Center Quarterly Volume 8 No.2

CENTER Quarterly

A JOURNAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY AND RELATEDARTS

PHOTOGRAPHY, ETC.

A

National Juried Exhibition sponsored by the Catskill Center For Photography, Woodstock, NY

JURORS: ANDY GRUNDBERG

SUSAN KISMARIC

CALLERY:

MARCUSE PFEIFERGALLERY, NYC

DATES:

AUGUST 4 -SEPTEMBER4, 1987

SUBMIT:

Send slides of photography and other work incorporating photography, photographic processes, or concepts relating to photography in a clear slide page (8½" x 11"). No entry form is needed. Each slide must be labelled with name, media, and dimension; submission should include address and phone. Include SASE. Original works to be exhibited will be requested after slide jurying.

Slide entries should be sent to the Center For Photography (CCFP), 59A Tinker Street, Woodstock, New York 12498.

DEADLINE:

All slide entries must be received by May 20. Judging will take place shortly thereafter.

FEES:

CCFP Members: $15 for first 4 slides, $5 for each additional slide with no limit. Valid for regular and student members. CCFP Subscribers must enter as described below. All others: $25 for first 4 slides, $5 for each additional slide with no limit. Included in fee is a complimentary subscription to the CENTER Quarterly, an acclaimed photography magazine for serious artists.

ORIGINAL WORK:

All work accepted for exhibition must be matted or mounted in white or off-white mat board in standard sizes only. Work must be accompanied by name and address and a list of titles, dates, media, and sale prices (including a 50% commission). Accepted pieces that do not reasonably meet the quality of the slides may be refused upon receipt. The gallery will cover insurance during the show.

SHIPPING:

Work must be sent in a sturdy, reusable container (Fiber-bilt cases preferred), complete with return postage and insurance. For convenience, a separate check for $6 may be enclosed for UPS return (includes insurance up to $300).

QUESTIONS:

Avoid complications. Call for information on competition and/or membership: 914679-9957.

ANDY GRUNDBERG is well known to readers of Modern Photography, where he was a former contributing editor, and of The New York Times, where he is a photography critic. His writing has appeared in Afterimage, Art in America, and Polaroid's Close-Up.

SUSAN KISMARIC is currently a curator in the department of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Previously, she worked in the picture collection of the Time-Life Corporation. Kismaric is the author of the photography book, American Children.

MARCUSE PFEIFER GALLERY is an internationally recognized showplace which has been in existence for ten years. The gallery is located at 568 Broadway.

C~NT~R Quarterly

CENTER Quarterly is published by the Catskill Center For Photography (CCFP), 59A Tinker Street, Woodstock, New York. Copyright 1986, the Catskill Center For Photography. All rights reserved. No part of the contents may be reproduced without written permission of the publisher. All works illustrated in the Quarterly are copyrighted by the individual artists who produced them; copyright for essays belongs to the authors.

All opinions, ideas, and illustrations are those of the writers and artists themselves and do not in any way represent official policy of CCFP or its membership. All manuscripts and art work submitted must include SASE for return. CCFP, while taking all reasonable care, cannot be responsible for unsolicited materials. ISSN 0890-4634

Editor

Associate Editor

Advertising Manager

Graphic Designer

Printer

Kathleen Kenyon

Bil Jaeger

Colinda Taylor

Alan McKnight

Hamilton Reproductions

CCFP is a not-for-profit educational and arts organization. The Catskill Center For Photography receives funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. CCFP does not discriminate on the basis of sex, race, color, national or ethnic origin in the administration of its educational policies, scholarship programs, or other school administered programs.

THE CATSKILLCENTERFOR PHOTOGRAPHY

STAFF

Colleen Kenyon Bil Jaeger

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Joan Ades

Eric Lindbloom

Martin Benjamin Ann Lovett

Tom Brener

Alan Carey

Howard Greenberg

John Ludwig

Dan McCormack

Betty Marks

Sharon Horan Elliott Meisel

Ellen K. Levy

ADVISORY BOARD

Cornell Capa

Phillip Cavanaugh

A. 0. Coleman

Liza Cowan

Penelope Dixon

Ben Fernandez

Robert Forbes

Norman Jay ltzkoff

Lotte Jacobi

Stanley M. Kanney

Peter Kenner

Alan Klotz

Susan Komarow

Ronald Kurtz

Susan Manuso

Barbara Morgan

Robert Persky

FRIENDS AND PATRONS

Jorge Calado

Norman Jay ltzkoff

Grenville Cheng Douglas James

Peter Coffeen

Eileen Cohen

Michael Cohen

Susan Komarow

Ronald A. Kurtz

John Ludwig

Daniel Cowin Teri Lukowski

John D'Almeida Lee Male

Asher Edelman

Susan Manuso

Vinnie Fish Joel Mandelbaum

Michael Flomen Rochelle Marmorek

Jack Grainger Mimi Meisel

Mr. Elliot Gruenberg Elliott Meisel

Mrs. Elliot Gruenberg

Joyce Menschel

Linda Hackett Robert Menschel

Emile Hiesiger Richard J. Mertz

The Image Bank

1

Kathleen Kenyon

Marc Miller

Joan Munkacsi

John Pruitt

Stephen Shore

Andrea Stern

Neil Trager

Barry Ross Weiner

Marcuse Pfeifer

J. Randall Plummer

Lilo Raymond

Cynthia Schupf

John Schupf

Dennis Stock

Dale Stulz

Charles Traub

Courtia Jay Worth

Harvey S. S. Miller

Tom Miner

Joan Munkacsi

Chuck Pine J. Randall Plummer

Gordon Lee Pollack

Flavia Robinson

Judith Rogol Whitty Sanford

Mark Sick

David Silver

Sprint Photography

Susan Unterberg

Jean Upbin

Nancy Willard

Stephen J. Ziffer

Anne Noggle, Stellar by Starlight #1, 1985

The Staging of Self

Clara Gutsche

Social and artistic conditions particular to the 1960s, 70s, and 80s have allowed self-portraiture to flourish as consciously constructed strategy. Self-portraiture is but the logical extension of the tendency of photographers to use the external world to mirror internal interests and moods. Whereas earlier forays into self-investigation were sporadic, the recent prolific experiments are granted full artistic legitimacy in an art world which favors individualized stylistic stamps and

