Notes on Laura Bielau’s Arbeit
(Originally published on C4 Journal)
1. “And then the question goes back to what is art? And art is what an artist does, just sitting around in the studio.”
2. Despite its shifts in form and function over the centuries, the artist’s studio maintains much of the same mystique it once did—a place of intense and elusive creative activity, of which the public or a privileged few are granted only occasional glimpses. Today’s social media fueled dispatches from the studio seem intent on upholding its status as “the ivory tower of [the artwork’s] production,” letting the world know that a burgeoning masterpiece is underway while being careful not to reveal too much of the hidden mechanisms associated with the process. As a photographer working in the so-called “documentary style,” the idea of having a studio practice seems incredibly liberating to me, a preferable alternative to the often frustrating reliance on one’s immediate surroundings. I know, however, that in the confines of the studio, a person has to contend with an even more difficult counterpart than the outside world—oneself.
3. In Arbeit, Laura Bielau’s studio looks remarkably pristine, more like peering into the sanitized setting of an amateur laboratory experiment than the disheveled working space of an artist that one might expect. Visible clutter can serve as evidence of frenzied, fruitful activity, but in only one of Bielau’s images is there any sign of this sort of controlled mess. Instead, the overall picture is one of tedium and frustrated desire. Arbeit presents us with the photographer at odds with her own productivity, the immense difficulty of beginning, like the writer staring at “the terrifying whiteness of the page.” In the studio, where Bielau has only herself and the quotidian objects scattered around her space to work with, she confronts the inescapable creative block head on, wrestling not just with the urge to make something but with the difficult question of how.
4. The accompanying essay that covers the outside of the book cites a handful of artistic references for Bielau’s project. More than any of those named, though, the work seems to share a kinship with the driving forces behind the early output of Bruce Nauman. Alone in his San Francisco studio in the late 60s, Nauman resolved that, if the studio is where art is produced, then as an artist, whatever he did in that studio would be considered his art. Attempting to counter the boredom and emptiness of the studio setting, he resorted to a range of peculiar strategies involving whatever raw materials were at hand—principally the rudimentary movements of his own body, with which he performed dull, repetitive maneuvers for the camera. With a similar nonchalance, Bielau seems to utilize whatever is in arm’s reach, scrutinizing things under the microscopic gaze of her camera. And, like Nauman, this includes herself, the awkward contortions of hands and feet, the facepalm as a universal sign of physical and mental exhaustion. These, too, feel like strategies for counteracting monotony, a way of making do with what’s available. Looking at Bielau’s quirky self portrait of her eyes peering through a narrow, eye-sized slit in a piece of paper, I think of Nauman and his taped-out square on the studio floor, “stressing the artist’s isolation within the double entrapment of [the] studio and the frame.”
5. Arbeit—work, a word with a particularly elastic meaning, with the potential to denote the mental and physical effort exerted, the site where such labor takes place, and the resulting product of that labor. It’s typically the last of these variable definitions that holds the greatest significance for artists and photographers, the work being the thing that is ultimately put on display, sent out into the world to serve as a measure of its maker. In Bielau’s book, it’s the word’s ambiguity itself that seems to be of interest, with all of its possible meanings coming into play. Her process as an artist is put on display alongside the generic products of other peoples’ unseen labor found in and around her space. Definitions fold into one another—verb, adjective, noun.
6. Deferment feels intrinsic to Bielau’s project. Even titling the book work seems like a clever rebuff to the notion of what constitutes work itself, as her images evoke the putting off of labor either through clever forms of procrastination or the obstruction of creative hang-ups. There is often an apprehension in this kind of creative work that the book seems to allude to, the way it constantly weighs on the mind when one is not actively engaged in it. One might even argue that there is never really such a time, as everything in one’s life tends to somehow get funneled into the work’s making. Such is the culture we live in today, too, where remoteness and flexibility simply translate to working everywhere, all the time. In Arbeit’s accompanying text, Maren Lübbke-Tidow describes Bielau’s photographs as being “just as personal as they are utterly unspectacular.” Though the conflation of those two terms strikes me as odd at first, it holds true. In resorting to photographing herself and the banal objects of her studio with such ruthless indifference, Bielau seems to be reacting against the challenges inherent in her own practice. It appears to be frustration, procrastination, and boredom that we see in the pictures—but those same images also function as a kind of resistance to it all.
7. In one of his notebooks, Albert Camus, quoting Maurcus Aurelius, writes: “What prevents a work from being completed becomes the work itself.”
8. The images in Arbeit prompt me to consider another point of reference in the work of Irving Penn, if only as a revealing contrast. Here, I’m thinking specifically of his Street Material images and the earlier Cigarettes work, first exhibited at the MoMA in 1975. Both of Penn’s series are made up of austere photographs of discarded objects found along the streets of New York City, isolated objects such as an old glove, a crushed takeout box, and a few cigarette butts, all pictured against a flat studio background. They are depicted with a straightforwardness that similarly characterizes many of the object images in Arbeit—two sticks of gum, a slice of bread (first plain, then buttered), the bottom of a pair of sneakers. With Penn’s images, however, he pulls these cast-off objects out of the gutter—both literally and metaphorically—imbuing them with a preciousness that’s only furthered by the technical complexity of the palladium print process he uses. He transforms the city’s detritus into a collection of Romantic ruins, weathered and worn by the passage of time but still maintaining a certain grandeur as photographed objects. Bielau’s images, on the other hand, don’t strive towards any kind of sensuousness or romanticism, keeping the photographed objects secured in their real-world banality. It is largely a result of the objects themselves, most of which are mass manufactured items with no distinct character or identity. Employing the “mathematical rationality” of the camera, her blunt depictions further estrange us from the world of man-made materials, making them appear alien and grotesque. “Rather than raising the status of the objects they depict, the images themselves aspire to the status of objects”—disposable objects that one might not give a second thought to tossing into the gutter.
9. “For a shot to be good,” Robert Adams said, “—suggestive of more than just what it is—it has to come perilously near being bad, just a view of stuff.” A view of stuff would not be an entirely unfair assessment of the images in Arbeit, where, in many instances, the frame simply conforms to the dimensions of the object itself, as though formal composition were secondary to the object’s lackluster presence. But it’s also a fascinating view of otherwise commonplace stuff, fascinating precisely because of its strange, unflinching directness. The images, with their deliberate dryness, break with certain expectations we have of photography to elevate the banal to something of greater aesthetic interest. While photography typically offers us a different set of vantage points for looking at the world, its familiar parts, the repetition of certain motifs and stylistic choices within the medium can often become weary, feeling as unsurprising as the world they seek to provide an alternate record of. One recourse to this is to revel in photography’s role as “the recorder of bald prosaic fact,” its ability to reflect the world back with the full severity of its drab surface. This, too, can be remarkably compelling.
10. The final image in Arbeit brings us, at last, out into the openness of the natural world—a short breath of air, then the book is shut.
