Glitch: The Art of Error and Imperfection (With Reference to the Photography of Julia Margaret Cameron)

Julia Margaret Cameron: The Holy Family (1872) [1]

The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

 

 

I. 

 

Thanks in large part to Jews working in the American entertainment industry, a fair few words of Yiddish origin have been adopted by English-speakers: chutzpah, klutz, mensch, schlep, schmooze, shtick ... etc.

 

But my favourite such word at the moment is the rather impish-sounding glitch, which first entered everyday English during the period of the Space Race (1955-1975).  

 

Whilst it now refers to a temporary technical issue or a short-lived fault in a system that eventually corrects itself, glitch is derived from a Yiddish word for that which slides, slithers, or causes one to slip or skid, which is interesting; might one refer to a patch of black ice as a glitch in the road?

  

Commonly used within the computing and electronics industries - and still a favourite with the engineers at NASA - the term glitch is also found in the world of art ...

 

 

II.

 

Glitch art is the contemporary practice of using errors for aesthetic purposes, either by corrupting digital data or physically manipulating electronic devices. As well as glitch imagery and film, there is also glitch music, a genre of experimental electronic sound that many people simply call noise.

 

Of course, whilst such 'errors' can be random effects, they are more often the result of deliberate manipulation and so not really errors at all. Numerous artists have posted online tutorials explaining the techniques they use to make their work and produce (pseudo) glitches on demand. 

 

Personally, I prefer real errors and genuine glitches to those distortions and deviations that are the result of intention. But, either way, you can end up with some amusing results, which is why glitch art is increasingly common in the world of design. And of course, there's even an app allowing those who like to edit their pics on social media to produce an instant glitch effect.  

 

Let's not pretend, however, that there's anything remotely subversive (or even all that original) about this phenomenon [2]. Artists have played with light, sound, and colour and been aware that beauty often lies in small imperfections - that failure is often more instructive than benign success - long before the digital age or anyone was using the term glitch.

 

 

III. 

 

Consider the case, for example, of the Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, whose controversial images were lambasted by the critics [3] and jeered at by her contemporaries for being smudged, smeared, or out of focus, but which are now regarded as brilliantly ahead of their time.

Error, we might say, was the hallmark of her style; Cameron deliberately left the flaws that others would have attempted to disguise or eliminate, affirming an art of imperfection and happy accident and rejecting the idea of photography as a scientific practice via which one aimed at a perfect representation of the world, or an accurate and precisely detailed rendering of the human subject. 

 

Using an extremely messy - and slippery [4] - process that involves coating glass with an even layer of collodion, sensitising it with a bath of silver nitrate, and then exposing and developing the plate whilst still wet, Cameron was, arguably, the Cindy Sherman of her day and elements in her work are not only postmodern as some commentators claim, but distinctly glitchy.  

 

 

Notes

[1] The photograph used here illustrates Cameron's unorthodox style; undefined edges, out-of-focus figures, etc.

 

[2] We might, in fact, best understand glitch art as a form of nostalgia on the behalf of those who remember (or wish to retrospectively experience) the days of cassettes, video tapes, home movies, and polaroid instant cameras, etc. In other words, it's an attempt to resurrect a bygone techno-aesthetic. 

 

[3] In 1865, The Photographic Journal reviewed an exhibition of Cameron's portraits, commenting: 

      

"We must give this lady credit for daring originality, but at the expense of all other photographic qualities. [...] In these pictures, all that is good in photography has been neglected and the shortcomings of the art are prominently exhibited. We are sorry to have to speak thus severely on the works of a lady, but we feel compelled to do so in the interest of the art."

 

Meanwhile, a reviewer at The Photographic News wrote: 

 

"What in the name of all the nitrate of silver that ever turned white into black have these pictures in common with good photography? Smudged, torn, dirty, undefined, and in some cases almost unreadable, there is hardly one of them that ought not to have been washed off the plate as soon as its image had appeared."

 

[4] I remind readers of the etymology of the term glitch discussed in the first section of this post.

 

Just Because the Sky Has Turned a Pretty Shade of Orange and Red Doesn't Mean You Can Simply Point a Camera and Shoot ... Or Does It?

Golden sunset and red sunrise over Harold Hill 

(SA / Dec 2022) 

 

 

I. 

 

For many serious photographers, these two snaps taken from my bedroom window - a golden sunset and a red sunrise - constitute perfect examples of cliché. 

 

That enormous numbers of people enjoy looking at such pictures doesn't alter the fact that images of dusk and dawn have virtually zero aesthetic value; their mass production and popularity only confirming their banality. 

 

As one commentator notes: 

 

"Their very ubiquity is what seems to repel; photography has tainted what it sought to cherish through overuse. It miniaturises natural grandeur and renders it kitsch." [1]

 

If you're a reader of Walter Benjamin, you might explain how mechanical reproduction devalues the aura - by which is meant something like the uniqueness - of an object or event [2]; if you're a fan of D. H. Lawrence, you'll probably start shouting about Kodak vision and how this prevents us from seeing reality, just as cliché inhibits the forming of new perspectives [3].  

 

Now, whilst sympathetic to both of theses authors, I also want to be able to take my snaps and share them with others in good conscience. And so I feel obliged to challenge those who are hostile to photography per se - even if, on philosophical grounds, I share their concerns.

 

And I also feel obliged to challenge those who are dismissive of certain genres of amateur photography - pictures of flowers, or cats, or of the sun's risings and settings - out of cultural snobbery; i.e., those who sneer at aesthetically naive individuals and speak of the wrong kind of people making the wrong kind of images.

           

 

II. 

 

I'm thinking, for example, of the Marxist academic, writer, photographer and curator, Julian Stallabrass, who is interested in the relations between art, politics and popular culture and who sneeringly entitled a chapter of his 1996 work on the widespread popularity of amateur photography 'Sixty Billion Sunsets' [4].