Semchuk, Self-portrait, mother unexpectedly died, August, 1981 subjective content. Further impetus is provided by the feminist context that the personal is political, and by conceptual art's substitution of the creative idea for the art object. That idea, by extension, has become the artist him/herself. Photographic records are indispensable aids to body and performance art.

Dialogues with the ego, self-portraits can be self-revealing and Et jc restc la a rcgardcr la pluie qui tombe. Et nos nuil'> de Chine. ct notrc amour. ct cc parfum dam, l'air moitc, di.~parm,a"ec toi. beau capitainc?

Sandra

Raymonde April, untitled, nd. (courtesy Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, National Museums of Canada)

direct, or self-dramatizing and cloaked, running the gamut from the narcissistic fantasy of being the star of one's own and everyone else's world, to the tentative, insecure quest for self-definition; from the use of self as a convenient character, even a fiction, to the probing for self-knowledge; from the self-celebration of a larger than life ego, to the use of self as representative of a larger social issue.

Some self-portrait projects coincide with art historical categories. Self-portraits that function as signatures of transient presence are directly descended from the nineteenth century American Western landscape photographer's use of themselves as human scale in uncharted landscape. When Lee Friedlander becomes an omnipresent shadow of himself as supertourist, or when Michael Snow photographs himself at arm's length against a grid of Venice scenes (Venetian Blind), the photographer leaves visual initials traced on twentieth century scenes.

Conceptual self-processing is exemplified by the well-known work of Lucas Samaras. Instant and plastic, the SX-70 prints are records of his treating the material of his own body. As initial process, Samaras undergoes autoerotic distortions and contortions; as second generation re-processing of the original prints, he applies hand-worked paints and inks as an after-the-event ceremonial body painting. Toronto artist, Suzy Lake, also "tampers with" the scale and content of her negatives and prints, and hence her self-image. Lake's self dissolves, distorts, mutates, and warps behind layers added and removed from the serial photographs. But if Samaras revels in selfglorification, Lake is "de-particularized," vulnerable to victimization and dissolution. The first self-devoted, the second self-dispersed, Christopher Lasch would see both Samaras and Lake as denying any distinction between self and surroundings. In The Minimal Self he argues, "The minimal or narissistic self is, above all, a self uncertain of its own outlines, longing either to remake the world in its own image or to merge into its environment in blissful union."

The post-modernist program to dissect socially constructed representation is used by Cindy Sherman in her self-staged appropriations of famous cinematic female persona. Acting as her own director, producer, star, and publicist, Sherman mimics the cultural illusions fabricated by the Hollywood image-making apparatus, thereby exposing a representation as a fantastic and mythic hallucination. Playing dress-up for self-portraits is limited neither to Cindy Sherman nor to contemporary art practice. Charles Negre and Francis Frith wrapped themselves in oriental garb; C. E. Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge disguised themselves as gold miners. The apotheosis of selfdramatized appropriation of a public figure for private purpose was reached by F. Holland Day, who in 1898 produced a 250 photograph series of himself as Christ. Costuming included the beard he grew for a year before beginning the "sacred" photographs.

But many self-portrait projects do not fit into the prevailing framework of discourse on self in relation to self, culture, and representation. The trend of women self-portraitists plumbing psychological depths of personal issues operates as a social and political strategy for analyzing artist intention and audience reception.

Initial, consciousness-raising steps of this trend are represented in the widely distributed book, Insights, edited by Joyce Tenneson Cohen, 1978. In a high proportion of the photographs, women portray themselves as small relative to the frame, obscured by shadows, crouched in corners, as headless bodies, or with masked faces. The women seem tethered to the routinely functional; they are keepers of the inner spaces of the home, womb, and psyche. The photographs involve little personal or photographic invention, and serve more to record self-exploration. In many cases, there are only tentative departures from the conventional norms of social expectation for women. This genre of women's work has been open to attack in the art world as merely self-therapeutic.

Raymonde April's narrative and psychological self-portraits function on several levels and succed in reaching down into dark, obsessed areas of her mind. In diary format, domestic scenes accompany self-descriptive entries: both photographs and text are intense, shadowy, and probing. The dreamlike/nightmarish images give April, and us, access to the recesses where she sorts out gripping emotions.

To what just barely endurable limits can grief, separation, and loneliness be self-represented is the question posed by Sandra Semchuk's Self-portrait, mother unexpectedly died, August, 1981, taken the very day. All vestiges of pose and mask are effaced by Semchuk's direct contact with raw inner pain. Semchuk demands of herself a

Sandra Semchuk, Co-operative Self-portrait, Dad and I, Yuma, Arizona, #1, #2, and #3, 1980

riveted concentration, resulting in the intense stare she targets on the viewer.

Using only the manipulations of straight photography, Anne Noggle challenges socially constructed roles. Stereotypes are defeated as Noggle casts and re-casts the shape of her outer shell into masculine and feminine, matronly and youthful, "natural" and "cultural" incarnations of her self-image. When Noggle dissolves into water, smoke, deep shadows, and brilliant highlights, or when her face is unrecog6

nizably altered from one photograph to the next, she offers an ambiguous, mutable, layered, and flexible range of self-generated persona. Further, as Noggle's eyes contact ours when she bares her aging flesh in defiance of social taboos, she assumes power over her own and the viewer's discomfort with the time-worn female body. Her calculated strategy is shocking to us.

