual weight to her figures, her

photographs are not, as Kathryn Hixson has pointed out, “physical

portraits that reveal the psyche” (1992: 29). Instead of translating or

illustrating psychic realities through physical forms, Woodman

approaches time and space through body metaphors. Revealed in the

developed photographs are visual possibilities of crossing lines

between external and mental spaces, between emotional bodies and

bodies of knowledge. In acting in and on the actual scenes that she

photographs, Woodman suggests, phantasmatically, the possibilities

the subject may have to reach new spaces of experience and

knowledge, to act across boundaries.

The counterpart of exposing the body as a surface on which

social and cultural texts are symbolically inscribed is the possibility of

writing one’s own physical and symbolic presence in space. This

seems to me by far the most outstanding statement in Woodman’s

work. It is also a perspective worth developing in relation to

speculative photographs and to perception and knowledge patterns

that we can draw from them. In its journey of self-discovery that

Woodman depicts photographically, the body reaches out for space, as

in the contact sheets for her composition entitled Space2, suggestive of

the revelation of another dimension of space, or of another dimension

of the subject acting in it. In its groping for space the photographed

figure occupies extended surfaces in the frame of the photograph.

Consequently, the visual equivocations on how much space the body

can cover carry the question of how far photography can follow it.

Extent becomes a matter of speed of movement in front of the camera

(the speed of the figure’s performance), which reduces the physical

body to a thin, milky envelope, a membrane more suggestive of

internal textures (a membrane of meaning or of the invisible, in

Merleau-Ponty’s terms evoked in the argument to Chapter 3). As we

have seen in the case of Woodman’s taking a base in Bellocq’s

photograph, the perceptually extended limits of the corporeal expand

photography’s bidimensional character and thereby create a symbolic

third dimension. By a paradox of pictorial thought, the depth of the

Performing Corpo-Realities 185

photograph is thrust into surface, due to the contrast between the

extended time of the exposure and the speed of the moving body.

Double or multiple vanishing points upset mono-ocular perspective to

suggest multiple viewpoints within one capture, that is in one

sequence of perception (and not through montage, manipulation, or

doctoring). Symbolically, this photographic deviation reflects on fix

subject positions.

In his discussion of images formed by means of the old

device of camera obscura, Geoffrey Batchen considers the

relationship between the inscription of the visible into the physiology

and the temporality of the human body at the beginning of the

nineteenth century. In that context, he emphasizes the part played by

the new form of vision that photography has produced in the

configuration of the modern epistemic paradigm. “Scholars were

forced to address a newly uncertain relationship between observer and

observed”, remarks Batchen, “and to incorporate within their work

both the unpredictability of the flesh and the exigencies of time”

(1997: 84; emphasis added). We seem to stand now at an interestingly

symmetric moment in the history of photography, a turning point in

which extreme experiments with the photographic image reenact a

similar change in perception to reflect an understanding of knowledge

adapted to new realities and technologies informing and reforming

them. Paradoxically, a certain release from the corporeal accompanies

this change in the epistemic paradigm of the turn of the twenty-first

century in the case of speculative visual work (photography or video),

such as the release of the bodily ego in Tenneson’s photographs, or

Michals’ dematerializations. I would like to point out that these visual

forms working against the image, or incorporating its effacement (as

in Kuntzel’s video piece) appeal not so much to a deconstructionist

view of the subject as image but rather to photography’s possibilities

to re-figure and synthesize experience and our consciousness of it.

In her re-figurations of the body’s positions in space,

Woodman reflects the “unpredictability of flesh and the exigencies of

time” Batchen refers to on a mode that surpasses the exclusive domain

of adolescent growth or narcissistic musing. One of her unfinished

works, The Temple Project, New York, Spring, 1980, epitomizes the

inseparable connection between visuality, temporality, and the

positioning of the body in space. Printed on blue and sepia sensitive

paper used by architects for their drafts, the photographs in this series

Touching Surfaces 186

depict living caryatids, young women wearing around their waist silk

analogs of drapery in ancient Greek sculpture. Here, Woodman’s

metaphoric and structural approach of a historical model allows us to

visualize time as a physical and psychic dimension. Plastic qualities of

temporality are worked out in this sequence of images. While the body

is metaphorically incorporated into a larger time frame through the

historical reference and the panoramic set-up of the project, space –

metonymically suggested by the bodies cropped in the photographs –

becomes part of an architecture: a structured spatial form. As Kathryn

Hixson has pointed out, “the body is an architecture, the supports that

literally constitute space” (Woodman 1992: 31).

Most of the series of Woodman’s photographs have, instead

of titles, names of places attached to them and a time period

indication, starting with the earliest photographs, Boulder, Colorado,

1972-1975, to her last series MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, New

Hampshire, Summer, 1980. These references locate the present time

dimension of the capture into a potential narrative of life experience in

a certain space of time and place which is both specific and vague

(functioning much as a frame or a series of frames). Yet, in many of

her photographs, the body is placed, as we have seen, at the

intersection between actual and imaginary spaces. In these

photographs, Woodman explores both the transience of life and

existence in transition, as if, in order to be creative, life itself had to be

conceived as an extended series of transitional spaces. The

intermediate states captured in the contact sheets or in the

compositions made up of several sequences situate the moment of the

capture within an imaginary and imaged temporal continuum. In the

printed contact sheet for Space2

, for instance, are displayed the stages

that precede the choice of the one sequence to be enlarged, an image

resulting – as the contact sheet shows – from a complex protocol of

juxtaposed postures, movements, displacements by which the body

inscribes itself in space and occupies several temporal moments and

physical modalities. In her earlier photographs, we remember, peeling

wallpaper, mildewed walls, derelict interiors, forsaken homes were the

locus of fluid imaginary tapestries allowing Woodman to probe into

various textures of time and the ways in which it is experienced in the

interstices between the physical and the psychic body.