 

As Annebella Pollen notes: 

 

"Stallabrass's denigration of mass photographic practice is based on what he perceives to be its overwhelmingly conventionalised sameness (unlike elite art practices, which are positively polarised as avant-garde, creative and distinctive)." [5]

 

In other words, because Stallabrass sees every sunset photograph as essentially the same, he dismisses them all as "sentimental visual confectionary indicative of limited aesthetic vision and an undeveloped practice" [6]; in other words, stereotypical shit. 

Unfortunately, this attitude is echoed by many other critics and theorists convinced of their own cultural superiority. If you thought postmodernism did away with such snobbery, you'd be mistaken - which is a pity. 

 

For whilst I may agree that just because the sky has turned a pretty shade of orange and red one is nevertheless required to do more than simply point a camera and shoot in order to produce an image that is also a work of art, there's nothing wrong with just taking a snap and plenty of snaps have genuine charm and, yes, even beauty. 

 

In the end, even a bad photograph can seduce and what Barthes calls the punctum - i.e., that which is most poignant (even nuanced) in a picture - is often the failure, fault, cliché, or imperfection. Perhaps, in this digital age of imagery shared via social media, we therefore need to rethink what constitutes a good or bad photograph.    

And, ultimately, Stallabrass is simply wrong: no two sunsets (or dawns) are ever the same and no two photographs of sunsets (or dawns) are ever the same; there is an eternal return of difference (not of the same or to the same). 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Annebella Pollen, 'When is a cliché not a cliché? Reconsidering Mass-Produced Sunsets', eitherand.org - click here. 

 

[2] See Walter Benjamin's essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' (1935), which can be found in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zorn, (Bodley Head, 2015).

 

[3] See D. H. Lawrence's essay 'Art and Morality' (1925), which can be found in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 161-68. 

 

[4] Julian Stallabrass, Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture, (Verso, 1996). 

 

[5] Annebella Pollen, 'When is a cliché not a cliché? Reconsidering Mass-Produced Sunsets', op. cit.

 

[6] Ibid.

 

 

Derealisation

Derealisation (A Cursed Image)
SA (2021)

 

 

After a Greek art student described the photos on my Instagram account as cursed images, I was encouraged to investigate this term and write a short post on the subject [1].  

 

However, whilst in some instances this description might seem appropriate, I don't think it holds true for all of the pictures and I certainly wasn't aiming at producing images that could be categorised as such; nor do I like to be seen as a follower of trends. 

 

Further, it could just as easily be argued that the photos are, in fact, symptomatic of my disordered mental state and represent how I perceive the world, rather than exemplify a deliberate aesthetic. 

 

This is why the images are, for example, often lacking in depth of feeling or emotional resonance; why there's no sympathy or sincerity in them, even when contemplating corpses. It's as if everything were seen from an ironic perspective by someone who is detached, distant, and dissociated from reality. 

 

I don't know if this is caused by some kind of brain dysfunction, but it's pretty much how I've always seen things - even as a very young child observing the world of animals, grown-ups and school friends. 

 

It might have something to do with my birth sign (Aquarius), or it might be due to the fact that I spent so much time watching TV that eventually I saw real life as if it too were being played out on a screen - who knows? 

 

And, indeed, who cares: it's never been something that's particularly bothered me or caused any anxiety. In fact, my ability to be objective - to see things with a little coldness and cruelty - made me feel not only different from other children, but superior - like an alien being, or a god. 

 

And what young boy doesn't want to feel like that? [2]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See 'A Brief Note on Cursed Images' (21 September 2022): click here. Readers interested in judging my photos for themselves should go to: @stephenalexander9383

 

[2] I'm thinking here of Nietzsche's remark: "One would make a fit little boy stare if one asked him: 'Would you like to become virtuous?' – but he will open his eyes wide if asked: 'Would you like to become stronger than your friends?'" 

      See §918 of The Will To Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, (Vintage Books, 1968), p. 485. 

 

A Brief Note on Cursed Images

The first image posted on cursedimages.tumblr.com 

(28 October, 2015)

 

 

For those who don't know, a cursed image refers to picture - usually a photograph - that in someway unsettles the viewer. The term originates from a Tumblr blog established by an anonymous female film student in 2015 and rapidly spread across all forms of social media. 

 

But what, I hear you ask, actually constitutes such a picture? 

 

Well, an image might be described as cursed due to its content, some technical aspect, or the context in which it was taken or is viewed. Or it might simply possess a mysterious quality that is not quite possible to pin-point, but which nevertheless gives people the willies. 

 

As one commentator rightly says, if a picture needs a caption underneath to explain why it's cursed, then it isn't cursed. 

 

Uncanny ambiguity and a kind of abject (and amateurish) surrealism are key and the very best images oblige the viewer not only to wonder what it is they're looking at or try to figure out the intention of the photographer in taking such a shot, but question the nature of everyday reality and their own place within it. 

 

Thus, cursed images have an existential import, as mundane objects - such as a crate of tomatoes - suddenly appear uncanny, even evil. And yet, as Matt Moen notes:

 

"In a chaotic world that seems to defy logic more and more with each passing day, the cursed image offers us a perverse sense of comfort by reaffirming the fact that it's not just us who seem to be going crazy." [1]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Matt Moen, 'Cursed Images: Finding Comfort in Discomfort', on papermag.com (09 Dec 2019): click here. 

      In the same piece, Moen also makes the important point that the cursed image presents a direct challenge to the carefully photoshopped or deepfake picture by "positing a reality that is far stranger than anything we could fabricate".

 

 

A follow up post to this one on derealisation suggests my photos are more the product of mental dysfunction than the desire to follow social media trends, or subscribe to a creepy aesthetic: click here.  

 

Might as Well Jump (Jump!)

Philippe Halsman:  

Grace Kelly Jump (1954) 

philippehalsman.com

 

I. 