An emotional relation to self or to major life events is not the exclusive domain of women. John Coplans' descriptively detailed,

Anne Noggle, One of Us (video still from the Recent Follies series), 1985

John Coplans, Self Portrait, Back Striding, 1985

John Coplans, Self Portrait, Hands Holding Feet, 1985

Anne Noggle, It is I, It is She, It is He (homage to Van Deren Coke), 1986

frontal photographs of his sixty-five year old body (never his face) going flabby and wrinkly deal, by inference, with deep and troubling feelings. Coplans self-examines his body with a classical formalism reminiscent of Greek sculputres. By matching his photographed imperfect aging body to the smooth marble of youthful athletic ideal, he sets up an antithetical tension between experienced and imagined self.

An underlying assumption supporting the practice of self-portraiture is that all experience originates in the body. As the physical site of class and sexual role conditioning, the reshaping of the bodily self represents a reconsideration or rejection of cultural standards. By controlling the representation of body image, the photographer creates self-defined metaphors for his/her thinking and feeling self.

However, the equation of body with self contains one psychic wild card: the direct control inherent in self-portraiture is performed at the expense of dividing the self into subject and object. Sorel Cohen's studio series, in which she photographs herself as the spectator of herself painting herself, represents the triad of mental roles played by anyone making self-portraits before an imagined future audience. To watch oneself, to act oneself, is to be accompanied by a detached, externalized view of self, i.e., by otherness.

Simultaneously embodying selfhood and otherness, the self-portraitist enjoys freedom from outside constraint, but risks the isolation of total withdrawal into self. Generally, photographers take self-portraiture's essential aloneness in one of two directions. Some, like Cheryl Sourkes, start with self in an effort to reach outside to connect with other people: "I photographed myself to see what I looked like from the outside. I didn't want to be a disembodied consciousness. I wanted to be in the world with other people." Others, like Lucas Samaras (ARTnews, April 1976), end with self, maximizing the sense

of total control of self-reliance: "I want things as I want them, not as somebody else wants them. Being with other people means having to make compromises. Well, I do not want to make certain compromises, and that's that."

CLARA GUTSCHE is a photographer who teaches at Champlain College in Montreal. Her writing has appeared in Photo Communique and Vanguard. Coplans photographs courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York.

Sorel Cohen, An Extended and Continuous Metaphor, #16, 1983-1984 (original diptych in color)

''Dreams I Might Have Had'':

The Photomontages of Allen A. Dutton

"I work for dreamlike imagery, not for specific images of my dreams," Allen Dutton says of his photomontages. "I attempt to make my pictures look like dreams I might have had. I try to achieve images that accurately reflect my subconscious. Believing as I do that my psyche is not at all unique, I have faith that my images will mirror the subconscious minds of others."

Dutton's conviction that his dreams (and his distinctive imagistic versions thereof) are not merely idiosyncratic or purely personal should be kept in mind when considering his images. "I honestly feel that if people react to my images violently, they are touching in them an area they want to keep hidden," he has said. "When you are into investigating your own hangups and your own psyche, you probably are investigating a sort of universal psyche without knowing it. We have a great commonality of experience." 1

At the same time, the photographer acknowledges readily that these are his own visions of the world, for which he takes full responsiblity. The collage imagery, much of it specifically grotesque, has been for him "an emotional purgative, so to speak, because I could let more hang out and trust that my viewer would not see me but himself in the image I have spent many years hiding things and compromising what I think about them to be more acceptable. I think my art has helped me overcome this and to the extent it has, it has been very therapeutic for me."

Much of that therapy centers around Dutton's persistent fight against self-censorship. "Almost anyone would have real problems should he or she sit down and tell someone their daydreams," he proposes. "Not only are these shocking but they are also disjointed. Certainly they are not logical. A revelation of them would make us look as though we don't have good sense, or ... are perverted. It is very difficult for people to deal with certain parts of themselves.

"As soon as you think of something and determine you are going to make it public, the censors go to work," Dutton elaborates; "time after time when I started to photograph, the censors popped up; the internal policeman stopped me. I don't pretend that I am truly free. There are some things I still find very difficult to photograph. I'll make almost any excuse for not working in these areas."

Born in 1922 in Kingman, Arizona, Dutton has remained a resident

A. D. Coleman

of his native state, though he began his career in the arts in Los Angeles as a painter, ceramicist, and sculptor. Asked for his adolescent influences, he cites the romantic poets, especially Byron and Tennyson, as well as El Greco and Picasso, but most of all Salvador Dali. He has written, "I was introduced to surrealism early and found great satisfaction in the work of Magritte, Tanguy, and Dali. When I became a painter it was natural that I turn to surrealism. Photography seemed to me to be less effective than painting in dealing with these concepts until I began to experiment with the montage."

That turn to photography did not come until 1961, when Dutton was almost forty. "I found it to be more rewarding than any medium I had tried," he indicates. However, it took time for him to evolve a working method which enabled him to avoid what he sees as the pitfalls of combinatorial photographic imagery. In most photomontage, he feels, "the juxtapositions and transitions [are] too abrupt and undreamlike," while in most multiple printing the imagery is "too studied." In order to avoid that "studied" or self-conscious quality, Dutton's approach to the creation of his imagery emphasizes fluidity, spontaneity, and emotional resonance.