Notes
1. Quotation from Bruce Nauman
2. “The ivory tower of its production” is from Daniel Buren’s essay “The Function of the Studio”
3. “the terrifying whiteness of the page" is a phrase from Stéphane Mallarmé
4. The book’s essay is written by Maren Lübbke-Tidow; “stressing the artist’s isolation…” is from Coosje van Bruggen's essay “Sounddance”
7. The same quote appears, reformulated, in Kate Zambreno’s novel Drifts as “what prevents a book from being written becomes the book itself”
8. The phrase “mathematical rationality” is borrowed from David Campany’s essay in Peter Fraser’s book Mathematics (Skinnerboox, 2017); “rather than raising…” is from Eugénie Shinkle’s essay “Boredom, Repetition, Inertia: Contemporary Photography and the Aesthetics of the Banal”
9. “The recorder of bald prosaic fact” is from Sir Harry Perry Robinson's Picture Making by Photography (1884)
Walker Evans’s eyeye
(Originally published in Source: Thinking Through Photography, Issue 107)
“I think, in truth, I'd like to be a letterer.” (Walker Evans)
Concise, succinct, direct, spare—these are the sort of descriptors that appear frequently in writings on Walker Evans and in his own commentary on his work, attributes that have their roots in the literary ambitions he set aside when photography took precedence. In Maria Morris Hambourg’s essay “A Portrait of the Artist,” she notes how “Evans’s sense of craft was largely brought over from his word-by-word concentration on literature … economy and concentration, supreme virtues of modernist literature, were Evans’s goals as well.”1 Evans largely credits Gustave Flaubert with influencing his decision to maintain an emotional distance from his subjects, cultivating a photographic style that also reflects the poet Ezra Pound’s call for a “direct treatment of the ‘thing.’”2 The approach he adopted—of stripping ornament away, embracing an aesthetic of cool detachment—is evidenced by the formal treatment of his subjects, but it’s also present in the snippets of vernacular language he chose to punctuate his pictures. Combing through Evans’s vast body of work, looking is often preempted by or inextricable from reading, and one can easily locate a catalog of laconic poetry nested within the confines of his pictures. He didn’t explicitly follow in the footsteps of the great modernist writers he studied in his youth, but his sensitivity to the potency of the written word is nonetheless clear where language does crop up, the “infinite possibilities” he recognized in the linguistic messages scattered throughout the visual landscape.3 For the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, the increased proliferation of language in public space—in the form of advertisements, newspapers, signage—signaled a moment of crisis for poetry. For Evans, it was the means.
One of Walker Evans’s most successful mergings of word and image is also one of his more recognizable photographs, typically referred to by its own “internal caption.”4 First appearing in a four-page spread of Evans’s photographs and writings in Creative Arts magazine in December of 1930, the picture is dominated by a massive neon sign spelling out the word DAMAGED, which three men are hauling off of a flatbed truck parked along New York City’s West Eleventh Street. Stretching diagonally across the length of the frame, this colossal fragment of language holds sway over the image, complemented by just enough context to ground it in the world of material objects. Though documentary in nature, the semantic force of this solitary word—its bizarre scale, the stark white-on-black contrast that foregrounds it—produces something that’s otherwise entirely surreal.
To be “damaged” is to be rendered deficient or broken, inviting us to read Evans’s picture as a bit of pithy, self-referential irony—a damaged sign announcing itself as such. It has been suggested that the sign may have formed part of a marquee for the film Not Damaged, making it a kind of fortuitous found erasure for Evans. Given that it was made at the close of the 1920s, it’s difficult not to read his picture in the shadow of the Great Depression, the immense psychological and physical toll it inflicted on the American landscape that Evans so doggedly recorded. For Douglas Eklund, the image serves as “an indictment of the entire society from which Evans is in flight,” as well as being a precursor to the kind of biting social commentary associated with much of the American street photography that followed.5 Beyond that, the word’s tense, embedded inside of a photograph which recedes into the past the moment it’s produced, gestures towards the type of sly medium self-referentiality that Evans was undoubtedly fond of.
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Literary terminology, references to poetry, and specifically to concrete poetry, also abound in writings about Evans, and Damaged is among a handful of photographs included in the extensive bibliography of one word poems (or “oneworders”) that appears in Paul Stephens’s recent study, absence of clutter: minimal writing as art and literature. Minimal writing, a loosely defined term aligned with and sometimes used interchangeably with concrete poetry and other forms of visual poetry, came into its own in the mid 1960s, mirroring developments in the art world which increasingly brought written language in contact with visual art, and which tended to reduce materials down to their most austere, elemental forms. Minimal writing, and especially the one word poem, can be seen as an extreme limit of this tendency, atomizing language in order to bring about a heightened attention to both the visual properties of words and the multiplicity of meanings generated by decontextualization.
Aram Saroyan is probably the most notable purveyor of so-called minimal poetry, with books like his 1967 publication Coffee Coffee consisting largely of single words—building, lookout, oh, added, usual, rinse, darkest, medicine, crying—floating in the center of a white page. Underpinned by the uniformity of the typewriter, each word is presented as an abrupt fact, like an object placed there to simply behold. In his eponymous book published by Random House in 1968, poems like lighght, eyeye, and his infamous three-humped m veer even further away from anything resembling literature, replacing the linearity of reading and proper syntax (even grammar) with “something you see rather than read.” As Saroyan puts it, “even a five-word poem has a beginning, middle, and end. A one-word poem doesn’t. You can see it all at once. It’s instant.”6 Saroyan’s poems often behave like images, disrupting the temporality that has historically been associated with writing and used to distinguish the verbal from the visual arts. As Paul Stephens points out, Saroyan makes their correlation clear through the format of his 1970 book Words & Photographs, which pairs a series of square pictures (Saroyan assisted the photographer Richard Avedon as a teenager) beside his characteristic one word poems. On one spread, for example, a kaleidoscopic view of Broadway in Times Square, which looks very much like Evans's own composite image from the same location, is situated alongside the word “Gone.” It could be taken as a lament for a bygone era of city life, but the word’s informal definition also resonates with the swirling drunkenness of the multiple night time exposure. As Stephens makes clear throughout absence of clutter, “the stark literalness of minimal text works can nonetheless be richly allusive”—a suggestiveness that’s magnified when such texts mingle with the ambiguity of particular photographs.7
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Evans’s own formulation of his “lyric documentary” style—“the real thing that I’m talking about has purity and a certain severity, rigor, simplicity, directness, clarity”8—bears a marked similarity to Marjorie Perloff’s definition of literary minimalism, “a poetics that holds that spareness, tautness, understatement, and reduction are emblematic of poetic authenticity.”9 Through this paring back, both Evans and Saroyan hold language up to scrutiny, emphasizing each word’s materiality while at the same time demonstrating how unstable and equivocal language can be in its attempts to signify. Much of the force of minimal poetry is generated by the wrenching of words from proper syntax, deliberately severing them from the context that would otherwise anchor their meaning, something which Evans acknowledged was very much the project of photography. The verb “lift” has been evoked by Evans in reference to the practice of photographing as well as his habit of collecting actual signage found in the landscape, and it’s worth noting that Saroyan, in a similarly documentary mode, culled the words for many of his poems from the environment around him. While to lift implies a change of position, it also suggests a heightening of status or intensification. With this cutting away comes a broader scope of meaning, a form of “amplification through simplification.”10 As the poet Steven McCaffery writes, “by eliminating grammatical armament from language, by a freeing of the parts to be themselves and by inviting the reader into this immanence of the text, the full polysemous possibilities of language are opened up.”11 In Evans’s Damaged photograph, for example, this giant scrap of language detached from its proper site causes its connotations to multiply endlessly.