 

As much as I admire Byung-Chul Han - and as much as I enjoy reading his books - I do slightly worry that he's just a teensy-weensy bit of a miserabilist. 

 

That is to say, the sort of philosopher who, when asked if he's a happy person, responds by first pointing out that, in his view, this is a meaningless question before then insisting that happiness is not a condition that he aspires to anyway.

 

Or the sort of philosopher who finds the world cruel and confusing and thus almost impossible to comprehend: "That is also why I am not happy. I rarely understand the world. It appears quite absurd to me. You cannot be happy living in absurdity. To be happy takes a lot of illusions, I think." [1]

 

And the sort of philosopher who, when offered a nice piece of cake, says: I don't eat cake ...

 

This perhaps helps explain how it is that Byung-Chul Han has kept his trim, somewhat boyish figure and also why it is that he hates people jumping with joy (particularly in front of a camera lens) ...   

 

 

II.

 

In a short piece first published in Die Zeit, in 2016, Byung-Chul Han claims that young people being photographed these days love to "jump around wildly" and that this phenomenon seems to have spread "like an epidemic" [2]. 

 

He asks: "Are they really jumping with joy? Is jumping an expression of the increasing vitality of our society? Or are these jumps rather pathological twitches of the narcissistic ego?" [3] I'm not sure I know the answer to these questions, but I do know that individuals jumping in front of cameras is nothing new (even if more widespread).  

One recalls, for example, the astonishing pictures of Philippe Halsman, about which I have written previously on Torpedo the Ark [4]. This includes the above photo of American film star (and future Princess of Monaco) Grace Kelly, taken in 1954, which I will always love, no matter what arguments Han puts forward.  

 

However, I am prepared to consider his arguments ...

  

 

III. 

 

According to Han, in earlier times, when photos "served primarily as mementos, people being photographed presented themselves in a calm and civilized manner" [5]. No one, he says, would have dreamt (or dared) to leap about in front of the camera:

 

"The aim of a photograph was mainly to preserve the moment [...] People held back, and the event came to the fore. They receded behind the moment or occasion that was to be remembered. No one wanted to present themselves, let alone make an exhibition of themselves." [6]

 

Looking at old photos - and I'm talking about very old photos - there's obviously some truth in this. But perhaps this is for the same reason that, in most old photos, people aren't smiling either; namely, that early pictures required such long exposure times that the subject had to stay as silent and as still as possible. 

Of course, it's true that after 1900 exposure times became much shorter, thanks to the invention of the box Brownie, which ushered in the age of the snapshot. And yet, smiles were still uncommon in early 20th-century pictures and people were not, as a rule, jumping about in front of the camera; thus there were doubtless cultural conventions in operation (and not merely technological considerations). 

 

For example, photography was still not regarded as a unique art form with its own aesthetic; it was still heavily indebted to the tradition of portraiture in painting. People may or may not have taken themselves more seriously then than now, but they certainly took photography more seriously; having a picture taken was still a big deal and one didn't want to be immortalised acting or looking the fool.    

 

Han says that today, in the age of Facebook, self-exhibition is an absolute value and people vie for attention and for likes. That they have lost that which once gave photographs a certain austere charm and aura (lost their inwardness, their reserve, their humanity) and the world become "merely a pleasant backdrop for the ego" [7].

 

Han concludes: 

 

"We are witnessing the development of a kind of photography that is free of remembrance and history, a photography that is permanently on the hop, so to speak, that has an altogether different temporality, which lacks width and depth, a photography that exhausts itself in moments of fleeting emotion, a photography that is not narrative but only deictic." [8] 

 

The thing is, however, I rather like this kind of photography. One is even tempted to call it (à la D. H. Lawrence) the photography of the immediate present; instant photography in which there is "no perfection, no consummation, nothing finished" [9] (or, as Han would have it, no age, no fate, and no death). 

 

I don't want to stare at old black and white photos of the past, or Roland Barthes's mother, and think this is how it was ... If that makes me a spider monkey who leaps about jumping for attention whilst remaining fettered to the moment and "devoid of the [human] virtues of understanding and wisdom" [10], then so be it.

 

Notes

 

[1] See the conversation between Byung-Chul Han, Niels Boeing and Andreas Lebert, entitled 'I am Sorry, But These Are the Facts', in Capitalism and the Death Drive, trans. Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2021), p. 135. 

 

[2] Byung-Chul Han, 'Jumping Humans', in Capitalism and the Death Drive, p. 49.  

[3] Ibid.

 

[4] Let me remind readers who can't be bothered (or don't have time) to click here, that Halsman produced a celebrated series of pictures of famous people jumping in the air, 178 of which were published as a book in 1959, along with an essay containing his philosophy of jump photography that he termed jumpology. 

      Essentially, Halsman was interested in seeing his subjects lose a little self-control and reveal character traits that would otherwise remain hidden. I suppose, that being the case, I would understand Byung-Chul Han's opposition to the project on the grounds that such a desire for transparency has fatal consequences.

 

[5] Byung-Chul Han, 'Jumping Humans', Capitalism ad the Death Drive, p. 49. 

 

[6] Ibid., pp. 49-50.

[7-8] Ibid., p. 51. 

[9] D. H. Lawrence, 'Preface to New Poems', in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Appendix I, p. 646. 

[10] Byung-Chul Han, 'Jumping Humans', Capitalism ad the Death Drive, p. 52. 

Readers might like to be reminded of my own contribution to jump photography (and the poetry of the present), in a 2017 post featurning the Lithuanian artist Gedvile Bunikyte: click here.  

Auschwitz-Geschichten 1: In Memory of Prisoner 26947 (Czesława Kwoka)

Czesława Kwoka (1942/43)

Photo by Wilhelm Brasse 

Auschwitz-Birkenhau State Museum

 

 

I. 

 

Most people find it extremely difficult to look at the heaps of emaciated bodies left to rot in the Nazi death camps once the system of extermination began to break down.      