He begins his own work "by photographing anything that interests me without regard to how I will work the images into a montage. I attempt to let my subconscious dictate not only the subjects I photograph but also how I assemble them. My selection of lens, camera angle, and lighting are all done without study. I use whatever feels appropriate. After processing and proofing I select negatives quickly, making many prints of various sizes. Over the years I have accumulated hundreds of pictures which I keep readily available. When I get ready to montage I use a large room, where I lay out a great many prints. I then select several backgrounds, preferring to have various picture areas ready to be populated before I begin assembly. The assembly is done intuitively, and the elements I choose must seem right immediately. The picture is finished when I feel it is."

Despite all the chance factors and psychic variables inherent in this strategy, there is a strongly directorial method to Dutton's madness. Each of the "open and uncluttered landscapes" which he refers to above as "backgrounds" is in fact conceptualized as "a stage on which you can produce a play," complete with sets, props, and

dramatis personae excised from other images. And Dutton's technique for manufacturing his prints is a model of patient, careful craft, devised to eliminate those abrupt transitions between image components which, he believes, serve only to shatter the dreamlike atmosphere.

Though it is for his photomontages that he is best known-they

have been exhibited internationally and reproduced in such periodicals as Aperture, Album, and Creative Camera-not all of Dutton's work is produced via photomontage. For example, one recent suite of non-montaged landscape images, Hide and Seek, puns on the scaleless quality of the Arizona desert by including nude models scattered among the cacti in such a fashion athat they challenge the viewer to ferret them out. Dutton's most recent book, Arizona Then and Now (a collaboration with Diane Taylor Bunting), is an elaborate documentary "rephotographic" project. His current work-in-progress is "a very inclusive photographic documentary of every Arizona community." •

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of Dutton's work is the prominence therein of women as protagonists, represented in part or in whole-and particularly his frequent use of models who, by current cultural standards, are considerably overweight and largebreasted. His first book, The Great Stone Tit, is a suite of directorial yet representational images portraying nude women in a setting which includes mammary-like desert rock formations. The photographer does not intend to make a satirical commentary on female avoirdupois; quite the contrary, in fact. "The first time I photographed a pregnant female," he indicates, "it was very difficult to admit that I really dug the look of a woman about ready to deliver. I am really turned on by fat ladies. I think they are sensuous beings. Current fashion decrees we are not supposed to like obesity." His first wife, indeed, weighed 270 pounds.

Yet he does not deny that many of his images mock and are otherwise critical of aspects of female behavior. "Women as well as men have feet of clay," he asserts. "To point this out is not disrespectful our culture has tended to ignore some glaring feminine foibles. Home and mother have been unassailable. Women have vilified men for centuries with near immunity from rebuttal. I recognize their legitimate fight for equal rights and many of the wrongs done them should be redressed, but I will not temper what I say about them because of past wrongs they have endured. Equal rights carries with it willingness to accept careful scrutiny."

Seeing himself as "a product of an era where women were conned as completely as men" into accepting sexual stereotypes, Dutton interprets the criticism of his work as "anti-feminist," as stemming in part from a desire in many women to "maintain the feminine myth." He believes that myth to be deeply harmful; his images are meant on some levels to hasten its disappearance.

The radical influences of what Dutton terms his "middle years"-including, in addition to the surrealists, Cezanne, Marx, and Engelshave yielded to the meditative: Hindu and Zen philosophy, Edward

Stop Signs with Running Water, 1979

Weston, Wynn Bullock, and Minor White (with whom Dutton studied on several occasions). "I have had an occasional relapse to painting but it never lasted long," Dutton claims. Nonetheless, in the summer of 1982 he produced a series of some twenty large paintings which satirize American Western art-"cliches which are in the best character of Remington and Russell, though not as impressionistic, in which the Rhino has replaced the Horse." Four years ago he manufactured a forty-foot sculpture which sits in his pistachio orchard. He continues to outwit the "internal policeman" who inhibits the public expresion of his subconscious. If his productivity and consistent inventiveness are any gauge, Allen Dutton would appear to have entered the most fertile period of his life.

A full, illustrated description of Dutton's photomontage technique can be found in the chapter he contributed to Darkroom Dynamics: A Guide to Creative Darkroom Techniques, edited by Jim Stone (Curtin & London, Inc. I Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., 1979).

© 1982 by A. D. Coleman. All rights reserved.

1 This statement, and several others elsewhere in the text, are taken from an interview with Dutton conducted in May of 1977 by Bill Jay and James Hajicek and published in Northlight 5 (Tempe, Arizona: Art Department, Arizona State University).

A. D. COLEMAN is on the faculty of the New York University Photography Department in the Tisch School of the Arts. He is a contributing editor to Lens on Campus.

Sand Aside for Pleasure even with Clearance, 1978

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Overleaf, ©1986 Michael Martone

MICHAEL MARTONE is a photographer and writer living in New York City, where he teaches at New York University. His first book, Dark Light (1973), will be followed by the recently finished Notes from a Moving Ambulance. Photographs reproduced here are untitled silver prints. Text and all photographs copyright 1986 by Michael Martone.

The Scream of A.M.J.

1.

Alice my sweetblueangel of the night you would not believe the news of your own death or these images of you created in the swirling baths of the darkroom '

Two expressions (from a yawn to a scream) in the same film.

2.

What is a grown man to say to you who reinvents our past misery as art twenty years after we last saw each other. Then after my negatives of you are drying yellow News reaches me of your suicide from a forgotten acquaintance who tells me to "sit down I have something grievous to tell you about your exwife."

Call it depression or fatigue & I sit down my hand trembling the telephone receiver towards my trembling ear, if you can imagine that a trembling ear.

Strange chance of fate meeting you once again so suddenly from a telephone call.

3.

ALICE! you would not believe the attention we both get now from this series of photographs

Me who was supposed to be the one to go first still alive at the age of 44 in love with another Woman recreating you still feeling your jealousys selling your face to a museum for 750 dollars a piece framing you with mat board signing your face across with the words michael martone.

