Professional Documents
Culture Documents
#ONSCIOUSNESS
&
,ITER TURE
THE !RTS
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 photo: Jacqueline Hayden, Ancient Statuary (1998).
Courtesy of the artist.
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: 978-90-420-2513-4
ISSN: 1573-2193
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009
Printed in the Netherlands
Touching Surfaces
Photographic Aesthetics,
Temporality, Aging
ANCA CRISTOFOVICI
Aurora-Stela Anghel
Aurora Anghel
Daniel Cristofovici
Carolina
Acknowledgements
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
2
(In)Visibility:
Photographs that Make a Change
Jim Dine
1. Mirroring Marginal Thought:
an Aesthetics of Doctored Images 67
2. Editing, Composition
and the Visual Reconstruction of Memory 78
xii Touching Surfaces
3
The In-visible:
Spectral Visions, Transformative Perceptions
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
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
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
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.
xiv Touching Surfaces
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.
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.
20. E.J. Bellocq. Ca. 1912. “Storyville Portrait”. Plate 67. Copyright
Lee Friedlander. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.
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
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.
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.
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
The Visible:
Photographic Statements for an Aesthetics of
Change
Ellen Hinsey
Susan Griffin
18 Touching Surfaces
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
20 Touching Surfaces
* 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.
[...] people are not just their own age; they are to some
extent every age, or no age…
D.W.Winnicott
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)”.
Suzanne
Hervé Guibert
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
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
32 Touching Surfaces
“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
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
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).
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.
Susan Griffin
Dawn Raffel
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
Marguerite Duras
with new modes of visibility, with new ways of relating to the real, to
time passing.
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.
(In)visibility:
Photographs that Make a Change
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.
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).
60 Touching Surfaces
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).
66 Touching Surfaces
1. Jim Dine
Mirroring Marginal Thought:
an Aesthetics of Doctored Images
In inner life, time plays the role of space.
Simone Weil
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 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
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.
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
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
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).
The In-visible:
Spectral Visions, Transformative Perceptions
James Dickey 1
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)
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
space: the one working under, or between the image. Another space: that
is to say, simply, time (Kuntzel 1988: 149; tr. mine; emphasis added).
1. Duane Michals
The Fixation of Unstable Fields:
Movement, Change, and Temporality
Garry Hill
2. Optical Thresholds
Thresholds of change
Thresholds of movement
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
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
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
1. Joyce Tenneson
Transformations of the Self: Motion, Emotion, Repose
Russell Hoban
Dante Alighieri 4
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.
142 Touching Surfaces
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.
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.
148 Touching Surfaces
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.
Herbert Blau
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).
152 Touching Surfaces
(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
Performing Corpo-Realities
1. Francesca Woodman
Photographic Ambiguities and Formal Growth
Emily Dickinson
Marianne Moore
Sylvia Plath
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.
172 Touching Surfaces
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
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.
Joanna Scott
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
2
printed contact sheet for Space , 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
Virginia Woolf
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
Martin, Rosy and Kay Goodbridge. 2001. ‘Outrageous Agers’. On line at:
http://www.focalpoint.org.uk/agers.htm (consulted 02.02.2005)
Maynard, Patrick. 1997. The Engine of Visualization. Thinking Through Photography.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
McConkey, James. 1996. The Anatomy of Memory. An Anthology. New York, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Meatyard, Ralph Eugene. 1983. Caught Moments – New Viewpoints. Exhibition
catalogue. London: Olympus Gallery.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1996. Le Visible et l’invisible. Paris: Gallimard.
Merrill, James. 1986. ‘Divine Poem’ Recitative. Prose by James Merrill. San
Francisco: North Point Press.
Merton, Thomas. 1996. Qtd. in Negotiating Rupture. The Power of Art to Transform
Lives. Exhibition catalogue. Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art.: 88.
Michals, Duane. 1971. The Journey of the Spirit after Death. New York: Winter
House Ltd.
Michals, Duane. 1976. Real Dreams. Photo Stories. Danbury, N.H.: Addison House.
Michals, Duane and Theodore Haimes. 1978. ‘Duane Michals’, Video piece.
Michals, Duane. 1978. Merveilles d’Egypte. Paris: Denoël/Filipacchi.
Michals, Duane. 1981. Changments: Photographies et texte de Duane Michals. Paris:
Hercher.
Michals, Duane. 1984. Sleep and Dream. New York: Lustrum Press.
Michals, Duane.1989. Slow Upside Down Inside Out and Backwards. Fairy Tunes for
Children. New York: Sidney Janis Gallery.
Michals, Duane. 1991. Duane Michals. Video piece.
Michals, Duane. 1992. Eros & Thanatos. Santa Fe: Twin Palm Books.
Michals, Duane. 2001. Questions Without Answers. Santa Fe: Twin Palm Books.
Michals, Duane. 2003. The House I Once Called Home. London: Enitharmon.