Rather than perpetuate the opposition of image and word, Evans’s and Saroyan’s compositions exemplify W.J.T. Mitchell’s figure of the imagetext, a nebulous space where verbal and visual registers swirl around within the same muck of representation, unable to be adequately disentangled. For Mitchell, the binaries traditionally used to differentiate between word and image—time/space, convention/nature, ear/eye—are deeply flawed, and better replaced by approaching the subject as a set of fluid relations. Saroyan’s poetry is as much “language to be looked at”12 as it is to be deciphered for its semantic content, and by embedding language within photographs, Evans complicates the easy parsing out of verbal and visual signifiers. The resonances between their work offers a way of considering one of Mitchell’s most pressing assertions—that “the image/text problem is not just something constructed ‘between’ the arts, the media, or different forms of representation, but an unavoidable issue within the individual arts and media. In short, all arts are ‘composite arts’ (both text and image); all media are mixed media, combining different codes, discursive conventions, channels, sensory and cognitive modes.”13
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When, later in life, just before his seventieth birthday, Evans acquired a Polaroid SX-70 camera, he experienced something of a personal renaissance, producing thousands of instantaneous photographs with his newly adopted tool. While much of Evan’s earlier work shows him employing the metaphorical value of terse language for purposes of irony and political commentary, his late period Polaroids revel in language’s latent visuality. With context disappearing ever further behind language, the pictures are like a series of stutters. Letterforms are magnified and fractured, the emphasis instead placed on the awkward flourishes of hand-painted typography, the negative space between and around truncated letterforms. Word and image inconspicuously dissolve into one another. For Mitchell, the separation of these two things often comes down to convention or “institutional context,” a matter of convenience rather than pertaining to something fundamental in each. With both Evans and Saroyan, the boundaries are shown to be more permeable than fixed.
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Notes
When the poet Mary Ruefle began writing the lectures that would later be collected in her book Madness, Rack and Honey, she realized that she could talk about anything in the world and still be talking about poetry. For a poet, it seems, anything that one experiences, from a tangible object to a vague feeling, is capable of being transmuted into the language of poetry. And just as the impulses for writing poetry can be found anywhere, the ideas used to inform and think about it as a discipline are also potentially as ubiquitous. They only have to be thought of in those terms, tailored appropriately, and applied.
Photography, like poetry, is characterized by a constant channeling between itself and the world, a reciprocity, to borrow from its own vernacular. Photography looks at the world while also absorbing it, transforming aspects of it into something else altogether. Within this relationship there exists a wide range of diverse processes. Fragmentation, isolation, fixity, accumulation, reconstruction—these things are all integral to photography as a practice and help to make up the complex, mutable logic that regulates it. Film, as a technological extension of photography, shares some of its characteristics, though it too is grounded in its own particular set of principles, as are writing and music, mushroom hunting and race car driving. All of these endeavors contain an underlying logic that is endlessly transferable, capable of being transposed from one discipline or context to another. It all depends on how and where someone decides something may be useful.
Minor White, for example, notably took inspiration from Richard Boleslavsky’s Acting: The First Six Lessons, written in 1933. He felt it contained the “essentials of creative work” which were useful not only for the theater, as it was intended for, but also for the practice of photography. Through it, he was made to understand the “clothing of the naked emotions that is necessary to art,” the way that photographic form could be used to render private expressions as something universal. White looked to Boleslavsky’s work as a template for his own book-length manuscript, “Eight Lessons in Photography,” which, although it was never published, served as the foundation of his teaching philosophy over the next few decades. Henri Cartier-Bresson, another master of 20th century photography, considered the book Zen in the Art of Archery “a manual of photography.” Its lessons of mastering and transcending the technical aspects of shooting with a bow and arrow, so that it becomes an unconscious activity, make for an obvious parallel to Cartier-Bresson’s own mystical notion of “the decisive moment,” when mind, body, and the visible world all fall into perfect alignment.
One of the most important photobooks of the 21st century, Paul Graham’s A shimmer of possibility, is built on another kind of transposition from the realm of literature to photography. Though not explicitly based on the content of the Russian writer Anton Chekov’s short stories nor attempting to illustrate them, Graham discovered in them a model for observing the world with a camera. He wanted “to reflect Chekhov’s openness, his simple transparency,” by “similarly isolating a small rivulet of time.” In the same way that Chekov would carry on writing about a woman combing her hair for multiple pages, Graham’s photographs linger on equally banal moments with a pressing clarity.
“Photography is the vehicle through which we learn to think analogically,” Kaja Silverman writes. There are aspects of photography that are very clearly like other things we encounter, and vice versa—not so much because they appear similar, but because something fundamental to them seems to correspond despite all the superficial differences. By encountering these ideas outside of the context of photography, White, Cartier-Bresson, and Graham found in them a free-floating concept, detached from any specific object. They thought in terms of analogy and application, bringing those ideas into photography by adapting them to serve their own particular methodologies. And when they did, the medium of photography itself expanded.
“The Gap from Eye to Page:” Photographs of Readers
(Originally published on C4 Journal)
Above my bed hangs a small black and white photograph of the artist Joseph Cornell, a torn frontispiece from one of his biographies. In it, Cornell is sitting outside, his lumpish figure hunched over in a rickety chair that looks more appropriate for a child. His body is turned away from the camera, just barely revealing the corner of the book he’s holding. A tangle of blurred branches juts into the right edge of the frame, making the picture feel especially voyeuristic, as though we’re intruding on a silent conversation he’s having with himself. It’s the kind of image that befits a man known for his lifelong solitude, who, through his obsessive tinkering, sought to transform the discarded materials of the world into objects of reverie. Cornell is something of the ultimate fantasist, a maker of miniature dreamworlds, which makes him seem an ideal person to be shown immersed in the act of reading. Is his attention sustained by the book in front of him? Or is he daydreaming about Rose Hobart, or another one of his infatuations from the silver screen, like those whose images adorned the edges of his bedroom mirror? None of this is discernible, and my feeling is that the allure of this photograph, and others like it, resides in that barrier to knowing, in the kind of unfounded speculation that arises from it. “Is there anything,” Sven Birkets asks, “more open-ended, and more suggestive, than the sight of an open book?”
Photographs of readers are a peculiar species of portraiture, if they can be considered portraits at all. Unlike other photographs of people, which can proffer a sense of the subject’s interiority through their facial expressions and bodily posture, pictures of readers are set apart by their preoccupation with the page, making their outward appearance remarkably untelling. With the picture of Cornell, a viewer is twice removed. Not only is the subject occupied by something that eludes visual representation, his back is also to the camera, so that we’re incapable of registering even a furrowed brow or some other gesture that might signify what’s going on underneath the surface. Unable to impart much about the dynamic mental processes that constitute the activity of reading, pictures of readers can sometimes feel especially mute and inaccessible. Even if the reading subjects could somehow transcend the picture’s immobile surface, the subtle scanning of eyes and occasional turn of the page would still fall short of suggesting something of their inner life.
Such pictures are invitations to a different kind of photographic reading, though, one that feels less like learned visual literacy and more akin to a form of daydreaming. While pictures of readers seem to highlight the rift between reading’s cognitive locus and the representative capacity of the photograph, they can also be particularly generous, encouraging flights of fancy and wild, pleasurable conjecture. The subject is withdrawn into themselves, blank in expression and dull to the camera’s presence, leaving a viewer free to pile on whatever suppositions they please. The nature of the exchange between reader and text in the photograph, “the gap from eye to page,” as Philip Larkin calls it, becomes a space for projection, and an invitation to more imaginative thinking. Looking at photographs of readers, one also gets the sense that there is a peculiar kind of mimicry being acted out. We are looking at someone looking at something, absorbed in the same activity to which we are also onlookers. This is especially true of photobooks containing these images, like André Kertész’s On Reading or Melissa Catanese’s recent Voyagers, filled with image upon image of stoic bibliophiles craning their necks over books, magazines, and newspapers. Moving through the pages of these books, one feels themselves inadvertently emulating the subjects in the pictures, becoming a reader of readers. This is another reason why I think pictures of reading subjects tend to be so captivating. They are, at least within the binary logic of John Szarkowski, less like a window and more like a mirror.
“A Texture Akin to Language”: Re-reading Waffenruhe
(Originally published on American Suburb X)
“The fridge was loud, but outside it was quiet, much quieter.”