4.

Was 1st Der Schrei?

It was a scream once pronounced so loud upon my existence that the neighbors across the alleyway called the Police saying that they had heard the sound of someone in trouble maybe murdered.

5. Old nightmares return your head upon the pillow, red Xmas pajamas worn in our bed buttoned snug as a child might have it your hands blocking your cry, devoid of lifelines fright that Mother and Da Daa Ka Kaa their life away.

6.

Intimate experience once forgot re-engage as I flip through these negatives of you grease penciled "Alice here or there"

Silly Kid

How do you know?

But supposing it won't happen!

Which State of G-DS Heaven shall call Her?.

Alice dead and buried in a borough of New York City she would when alive rather not have visited.

7. 1953.

Darkroom with my bed in it on my Twelfth birthday Single shot developer or maybe Semen my Father sent away in a straight jacket. 1963.

Alice about to be engaged to me in the crazyhouse secretly from the nursing staff.

Patients throwup a party for us late one Sunday night in the quiet of the mens room.

We spit out our pills so that we could feel something again.

8.

Every 6 months new patients and new visitors arrive & after awhile when fears subside (The Snakepit disarmed) they ask us "what's this one in here for?. "doesn't look crazy, nice face too"

We invent fantastic stories for the visitors amusement this one is shocked this one fogged Her/His film

On the holidays my story lengthens I choose out of context the true story of my own disease.

Michael Martone

9.

A problem arises I am no longer in my own story of you Alice.

10.

But I do remember the old Woman who nursed us in our respective wards, whose arm is or was tattooed with the numbers of Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau.

Her Husband also works here promoting the annual Patient talent show "Oh help us Mister Maarrtone draw something for us" "I am A PHOTOGRAPHER (artist) God Damn you!" "Can't you remember that ARTIST is not JOOST a Painter Mr. Zch ___ Z."

11.

Alice's retort-Vainglorious memoirist

Son of Bitch and Bastard Dektol blackened fingernails illuminating nothing new till the white light shoots into the fixative try these images of you, pressed with paper towel and Clorox then into Milk (a shortstop) as your hands were in life in the Kitchen or bathroom white flesh edged in reddened skin my hands again touching your hand on the photo easel my life moving you once again towards art.

12.

Annual mental state hospital longterm Patient Talent Show Mr. So&So singing songs from Oklahoma, "OHWHATA Beautimorning" A lunatics demonstration of Karate.

Barbara Forelorns version of the Gershwin song book. A magician waits alone backstage till her stage fright is over. On the paper decorated bridgetable awaits us the first prizeA his or hers cosmetic set and a cake from the patient-run Kitchen with the names of the winners rested in between the iced mask of Comedy and Tragedy.

13. This darkroom is a coffin with a surprise in it, a thirteen year old girl watching my hands wave about the enlarger light

says that "I do a VooDoo trick" dodging and burning around you, Alice.

JACK MARTONE MURDERED IN STATE HOSPITAL FOR THE INSANE 1956

His Son Michael almost murdered after his own 3 yr. internment.

14.

Jack's retor.t. Repartee. Retortus. Look Michael, I sweat out of my heart, gravitate to wornout people I can now watch the new middle class of our old city wear their money on a leash Petdesstreeeans (laughter) Akita.Borzoi.Pit Bulls.Saluki. don't mock fingershoot them anymore as they know not when or where it comes from.

15.

Like Father like Son Artist & Artist & who in the name of Jesus and Joseph and Mary would think that our family would survive in picture or print other than on the Government documents?.

YOU THE READER SAY TO ME THAT THIS IS A FAMILIAR PLOT TAKE THIS THEN, FOR A POEM.

16. Flowers adorn the grave for it is vegetation that when dead we return to. So new flowers wait at my Parents grave seeding, if untread upon the flowers that wait for me.

As I photograph the ribboned flowers I can hear her crying for that is what She did when Her period came like clockwork a soft whimper that needed no diagnosis nor blame In the next moment She Plucks a flower for Her hair Chases me like a wild woman Scares me. And now rest in peace.

"I played 'the Christchild' in the Christmas play at the Convent when I was two. My sisters were angels." (1946)

Tenneson Family, 1950

"Before I went to the Church on my wedding day, I visited the nuns so they could see me in my white dress." (1967)

Joyce Tenneson, Self Portrait, 1978

Personal Clues/ Private Associations

Nancy Hall-Duncan

Joyce Tenneson is an investigative reporter whose search for clues has been long and fraught with danger and uncertainty. For the past fifteen years, Tenneson has relentlessly documented her own life. She has used the camera, the tool of objective research, to probe unknown terrain. It is an important and unending inquiry, because what she seeks is the most elusive of subjects-herself-and the meaning of her own identity.

The answers she has found are her portraits. The portrait can assume almost as many forms as there are faces. It can flatter or idealize, reflect the sitter's self-image or one. the photographer has imposed upon him. It can be fashioned to fit the image one wishes to pass to posterity or it can conform to a convention, as a bridal portrait or a baby picture often does.

But these are not Joyce Tenneson's questions: she asks portraiture instead to reveal to us answers about our inner selves. And indeed portraiture is uniquely suited to this task, for it alone depicts the human fo(m, an analogue to our own image. While Tenneson's images are not always of herself, her identification with the images is powerful. Viewing the human form is like facing ourselves: it elicits a subliminal response, an empathy in seeing a corollary of our bbdies. This response occurs in looking at any body part-hands, feet, torso-but is particularly personal and highly charged when we look into another face. In his article The Uncanny Portrait, Max Kozloff has explained the psychological source of this feeling. "[The face] is where we are. We kiss, eat, breathe and speak through it. It's where we look, listen and smell. It is where we think of ourselves as being finally and most conclusively on show. It's the part we hide when we are ashamed and the bit we think we lose when we are in disgrace." In portraiture, each part of the body carries a wealth of subliminal psychological meaning.