 

And, of course, such unparalleled scenes of atrocity are horrific; no one likes to think of human beings reduced to base matter or witness mounds of anonymous corpses showing signs of advanced decomposition or still marked by traces of suffering [1].   

 

But is it any easier to look at this photo of a young Polish girl taken shortly before her death in Auschwitz ...?

 

 

II.

 

Czesława Kwoka was born in a small village in Poland, on 15 August, 1928. 

 

Along with her mother, Katarzyna Kwoka, she was deported shortly before Christmas 1942 and then sent to Auschwitz. She died on 12 March, 1943, aged fourteen, less than a month after her mother; just one of many Polish children murdered by the Nazis [2]. 

 

Czesia is among those memorialized in the permanent Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum exhibition The Life of the Prisoners. Her picture was taken by Wilhelm Brasse, a talented Polish inmate whom the Nazis pressed into service upon discovering that he had trained as a professional photographer prior to the German invasion of his homeland [3].       

 

Along with Anne Frank, Czesława Kwoka has become representative of all child victims of the Nazi killing machine.    

 

  

Notes

 

[1] Having said this, it's worth recalling Nick Land's argument that it's the corpse that wasn't cleanly and efficiently incinerated which functions as a sign of impersonal resistance to the final solution and that the real horror of the death camp comes when the system is in full operation and producing lamp-shades made from human skin and bars of soap from the body fat of the exterminated. See The Thirst for Annihilation, (Routledge, 1992), p. 139.

 

[2] Although details of her death are not known for certain, it's likely that Czesława was killed with a lethal injection of phenol - a favoured method amongst SS physicians. However she died, Czesia was just one of approximately 230,000 children and young people aged under 18 deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau between 1940 and 1945. As might be expected, the vast majority - over 90% - were of Jewish descent; the others had ethnic backgrounds including Polish, Russian, Ukranian, and Romani. Most arrived as part of families and were not listed in camp records. Less than 1000 survived to be liberated by the Red Army in January 1945. 

 

[3] Although he survived the War and still owned a camera, Brasse was was unable to return to his profession because, as he confessed, when he looked through the lens all he could see were the faces of the dead. A 50-minute television documentary about his life and work, The Portraitist [Portrecista], was made in 2005, dir. Irek Dobrowolski. A trailer, with English subtitles, can be viewed on YouTube: click here. 

 

 

To read other tales from Auschwitz, click here and here.         

 

 

Reflections on The Rokeby Venus

Diego Velázquez: The Toilet of Venus 

aka 'The Rokeby Venus' (1647-51) 

Oil on canvas, 122.5 x 177 cm 

nationalgallery.org.uk

 

D. H. Lawrence once jokingly suggested that his painting The Rape of the Sabine Women (1928) might best be described as a 'Study in Arses' [1]. 

 

And perhaps something similar might also be said of the only surviving female nude painted by Velázquez - the so-called Rokeby Venus - which has a lovely looking bottom as its focus point (one hardly notices the rather blurry face reflected in the mirror held by Cupid). 

 

Although paintings of the naked Venus had been popularised by 16th-century Venetian painters, such an overtly sensual picture would, of course, have been highly controversial in 17th-century Spain; the Catholic Church strongly disapproving of such risqué images. 

 

Amusingly, it's a picture that has continued to provoke outrage amongst moralists and militant ascetics of all stripes, including fanatic suffragettes such as Mary Richardson who, on the morning of March 10th, 1914, entered the National Gallery and attacked Velázquez’s most celebrated work with a meat-cleaver [2], and contemporary feminists concerned with the imperial male gaze and the sexual objectification of women, etc., etc. 

 

On the other hand, since its arrival and public display at the National Gallery in 1906, this extraordinary painting continues to inspire a wide range of artists, including the photographer Helmut Newton, who in 1981, took this beautiful photograph, after Velázquez, in his apartment in Paris, for an edition of French Vogue [3]:

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton, with Gerald M. Lacy, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), letter 4370, sent to Aldous and Maria Huxley [2 April 1928], p. 353.  

[2] Frustrated by their failure to achieve equal voting rights for women, some within the suffragette movement, including Mary Richardson - a loyal supporter of Emmeline Pankhurst - favoured the adoption of increasingly militant tactics. As well as the attack on The Rokeby Venus, Richardson committed acts of arson, smashed windows at the Home Office, and bombed a railway station. She was arrested on nine occasions and received prison terms totalling more than three years. Perhaps not surprisingly, considering her penchant for political violence, in 1932 she joined Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists (as did several other leading suffragettes, including Norah Elam and Mary Sophia Allen). 

      For an interesting online essay on all this, see Philip McCouat, 'From the Rokeby Venus to Fascism', Journal of Art in Society - click here. 

[3] To be honest, this photo has always meant more to me than the painting that inspired it and those who attended my Visions of Excess series at Treadwell's in 2004 might remember that the final paper on nihilism, culture, art and technology, featured an adapted version of this picture on the poster designed to advertise the talk.     

 

 

What if the Shoe Were on the Other Foot?

Photo by Chris Buck for O - Oprah Magazine (May 2017)

chrisbuck.com

 

 

New York based photographer Chris Buck is known for his unconventional portraits of various celebrities and politicians - and celebrity politicians - including Presidents Obama and Trump. His arresting images have appeared in many top publications and he has been involved with a number of high profile commercial campaigns, including the controversial Be Stupid campaign for Diesel. 

 

Like many people, however, I know of him primarily for his pictures in the May 2017 edition of O - The Oprah Magazine, which played with the idea of a reversal of class and race roles, in which whiteness was suddenly disprivileged, at best, if not subject to systemic discrimination in this alternative universe.