Michals, Duane. 2006. Foto Follies: How Photography Lost Its Virginity on the Way
to the Bank. Göttingen: Steidl Verlag.
Michals, Duane. 2006. Conversation with the author (July 2).
Milosz, Czeslaw. 1984. The Separate Notebooks. (tr. Robert Hass and Robert Pinsky).
New York: Ecco Press.
Moore, Marianne. 1967. ‘Armor’s Undermining Modesty’ in The Complete Poems.
New York: Viking Press.
Mulvey, Laura. 1991. ‘A Phantasmagoria of the Female Body: The Work of Cindy
Sherman’ in New Left Review 188: 136-51.
Newhall, Beaumont. 1980. Photography : Essays and Images. New York: Museum of
Modern Art.
Nixon, Nicholas. 1988. Pictures of People. Introduction by Peter Galassi. New York:
The Museum of Modern Art.
Nixon, Nicholas. 1991. People with AIDS. Boston: David R. Godine.
Nouhaud, Jean-Pierre. 1987. Blancs d'oubli: Onze photos de Suzanne Lafont.
Royaumont: Editions de Royaumont.
Païni, Dominique. 2000. ‘Le Retour du flâneur’/The Return of the Flâneur’, Art Press
255 (March): 33-40.
Parry Janis, Eugenia. 1989. ‘The Bug in Amber and the Dance of Life’ in Weinberg
1989: 9-30.
206 Touching Surfaces
Pearsall, Marilyn. (ed.). 1997. The Other within Us: Feminist Explorations of Women
and Aging. New York: Westview Press.
Pedro, Patrice (ed.). 1995. Fugitive Images. From Photography to Video.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Phelan, Peggy. 2002. ‘Francesca Woodman’s Photography: Death and the Image One
More Time’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 27, (4). On
line at: www. journals.uchicago.edu
Philbrick, Harry et al. (ed.) 1999. The Nude in Contemporary Art. Exhibition
catalogue. Ridgefield, Conn.: Ardrich Museum of Art.
Plath, Sylvia. 1981. ‘The Mirror’ in The Collected Poems. Ted Hughes ed.. London:
Faber & Faber.
Pollack, Barbara. 2000. ‘The Genetic Esthetic: DNA, MRIs, and X-Ray Visions’ in
ARTnews, 99, (4): 36-7.
Pollack, Terry. 2006. Conversation with the author (March 5).
Pontbriand, Chantal. 1990. ‘Language is a Skin’ in Geneviève Cadieux. Canada:
XLIV Biennale di Venezia. Exhibition catalogue. Montréal: Parachute &
Musée des Beaux Arts de Montréal.
Posner, Helaine. 1998. ‘Negotiating Boundaries in the Art of Yayoi Kusama, Ana
Mendeita and Francesca Woodman’ in Chadwick: 157-171.
Powers, Richard. 1985. Three Farmers On Their Way to a Dance. New York:
Morrow & Co.
Powers, Richard. 1991. The Gold Bug Variations. New York: Morrow & Co.
Raffel, Dawn. 2002. Carrying the Body. New York: Scribner.
Raffel, Dawn. 2002. ‘Silver Girls’ in Oprah Magazine May 2002: 262-267.
Richir, Marc. 1993. Le Corps. Essai sur l’intériorité. Paris: Hatier.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. [1923] 1963. Duino Elegies. (tr. J.B. Leishman and Stephen
Spender). New York: Norton.
Saint Denis, Hervey de. [1867] 1977. Les Rêves et les moyens de les diriger. Paris:
Editions d’Aujourd'hui.
Santayana, George. [Ca. 1912]. 1981. ‘The Photograph and the Mental Image’ in
Goldberg: 259-66.
Sarraute, Nathalie. [1939] 1957. Tropismes. Paris: Minuit.
Scott, Joanna. 2000. Make Believe. New York: Little, Brown & Co.
Shafto, Michael. 1985. How We Know. San Francisco: Harper & Row.
Sherman, Cindy. 1993. Cindy Sherman 1975-1993. Text by Rosalind Krauss, with an
essay by Norman Bryson. New York: Rizzoli.
Sherman, Cindy. 2003. Cindy Sherman. Essay by Rochelle Steiner. Story by Lorrie
Moore. Exhibition catalogue. London: Serpentine.
Sherman, Cindy. 2006. Cindy Sherman. Textes par Régis Durand, Jean Pierry Criqui,
Laura Mulvey. Exhibition catalogue, Jeu de Paume. Paris: Flammarion.
Sibony, Daniel. 1990. ‘Une technique de l’instant ou la machine à clicher’ in La
Recherche Photographique 7: 69-73.
Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. 1986. ‘Just Like a Woman’ in Francesca Woodman:
Photographic Work (1986) .
Sontag, Susan. 1977. On Photography. New York: Picador.
Soulages, François (ed.). 1986. Photographie et inconscient. Paris: Osiris.
States, Bert O. 1988. The Rhetoric of Dreams. Ithaca and London: Cornell University
Press.
Works Cited 207