the honorable truth of the here and now
“I tell all my students to erase nostalgia from their work. We owe it to future generations to make artifacts from this time that show how things are in this precise moment.” – Jim Stone, distinguished professor of photography UNM
I. Indecent Utopia
Oscar Gustave Rejlander, known posthumously as “the father of art photography,” began his photographic career and debates in the 1850s, at the very advent of the medium. He was widely ridiculed by members of various Photographic Societies for not adhering to the critics’ goal for the developing medium: truth-telling. It was thought then that if photography was to have any place in the realm of art, it would be for its ability over any other medium as a testament to fact. While it could not yet compete with the fine brush work of painting to render crisp lines or focused scenes, it could always appeal to the capacity of documentation of a given place and time, a chemical reaction in the face of something real. Other critics and collectors pressed the photographic process to match painterly styles like pictorialism, with blurred and out-of-focus images matching an ethereal brushwork; photography as legitimate art because of its painterly qualities.
This debate reached Rejlander’s heightening despair with the presentation of his Two Ways of Living, a reproduction of which is shown above. As deep focus was not yet perfected, Rejlander created this image by sun-bleaching 36 custom-cut negatives of the figures throughout the panorama into a discernible composition. When it hung in the salon in 1857 (the unframed image at 30cm x 17cm), it was surrounded by photographs in the pictorial style, and enshrined with frequent vitriol, especially by Thomas Sutton, an English photographic inventor. Sutton not only objected to the untruthful presentation of 36 separate negatives to create a single image, but he exposed his Victorian orientation when asserting that the nude women in the photograph surely were prostitutes, as no respectable lady would permit such flagrant immodesty. Irrelevant to Sutton, Rejlander was making his own Cartesian moralist argument with the image, made explicit with the title “Two Ways of Living,” wherein an elder man in the center looks upon two youths who have the biblically directional choice of virtue, seated at the right hand of the father, and vice, at the left hand of the Devil. Tellingly, while much of the virtuous path is rendered legibly with industrious sciences, globes, medicine, books, and carpentry, the path of vice is made up ambiguously: apart from scenes of gambling, vanity, and drinking, it is mostly female figures lounging, touching each other sensuously, and one women seemingly in a state of grief.
Jim Stone’s quote certainly has a historical precedent with Thomas Sutton and other critics of the Photographic Societies of the mid-1800s. There is an implicit critique that centers photography as a unique documentary artifact of a given space and time: a truthfulness based in the accuracy of the image. Using Rejlander’s collaged image, we can tease out more of what was happening in regard to notions of time, history, and iconographies of the past as a legitimizing framework. Firstly, the composition of Two Ways of Living is clearly a recreation of Raphael’s The School of Athens, a Renaissance fresco from 1511 showcasing philosophical titans of ancient Greece, (Moorish) Andalusian mathematicians, and Mediterranean scholars alongside then-contemporary figures like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo; The School of Athens presents a genealogy of European genius, culled from all parts of the continent and brought into a glorious present. It is, essentially, a form of reflexive and restorative nostalgia, wherein Raphael commands viewers to see themselves as inheritors of a progressive culture based in knowledge, science, and reason; and, seeing that this past is not actually lost, it is embodied in their gifted contemporaries; thus, the future can only be utopic. By invoking this frame explicitly, Rejlander calls into question the stability of this teleology some 300 years after the fresco: is it inevitable that a people will carry on greatness, or is it actually a conscious and individual choice? Rejlander presses the notion of individual will by his model’s anonymity: nobody here has cultural clout…yet.
^ Raphael’s The School of Athens, fresco completed in 1511 in the Vatican.
Stone’s quote has often haunted me, not only as I’ve been inspired by Rejlander’s photographs, but also as I’ve invested much research into contemporary queer and anti-colonial concepts of time. In these frameworks, his words functions in a teleological framework that assumes these truths: (1) one is capable of being totally in a here and now as divorced from other historic eras; (2) discernible longing for a past should be eradicated as distinctly antithetical to a progressive narrative; and (3) these processes constitute inherently honorable forms of truthful artistic representations of the contemporary. On these points, clearly, I’m not convinced.
II. then and there
^ Patrick Angus Walks into the Phoenix Bar a.r.havel and A. Hennen Payne. 2021.
Rejlander’s process of separately printed negatives for a single image prefaced analog collage forms of the 20th century, and digital formats like photoshop thereafter; but, it was, for myself and collaborator A. Hennen Payne, a particularly practical process in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. I could have models pose in the same space at different times and then juxtapose them together in seamless compositions. Patrick Angus Walks into the Phoenix Bar was one such project; and, while staged in January of 2021, it invites the point of the view of an oil painter who died of HIV-related complications in 1992. Angus painted scenes of gay sexual cultures of New York City in the ‘70s and ‘80s—from bathhouses, to gay bars, to more intimate domestic scenes of boys in bed. Some of my favorites look like plein air paintings inside gay strip clubs, the dancers illustrated in smears of movement, with titles that not only give the images an immediate sound-scape but also humorously critique the dynamics of the space: Grace Jone’s “Slave to the Rhythm", The Human League’s “[I’m Only] Human,” and Cock Robin’s “[Remember] The Promise You Made.” Some of these are not necessarily thumping anthems of gay camaraderie, but slow ballads of semi-despondency; in this way, the paintings take on a cinematic quality, perhaps a gay progeny of Charlotte Salomon’s Life or Theater: an Autobiographical Play.
^ “Material World” Angus. 1981; “Slave to the Rhythm” Angus. 1986; “I’m Only Human" Angus. 1986.
Angus almost never used the direct address of dancers, spectators, or other cruisers in his paintings; he saved that exclusively for his private self portraits, preferring to disappear into the anonymity of his public scenes. When staging the Angus tribute at the Phoenix bar, I asked the models to imagine a new customer (for the bartender) or client (for the rent-boys) walking into the space. A. Hennen Payne and I had just finished another panoramic image based on a very specific personal memory: the night of Trump’s election in the New Orleans queer bar, The All-ways Lounge. I recreated that evening as a tableau with the actual people who were present; while certainly a minor history in the telling of that evening, it was a way to re-embody memory and place, and pretty immediately following the 2020 election, a kind of closure on the Trump presidency. The camera lens took on a personification of an imagined future—an uninvited stranger the figures look on with apathy, disgust, and exhaustion—that was also a fresh idea of the past, at least we hoped so.
An Uninvited Stranger Walks into the Allways Lounge on November 8, 2016. a.r. havel and A. Hennen Payne. 2020.