 

The photos - which quickly went viral - were for the most part positively received, though, predictably, some found them offensive. Buck claims that his pictures were intended to stimulate questions, but not necessarily provide answers and that he's pleased to know that different people had different reactions:

 

"I want everyone to feel like they can vocalize their feelings about it, whether they’re positive or negative. More talk about this is a good thing. I’d rather people not get upset or offended, but if that’s their reaction then I think that’s totally fair too." *

 

For me, they illustrate something I think we all know at heart: that given the opportunity, everyone is capable of behaving as a cruel, selfish, exploitative arsehole who doesn't give a shit about those who are regarded as inferiors. 

 

In other words, no one is innocent. And those currently oppressed or subject to injustice and violence would behave just as appallingly - if not worse - given the upper hand. Slave morality - for all its fine words - is, let us not forget, a resentment-fuelled desire for revenge; a reactive expression of will to power. 

 

And so, even if the shoe were on the other foot, it would still mean a kick in the face for someone ... Is the solution then that we must all learn to go barefoot (were such a thing possible)?

 

* Note: I'm quoting from an interview with Chris Buck by Jennifer Berry. See: 'The Real Story Behind the O Pics That Have Been All Over Your Feed', Flare, (23 May, 2017): click here.  

Forever Dead and Lovely: Notes on Melanie Pullen's High Fashion Crime Scenes

Melanie Pullen: Untitled (ELLE), 2014 

From the series High Fashion Crime Scenes (2003-17)

melaniepullen.com

If, like me, you love Izima Kaoru's Landscapes with a Corpse for their drop dead gorgeousness and thanatological interest, then you're also gonna love the work of Melanie Pullen in her photographic series High Fashion Crime Scenes ...


Born in 1975, in New York, but currently living and working in Los Angeles, Pullen grew up in the West Village in a family home regularly visited by poets and painters, including Allen Ginsberg and Andy Warhol. She acquired her first camera as a teen and began shooting images of rock bands for various publications and record labels.     

Pullen is most noted, however, for her extensive series of  pictures based on vintage crime scene images taken from the files of the NY and LAPD. Inspired by cinematic images and photojournalism, she employed not only well-known actresses and models, but the services of a huge technical crew so that her photo shoots often resembled elaborate movie sets. Each of her pictures could take up to a month to create and the High Fashion Crime Scenes series used millions of dollars worth of designer clothing and accessories. 

Surprisingly - or perhaps not - Pullen claims to dislike violence. She is curious, however, about the role that violence plays within the arts and wider culture, as well as the response that people have to violent images. Her work might therefore be described not as an attempt to make violent crime seem glamorous or stylish by dressing up bodies in haute couture, but a critical examination of the way in which the horror and traumatic effect of murder, rape and suicide can be diminished via its aesthetic interpretation and/or portrayal in the media.  
 

Pullen herself has expressed concern with the way that images and descriptions of female corpses - often naked or semi-naked - are used to titilate or add sleazy sensational interest to a narrative; be it a film, a play, a news story, a coroners report ... or even a blog post.

See: Melanie Pullen, High Fashion Crime Scenes, with an introduction by Luke Crissell and essays by Robert Enright and Colin Westerbech, (Nazraelie Press, 2005), 128 pages.  

To read a sister post to this one - Notes on Izima Kaoru's Landscapes with a Corpse - please click here.

Forever Dead and Lovely: Notes on Izima Kaoru's Landscapes with a Corpse

Izima Kaoru: Kimura Yoshino wears Alexander McQueen #484 (2007)

Part of the Landscapes with a Corpse series

Galerie Andreas Binder (Munich)

artnet.com

 

No matter how we die, we will travel up to the world 

beyond the sky without regretting how we lived

The phrase drop dead gorgeous, popular with necrophiles and thanatologists alike, also inspired the Japanese fashion photographer Izima Kaoru to stage elaborate death scenes featuring attractive models and well-known actresses dressed in expensive designer outfits that oblige viewers to consider the cultural fascination with the beautiful female corpse.

The sequence of images begin with wide-angle shots and gradually narrow to close-ups of the model. The resulting pictures look rather like film stills and remind us that there's nothing more cinematic than the death of a beautiful woman (to paraphrase Poe), although Kaoru's work demands to be contextualised within a wider art history; one that includes traditional Japanese woodcuts [Ukiyo-e].

It's also important to understand the influence of the Buddhist practice of maranasati - a musing on one's own mortality using various visualisation techniques - upon Kaoru's photography. Thus it is that, prior to taking any pictures, Kaoru asks his models to imagine the circumstances surrounding their deaths (where, when, how, etc.) and to consider also what would constitute the most sightly way of exiting this world (leaving behind a beautiful corpse is never an easy task). 

In sum, Kaoru's pictures are a highly stylised and aesthetically pleasing form of what we in the West term memento mori and not merely images to do with fashion, sex, and cinema born of the floating world (though even if they were that alone, they'd still appeal to me). 

Izima Kaoru: Kimura Yoshino wears Alexander McQueen #483 (2007)

Part of the Landscapes with a Corpse series

Galerie Andreas Binder (Munich)

artnet.com

See: Izima Kaoru, Landscapes with a Corpse, German and English text by Roy Exley, Yuko Hasegawa and Peter Weiermair, (Hatje Kantz, 2008), 192 pages, 171 colour illustrations.

See also the documentary film by Chad Fahs, Landscapes with a Corpse (2014), which follows Izima Kaoru on a journey to create new work and perhaps find the answer to the question of what best constitutes a beautiful death. 

Readers interested in a sister post to this one - on Melanie Pullen's High Fashion Crime Scenes - should click here.

Übernatürlich: Jason DeMarte's Augmented Reality

Jason DeMarte: Invasive Apathy

(Photo Assemblage / Pigmented Ink Print, 2018)

I.

The idea of art as an innocent imitation of nature is, of course, a very old one. Indeed, despite everything that's happened during the last 150 years, there are people who still subscribe to this ancient Greek concept of mimesis.