Technically focused on an extension of the present,

Woodman’s photographs generate a spatial development of the instant

Performing Corpo-Realities 187

in various ways. Either by leafing through layers of time – as in her

allusions to past models –, or by representing time embedded in

extensions of the photographed figure (through the blur or the series).

Her unsettling the fix character of the photographic image highlights

the relative character of permanence, and that of impermanence as

well. Along with the sensuality of her photographs that brings to

surface close-ups of skin-depth emotions, Woodman has also a keen

eye for rendering abstractions visible. Paradoxically, this allows her to

enhance the tactility of the dissolving body. Similarly, time is

visualized as something slippery: a whitish matter, a geometry of

smoke caught in its passage (in a door or a window frame, in a mirror,

or in dust). Yet, these moving images also reveal permanence (as an

impression) and consistency (as remodeled possibilities of shape), as

if each movement we performed added up in a fluid continuum,

visible by degrees.

In Woodman’s photographs, the present is conjugated in the

progressive mode: a process unfolding under the beholder’s gaze.

“Then at one point I did not need to translate the notes; they went

directly to my hands,” reads the title of one of her compositions (done

in Providence, Rhode Island, around 1976), the comma at the end of

the title suggesting a virtual continuation equally alluded to in the

picture (the title comes, in fact, from a note in her diary).

Performative aspects in Woodman’s work relate to

developments in art history based on crossing boundaries between art

forms, between art and other modes of representation (in Some

Disordered Interior Geometries, referring to memory objects included

in the photograph, she notes: “These things arrived from my

grandmothers. They make me think about where I fit in the odd

geometry of time” (1981: n. pag.; emphasis added)). Like other

photographers of the 1970s and 1980s who have used the blur and the

sequence, Woodman anticipates current video techniques of

condensing time and space, the real and the virtual. Such works show

that, contrary to Paul Virilio’s prediction in his Aesthetics of

Disappearance and to other similar positions on visual culture, the

speed factor does not destroy the image. Incorporated by artists in

modes of imaging temporality and the mutability of signs, the figural

dissolve breaks ground for a refiguration of the subject. In such works,

technology acts as an ally and not as an enemy of creativity. The

Touching Surfaces 188

apparently disruptive conception of time in the work of such artists as

Francesca Woodman or Duane Michals, as Adam Weinberg concludes

in his essay “Vanishing Presence”, attempts to reintegrate past,

present, and future and thereby create an aesthetic confrontation with

the present, an attempt to enlarge it. Dissociated from the present

versus past binary, speculative photographs fixate the mutability of

existence, the instability of signs (images and art forms included) in a

cross-section of representations of individual and collective time

zones that capture simultaneous and heterogeneous perceptions. They

articulate different time-levels into a “temporal polyphony”, a term

employed by Stan Douglas, an artist who works with both still

photographs and video versions of the same subjects. In the

photographs discussed here, this “temporal polyphony” becomes a

technical modality allowing for the representation of multiple aspects

of experience and perception that challenge notions related to a single,

stable identity, or of a fixed position in physical as well as in symbolic

space.13

Although Woodman’s photographs show a condensation of

several spatial planes through the extension of the figural dimension,

they seem however not to be so much about escaping or surpassing the

limits of one’s condition (as feminist readings have insisted), but

rather about exploring and defining one’s own scope within a given

space. In the contact sheets for Space2 (Study for Space

2), for instance,

a blurred silhouette ruffles the air with vivid, graphic gestures. In

many of the miniature photographs associated kinetically on the

contact sheet, the silhouette is inscribed within a geometric figure

drawn on the photograph with a marker. The contact sheet is used as a

form of serial work. Significantly, in some of the sequences that are

less dense, the overlit parts of the body merge with the white surface

of the wall. In other sequences, the line of the marker, which interferes

with the contours of the human figure, has stopped short. The

geometrical figure drawn on the figure does not hem in the body; it

13 In an interview, Douglas comments on the possibility of representing

different temporal conditions in one image by “flipping the signs of the screen over

time” to show “the splitness of the image”. He also very suggestively describes the

technique he used in his video piece The Sandman: “I guess I was trying to establish

some kind of temporal polyphony, where you’re able to have two things happening

and you’re able to perceive those things simultaneously [...] just as one is able to look

at the present and understand how the past lived the way it did” (Douglas 2000: 27;

emphasis added).

Performing Corpo-Realities 189

appears instead as an obstacle to go beyond, or a threshold. The

human figure performs the role of an acrobat trying to keep its balance

(and consistency) as it moves. The sequences of this particular piece

highlight a quality present in all of Woodman’s work: a simultaneous

sense of continuity and contiguity. The irregular geometries drawn

around the figure on the contact sheet suggest an awareness –

subsequent to the act – of larger patterns we are creating or interfering

with as we move. A tentative form in itself, the contact sheet displays

sequences of momentary states that lead to one configuration, one

image chosen to be enlarged, an often difficult choice. In Space2, what

appears as the somehow conclusive image of the series is the one in

which the moving figure has almost regained its contours, only the

head (slightly inclined forwards) and the palms are blurred. In the

empty room, the acrobat has turned into an actress bowing in front of

an imaginary audience at the end of a performance. Matter has

coalesced.