It is this principle of bodily empathy which explains many of our strongest reactions to Tenneson's work. We, as humans, have very strong reactions to fragmentations of the body: the veiled face and disembodied hands and foot fragments create a strange sense of disquietude. The bodily empathy we feel with the images is particularly strong in the recent portraits, which have been enlarged one-toone with our actual body size, creating a sense of identity between our self-image and the depicted image.

There is also a deep bond of emotional and bodily affinity between Tenneson and her usual subjects-her friends, her son, and other women. These deeply felt subjects function literally as extensions of

Joyce Tenneson, Self Portrait, 1978

Joyce Tenneson, Alexander, 1980

Joyce Tenneson, Self Portrait, 1981

Joyce Tenneson, Swan and Aja, 1986

herself allowing her to project, question, and discover the myriad facets of her own identity through her reaction and depiction of the subject. Because she has always seen her work in photography as an extension of her own life, the emotional stakes are high. Not only the subject but also the details charge the photographs emotionally. Each inclusion is a distillation, a kind of personal clue to a realm of private associations. We are never to know the full meaning of her cast of objects-layers of veiling draped through the photographs, a bat-like wing, a child's dress-that recall both childhood and an historical past. Equally powerful are more abstract concepts: the idea of whiteness, for example, which in Tenneson's work goes far beyond its traditional associations with innocence and purity. Because of the pictures' psychological intensity, the moment chosen to be depicted is always extra-6rdinary. By divesting her photo-

Tenneson, Two Sisters, 1986

graphs of the momentary and situational, Tenneson delves into the deeper and lasting significance of her actions. The lack of movement makes the gestures seem almost ritualized, emphasizing the sense that we are looking inward toward the realm of emotion and feeling rather than at the mere circumstances of existence. This, like the photographs themselves, is a realm of shifting and uncertain boundary.

Tenneson's process contributes to the mysterious, silent beauty of the prints and creates their unique and individualized style. Both her black and white and newer color works have a sensuousness and a formal elegance that is as sophisticated as their psychological content.

These photographs are open-ended and challenging because they offer many answers but no ultimate conclusions. Joyce Tenneson's questioning of herself and her life is a ceaseless search, an investigation which must continue because the answers lie in the continual process of photographing and in the prints themselves. There will be no end, only the certainty that as Joyce Tenneson continues to , work, to grow, and to question, there will be more answers and more extraordinary photographs.

NANCY HALL is the author of The History of Fashion Photography, Photographic Surrealism, and E. 0. Hoppe: 100,000 Exposures; these publications were produced in conjunction with exhibitions she curated. Currently, Hall-Duncan works as curator of the art collection at the Bruce Museum in Connecticut.

JOYCE TENNESON keeps a studio in both Washington, D.C. and New York City. A photographer who taught in art schools for fifteen years, Tenneson now does commercial fashion and portrait work in Manhattan. The monograph, Joyce Tenneson Photographs, was published in 1983 by David Godine.

Joyce

Photograph As Memory: Memory As Influence

Starr Ockenga

Looking at my photographs is like peering through a peephole into the past. For me, the pictures form a complex chart that connects moments from my adult life (those actual instants of exposure) with much more distant events, often from my childhood.

Many of those incidents really happened, but some, when I describe them to my mother in vivid detail, she insists never occurred at all. Fantasy and fact are interwoven, and for some years that uncertain line embarrassed me. My memory seemed unreliable-even, perhaps, dishonest. However, in the course of my present work, I spend hours and hours in the company of children of varying ages, and I have made the reassuring discovery that many of them slide back and forth between the real and imagined as I do. Their ability to balance the two is the very nature of "play."

A little girl, one of my models, recently pointed to a taxidermiststuffed rabbit on my coffee table, and demanded to know, "Alive or dead?" I carefully explained that he had once been alive, had died, and was preserved for us to enjoy. She looked at him closely, pondered my words and declared, "Well, I've decided that he's alive again, and that's that." The subject was closed. She talks of me as the lady who keeps a rabbit as a pet.

What actually transpired-and what might have taken place-is subject matter for much of my work. Places, people, moments, emotions form a puzzle of influence that guides my eye.

Ten years ago, I was ambiguous about the power of my past. I refused to acknowledge its importance and resented its restrictions. Today, I accept it; I welcome its strength to lead me in new directions.

While in the process of making a series of pictures, I never think , about their sources. I work in the present, from picture to picture, and a series slowly evolves. But it now seems inevitable that when a group of photographs is completed, I will see in it specific parallels with my past. The pictures often summon up long forgotten events. These connections mesh too often to be coincidental.

Some years ago, having finished the pictures for a book about children dressing up and acting out adult roles, Kelly Wise, the editor and writer of the introduction for the book, suggested I sit in front of my typewriter with each of the photographs in front of me and free associate with the imagery. Every photograph triggered a memory of a particular childhood "adventure."

More recently, when I showed a series of photographs of babies to David Ross, the Diretor of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, he made the illuminating comment, "These pictures are really about baby worship."

Sarah Sleeping, 1979

Joshua in the Mirror, 1977

Jacob and My Father's Portrait, 1978

Religion was the essence of my childhood. My father was an evangelical minister of a large city church. In his black robes and velvet collars, he was a god figure in the pulpit as well as at home, an awesome presence. Like Moses carrying the commandments down from Mount Sinai, my father's rules and decrees seemed to come directly from God. My father the god, and God the Father fused into a giant, who sometimes held me on his lap.