Personally, however, I tend to agree with Nietzsche on this question and view art more as a metaphysical supplement to the reality of the natural world; one that transforms rather than merely represents the latter.

Art is thus a way of either enhancing or diminishing nature; perfecting or perverting reality. And the most interesting artists - artists like Jason DeMarte - understand the ambiguous character of this game; how nature can paradoxically appear more-than-natural and less-than-natural (even unnatural) at one and the same time.        

It's been said that DeMarte's cleverly composed works combining images of flora and fauna with artificial objects and sugary treats would make Mother Nature blush - though whether that would be with pride, passion, anger, embarrassment or shame, isn't clear. His playful yet sophisticated juxtapositions call into question the relationship of nature and culture and what it might mean for man to be translated back into the former, or to conceive of culture as a form of transfigured physis.  


II.

Unlike many visual artists, DeMarte has a clear conceptual insight into his own project, as can be seen from the following statement found on his website that he has very kindly granted me permission to reproduce here in full:


"I am interested in modern understandings of the natural world and how that compares to the way western society approaches its immediate consumer environment. It’s important for me to compare established idealist utopian ways of representing the landscape to the hyper-perfect way products and modern consumer life are represented in media. I’m particularly interested in the idea of disillusionment through false or misleading representation. I’m interested in creating photographs that merge simulated forms of life and colorful processed foodstuffs with idyllic pop material goods, in an effort to create a dialog of consumption, duplicity and homogenized ecstasy.

I work digitally combining images of fabricated and artificial flora and fauna with commercially produced and processed products. I look at how these seemingly unrelated and absurd groupings or composites begin to address attitudes and understandings of the contemporary experience. I represent the natural world through completely unnatural elements to speak metaphorically and symbolically of our mental separation from what is 'real' and compare and contrast this with the consumer world we surround ourselves with as a consequence. Ultimately this work is an investigation into the manipulation of truth.

My process draws from a long history of constructed narratives in photography, artist like Oscar Gustave Rejlander and Julia Margret Cameron, were early pioneers in manipulating truth with the medium, while later artists like Gregory Crewdson, Jeff Wall and Anthony Goicolea made the ordinary surreal with their highly choreographed stills. My process aims to simultaneously embrace a manipulation of truth by hyper exaggerating the ordinary and to also work within a kind of truth by utilizing the inherent believability of the photographic medium.

Like the early tableau photographers I draw inspiration from painting, specifically naturalist painting from movements like the Hudson River School. I’m interested in rekindling the romantic notions of nature while simultaneously subverting those romantic notions by juxtaposing pop consumption and visual gluttony."


III.

I find all of this fascinating: particularly his confession that at the heart of his project (or process as he calls it) is the question of truth - something which Nietzsche decouples from goodness and beauty and provocatively describes as that from which we would perish were it not for the skilful and deceptive reworking to which it is subjected by the artist.

Only art, says Nietzsche, has the power to make experience bearable by providing us with vital illusions. And for that we should be grateful ...  

Notes

Jason DeMarte's work has been exhibited in galleries and museums, both in the US and abroad, and featured in numerous journals, books, and other publications. He is currently represented by Rule Gallery in Denver Colorado and is part of the Photographers Showcase at Photo-Eye Gallery in Santa Fe. 

He is also an Associate Professor of Photography in the School of Art and Design at Eastern Michigan University and Assistant Professor of Photography in the College of Architecture, Art and design at Mississippi State University. 

Those interested in knowing more can visit his personal website by clicking here.

Nietzsche was preoccupied with the question of truth in relation to art throughout his writings. He does not reject the importance of the former as a will expressed in science, for example, but does question whether such might prove nihilistic and harmful to life. He proposes that the untruth of art might ultimately be more conducive to human wellbeing. The lines to which I refer above are found in The Will to Power, section 822, and The Gay Science, section 107.   

Tyler Shields: Provocateur or Pale Imitator?

Tyler Shields: Self-Portrait (2014)
tylershields.com

According to Andrea Blanch, keen to address criticism of her friend's work from the get-go, the provocateur often receives a bum rap. That is to say, they're often subject to false accusations or unfair judgements; dismissed as a fraud who "peddles in shock or wears the shallow guise of edginess".

But the true provocateur - such as Hollywood's favourite photographer, Tyler Shields - knows how to turn incitement into a fearless form of art that awakens lesser mortals from their mundane slumber and the "consumptive malaise of soul-grinding routine". Provocation, in its highest form, is thus not merely a means of challenging somebody to react; it's also a way of filling them with "passionate exuberance". Provocation is a vitalism; it brings people to life and not simply to the boil.

And so, whilst some of the images produced by Tyler Shields deliberately aim to shock and unsettle, what raises his oeuvre above that of his lesser-skilled contemporaries, is that they also "arrest us with the magnitude of their depth and complexity".

I have to say, with respect to Ms. Blanch, whose own work with a camera far exceeds anything produced by Tyler Shields in my view, this really is so much guff. Unfortunately, Shields - who has what might be termed a healthy ego - buys into this fearless genius nonsense and seems happy to blow his own trumpet when he can't find someone to do it for him. For this is a man who unabashedly places his work not in the world of fashion and celebrity culture, but the tradition of Baroque art - less Terry Richardson and more to do with the transcendental clarity of Caravaggio.

And this is a man who aggressively asserts his ownership of images, threatening prosecution and multi-million dollar fines to anyone who infringes his copyright, despite the fact that, as one commentator has noted, a brief glance at his portfolio "by anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the history of photography would reveal that a high number of his images look an awful lot like those of other photographers".

Now, as a rule, I'm not greatly concerned with notions of originality; all great artists steal, as Picasso said. However, this doesn't mean that all great thieves are artists and what does irritate is to see a powerful image rendered banal. An act of homage or even a playful pastiche should not result simply in an inferior copy or perpetuate a lazy form of nostalgia.