The performative aspect of Woodman’s photographs, which

has been only recently highlighted, is significant in a larger context

since it situates her work at the crossroads between two important

moments in the history of the visual arts from the second half of the

twentieth century.14 And I am on purpose insisting on this aspect in

this final chapter since it allows me to underline the relationship

between photography and other art forms in connection to the

visualization of temporality and of the consciousness of the self over

time. Performance emerged as a new art form in the 1960s and the

1970s, a form difficult to situate within the established genres of art

history. Generally considered within the larger trend of

Conceptualism, performance art has reintroduced in fact the real

within the fine arts under the form of a physical experience of the real

through the figurative body that had been evacuated by the various

abstract trends of the first half of the twentieth-century.

Performance art as an established alternative artistic practice

had a relatively short existence, among other reasons because of its

intentional ephemeral character. One of its major premises – the

impossibility to grasp time as an abstraction – became the very

obstacle to its preservation. The then emerging art of the video 14 Cf. Notes 1 and 2, p. 160.

Touching Surfaces 190

provided for a while the possibility to record it. Performance artists of

the 1970s, such as Vito Acconci or Marina Abramovic, found in video

not only the possibility to record the ephemeral performance but also a

continuation of their research into the possibility of exhibiting

physical time through the body, or of exposing time as a material. The

following generations of video artists continued this exploration of the

visuality of time, which implies, as Dominique Païni has pointed out,

erasing and transforming feelings and conditions (2000: 33-40).

The performative, tentative, transient aspect of Woodman’s

photographs marks a moment in which speculative photography was

redefining its place within the dynamic of art forms, between

providing the passing of time with a fixed image and exhibiting the

fluidity of time as remodeled by the second generation of video artists

who, in the 1980s and 1990s, use the medium for its plastic purposes

(Gary Hill, or Bill Viola, in the United States, Stan Douglas, in

Canada, or Thierry Kuntzel, in France).

It is no accident that Woodman’s work has inspired video

artists (and that, ironically, her own photographic work based on a

history of representations have now become a model for art students).

Woodman herself used video camera either to create short pieces or to

test visual possibilities for her photographs. In her video piece, Subrin

actually has art students enact Woodman’s strategies of creating the

figural dissolve, by moving (that is, performing) in front of the camera

in some, or in others, by waiving rapidly a hand placed close to the

objective. The main question in Woodman’s approach to photography

is a question of perception: how does one feel to be in a certain space,

to move in it, not to move, to accommodate one’s body to spatial

constraints. The resulting images do not reflect the passage of time,

but rather its fluidity, that is to say, the varied shapes time perceptions

may take. This concern in her work relates to forms of consciousness

we have of time, forms that relate to positions of the body in space, to

its ability to upset or relocate frames or boundaries as it moves, “to

transform a change of degree into a change of nature” (memento,

Powers).

It is perhaps because of this formative aspect of time

experienced by imperceptible degrees that we become aware of the

change of nature only in retrospect. I see in this aspect, one which

Woodman’s photographs so poignantly draw attention to, the

expression of a new paradigm in the perception of photographs as

Performing Corpo-Realities 191

instruments of identity construction. Instead of nostalgia coming from

an attachment to a fixed moment in the past, for Woodman, as for the

other artists discussed in this book, photographic thinking is used

creatively in the subject’s vital performances to bring psychic patterns

to surface, often by way improvisation (that is by relating to

perception instead of convention). This notion brings to mind Myrtle

Gordon’s solution, at the end of Opening Night, when she has come to

terms with the ghost of the adolescent and has integrated the girl’s

image into her own generational idiom. This move from conventions

to a new perception of the self helps Myrtle surpass her aging and

acting block and find the necessary energy to play the part of “the

second woman” by improvising, reinventing, adapting the given

script. Woodman also rewrites visual photographic scripts by

appealing to inner patterns and relying on spontaneity, improvisation,

or performance (physical and technical). She recategorizes the chance

factor inherent in the photographic process so that it becomes

instrumental in the subject’s playing against or with determinations.

At a time when the visual critique was focused on social

constructionism, Woodman was proposing a more “subtle model of

subjectivity”, as Margaret Sundell has suggested (Baker et al. 2003:

59), one that foregrounds, as I have tried to suggest, subject agency.

Woodman’s radical approach to corporeal realities helped

me articulate photographic representations of the body with an

understanding of the subject as an active agent in the creation of its

own history, instead of a passive surface on which historical

determinations are inscribed. The weight of subject agency that I read

in Woodman’s photographs builds up from aesthetic effects emerging

in the context of the spontaneity of the creative act subsequently

developed into aesthetic strategies. Like the creative efforts of the

other photographers, Woodman’s are, as it has been pointed out “not

deconstructive, but constructive” (Hixson 1992: 29). In my approach

of her work, I have placed the constructive creative dimension in

relation to her reflecting on temporality and subject agency with the

means provided by photography. Yet, when all has been said and

done, in the margins of thought persists the development of her own

life that faces us with the question of the end, and, along with it, with

the very limits of interpretation.

Coda

The compensation of growing old, Peter

Walsh thought […] was simply this: that the

passions remain as strong as ever, but one has

gained – at last! – the power which adds the

supreme flavour to existence – the power of

taking hold of experience, of turning it round,

slowly, in the light.

Virginia Woolf

In between the introduction and the conclusion of a book, there are

sequences of an initial intuition, what develops from glimpses and

flashes of thought. In between these two conventions, there is time.