One Easter Sunday I was sick and had to stay in bed. On his return from the Resurrection services, my father came to my room. From the pocket of his black morning coat, he pulled a small white rabbit as a present for me. The fact that he had a bunny in his pocket did not surprise me, it just reinforced his omnipotence.

An eloquent preacher, my father made the Old Testament prophets and the New Testament disciples live before my eyes. The Bible stories he told were not presented as myths or fables, but as Truth Absolute. I was educated to believe in fantastic events: Jesus took a child's basket of fish and loaves of bread and proceeded to feed a multitude. He turned water into wine. He walked upon the Sea of Galilee. He stilled its storms.

My father taught me to follow light. His first act in the old farmhouse he bought for our summers in New Hampshire was to pierce the kitchen wall and install a picture window to embrace the early morning sun, as it rose over the Presidential Range. Around that lightdrenched table, we held family devotions every morning. We knelt before our chairs and prayed around the world-for missionaries in Hawaii and Africa-with the sun warming our bowed heads. My little sister and brother with their blond hair appeared to have halos as they spoke to God. God and light became inevitably and permanently linked.

My father caught polio from visiting a sick parishioner. The disease struck his throat, and he was unable to use his voice, the instrument of his livelihood, for many months. As part of his rehabilitation, he played a simple one-fingered scale on the piano and loudly pitched his voice to the notes. Performing this exercise at 6:00 a.m. each day, he woke me, and I tiptoed downstairs to observe the peculiar scene. With the sun like a shawl over his morning coat, he projected a meaningless, but strangely profound sound. I wondered if it were through this unintelligible language that he communicated with his God, that he received his instructions.

Our religion depended on leaps of faith, on acceptance of unexplained phenomena, on logic not being essential to belief; in a child, it encouraged unreined fantasy. My inner world was populated with a cast of fictitious friends, human and animal, as well as the figures from my favorite periods of Biblical history, whom I could call at will to appear. I took walks with miniature mountain people, and we made "winter gardens" out of moss and lady slippers; Indians in beaded elegance and fairies in tutus danced amongst the silver birches. It was easy to talk to Ruth, kneel with Samuel, or enter the firey furnace with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

The Bible, a book of mystery and miracle, is also filled with frightening taboos. I never saw my parents nude. I only saw my own nakedness behind closed bathroom doors and under water in the tub. My sexuality was never addressed. I knew nothing of my body as I progressed through the surprises of puberty. Little girl bodies were uncharted territory, not to be explored. A neighbor child told me about the act my parents performed to conceive me. Outraged at the filthy lies she had spoken about my parents, I responded in a Biblical fashion: I stoned her.

There were the moments, when by myself, I reveled in my own sexuality. I put cucumber and lemon juice on my hair to make it lighter. I hung from the rafters in my bedroom under the eaves to make myself taller. In an attic trunk I discovered a rainbow of chiffon dresses my mother had worn on her wedding trip to Europe. I tried them on, enjoying the delicate silk next to my skin. I ·preened before an old wardrobe mirror and thought I felt what women feel.

The special places of my past, those that are sweetly precious or curiously disconcerting, are frequently evoked by the places I pass through as an adult. That feeling of deja vu occurs most often in rooms of old houses and in casually tended gardens. Places in the present remind me of my bedroom under the eaves in that New Hampshire house, of the rolling panorama of the White Mountains spread below the kitchen window or of the vegetable garden my mother tended in her pink striped shorts.

Mae/len with the Arabs, 1978

Michael in the Water, 1978

Fallen Angel, 1984 (original 20x24 Polaroid print)

Gardens were as constant in our lives as religion. Gethsemane and the Public Garden near my father's church could be part of the same conversation. Flowers and spiritually became intertwined. Each Sunday, bouquets the size of small gardens encircled my father's feet beneath the pulpit as he preached. After church, we carried those flowers to the sick and placed them by their bedsides in quiet sympathy.

Always a passionate gardener, my mother treated plants like members of the family. Field flowers mixed with garden grown peonies, petunias, larkspur, and hydrangia filled our house. Flower arrangements in over-sized glass pitchers and Chinese bowls were organic, not only in their contents, but in their alteration from day to day. My mother pulled out dead blossoms and poked new ones into the holes. Dropped petals accumulated under each bouquet and seemed a deliberate part of the arrangement. She painted those flowers, too. A painting of a long-deceased bouquet on the entry hall table hangs a bit to the left of the latest in its succession of replacements. Piles of half-finished watercolors accumulate on the dining room sideboard.

We wore flowers, also, but nothing so formal as corsages. For my June birthday party each year, my mother twisted daisies into crowns and placed them on our heads, as we watched a puppet show or a magician perform his white-bunny-out-of-the-hat trick. When mother left the house for yet another church service, she always plucked a flower from the bouquet closest to the door and pinned it in her lapel. Pictures of her traveling to mission stations around the world are a catalogue of the indigenous flora, as she seems never without a bouquet presented to her on her arrival or departure.

My sister and I, as documented by my father's Leica on old Kodachromes, were flowers ourselves in a colorful array of velvet, tulle, organdy, and taffeta dresses. Once on a trip to England, couturiers to the little princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, presented us with party dresses as a sign of gratitude to my father for the meaningful message in his Sunday sermon.

Noelle as the Painting, 1977

Sarah in the Garden, 1978

Doll Babies, 1982 (original color Fresson print)

My mother taught my sister and me to always look our best. My hair was curled nightly in rags, and my wardrobe was extensive. A big satin bow matching each outfit lifted my sausage curls off my face. I was seduced by "style" at an early age. As the oldest daughter of the minister, I was the primary choice for flower girl by marrying couples. I developed a routine, shashaying down the aisle and dropping petals from side to side. Each wedding required a new long dress. My most prized, the one in which I sat for my port•:>it,.was pale blue silk bordered with rosebuds.