Unfortunately, as art critic Paddy Johnson writes with reference to Tyler's version of the famous Sally Mann photo of a young girl smoking (Candy Cigarette, 1989), Shields often "takes what began as an incredibly haunting photograph and turns it into an art postcard". His re-imaginings disappoint not because they rip-off, but because they devalue and diminish.       


Notes

Andrea Blanch, 'The Fearless Artist', Foreword to Tyler Shields, Provocateur, (Glitterati Inc., 2016). 

Jamie Lee Curtis Taete, 'Is Celebratory Photographer Tyler Shields Inspired, Or Copying Other Artists?', Vice, Jan 15, 2016. Click here to read. The remarks by Paddy Johnson are also found in this article. 

Thanks to Simon Solomon for bringing the work of Tyler Shields to my attention and kindly gifting me a copy of Provocateur. 
 

Miles Aldridge: Supposing Truth to be a Supermodel

Miles Aldridge: 3-D (2010) 
milesaldridge.com

London-born photographer Miles Aldridge is someone whose work I admire immensely; it's so beautifully dark beneath the fluorescent colours and combines so perfectly his obvious obsessions: the great F-words of fashion, film, and fetishised femininity.

Clearly interested in the philosophical question of style, Aldridge playfully explores and experiments with the semiotics of the catwalk, the fatal seduction of cinema and the cultural construction of woman as a revered object within the pornographic imagination.

It's an artistic and a perverse quest for truth, resting upon the quasi-Nietzschean supposition that truth might be a supermodel or a goddess of the silver screen; sacred monsters whose mask-like faces express neither sensitivity nor sincerity; transsexual creatures who, as Baudrillard says, never dazzle because of their talent or intelligence, but because of their remoteness and what we might even describe as their apparent frigidity.

Of course, some critics find Aldridge's work vacuous and a form of conceit; a glossy fantasy that far from subverting the political and social realities of gender, class and consumerism - as is sometimes claimed - merely reinforces these things. But I beg to differ with this analysis. For me, his work matters. And it matters because it demonstrates how what we consume, what we worship, or what we most desire - be it a Birkin bag, a lifestyle, or the attractive stranger sitting across the bar - is never a new object in itself, but is rather an object previously encountered on screen or in the pages of Vogue; i.e. one that has already been assigned meaning within a discursive framework.

In other words, Aldridge's work disconcertingly suggests that it's impossible to know real objects existing outside a frame of reference; reality itself is constituted via representation and staged performance - just like a photo shoot. Those commentators who, like Glenn O'Brien, insist that Aldridge is in the business of constructing dreams, have radically misunderstood what is going on in his work - or underestimated what's at stake. For what Aldridge is doing is far more fundamental; he's using the logic of fashion and his passion for artificiality to rupture the order of referential reason.

And central to this project, as indicated, is the figure of woman as actress, as model, as perfect object; as one who understands the need for cosmetics and defends the right to lie. Not because she wishes to protect or disguise some concealed essence beneath appearances, but because she has no such essence. Again, many critics will protest that by placing the question of woman into the context of fashion and film, it means she becomes fetishized and commodified as an object or image, rather than liberated as a subject. But, even if this is the case, is that so bad? Mightn't a clever woman - who is always a well-dressed woman - use her own emptiness and reification to her own advantage?

Aldridge insists that his models have a blank expression not because they are mindless, but, on the contrary, because they are lost in thought. And, far from feeling on the verge of extinction because they have been transformed into a hollowed-out figure of male fantasy, they exhibit the pale power of seduction and stillness that is particular to those who are soulless; what Walter Benjamin termed the sex appeal of the inorganic.

For me, as for Aldridge, it's on the runway or the movie screen, where woman best stages her refusal of - and resistance to - male power and masculine depth. For although obliged to pout and to pose and embody consumer capitalism's ideals of femininity, luxury and artifice, woman as seductive object remains fundamentally untouchable and inaccessible. She teases her male spectators with a glimpse or the promise of her nakedness, whilst exposing also the truth that they are as fake and as hollow as she (in their desires, emotions and highest values).

Stare long enough into the void, says Nietzsche, and the void begins to stare into you ...

Another Bloody Sunset (On Eternal Recurrence and the Snobbery of Photographers)

Die Ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichen 
SA/2016

I hate people who take photography seriously; people who fuss over every aspect of their composition and have to employ all the latest technology; people who look down on those of us who enjoy simply taking snaps - including snaps of the sunset which, apparently, is not the done thing in the world of professional image making. Indeed, there's even a sneering acronym used in online chat forums: NABS - not another bloody sunset.

For me, there's something not only touching but philosophically interesting about the fact that, apart from a few superior types who like their cyclopic perception of the world to remain immaculate and claim to be unmoved by natural beauty or the wonder of events, people continue to look to the skies and attempt to capture, however naively or inadequately, the splendour of the rising or setting sun.

For I suspect that one of the things that enchants is the fact that just as no one steps twice into the same river, no sunset is ever witnessed more than once; it's an absolutely unique occurrence that only gives the illusion of an identical event happening over and over each day.

Nietzsche famously terms this the eternal recurrence of the same and, as Deleuze demonstrates in his radical interpretation of this concept, what returns is actually difference itself (paradoxical as this initially seems and contrary to what those commentators believe who write of return in terms of crushing certainty and fixed essence, rather than the very momentariness of the moment).  

The reason people will never tire of the sun and its effects and will never tire either of pictures, is because even the most clichéd of these images tell us something crucial; namely, that despite the experience of duration and continuity, there is no universal stability. 

We're All Going on a Summer Holiday (Notes on the Photography of Bernard Faucon)

Bernard Faucon: Les Grandes Vacances (1976-81)

bernardfaucon.net

Doesn't time fly?

It's now forty years since the scorching hot summer of '76, when French photographer Bernard Faucon first began assembling material for a five-year project that combined the ravishing, short-lived beauty of actual boys, with the rather more unsettling - though equally mythic - beauty of synthetic beings (in this case mannequins) into a queer form of tableau. 