The time the reader takes to read the book, and – multiplied by many

– the time it took to be written. In the interim, there is the process of

thought and, when the corpus is contemporary with the writing, the

concomitant development of new work. By necessity, research on

recent material is open-ended. Since the outset of this project in the

mid-1990s, new developments in the work of many of the

photographers I had chosen to discuss, as well as changes in

commercial imagery or in the critical discourse, have prompted me to

reconsider the works and to adjust my arguments to changing realities.

In the course of writing the book, the issue of aging came

inevitably to be subordinated to the wider question of the role of

images in the elaboration of subjectivity. We have the habit of looking

at photographs as parts of individual or collective narratives. Yet,

from its early days, photography has contributed to the deconstruction

of the binary opposing subjectivity to objectivity. In my exploration of

ways in which speculative photographs and aging illuminate each

other, I have therefore considered subjectivity as a factor of

consciousness of the self and as such, both an object of exploration

and an instrument of access to the photographic object. Consequently,

Touching Surfaces 194

the aesthetic angle dominating the book is placed under the sign of the

cognitive dimension. At the same time, the prominence I have given

to the relationship between age-selves (and more extensively, my

emphasis on connectedness) raises the question of the problematic

isolation of aging in the study of art works. The spectrum of that

question extends upon the methodological problem of isolating a

discrete unity from a heterogeneous field of signifiers without verging

on ghettoization. In studying difference and representation at this

point in time, how we create categories that are both rigorous and

open, and how we think of the relationships between categories –

cultural, social, psychological, or aesthetic – seems to me an important

path to take, one that cannot ignore the area of consciousness as a

many-faceted reality and as a complex concept. In that respect, the

history of photography – with its dynamic of genres, questions of

representation, editing, or archiving – can help us reconsider current

problems of categorization in the approach of art works.

By way of conclusion, I would therefore like to insist on the

importance of considering photography as an element of individual

and not only of social construction. What I have called the fabric of

the subject results precisely from essential tensions between technical

and symbolic practices, between determinations of various natures and

creativity. Many of the photographs discussed here show, for instance,

subjects as relating entities in reciprocal autonomy. Instead of subjects

whose bodies wear inscriptions of social texts, or time inscriptions, the

artists insist on agency. This challenging position, distinct from

ideologically oriented studies on photography and grounded in my

exploration of the aesthetics and philosophy of art photography, is one

of the arguments of the book that I would like to highlight. For the

aesthetic, as I have seen it in the photographic works that came to my

attention, integrates realities that are often difficult to categorize –

such as movement, change, and temporality – into a more

comprehensive, more alert consciousness of the self. The aesthetic

also brings into public attention creative ways of approaching such

complex psychic, physical, and cultural realities such as those related

to aging.

As these works show, the body does not only carry time

along. It is also an active factor in structuring our consciousness of

time patterns. By considering the visual problem of positioning the

body in reconstructed photographic spaces and temporal frameworks,

Coda 195

the artists discussed here insist on the impossibility of the subject to be

fixed within rigid frames of convention, of roles, or canons. Within an

aesthetics of the corporeal understood as a larger metaphor for

experience, the physical presence “caught” in the photographic image

is thereby endowed with the possibility of being an agent instead of a

passive medium. Photography too is being transformed in the process.

So is our attachment to photographs, when we take the time to look at

them. Released from the bodily ego, the figures represented in the

works that I have discussed create the illusion of moving through

different space levels but also through layers of time. The present

captured in the photograph becomes then not the trace of a moment in

time (and, implicitly, of a state associated with it) that will no longer

be – according to Roland Barthes’ “that-has-been” aspect, or to Susan

Sontag’s understanding of photographs as “melancholy objects” –, but

an accumulation of instants situated on different temporal planes,

which can show in the photograph as a progression of states. In a

speculative photograph, the moment that was (a unique moment in the

past) is no longer a unique reference point. Like the multiple

vanishing points in the multi-ocular perspective that structures space

in many photographs, it has outgrown its horizon. And this is a fact

difficult to dissociate from our mental habits so ingrained in the

understanding of photography as a mimetic medium. In such

photographic works, the present is always refigured through the

choice of models and of the poses, through the setting and the

processing of the image (by the artist, technically, and by the viewer,

perceptually). The stress falls on the presence. Similarly, the past is

refigured, not as a reminiscence of something that was at a certain

point in time, but as a dynamic of varied forms of memory, as a

conjunction of patterns of consciousness that interact with actual

modes of experience. The distortion of conventions entails, as we have

seen, modifications in the perception of photographs, and, more

extensively, in our understanding of subject position. Our reading of

speculative photographs, I have argued, may restructure our thinking

of the real in different ways than documentary photography does, that

is, formatively, rather than informatively. This important fact also

implies the mental possibility of acting on the reality of the subject,

the possibility of changing its representations, a notion which I have

highlighted in the last chapters but which is inherent to all the

photographic work considered in the book.

Touching Surfaces 196

Over the past decades, photographers have explored the

transience of time not discoursively but technically, making of

temporality an essential component of their photographic work. In

order to materialize the effects of time, Alain Fleisher, for instance,

has placed photographs taken from funerary monuments in developing

trays filled with a very concentrated developing substance. In contact

with light, the effect of the developing process in the dark room is

reversed. The images are progressively fading away throughout the

duration of the exhibition so that, with each view, one sees the image

in a different state of visibility, to its eventual complete effacement.

Conversely, Heather Ackroyd and Daniel Harvey have produced

photographic images that emerge on unexpected surfaces by using a

special ephemeral photographic process which alludes to the “the

pencil of nature”, the metaphor employed by William Henry Fox

Talbot in the nineteenth century to describe his attempts to fix images

imprinted on paper durably. The photographs of Ackroyd and Harvey

are printed on grass grown from seed, a living, developing surface that

records as it grows the shadings of a projected negative.