I cannot remember when I started to accumulate objects that would become props in my pictures. I have always filled drawers and boxes with bits of lace and feathers. And I still love dolls. My mother bequeathed me the collector's impulse; she never threw anything away. Her attics, basements, garages, and barns swelled with things no longer actively used. For her, these things seem physically inhabited by a memory, and, thus, can never be discarded. If the object were gone, the memory would also disappear. And to her, memory is sacred. She informed me once, "He who doesn't have sentiment is sunk."

When I started working with babies, I found that she had kept many of the dolls from my childhood, and I began including them in the pictures with "my babies." As the pastor's daughter, I was given more than my share (one Christmas, thirty-six), and for me, those dolls were living babies.

Christmas was the biggest celebration of the year. For a child, the birth of a baby is much easier to understand and accept than a crucifixion or a resurrection. My parents received baskets of Christmas cards. Many were reproductions of medieval and early Renaissance images of the madonna and child. I played with those cards all year, making "peep-boxes"-cutting up the cards and creating my own Christmas scenes in shoe boxes with a viewing hole in one end. I gave Nativity scenes new twists with multiple babies and flying animals. I remember thinking I was an angel, dressed in white feathered wings, as I sang a solo of Away in a Manger over some parishioner's squirming infant in the Christmas pageant.

On our summer travels, we studied paintings in museums across Europe. I observed the infant Jesus surrounded with lush fabrics, fruit, flowers, and birds. Other religious figures, like Moses or John, are immortalized in those early Renaissance paintings, too. But, the images of the baby Jesus were the most significant for me. Often portrayed unwrapped, unrestrainQd, he was not the swaddled baby of the gospel of Luke. Mother and child caress lovingly. While idealized and glorified, there is honesty, intimacy, and tenderness of gesture and expression in many of these works. All this real human emotion, real human drama with the infant at its center-the baby at its heart.

Working with babies made me relive my relationship with my own baby son. It was through him that I first really understood intimacy. I loved to be alone with my baby, to look at and hold his perfect little body. I wanted to make something to celebrate those feelings, but his babyhood passed before I became a photographer. Those treasured months faded into memory, but I now realize my mothering experience influenced my choice of babies as subject matter. We have just marked the milestone of his twenty-first birthday, and with that occasion I felt this group of photographs complete.

Working with children for almost twenty years has kept me close to them in spirit. We get along; we tell each other secrets. I constantly learn from what they say and from looking at their attitudes as recorded in my photographs.

A little four-year-old girl asked me, "May I also come here on the days I'm not modelling, just to have tea and treats together?" Of course.

NOTED BOOKS

Paul Caponigro, Pentra-lfan Dolmen, Pembrokeshire, Wales, 1972

STARR OCKENGA is a photographer and educator who runs her own studio in New York. The artist, whose images have appeared in Esquire, Close-Up, Interview, and Art in America has work in the collection of the Bibliotheque Nationale and the Museum of Modern Art.

Megaliths, by Paul Caponigro. New York Graphic Society/Little Brown, 34 Beacon St., Boston, MA 02108. 1986. 158 pages, $75.00, hardcover.

"Meaning hung in the air about the stones, and I had to gather concentration and quiet within myself to even begin conversing with these earth ambassadors, whose silence and sense of centeredness were sobering and internally cleansing to me."

Paul Caponigro, later in the introduction, reveals a simple expressionist strategy: "The photographs were sequenced to evoke a feeling for the wide range of experiences I had with the stones." Dolmens, circles, cairns, solitary stones, and other forms are universally presented in an ordered, balanced, evenly printed, and pleasant manner. These pictures are not trendy, but neither are they intensely felt or even mildly ground-breaking. In fact, they seldom produce what I would call a "feeling," unless it is a feeling for form and light.

Megaliths is an imposing book, printed on a heavy stock. The photographs, all black and white, are reproduced on a non-glossy paper, as current trends dictate, with the finest of duotone screens. The design by Eleanor Morris Caponigro is impeccable and stately, in keeping with the subject. Nothing is compromised, including the price.

Anyone approaching the book should keep in mind its illustrative nature·. The photographer who comes closest to this style might be Samuel Chamberlain, famous for many black and white picture books of pretty places, aimed at armchair travelers. Fortunately, some of Caponigro's imagery has a formal beauty that surpasses most commercial photoillus tration, and Caponigro has an underlying philosophy and personal quest--extending over two decades-that further validates the work.

The best of Caponigro's images succeed without qualification. Plate 27 of a wedge-grave shows a remarkable spatial and textural sense, and it evokes the pastoral and mysterious country where farmers and ancient stone structures coexist. The inevitable Stonehenge section contains the cliched (plate 94, Sunrise at Stonehenge), but others (such as plate 98) are fascinating for their play of light or their arrangement of forms.

Arthur Tress: Talisman, edited by Marco Livingston. Thames and Hudson, 500 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10110. 1986. 156 pages, $19.95, softcover.

Arthur Tress is one of those softspoken, underrated photographers who will eventually be "discovered," even though a steady stream of materials has been evident throughout a productive career. For now, Arthur Tress: Talisman may just be another part of that stream which began two decades ago and has included the notable The Dream Collector and Shadow of the 1970's. At last we have Talisman, a perfect Tress sampler, with excerpts from both of those earlier works along with bizarre black and white still lites, complex color constructions in hospitals, and glaring political comments all completed in the 1980s. For purists, only the originals will do, but this is an important adjunct for most of us. The book includes a series of pithy, mostly unpublished statements by Tress about his work from 1968 to date, and a helpful sixteen page introduction by Marco Livingstone. -Bil Jaeger

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