There is a literal wall of language separating the two halves of Michael Schmidt’s landmark photobook Waffenruhe (published in 1987 and reprinted in 2018), a visually sprawling text that spans seventeen pages at the center of the book. Despite the text’s conspicuousness and length, the many reviews and critical writings on Waffenruhe tend to include only a marginal, if any, discussion of its utility within the book. For what is a relatively slim volume, consisting of a meager thirty-nine images, Einar Schleef’s stream-of-consciousness story—excerpted from his longer work Zigaretten—occupies a substantial portion of the book and performs an obtrusive break in its structure. Unlike an appended forward or post-scripted essay, which might feel tacked on as supplementary (but not always convincingly necessary) material, the textual component of Waffenruhe is deliberately—and rather severely—integrated into the fabric of the book. Its dominant position interrupts the flow of images in a way that feels difficult to set aside, and its very appearance, with its glaring lack of paragraph breaks and slightly-oversized typeface pushed to the margins’ limits, is as pronounced as its placement. To flip past would be choosing to neglect a prominent element of the work’s larger composition. Without it, the entire durational experience of the book is dramatically altered, its overall makeup and readerly experience sacrificed for the supposed inviolability of the photographic sequence.
In some respects, the lack of scrutiny in regards to Schleef’s text—either for its content or the sheer discontinuity it effects through its disorienting, monolithic layout—is excusable given the extraordinary emotional density of Schmidt’s photographs. Centered on Berlin just before the Wall came down, their atmosphere is weighted heavily by the burden of the city’s history and the existential dread of the present, all of which is manifest through structural decay, bodily scars, and an encroaching darkness that threatens to consume so many of his frames. It is a collection of pictures that one sinks deeply into like quicksand, willingly or otherwise. One can understand the hesitation to depart from that immersive psychological space in order to have to re-adjust to another.
In absorbing Schleef’s text as part of the book’s built progression, though, one finds not an incompatible set of coordinates but an extension of Schmidt’s project, a corresponding literature that resonates with the alienated glances of his pictures. The story’s aesthetic sprawl and rambling style lends it an ambient quality that allows the language to permeate the visual with increased ease, establishing what is, in effect, two worlds with a shared atmosphere. As Thomas Weski points out in his addendum to the book’s 2018 re-publication, the two elements are meant to “be accorded equal status,” a fact made apparent by the equal typographic treatment of the two authors’ names on the book’s spine and title page. Given that Schmidt himself took charge of designing the book and deciding upon the centrality of the text, its relevance should be apparent. If, however, in the discussions around Waffenruhe, the scales have been tipped in favor of the images, it seems worthwhile to momentarily shift the balance.
“How could he put it into words. He wasn’t ill. He had felt this way for years."
In the seventeen-page text, early morning slips into darkness as a lone man languishes in an empty house, “suffering from something he did not have a name for.” Schleef’s narrative, noticeably short on context, centers on an unnamed male protagonist, whom we gradually learn has been left by his wife and daughter in what was their shared home. His only companion is a rabbit, which seems more like a reminder of his loss than a source of comfort. The story itself begins as abruptly as it appears upon turning the page. Rather than being slowly eased in, the reader is dropped into the midst of the protagonist’s stifling space and faced with a disorienting temporality, exacerbated by the man’s own inability to situate himself in relation to the passing hours and days. “The television had said so two days ago. Three. Today was Thursday. All at once he was at the same point in time.” The reader is given only occasional points of reference from which to measure the duration of the narrative against as it continually fractures and digresses, flitting abruptly from subject to subject. Meanwhile, certain imagistic details recur. It’s as though the protagonist’s consciousness were perpetually changing course, struggling to retain focus. “He was having difficulty with his thoughts,” we are told. Among his recurring preoccupations are the nagging sound of the rabbit eating rubbish and chewing on a wooden door frame; the crows gathering outside; the waning light; the noise of the refrigerator; the tea and coffee that seems to always be growing cold, colder. Through a flurry of his neurotic impressions, the reader senses that the protagonist is self-imprisoned in his home, where things are in a general state of disarray. The text is laden with the feeling of someone holed up inside, waiting out the end of days. With no apparent notice or consistency, the temporal focus of the narrative slides back and forth, as knowledge of the protagonist’s life—his relationship with his estranged wife and child, his parents’ disapproving view of him, his reluctance to maintain connection with the outside world—slips out amidst a succession of truncated sentences. What results from all of this is an environment in which past and present have become muddled, and where time feels stagnant and inescapable. A future does not even seem to be among the considerations.
All of this—a sense of confinement, the fitful apprehension, the swelling gloom—is reflected in Schmidt’s photographic treatment of Berlin, where much more is alluded to than granted outright. His views are attenuated and oblique, forcing scrutiny as one labors in vain to see around certain obstructions within the frame. Just as Schleef’s protagonist obsessively attends to the minutiae of his interior space—the oily skin forming on the surface of his drink, the books that lay untouched in other rooms—Schmidt calls attention to the insignificant and peripheral aspects of his surroundings. Decaying surfaces and blurred masses come to occupy the forefront of his pictures, while tangles of branches frequently lie between the viewer and a more comprehensive view of the world. As Kolja Reichert writes, “the pictured subjects seem too big for the viewfinder. Too big, too close, impossible to get past.” In Waffenruhe, obstruction is an essential part of Schmidt’s visual language. Both aspects of the work—image and text—are marked by fragmentation and discontinuity, preventing easy access to their respective subjects. What does coalesce from the accumulation of these fragments is a palpable feeling of anguish and loss—an irreconcilable Weltschmerz, or world weariness. Appropriate to the book’s title—Ceasefire in English—the stillness presented in both elements of the work is pervaded by a heightened sense of anxiety. As Gerry Badger writes in his 1987 review of the book for Creative Camera, the title “implies an uneasy dichotomy, an unreal state of temporal stasis.” Indeed, as Schleef’s text builds to its end, its mode of communication becomes increasingly erratic and detached from reality. The narrative rushes to a sudden halt, succeeded by Schmidt’s photograph of a trestle-bridge punctuated by a large black void, as if the sun had burnt through its center.
“Consciousness. What was he supposed to do with it.”
Though written in the third person, Schleef’s narrative is so excruciatingly confined to the protagonist’s inner life, his narrow, isolated purview, that one feels themselves living exclusively inside his head throughout the text. With this circumscribed range of his unfolding thoughts and actions, the reader is further oriented towards the visual world from the vantage point of a single person. There is a shared subjectivity between the photographs and writing, one characterized by a deep and disquieting intimacy. Both Schmidt’s images and Schleef’s narrative are, above all, psychological portraits, providing two corresponding visions of an afflicted mood that suffuses the whole of the book. “The images work with Schleef’s text to create a brusque, entirely individual perspective on the fragility of human existence,” Thomas Weski writes. Throughout the book, it's the people—those portrayed in photographs, the nameless protagonist of the text—who seem to be the most burdened. It is these individuals who have inherited Berlin’s turbulent history.
Despite their differences in content, Schmidt’s photographs and Schleef’s writing work together to evince the so-called “mental Berlin wall,” offering a broader experience of the murky psychological landscape that was late-80s Berlin. In his brief afterward, Janos Frecot notes how Schmidt employs “photography to create a texture akin to language, one that neither consists of individual pictures, nor develops into a series, but instead corresponds to the tapestry of Schleef’s text.” Though positioned independently, image and text form the warp and woof of the book’s overall fabric, each permeating across the boundaries of their respective mediums. When taken together, the overall view of Waffenruhe is greatly enlarged, allowing us to become immersed in what feels like a permanent condition of instability.
“Nothing. Everything stays the way it is now. Now, that had already lasted such a long time.”