Photosynthesis replaces here chemical pigments in a literal expression

of an aesthetics of the ephemeral that many art forms have privileged

in the second half of the twentieth century.

In photographic works made by artists, we see how aspects

of subject position and consciousness of the self can be illuminated by

photographic technique, particularly by deviating from conventions of

photographic representation within the constraints imposed by the

medium. What all the works discussed in the book have in common is

that they are engaged in exploring both the possibilities and the limits

of the body, and I have taken this phenomenological engagement with

the bodily experience as a signifier of subject growth. The

performative aspect evolving from such explorations of technical and

physical constraints, which became predominant particularly towards

the end of the book, is by no means a manifestation of masquerade

practices or of purely deconstructive projects. Performing with the

camera or in front of the camera enables the artists to bring into the

visual field more subtle textures that are suggestive of the subject’s

exchanges with its own cultural, physical, or psychological

determinations.

Coda 197

Consequently, I have considered consciousness not

exclusively as a mental process, but also as a way of exploring,

surpassing, or containing the limitations of the material body. In other

words, consciousness is understood as a phenomenological presence

represented in the physical body, a processual presence that connects

the physical and the psychic body. With Dine, we have seen the

coming into consciousness of images of different age-selves, and ways

of connecting them. Central to Michals’ work is the exploration of

consciousness of movement, that is, of infinitesimal changes of the

subject in imperceptible time. Tenneson calls our attention to an

enhanced consciousness of emotions out of which she has built her

aesthetic idiom. Like Michals, she reminds us that resorting to

conflicting emotional zones and formalizing them even by sometimes

intensifying the sentimental aspect can be a way of touching sensitive

surfaces of contact between the physical and the psychic, as well as a

means of touching a larger audience. The evocation of the video

pieces by Kuntzel and Tanaka reflects on the alternative apparition

and disappearance of images as signifiers of a consciousness of the

self beyond memory, while Dine and Woodman seem to attempt to

stabilize it from a flux of images. Explicitly or intuitively, in all the

works considered here, consciousness relates to bringing perceptions

of the self – some conflicting, others of variable consistencies – into

visibility by deviating from photographic conventions in order to

provide varied visual understandings of the aging body. They concern

ultimately, as it has been said about Woodman’s work “what one feels

as a body as opposed to how one looks” (Baker 2003: 59). At the

same time, the exploration of photographic works from the

perspective of the category of aging also speaks of visualization as a

practice whose dimensions are aesthetic, ethic as well as social, even

as the notion of invisible does not have here the predominant cultural

meaning of absence of representation, but rather a more diffuse sense

denoting areas which are not easily perceptible and, hence,

representable. The aesthetic visualizations of aging, I have tried to

suggest, can rebound on its ethic and social dimensions even as they

do not relate to them in a literal way.

At the end of the first chapter I have referred to this form of

consciousness metaphorically through the notion of “the poetic body”,

and I have turned this notion emanating from fictional visualizations

of the subject into a mental construct that enabled me to relate the

Touching Surfaces 198

physical to the psychic body. The performative dimension of the

photographs discussed in the subsequent chapters has revealed the

importance of “the plastic body”: a metaphoric concept for

representations of the subject that foreground the flexibility, namely,

the adaptability of the body. More recently, the aging body has

become visible in commercial photography as an acceptable body, as

a form of new normality. The strategies of representation in the two

fields are no longer, as we have seen, so different. However, through

deviating techniques, speculative photographs propose forms that

reach beyond acceptability, to accompany the subject in its

synaesthesic accommodation with varied versions of the physical

body. The underlying assumption of this argument is that, by

producing changes in perception through the technically and

plastically extended possibilities of the photographic medium,

speculative photographs carry the possibility of transforming our

vision, in the optical sense as well as in its larger sense of world view.

As I approach the end of this book, Bellocq’s photograph

evoked in the first chapter comes back to mind. And with it, Robert

Grudin’s remark in his Time and the Art of Living, that “the real crux

of aging [is] that the pain of growing old lies specifically in the fact

that part of us does not grow old” (1982: 113). Some twelve years

ago, at the outset of my research on speculative photographs and

aging, I was asked at a conference about precisely which part I

thought that could be. My reply was hesitant since it seemed difficult

to determine whether such location was physical, psychic, or both. In

the process of writing the book, the answer emerged progressively:

each of us locates the part of us that does not grow old differently,

physically or phantasmatically, not as a reminder of the past, but

rather as a detail, or a punctum as Barthes would have it, which

reorganizes our perception of the self. Year after year, in the summer,

I have spent many hours by the sea contemplating bodies in the

variety of their expressions, shapes, and ages. Young ones – often

stereotyped, or not yet wearing their own signature. And older ones,

sometimes very old women and men exposing themselves to the sun

and the sea air without restraint yet with modesty. I have tried to focus

on what, in old age, each body had preserved from former age-selves:

some a youthful gaze, or an inclination of the head, others slender,

elegant legs; some well-stretched shoulders, or a firm design of the

Coda 199

back, others a bony ankle or wrist echoing adolescent anatomies. In its

dissymmetry of signifiers of age, the syntax of the older body seems

to retain the memory of a shape that I read not so much as a token of

the past, but rather as a presence, a persistence. In a photograph, such

presences can represent metaphoric sites of a congruous consciousness

of the self. From looking at the photographs that have accompanied

me in the process of writing (… and aging) I have drawn an

understanding of the variety of such locations based on photographic

processes and procedures that change our notions of beauty or the

aesthetic, and, perhaps, our very perception of temporality. From that

perspective, the part of us that does not grow old can be, rather than a

source of pain, a triggering factor in the process of recreating

ourselves, even as we struggle against the limitations of aging and

learn how to come to terms with them.