A project which came to be known as Les Grandes Vacances and that might best be described - borrowing if I may from the clinical language of paraphilia - as a work of paedopygmalionism, although I'm fairly certain that the perverse love of boys, be they real or artificial, isn't really the point of these pictures.

What then, one might ask, is the point of these disconcerting images taken from a summer camp pitched deep in the Uncanny Valley? 

To be honest, I'm not sure I can answer this question. Even Roland Barthes recognised that the puzzle they pose and leave dangling before our eyes - "which cannot look away and yet cannot pierce their mystery" - is a genuine one and thus never fully solvable. 

Ultimately, no photograph, if it's any good, can ever be explained; if we could always articulate what we wanted to say, then no one would bother taking pictures which, far from speaking a thousand words, present an enigmatic, silent, and still form of truth.    

It's interesting to note, however, that Faucon - a philosophy graduate of the Sorbonne who initially worked as a fine art painter - gave up photography in the mid-1990s and began to reinvent himself as a writer, suggesting that the pen remains not only mightier than the sword, but the camera and the paintbrush too.  

See: Roland Barthes, 'Bernard Faucon', in Signs and Images, trans. Chris Carter, (Seagull Books, 2016). 

Picture This (On the Evil Genius of the Image)

There is a great affectation in ascribing meaning to the photographic image. 

To do so is to make objects strike a pose. - Jean Baudrillard

I have recently developed a liking for taking photographs, though perhaps it would be better to call the images produced visual fragments (or simply snaps). 

For photographs are taken by photographers and refer us to an aesthetic practice with its own history, and I'm not a photographer. Nor do I know much (or care much) about photography as an art form or technical pursuit. 

I simply enjoy taking random snaps of objects that have in some mysterious manner captured my attention and, as it were, revealed something of themselves. This aspect is crucial: I don't choose the objects or imagine the world (in the same way that I don't speak language). There's nothing imaginary about the production of images or subjectively predetermined.

Pictures - the very rare ones that work at any rate - are not merely representations of something else which can immediately be understood and discussed in conventional and critical terms. Rather, they are fatal objects in their own right which allow an impersonal and inhuman reality to shine through in a way that is untainted and unmediated; what Baudrillard refers to as the transparency of evil (the showing-through of the world as is, rather than as we would have it).  

When you see a picture of this kind, there's nothing to say about it, nothing to know. Any attempt to drape meaning over it or identify the author of the image as if that will tell you something essential, is futile and inappropriate. A great image, in other words, renders silent and is the site of disappearance (the fact that so much has been written on photography is therefore somewhat ironic). 

Now, this is not to say or imply that any of my snaps are rare in this sense. But, in their naivety and imperfection - in their lack of title and date - perhaps a small number have something diabolical about them ... 

The Case of Evelyn McHale (The Most Beautiful Suicide in the World)

Photo of Evelyn McHale, by Robert C. Wiles. 

For poets, there is nothing more romantic than the suicide of someone young; particularly if they take their lives with an element of style and manage to leave behind them a good-looking corpse. And no one has managed to achieve this feat with more success than an attractive, twenty-three year old bookkeeper, called Evelyn McHale, in 1947.

Hers is often described as the most beautiful suicide in the world and I’m happy to share this view. What makes her case so magnificent and not merely tragic (or mundane), are the following six points:

1. She chose a magical date, May 1st, an ancient spring festival, on which to make her self-sacrifice, thereby lending her death a certain mythical aspect or celebratory pagan splendour.

2. She chose the right method for her location. When in Berlin, for example, one should swallow poison or use a gun; in London, it’s appropriate to throw oneself from a bridge into the Thames, or onto the tracks of the Underground before an approaching train. But, as Serge Gainsbourg observed, New York is all about the astonishing height of its buildings. And so, when in NYC, one simply has to jump.

3. Having chosen, rightly, to jump, Evelyn then selected one of the two truly great and truly iconic modern structures from which to leap: the Empire State Building. This 102-story skyscraper, located in Midtown Manhattan, is, with its beautiful art deco design, the perfect place from which to fall to one’s death and since its opening in 1931 only a select number of lucky souls have had the privilege (and fatal pleasure) of plunging from this iconic site.

4. She was impeccably dressed for the occasion, with gloves and a simple, but elegant, pearl necklace. Before jumping she calmly removed her coat and neatly folded it over the wall of the 86th floor observation deck. She also left behind her a make-up kit, some family snaps, and a suicide note written in a black pocketbook, in which she asked to be cremated without any kind of fuss or service of remembrance. In other words, even in death, Evelyn kept her composure - which brings us to our fifth point:

5. She didn’t land with an undignified splat on the pavement of 34th Street; but, rather, with a crash onto the roof of a waiting car. And it wasn't just any old car - it was a UN Assembly limousine, as if she wanted to make an impression on the entire world. And impression, as we see from the photo above, is the key word here. For Evelyn literally impressed herself into the roof of the Cadillac, so that it seemed to fold round her, with metallic tenderness. There is almost nothing to suggest the terrible violence of the scene - apart from the ripped stockings and the absence of shoes.

6. She conspired with fate to ensure there was a photographer nearby to instantly capture the event of her death on film; thereby ensuring her place within the cultural imagination. Indeed, fifteen years later, Andy Warhol would incorporate her image into his work, just as he did images of other beautiful women, including Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor.

As for the student photographer, Robert C. Wiles, he also struck it lucky that day; his astonishing photo of Evelyn was published in Life Magazine as a full-page 'Picture of the Week' in the May 12 issue. It was his first - and last - photo ever to be published and one likes to imagine he hung his camera up after taking this perfect shot, but I don't know if this is true or not.

I'll stop here - but I could of course talk about (and darkly caress) this topic forever. For Camus was right: there is only one truly serious philosophical question - and that is the question of suicide.