Notes on Laura Bielau’s Arbeit
(Originally published on C4 Journal)
1. “And then the question goes back to what is art? And art is what an artist does, just sitting around in the studio.”
2. Despite its shifts in form and function over the centuries, the artist’s studio maintains much of the same mystique it once did—a place of intense and elusive creative activity, of which the public or a privileged few are granted only occasional glimpses. Today’s social media fueled dispatches from the studio seem intent on upholding its status as “the ivory tower of [the artwork’s] production,” letting the world know that a burgeoning masterpiece is underway while being careful not to reveal too much of the hidden mechanisms associated with the process. As a photographer working in the so-called “documentary style,” the idea of having a studio practice seems incredibly liberating to me, a preferable alternative to the often frustrating reliance on one’s immediate surroundings. I know, however, that in the confines of the studio, a person has to contend with an even more difficult counterpart than the outside world—oneself.
3. In Arbeit, Laura Bielau’s studio looks remarkably pristine, more like peering into the sanitized setting of an amateur laboratory experiment than the disheveled working space of an artist that one might expect. Visible clutter can serve as evidence of frenzied, fruitful activity, but in only one of Bielau’s images is there any sign of this sort of controlled mess. Instead, the overall picture is one of tedium and frustrated desire. Arbeit presents us with the photographer at odds with her own productivity, the immense difficulty of beginning, like the writer staring at “the terrifying whiteness of the page.” In the studio, where Bielau has only herself and the quotidian objects scattered around her space to work with, she confronts the inescapable creative block head on, wrestling not just with the urge to make something but with the difficult question of how.
4. The accompanying essay that covers the outside of the book cites a handful of artistic references for Bielau’s project. More than any of those named, though, the work seems to share a kinship with the driving forces behind the early output of Bruce Nauman. Alone in his San Francisco studio in the late 60s, Nauman resolved that, if the studio is where art is produced, then as an artist, whatever he did in that studio would be considered his art. Attempting to counter the boredom and emptiness of the studio setting, he resorted to a range of peculiar strategies involving whatever raw materials were at hand—principally the rudimentary movements of his own body, with which he performed dull, repetitive maneuvers for the camera. With a similar nonchalance, Bielau seems to utilize whatever is in arm’s reach, scrutinizing things under the microscopic gaze of her camera. And, like Nauman, this includes herself, the awkward contortions of hands and feet, the facepalm as a universal sign of physical and mental exhaustion. These, too, feel like strategies for counteracting monotony, a way of making do with what’s available. Looking at Bielau’s quirky self portrait of her eyes peering through a narrow, eye-sized slit in a piece of paper, I think of Nauman and his taped-out square on the studio floor, “stressing the artist’s isolation within the double entrapment of [the] studio and the frame.”
5. Arbeit—work, a word with a particularly elastic meaning, with the potential to denote the mental and physical effort exerted, the site where such labor takes place, and the resulting product of that labor. It’s typically the last of these variable definitions that holds the greatest significance for artists and photographers, the work being the thing that is ultimately put on display, sent out into the world to serve as a measure of its maker. In Bielau’s book, it’s the word’s ambiguity itself that seems to be of interest, with all of its possible meanings coming into play. Her process as an artist is put on display alongside the generic products of other peoples’ unseen labor found in and around her space. Definitions fold into one another—verb, adjective, noun.
6. Deferment feels intrinsic to Bielau’s project. Even titling the book work seems like a clever rebuff to the notion of what constitutes work itself, as her images evoke the putting off of labor either through clever forms of procrastination or the obstruction of creative hang-ups. There is often an apprehension in this kind of creative work that the book seems to allude to, the way it constantly weighs on the mind when one is not actively engaged in it. One might even argue that there is never really such a time, as everything in one’s life tends to somehow get funneled into the work’s making. Such is the culture we live in today, too, where remoteness and flexibility simply translate to working everywhere, all the time. In Arbeit’s accompanying text, Maren Lübbke-Tidow describes Bielau’s photographs as being “just as personal as they are utterly unspectacular.” Though the conflation of those two terms strikes me as odd at first, it holds true. In resorting to photographing herself and the banal objects of her studio with such ruthless indifference, Bielau seems to be reacting against the challenges inherent in her own practice. It appears to be frustration, procrastination, and boredom that we see in the pictures—but those same images also function as a kind of resistance to it all.
7. In one of his notebooks, Albert Camus, quoting Maurcus Aurelius, writes: “What prevents a work from being completed becomes the work itself.”
8. The images in Arbeit prompt me to consider another point of reference in the work of Irving Penn, if only as a revealing contrast. Here, I’m thinking specifically of his Street Material images and the earlier Cigarettes work, first exhibited at the MoMA in 1975. Both of Penn’s series are made up of austere photographs of discarded objects found along the streets of New York City, isolated objects such as an old glove, a crushed takeout box, and a few cigarette butts, all pictured against a flat studio background. They are depicted with a straightforwardness that similarly characterizes many of the object images in Arbeit—two sticks of gum, a slice of bread (first plain, then buttered), the bottom of a pair of sneakers. With Penn’s images, however, he pulls these cast-off objects out of the gutter—both literally and metaphorically—imbuing them with a preciousness that’s only furthered by the technical complexity of the palladium print process he uses. He transforms the city’s detritus into a collection of Romantic ruins, weathered and worn by the passage of time but still maintaining a certain grandeur as photographed objects. Bielau’s images, on the other hand, don’t strive towards any kind of sensuousness or romanticism, keeping the photographed objects secured in their real-world banality. It is largely a result of the objects themselves, most of which are mass manufactured items with no distinct character or identity. Employing the “mathematical rationality” of the camera, her blunt depictions further estrange us from the world of man-made materials, making them appear alien and grotesque. “Rather than raising the status of the objects they depict, the images themselves aspire to the status of objects”—disposable objects that one might not give a second thought to tossing into the gutter.
9. “For a shot to be good,” Robert Adams said, “—suggestive of more than just what it is—it has to come perilously near being bad, just a view of stuff.” A view of stuff would not be an entirely unfair assessment of the images in Arbeit, where, in many instances, the frame simply conforms to the dimensions of the object itself, as though formal composition were secondary to the object’s lackluster presence. But it’s also a fascinating view of otherwise commonplace stuff, fascinating precisely because of its strange, unflinching directness. The images, with their deliberate dryness, break with certain expectations we have of photography to elevate the banal to something of greater aesthetic interest. While photography typically offers us a different set of vantage points for looking at the world, its familiar parts, the repetition of certain motifs and stylistic choices within the medium can often become weary, feeling as unsurprising as the world they seek to provide an alternate record of. One recourse to this is to revel in photography’s role as “the recorder of bald prosaic fact,” its ability to reflect the world back with the full severity of its drab surface. This, too, can be remarkably compelling.
10. The final image in Arbeit brings us, at last, out into the openness of the natural world—a short breath of air, then the book is shut.