Touching Surfaces 200

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08

Index

Ackroyd, Heather, 196

aesthetic, circuit, 12, 26, 30; codes, 2

n.*, 44, 65 n. 10, 142; idioms, 71,

127, 153; modes, 130, 140, 153;

qualities, 9, 44; reconstruction,

30, 37; strategies, 4, 9, 44, 63,

153, 191; transformation, 121,

127

aesthetic (the), as a category, 1, 9, 12,

32, 51 n. 16, 127, 130, 133, 151,

163 n. 4, 194; and the cognitive,

194

aesthetics, of aging, 19, 143; of

change, 9-10, 94; of the

corporeal, 195; of effacement, 31;

of the ephemeral, 94, 196; of

expressivity, 31; photographic

aesthetics, 9, 127-155, 169

affect(s), 32, 48, 123, 126, 152

affection, 32, 34, 38, 122, 138, 140;

affective charge, 121; qualities, 150;

relation, 8, 66

affectivity, 32

age-selves, 18, 21, 48, 52, 57, 85,

104, 146, 161, 194, 197, 198

aging, and aesthetics, 11, 19, 50, 139,

141, 143; and the body, 4 n. 2, 25,

29-30, 31 n. 7, 39 n. 10, 42, 51,

57, 82, 122, 197-198; as change,

11, 12, 18, 136; consciousness of,

7, 9, 20, 60, 121, 126, 157, 160,

162; creative potential of, 10, 34,

41; and creativity, 5, 12, 13, 38,

161; hypervisualization of, 19,

122; as matter, 39, 79; and

photography, 9, 11, 13, 72, 125,

193; as process, 1, 6, 9, 18-20,

93-94, 130; recategorization of, 5;

representations of, 3-5, 82; as

sign, 51; signs of, 2, 20, 29, 31,

34, 38, 57, 63, 116; as state, 5-6,

11, 20; as theme, 4; tropes of, 3;

visualization of, 5, 9, 197;

vulnerability of, 121, 123, 163

Appelt, Dieter, 93

Arbus, Diane, 169

Arnheim, Rudolf, 8

Atget, Eugène, 111

Avedon, Richard, 5 n. 3, 30 n. 4, 160

Baker, George et. al., 158, 162, 169,

179, 184, 191, 197

Barthes, Roland, 4, 11, 144, 195, 198

Basting, Anne, 3 n. 2

Batchen, Geoffrey, 8, 144-145, 185

beauty, 19, 29, 32, 41-44, 122, 123,

131, 134, 138-139, 140-144, 146,

150-155, 160, 199; as a category,

29, 32, 131, 139, 151, 154;

canons of, 29, 43, 153;

stereotypes of, 134, 138, 142, 151

Beckett, Samuel, 76

Bellocq, E. J., 52, 159 n. 3, 170, 180,

184, 198

Benjamin, Walter, 60-61, 64, 69, 79,

103, 115

Bergson, Henri, 58, 68, 174

Bianciotti, Hector, 38

Bishop, Elizabeth, 118

Blau, Herbert, 76, 151

Blume, Anna and Bernhard, 93

body, the aging, 4 n. 1, 25, 29-30, 31

n. 7, 39 n.10, 42, 51, 57, 82, 122,

197-198; body memory, 58, 141;

the old(er), 30 n. 4, 32, 108, 122,

141, 161, 181, 199; the physical,

6, 12, 100, 110, 113, 116-117,

Touching Surfaces 21

123, 125-126, 130, 141, 149, 159-

160, 169, 184, 197-199; the

plastic, 100, 135, 177, 198; the

poetic, 52, 197; the psychic, 27,

50, 113, 120, 123, 125, 153, 159-

161, 169, 172-173, 186, 197-198;

textures, 15, 34, 148, 172; the

youg(er), 13-14, 198

Bollas, Christopher, 18, 21, 31, 47,

63, 85, 114, 161

Borges, Jorge Luis, 118

Brassaï [Gyula], 90 n. 2, 173-174

Brunet, François, 8

Bryson, Norman, 50-51

Cadieux, Geneviève, 4, 10, 48-51, 52

n. 16, 132, 138, 142, 163, 175,

180 n. 11

Cahun, Claude, 174

Cameron, Julia Margaret, 117, 144-

145

Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 68

Cassavettes, John, 12

Chadwick, Whitney, 183

Chevrier, Jean-François, 26

cognitive, perspective, 113, 194;

qualities, 8, 150; role, 62 n. 6, 163

n. 4; sciences, 7, 59; spaces, 126

Cohen, Abigail, 171 n. 7

consciousness, 1-2, 7-8, 11; 17-18,

20-21, 47, 50, 52, 58, 62, 64, 66,

70-73, 75-77, 79-80, 85, 87, 89,

94, 98, 100, 104, 108-109, 113,

118-120, 122, 130, 140, 153, 157,

169-170, 194, 197; of aging, 1, 9-

10, 126, 162; degrees of 7, 72,

133, 146; double consciousness,

48, 100, 136; form(s) of, 20, 79,

115, 127, 130, 146-150, 179, 190,

197; of form, 7, 131; formalized,

10, 133; and photography, 84,

170; of the self, 7, 12, 14, 18, 50,

64, 113, 159, 161-162, 169, 174,

189, 193, 197-199; states of, 18,

47, 173, 177; of time, 64, 88, 136;

visual, 57, 60, 85, 89

Coplans, John, 5 n. 3, 122, 160,

Costa, Mario, 64

Covey, Herbert, 3, 41 n. 12

Coulthard, Edmund, 3 n. 2

corporeal (the), 5, 9, 12, 22, 42, 61-

63, 110, 131-132, 184-185, 195;

corporeal, images, 125; memory 58;

realities, 160, 172, 191

corporealization, of thought, 63

creative, act, 7, 63, 191; potential, 10,

34, 41, 159; process, 59, 76, 109,

140, 169; thinking of aging, 9

creativity, 5, 12-13, 32, 67, 159, 163,

187, 194; and aging, 12-13, 38,

163

Cristofovici, Anca, 65, 175 n. 10

Cumming, Donigan, 5 n. 3, 160-163,

178

Cunningham, Merce, 30 n. 4, 171 n. 8

Daguerre, Louis-Jacques-Mandé, 109

n. 10

Daly, Ann, 162, 179, 184

Dante Alighieri, 135

Diamond, Hugh Welch, 60, n. 5

Dickey, James, 87

Dickinson, Emily, 167

difference, 3-4, 13, 30, 34, 126-127,

153-154, 194; corporeal, 3 n. 2;

images of, 4; and likeness, 142;

and resemblance, 30, 34

Dine, Jim, 7, 10-11, 66-85, 91, 100,

111, 119, 122, 132, 147, 148, 157,

169, 177, 197

Douglas, Stan, 188, 190

Draaisma, Douwe, 58

Drahors, Tom, 149 n. 8

Duchenne de Boulogne, Guillaume,

60 n. 5

Dunas, Jeff, 148

Durand, Régis, 8 n. 5, 51

Duras, Marguerite, 45

Eakins, Thomas, 99

Edelman, Hope, 14

editing, 65, 78-84, 158, 159 n. 3, 194

Ehrenzweig, Anton, 81

emotions, 10, 13-14, 39, 45, 49, 62,

65, 95, 126, 136-138, 142-143,

145 n. 5, 152-153, 159, 161, 187,

197

0

Index 21

Featherstone, Mike, 3 n. 2

Fellini, Federico, 91 n. 3

Flynn, Ann-Gerard, 31

Frank, Robert, 118

Freud, Sigmund, 7, 21, 25, 28 n. 3,

37, 59, 76, 84

Friedlander, Lee, 52, 170, 175

Frueh, Joanna, 28, 31

Gass, William H., 150

Gazzara, Ben, 12

Gernsheim, Helmut, 145 n. 6

Giacomelli, Mario, 5 n. 3

Goldberg, Vicki, 25, 26, 59, 138, 141,

148-151

Goldin, Nan, 5 n. 3, 160

Griffin, Susan, 17, 38

Grudin, Robert, 78, 198

Grundberg, Andy, 64 n. 8, 66, 68, 69,

73, 78, 81, 99

Guibert, Hervé, 12, 28, 31 n.7, 32-38,

39, 41, 103, 108 n. 8, 122, 142,

154, 163

Gunning, Tom, 112

Hamon, Philippe, 65 n. 10

Harvey, Daniel, 196

Hayden, Jacqueline, 4, 10, 15, 27-31,

32, 34, 41, 50-51, 127-132, 137,

133 n. 3, 140, 147 n. 7, 155, 163

Hill, Gary, 95, 190

Hinsey, Ellen, 17

Hixson, Kathryn, 171, 184, 186, 191

Hoban, Russel, 135, 138

Hockney, David, 47 n. 15

holding, 13, 30, 142-143, 163; effect,

153; environment, 50; gaze, 163;

objects, 50

ìnner space(s), 25, 50, 62, 71, 111,

160

invisible (the), 8, 10, 21, 47, 60, 87-

94, 104, 184, 197;

invisible, body, 60; change, 113;

meaning, 90, 184; processes, 57,

93, 101; reality, 65

invisibility, 88, 92; of aging, 3, 9, 20,

48, 57; and movement, 111

Keith, Thomas, 93

Klein, William, 93

Kollwitz, Käthe, 39-40, 45

Kozloff, Max, 8, 58, 112, 113, 116,

117, 172

Krauss, Rosalind, 8, 43-44, 60-62, 67,

69, 170, 175, 179, 181

Kuntzel, Thierry, 88-93, 114, 116,

148, 185, 190, 197

Ladd, George T., 8

Lapierre, Nicole, 20

Laughlin, Clarence John, 120-121,

149, 169

Lemagny, Jean-Claude, 8 n. 5, 117

Lingwood, James, 132

Magritte, René, 111, 168

Manchot, Melanie, 31 n. 7

Mann, Sally, 82

Mapplethorpe, Robert, 4, 123

Marey, Etienne-Jules, 61, 99

Martin, Rosy, 4 n. 2

Maynard, Patrick, 8, 63, 69

Meatyard, Ralph Eugene, 57, 60, 89,

93, 120, 145 n. 5, 169, 170

memory, 10, 57-58, 68, 71-75, 84-85,

91-93, 100, 108, 116, 118, 122,

130, 142, 148-149, 197;

anticipative (expectative), 103,

113; and creativiy, 67; and

forgetting, 71, 88, 92; forms of,

72, 169, 195; gaps of, 20, 91; of

images, 66; and the imagination,

75-76; loss of, 90; and mourning,

92, 163; patterns of, 67; and

photography, 57-60, 64, 66-74,

80, 85, 89-91, 93; retinal, 52, 65;

system(s) of, 58; theories of, 57-

59; visual, 91- 93

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 8, 89-90,

93, 98, 126, 184

Merrill, James, 135 n. 4

Merton, Thomas, ix, 120

Michals, Duane, 1, 7, 11-12, 35, 87-

88, 93-94, 97-123, 132, 135-137,

143, 146, 149, 166, 167, 169, 172,

175, 176, 178, 185, 188, 197

1

Touching Surfaces 21

Moore, Marianne, 167

mourning, 14, 92, 110, 112, 163; and

aging, 14, 18-19, 38, 112; and

photography, 20, 37-38, 144;

projective (anticipated), 37, 110;