Notes
1. Quotation from Bruce Nauman
2. “The ivory tower of its production” is from Daniel Buren’s essay “The Function of the Studio”
3. “the terrifying whiteness of the page" is a phrase from Stéphane Mallarmé
4. The book’s essay is written by Maren Lübbke-Tidow; “stressing the artist’s isolation…” is from Coosje van Bruggen's essay “Sounddance”
7. The same quote appears, reformulated, in Kate Zambreno’s novel Drifts as “what prevents a book from being written becomes the book itself”
8. The phrase “mathematical rationality” is borrowed from David Campany’s essay in Peter Fraser’s book Mathematics (Skinnerboox, 2017); “rather than raising…” is from Eugénie Shinkle’s essay “Boredom, Repetition, Inertia: Contemporary Photography and the Aesthetics of the Banal”
9. “The recorder of bald prosaic fact” is from Sir Harry Perry Robinson's Picture Making by Photography (1884)
Walker Evans’s eyeye
(Originally published in Source: Thinking Through Photography, Issue 107)
“I think, in truth, I'd like to be a letterer.” (Walker Evans)
Concise, succinct, direct, spare—these are the sort of descriptors that appear frequently in writings on Walker Evans and in his own commentary on his work, attributes that have their roots in the literary ambitions he set aside when photography took precedence. In Maria Morris Hambourg’s essay “A Portrait of the Artist,” she notes how “Evans’s sense of craft was largely brought over from his word-by-word concentration on literature … economy and concentration, supreme virtues of modernist literature, were Evans’s goals as well.”1 Evans largely credits Gustave Flaubert with influencing his decision to maintain an emotional distance from his subjects, cultivating a photographic style that also reflects the poet Ezra Pound’s call for a “direct treatment of the ‘thing.’”2 The approach he adopted—of stripping ornament away, embracing an aesthetic of cool detachment—is evidenced by the formal treatment of his subjects, but it’s also present in the snippets of vernacular language he chose to punctuate his pictures. Combing through Evans’s vast body of work, looking is often preempted by or inextricable from reading, and one can easily locate a catalog of laconic poetry nested within the confines of his pictures. He didn’t explicitly follow in the footsteps of the great modernist writers he studied in his youth, but his sensitivity to the potency of the written word is nonetheless clear where language does crop up, the “infinite possibilities” he recognized in the linguistic messages scattered throughout the visual landscape.3 For the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, the increased proliferation of language in public space—in the form of advertisements, newspapers, signage—signaled a moment of crisis for poetry. For Evans, it was the means.
One of Walker Evans’s most successful mergings of word and image is also one of his more recognizable photographs, typically referred to by its own “internal caption.”4 First appearing in a four-page spread of Evans’s photographs and writings in Creative Arts magazine in December of 1930, the picture is dominated by a massive neon sign spelling out the word DAMAGED, which three men are hauling off of a flatbed truck parked along New York City’s West Eleventh Street. Stretching diagonally across the length of the frame, this colossal fragment of language holds sway over the image, complemented by just enough context to ground it in the world of material objects. Though documentary in nature, the semantic force of this solitary word—its bizarre scale, the stark white-on-black contrast that foregrounds it—produces something that’s otherwise entirely surreal.
To be “damaged” is to be rendered deficient or broken, inviting us to read Evans’s picture as a bit of pithy, self-referential irony—a damaged sign announcing itself as such. It has been suggested that the sign may have formed part of a marquee for the film Not Damaged, making it a kind of fortuitous found erasure for Evans. Given that it was made at the close of the 1920s, it’s difficult not to read his picture in the shadow of the Great Depression, the immense psychological and physical toll it inflicted on the American landscape that Evans so doggedly recorded. For Douglas Eklund, the image serves as “an indictment of the entire society from which Evans is in flight,” as well as being a precursor to the kind of biting social commentary associated with much of the American street photography that followed.5 Beyond that, the word’s tense, embedded inside of a photograph which recedes into the past the moment it’s produced, gestures towards the type of sly medium self-referentiality that Evans was undoubtedly fond of.
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Literary terminology, references to poetry, and specifically to concrete poetry, also abound in writings about Evans, and Damaged is among a handful of photographs included in the extensive bibliography of one word poems (or “oneworders”) that appears in Paul Stephens’s recent study, absence of clutter: minimal writing as art and literature. Minimal writing, a loosely defined term aligned with and sometimes used interchangeably with concrete poetry and other forms of visual poetry, came into its own in the mid 1960s, mirroring developments in the art world which increasingly brought written language in contact with visual art, and which tended to reduce materials down to their most austere, elemental forms. Minimal writing, and especially the one word poem, can be seen as an extreme limit of this tendency, atomizing language in order to bring about a heightened attention to both the visual properties of words and the multiplicity of meanings generated by decontextualization.
Aram Saroyan is probably the most notable purveyor of so-called minimal poetry, with books like his 1967 publication Coffee Coffee consisting largely of single words—building, lookout, oh, added, usual, rinse, darkest, medicine, crying—floating in the center of a white page. Underpinned by the uniformity of the typewriter, each word is presented as an abrupt fact, like an object placed there to simply behold. In his eponymous book published by Random House in 1968, poems like lighght, eyeye, and his infamous three-humped m veer even further away from anything resembling literature, replacing the linearity of reading and proper syntax (even grammar) with “something you see rather than read.” As Saroyan puts it, “even a five-word poem has a beginning, middle, and end. A one-word poem doesn’t. You can see it all at once. It’s instant.”6 Saroyan’s poems often behave like images, disrupting the temporality that has historically been associated with writing and used to distinguish the verbal from the visual arts. As Paul Stephens points out, Saroyan makes their correlation clear through the format of his 1970 book Words & Photographs, which pairs a series of square pictures (Saroyan assisted the photographer Richard Avedon as a teenager) beside his characteristic one word poems. On one spread, for example, a kaleidoscopic view of Broadway in Times Square, which looks very much like Evans's own composite image from the same location, is situated alongside the word “Gone.” It could be taken as a lament for a bygone era of city life, but the word’s informal definition also resonates with the swirling drunkenness of the multiple night time exposure. As Stephens makes clear throughout absence of clutter, “the stark literalness of minimal text works can nonetheless be richly allusive”—a suggestiveness that’s magnified when such texts mingle with the ambiguity of particular photographs.7
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Evans’s own formulation of his “lyric documentary” style—“the real thing that I’m talking about has purity and a certain severity, rigor, simplicity, directness, clarity”8—bears a marked similarity to Marjorie Perloff’s definition of literary minimalism, “a poetics that holds that spareness, tautness, understatement, and reduction are emblematic of poetic authenticity.”9 Through this paring back, both Evans and Saroyan hold language up to scrutiny, emphasizing each word’s materiality while at the same time demonstrating how unstable and equivocal language can be in its attempts to signify. Much of the force of minimal poetry is generated by the wrenching of words from proper syntax, deliberately severing them from the context that would otherwise anchor their meaning, something which Evans acknowledged was very much the project of photography. The verb “lift” has been evoked by Evans in reference to the practice of photographing as well as his habit of collecting actual signage found in the landscape, and it’s worth noting that Saroyan, in a similarly documentary mode, culled the words for many of his poems from the environment around him. While to lift implies a change of position, it also suggests a heightening of status or intensification. With this cutting away comes a broader scope of meaning, a form of “amplification through simplification.”10 As the poet Steven McCaffery writes, “by eliminating grammatical armament from language, by a freeing of the parts to be themselves and by inviting the reader into this immanence of the text, the full polysemous possibilities of language are opened up.”11 In Evans’s Damaged photograph, for example, this giant scrap of language detached from its proper site causes its connotations to multiply endlessly.
Rather than perpetuate the opposition of image and word, Evans’s and Saroyan’s compositions exemplify W.J.T. Mitchell’s figure of the imagetext, a nebulous space where verbal and visual registers swirl around within the same muck of representation, unable to be adequately disentangled. For Mitchell, the binaries traditionally used to differentiate between word and image—time/space, convention/nature, ear/eye—are deeply flawed, and better replaced by approaching the subject as a set of fluid relations. Saroyan’s poetry is as much “language to be looked at”12 as it is to be deciphered for its semantic content, and by embedding language within photographs, Evans complicates the easy parsing out of verbal and visual signifiers. The resonances between their work offers a way of considering one of Mitchell’s most pressing assertions—that “the image/text problem is not just something constructed ‘between’ the arts, the media, or different forms of representation, but an unavoidable issue within the individual arts and media. In short, all arts are ‘composite arts’ (both text and image); all media are mixed media, combining different codes, discursive conventions, channels, sensory and cognitive modes.”13
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When, later in life, just before his seventieth birthday, Evans acquired a Polaroid SX-70 camera, he experienced something of a personal renaissance, producing thousands of instantaneous photographs with his newly adopted tool. While much of Evan’s earlier work shows him employing the metaphorical value of terse language for purposes of irony and political commentary, his late period Polaroids revel in language’s latent visuality. With context disappearing ever further behind language, the pictures are like a series of stutters. Letterforms are magnified and fractured, the emphasis instead placed on the awkward flourishes of hand-painted typography, the negative space between and around truncated letterforms. Word and image inconspicuously dissolve into one another. For Mitchell, the separation of these two things often comes down to convention or “institutional context,” a matter of convenience rather than pertaining to something fundamental in each. With both Evans and Saroyan, the boundaries are shown to be more permeable than fixed.
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Notes
When the poet Mary Ruefle began writing the lectures that would later be collected in her book Madness, Rack and Honey, she realized that she could talk about anything in the world and still be talking about poetry. For a poet, it seems, anything that one experiences, from a tangible object to a vague feeling, is capable of being transmuted into the language of poetry. And just as the impulses for writing poetry can be found anywhere, the ideas used to inform and think about it as a discipline are also potentially as ubiquitous. They only have to be thought of in those terms, tailored appropriately, and applied.
Photography, like poetry, is characterized by a constant channeling between itself and the world, a reciprocity, to borrow from its own vernacular. Photography looks at the world while also absorbing it, transforming aspects of it into something else altogether. Within this relationship there exists a wide range of diverse processes. Fragmentation, isolation, fixity, accumulation, reconstruction—these things are all integral to photography as a practice and help to make up the complex, mutable logic that regulates it. Film, as a technological extension of photography, shares some of its characteristics, though it too is grounded in its own particular set of principles, as are writing and music, mushroom hunting and race car driving. All of these endeavors contain an underlying logic that is endlessly transferable, capable of being transposed from one discipline or context to another. It all depends on how and where someone decides something may be useful.
Minor White, for example, notably took inspiration from Richard Boleslavsky’s Acting: The First Six Lessons, written in 1933. He felt it contained the “essentials of creative work” which were useful not only for the theater, as it was intended for, but also for the practice of photography. Through it, he was made to understand the “clothing of the naked emotions that is necessary to art,” the way that photographic form could be used to render private expressions as something universal. White looked to Boleslavsky’s work as a template for his own book-length manuscript, “Eight Lessons in Photography,” which, although it was never published, served as the foundation of his teaching philosophy over the next few decades. Henri Cartier-Bresson, another master of 20th century photography, considered the book Zen in the Art of Archery “a manual of photography.” Its lessons of mastering and transcending the technical aspects of shooting with a bow and arrow, so that it becomes an unconscious activity, make for an obvious parallel to Cartier-Bresson’s own mystical notion of “the decisive moment,” when mind, body, and the visible world all fall into perfect alignment.
One of the most important photobooks of the 21st century, Paul Graham’s A shimmer of possibility, is built on another kind of transposition from the realm of literature to photography. Though not explicitly based on the content of the Russian writer Anton Chekov’s short stories nor attempting to illustrate them, Graham discovered in them a model for observing the world with a camera. He wanted “to reflect Chekhov’s openness, his simple transparency,” by “similarly isolating a small rivulet of time.” In the same way that Chekov would carry on writing about a woman combing her hair for multiple pages, Graham’s photographs linger on equally banal moments with a pressing clarity.
“Photography is the vehicle through which we learn to think analogically,” Kaja Silverman writes. There are aspects of photography that are very clearly like other things we encounter, and vice versa—not so much because they appear similar, but because something fundamental to them seems to correspond despite all the superficial differences. By encountering these ideas outside of the context of photography, White, Cartier-Bresson, and Graham found in them a free-floating concept, detached from any specific object. They thought in terms of analogy and application, bringing those ideas into photography by adapting them to serve their own particular methodologies. And when they did, the medium of photography itself expanded.
“The Gap from Eye to Page:” Photographs of Readers
(Originally published on C4 Journal)
Above my bed hangs a small black and white photograph of the artist Joseph Cornell, a torn frontispiece from one of his biographies. In it, Cornell is sitting outside, his lumpish figure hunched over in a rickety chair that looks more appropriate for a child. His body is turned away from the camera, just barely revealing the corner of the book he’s holding. A tangle of blurred branches juts into the right edge of the frame, making the picture feel especially voyeuristic, as though we’re intruding on a silent conversation he’s having with himself. It’s the kind of image that befits a man known for his lifelong solitude, who, through his obsessive tinkering, sought to transform the discarded materials of the world into objects of reverie. Cornell is something of the ultimate fantasist, a maker of miniature dreamworlds, which makes him seem an ideal person to be shown immersed in the act of reading. Is his attention sustained by the book in front of him? Or is he daydreaming about Rose Hobart, or another one of his infatuations from the silver screen, like those whose images adorned the edges of his bedroom mirror? None of this is discernible, and my feeling is that the allure of this photograph, and others like it, resides in that barrier to knowing, in the kind of unfounded speculation that arises from it. “Is there anything,” Sven Birkets asks, “more open-ended, and more suggestive, than the sight of an open book?”
Photographs of readers are a peculiar species of portraiture, if they can be considered portraits at all. Unlike other photographs of people, which can proffer a sense of the subject’s interiority through their facial expressions and bodily posture, pictures of readers are set apart by their preoccupation with the page, making their outward appearance remarkably untelling. With the picture of Cornell, a viewer is twice removed. Not only is the subject occupied by something that eludes visual representation, his back is also to the camera, so that we’re incapable of registering even a furrowed brow or some other gesture that might signify what’s going on underneath the surface. Unable to impart much about the dynamic mental processes that constitute the activity of reading, pictures of readers can sometimes feel especially mute and inaccessible. Even if the reading subjects could somehow transcend the picture’s immobile surface, the subtle scanning of eyes and occasional turn of the page would still fall short of suggesting something of their inner life.
Such pictures are invitations to a different kind of photographic reading, though, one that feels less like learned visual literacy and more akin to a form of daydreaming. While pictures of readers seem to highlight the rift between reading’s cognitive locus and the representative capacity of the photograph, they can also be particularly generous, encouraging flights of fancy and wild, pleasurable conjecture. The subject is withdrawn into themselves, blank in expression and dull to the camera’s presence, leaving a viewer free to pile on whatever suppositions they please. The nature of the exchange between reader and text in the photograph, “the gap from eye to page,” as Philip Larkin calls it, becomes a space for projection, and an invitation to more imaginative thinking. Looking at photographs of readers, one also gets the sense that there is a peculiar kind of mimicry being acted out. We are looking at someone looking at something, absorbed in the same activity to which we are also onlookers. This is especially true of photobooks containing these images, like André Kertész’s On Reading or Melissa Catanese’s recent Voyagers, filled with image upon image of stoic bibliophiles craning their necks over books, magazines, and newspapers. Moving through the pages of these books, one feels themselves inadvertently emulating the subjects in the pictures, becoming a reader of readers. This is another reason why I think pictures of reading subjects tend to be so captivating. They are, at least within the binary logic of John Szarkowski, less like a window and more like a mirror.
“A Texture Akin to Language”: Re-reading Waffenruhe
(Originally published on American Suburb X)
“The fridge was loud, but outside it was quiet, much quieter.”