Muybridge, Eadweard, 61, 99

Newhall, Beaumont, 109 n. 10

Nixon, Nicholas, 5 n. 3, 122, 160

Nori, Claude, 149

Païni, Dominique, 190

Parry Janis, Eugenia, 79

Paz, Octavio, 118

Pearsall, Marilyn, 3, 31, 36

perception, 2 n. *, 3, 6-7, 11, 21-22,

25-27, 48, 60-65, 69, 71, 76, 79,

83, 87-95, 96-105, 115, 116, 120,

125-126, 130, 137, 150, 152, 165-

169, 171, 175, 177, 181, 183, 185,

188, 191, 195, 197, 198-199; of

aging, 5, 11-12, 18-20, 25, 38, 50,

57, 125, 136, 152, 161, 181;

habits of, 27; phenomenology of,

8; of photographs, 8-10, 113, 191,

195; psychology of, 8;

temporality of, 5, 199; of time, 6,

64, 83, 92, 94, 115, 178, 183, 190

Phelan, Peggy, 158 n. 2, 171 n. 6

Plath, Sylvia, 141, 167

Pollack, Barbara, 62 n. 6

Pollack, Terry, 4, 39-41, 45-48

Pontbriand, Chantal, 51

Powers, Richard, 100, 103, 168, 190

Proust, Marcel, 76, 173-174

psychic space(s), 6, 18, 23, 111

Raffel, Dawn, 38, 154 n. 11

Rauschenberg, Robert, 62 n. 6

Richir, Marc, 125-126

Rilke, Rainer Maria, 25, 50

Roiphe, Ann, 139

Rossen, Janice, 3

Rowlands, Gena, 12

Ruscha, Ed, 118

Saint Denis, Hervey de, 59 n. 3

Sander, August, 103

Santayana, George, 59

Sarraute, Nathalie, 66

Scott, Joanna, 183 Sherman, Cindy, 4, 41-44, 50-51,

122, 132, 138, 174

Sibony, Daniel, 65 n. 9

Snow, Michael, 93

Solomon-Godeau, Abigail, 183

Sontag, Susan, 4, 195

Soulages, François, 60

States, Bert O., 59 n. 4

subject, agency, 191, 194; as agent,

191, 195; construction, 1, 6-7, 9,

11, 79, 87, 114, 143, 150, 152;

position, 100, 177, 185, 195, 196

subjectivity, 9, 12, 65, 82, 130, 131,

152, 181, 191, 193

Subrin, Elizabeth, 158-159, 180, 190

Sundell, Margaret, 191

Talbot Fox, William Henry, 196

Tanaka, Janice, 91-92, 110, 197

Tannenbaum, Barbara, 145 n. 5

temporality, 1, 5, 9, 11, 21, 39, 41,

45, 73, 93-95, 102-103, 117, 121,

130, 148, 150, 157, 162, 185,

186-187, 191; and aging, 1, 10;

and change, 11, 95-101, 120, 194;

metaphors of, 39; and movement,

5, 11, 93, 95-101, 116, 172, 194;

of perception, 5, 199; and

photography, 4 n. 2, 41, 73, 89,

93-94, 117, 196; and subject

construction, 1, 9, 162, 194;

visualization of, 89, 117, 189

Tenneson, Joyce, 5, 11, 132, 135-155,

161, 170, 175, 179, 181, 185, 197

Townsend, Chris, 3 n. 2, 158 n. 2

transitional, objects, 31, 82, 161;

phases, 13; processes, 161, 163;

space, 21, 104, 186

unconscious (the), 7, 10, 21, 24, 48,

57-67, 68-71, 75-75, 78-85, 100,

111-112, 152, 169, 177; optical,

60-61; photographic, 57-63, 80

Vine, Richard, 26

Viola, Bill, ix, 114, 190

2

Index 21

Virilio, Paul, 18, 187

visible (the), 8-11, 18-52, 60, 89-90,

111, 115-117, 144, 159, 177, 185

visibility, 9-10, 42, 48, 51, 57, 64, 68,

82, 87, 89, 92, 94, 99, 110, 148,

172, 175-176, 178-179, 183, 196-

197;

visualization(s), 2 n.*, 5, 9, 10, 13,

42, 46, 62-63, 80, 92-93, 117,

189, 197

Wagram, Catherine, 150

Wall, Jeff, 4, 23-27, 30, 32, 62, 70,

132, 138, 141

Weinberg, Adam D., 93-94, 183, 198

White, Minor, 149

Winnicott, D.W., 21, 23, 47, 161

Wollheim, Richard, 63, 134 n. 49

Woodman, Francesca, 7, 11-12, 113,

132, 133, 157-160, 162-191, 198

Woodward, Kathleen, 2, 3, 18, 25 n.

1, 29, 30, 39 n. 10

Woolf, Virginia, 193

Wyatt-Brown, Anne, 3

Yates, Frances A., 58

3