There is a literal wall of language separating the two halves of Michael Schmidt’s landmark photobook Waffenruhe (published in 1987 and reprinted in 2018), a visually sprawling text that spans seventeen pages at the center of the book. Despite the text’s conspicuousness and length, the many reviews and critical writings on Waffenruhe tend to include only a marginal, if any, discussion of its utility within the book. For what is a relatively slim volume, consisting of a meager thirty-nine images, Einar Schleef’s stream-of-consciousness story—excerpted from his longer work Zigaretten—occupies a substantial portion of the book and performs an obtrusive break in its structure. Unlike an appended forward or post-scripted essay, which might feel tacked on as supplementary (but not always convincingly necessary) material, the textual component of Waffenruhe is deliberately—and rather severely—integrated into the fabric of the book. Its dominant position interrupts the flow of images in a way that feels difficult to set aside, and its very appearance, with its glaring lack of paragraph breaks and slightly-oversized typeface pushed to the margins’ limits, is as pronounced as its placement. To flip past would be choosing to neglect a prominent element of the work’s larger composition. Without it, the entire durational experience of the book is dramatically altered, its overall makeup and readerly experience sacrificed for the supposed inviolability of the photographic sequence.
In some respects, the lack of scrutiny in regards to Schleef’s text—either for its content or the sheer discontinuity it effects through its disorienting, monolithic layout—is excusable given the extraordinary emotional density of Schmidt’s photographs. Centered on Berlin just before the Wall came down, their atmosphere is weighted heavily by the burden of the city’s history and the existential dread of the present, all of which is manifest through structural decay, bodily scars, and an encroaching darkness that threatens to consume so many of his frames. It is a collection of pictures that one sinks deeply into like quicksand, willingly or otherwise. One can understand the hesitation to depart from that immersive psychological space in order to have to re-adjust to another.
In absorbing Schleef’s text as part of the book’s built progression, though, one finds not an incompatible set of coordinates but an extension of Schmidt’s project, a corresponding literature that resonates with the alienated glances of his pictures. The story’s aesthetic sprawl and rambling style lends it an ambient quality that allows the language to permeate the visual with increased ease, establishing what is, in effect, two worlds with a shared atmosphere. As Thomas Weski points out in his addendum to the book’s 2018 re-publication, the two elements are meant to “be accorded equal status,” a fact made apparent by the equal typographic treatment of the two authors’ names on the book’s spine and title page. Given that Schmidt himself took charge of designing the book and deciding upon the centrality of the text, its relevance should be apparent. If, however, in the discussions around Waffenruhe, the scales have been tipped in favor of the images, it seems worthwhile to momentarily shift the balance.
“How could he put it into words. He wasn’t ill. He had felt this way for years."
In the seventeen-page text, early morning slips into darkness as a lone man languishes in an empty house, “suffering from something he did not have a name for.” Schleef’s narrative, noticeably short on context, centers on an unnamed male protagonist, whom we gradually learn has been left by his wife and daughter in what was their shared home. His only companion is a rabbit, which seems more like a reminder of his loss than a source of comfort. The story itself begins as abruptly as it appears upon turning the page. Rather than being slowly eased in, the reader is dropped into the midst of the protagonist’s stifling space and faced with a disorienting temporality, exacerbated by the man’s own inability to situate himself in relation to the passing hours and days. “The television had said so two days ago. Three. Today was Thursday. All at once he was at the same point in time.” The reader is given only occasional points of reference from which to measure the duration of the narrative against as it continually fractures and digresses, flitting abruptly from subject to subject. Meanwhile, certain imagistic details recur. It’s as though the protagonist’s consciousness were perpetually changing course, struggling to retain focus. “He was having difficulty with his thoughts,” we are told. Among his recurring preoccupations are the nagging sound of the rabbit eating rubbish and chewing on a wooden door frame; the crows gathering outside; the waning light; the noise of the refrigerator; the tea and coffee that seems to always be growing cold, colder. Through a flurry of his neurotic impressions, the reader senses that the protagonist is self-imprisoned in his home, where things are in a general state of disarray. The text is laden with the feeling of someone holed up inside, waiting out the end of days. With no apparent notice or consistency, the temporal focus of the narrative slides back and forth, as knowledge of the protagonist’s life—his relationship with his estranged wife and child, his parents’ disapproving view of him, his reluctance to maintain connection with the outside world—slips out amidst a succession of truncated sentences. What results from all of this is an environment in which past and present have become muddled, and where time feels stagnant and inescapable. A future does not even seem to be among the considerations.
All of this—a sense of confinement, the fitful apprehension, the swelling gloom—is reflected in Schmidt’s photographic treatment of Berlin, where much more is alluded to than granted outright. His views are attenuated and oblique, forcing scrutiny as one labors in vain to see around certain obstructions within the frame. Just as Schleef’s protagonist obsessively attends to the minutiae of his interior space—the oily skin forming on the surface of his drink, the books that lay untouched in other rooms—Schmidt calls attention to the insignificant and peripheral aspects of his surroundings. Decaying surfaces and blurred masses come to occupy the forefront of his pictures, while tangles of branches frequently lie between the viewer and a more comprehensive view of the world. As Kolja Reichert writes, “the pictured subjects seem too big for the viewfinder. Too big, too close, impossible to get past.” In Waffenruhe, obstruction is an essential part of Schmidt’s visual language. Both aspects of the work—image and text—are marked by fragmentation and discontinuity, preventing easy access to their respective subjects. What does coalesce from the accumulation of these fragments is a palpable feeling of anguish and loss—an irreconcilable Weltschmerz, or world weariness. Appropriate to the book’s title—Ceasefire in English—the stillness presented in both elements of the work is pervaded by a heightened sense of anxiety. As Gerry Badger writes in his 1987 review of the book for Creative Camera, the title “implies an uneasy dichotomy, an unreal state of temporal stasis.” Indeed, as Schleef’s text builds to its end, its mode of communication becomes increasingly erratic and detached from reality. The narrative rushes to a sudden halt, succeeded by Schmidt’s photograph of a trestle-bridge punctuated by a large black void, as if the sun had burnt through its center.
“Consciousness. What was he supposed to do with it.”
Though written in the third person, Schleef’s narrative is so excruciatingly confined to the protagonist’s inner life, his narrow, isolated purview, that one feels themselves living exclusively inside his head throughout the text. With this circumscribed range of his unfolding thoughts and actions, the reader is further oriented towards the visual world from the vantage point of a single person. There is a shared subjectivity between the photographs and writing, one characterized by a deep and disquieting intimacy. Both Schmidt’s images and Schleef’s narrative are, above all, psychological portraits, providing two corresponding visions of an afflicted mood that suffuses the whole of the book. “The images work with Schleef’s text to create a brusque, entirely individual perspective on the fragility of human existence,” Thomas Weski writes. Throughout the book, it's the people—those portrayed in photographs, the nameless protagonist of the text—who seem to be the most burdened. It is these individuals who have inherited Berlin’s turbulent history.
Despite their differences in content, Schmidt’s photographs and Schleef’s writing work together to evince the so-called “mental Berlin wall,” offering a broader experience of the murky psychological landscape that was late-80s Berlin. In his brief afterward, Janos Frecot notes how Schmidt employs “photography to create a texture akin to language, one that neither consists of individual pictures, nor develops into a series, but instead corresponds to the tapestry of Schleef’s text.” Though positioned independently, image and text form the warp and woof of the book’s overall fabric, each permeating across the boundaries of their respective mediums. When taken together, the overall view of Waffenruhe is greatly enlarged, allowing us to become immersed in what feels like a permanent condition of instability.
“Nothing. Everything stays the way it is now. Now, that had already lasted such a long time.”