"queer and straight photography" - christoph ribbat

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Queer and Straight Photography Author(s): Christoph Ribbat Source: Amerikastudien / American Studies, Vol. 46, No. 1, Queering America (2001), pp. 27-39Published by: Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbhStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41157626Accessed: 19-08-2015 17:14 UTC

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Queer and Straight Photography

Christoph Ribbat

ABSTRACT

"Straight" and "queer" are key terms in American photographic discourse: "straight" served as the central concept of camera work between the 1920s and the 1960s, whereas "queer" photography questioned and challenged straight standards in the late twentieth century. Although queer theory claims to defy categorization, the essay argues that queer photography can be clas- sified as a unified movement: accepted by the art world, dependent on certain fixed standards. This piece explores the early years of "straight"; it contrasts the representation of cross-dressers by "straight artists" Weegee, Lisette Model, and Diane Arbus, and by queer photography's representatives, Nan Goldin and Mark Morrisroe. In closing, the article discusses two young contemporary artists- Nikki S. Lee and Collier Schorr- and the usage of queer and straight in their work.

Just look at this binary opposition in my title- as elegant as egg yolk on a tie. Queer and straight? It seems perfectly outdated to work with these pairs, since queer theory has made us thoroughly uncomfortable with such fixed notions as male/female, normal/abnormal, or homosexual/heterosexual.1 Clearly, "queer" has much more cur- rency as a verb than as an adjective in contemporary usage: "queering straight photography" would be de rigueur. Such a paper would queer, i.e., deconstruct, demystify, destabilize the notion of straight photography, an American concept developed in the early twentieth century by photographers and critics to denote photographic practice that produced pure, unretouched images- a label that later came to stand for the most powerful modernist photographic tradition, represented by artists such as Paul

• Strand and Edward Weston. If "queer and straight photography" seems much too clear-cut, the most obvious,

though not the most sophisticated response might be: "To stop thinking in binaries is about as easy as to stop breathing." I would like to be slightly more elaborate: The photographers and critics who have queered the concept of straight photography in recent years have, of course, established new binaries. Straight served as the Other against which their own, queer, projects were constructed: "Queer and sex-radical photography,"2 images that undercut fixed notions of identity, desire, and gender, have become omnipresent in contemporary visual arts. In this essay, straight and queer photography are discussed as two interacting schools of camera work. More attention will be paid to the rhetoric surrounding the images than to the images themselves. This article exam- ines the programmatic dimensions of "straight" and "queer" in photographic discourse.

1 Scott Bravmann, Queer Fictions of the Past: History, Culture, and Difference (New York: Cambridge UP, 1997) 20. 2 This is how the back cover of a seminal collection of critical and artistic works labels its cata- logue of artists working in the context of queer studies (Deborah Bright, ed., The Passionate Camera: Photography and Bodies of Desire [London: Routledge, 1998]).



28 Christoph Ribbat

Straight Photography

In the early twentieth century, critics and artists attempted to purify, to embellish, to masculinize photography.3 The most prominent term produced by the discourse un- folding around the photographic image was "straight photography." The subjects of photographers might have struggled "to maintain a pose," moving their bodies in "queer contortions" (as Edith Wharton puts it in The House of Mirth) .4 The individual behind the camera was assumed to act straight, unemotional, fully in control.

A resounding "plea for straight photography" had been made in 1904. Critic Sadakichi Hartmann, reviewing the exhibition of the Photo Secession at the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, urged photographers to use their eye, their good taste, their knowledge of composition to produce perfect images that did not need retouching or doctoring- means which Hartmann defined as "not natural to photography."5 In 1901, Charles H. Caffin, writing on Alfred Stieglitz, characterized the straight photographer as an artist working mainly in the open air, "with rapid exposures, leaving his models to pose themselves, and relying for results upon means strictly photographic." Eleven years later, in a New York Times review, "the advocates of pure or 'straight' photography" were described as artists who felt that by "manipulating a print you lose the purity of tone which belongs especially to the photographic medium."6

However, even in straight photography, retouching or accentuation of the print were not considered completely unacceptable. Applying daub, scratching, and scrib- bling were taboo only if they were "used for nothing else but producing blurred ef- fects."7 A. D. Coleman has pointed out how "straight" stood for much more than for technical detail. "Straight" was about "sharpness of focus and realism," qualities that became not simply matters of style but moral imperatives.8 Coleman points out how "straight" also meant that artists moved away from staging events. In the late nineteenth century, the pictorialists had directed scenes, had participated fully in the crea- tion of the event that finally produced the image.9 Orvell has commented on this mode of artificial realism: then, "what was offered as almost nature" had been deemed sufficient.10 Straight photography attacked this aesthetic with a philosophy that de-

3 For a recent critical rereading, see Colin Eisler, "'Going Straight': Camera Work As Men's Work in the Gendering of American Photography, 1900-1923," Genders 30 (1999): online, http:// www.genders.org (20 January 2001). 4 Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (New York: Signet, 1964) 219. 5 Sadakichi Hartmann, "A Plea for Straight Photography," Photography: Essays & Images, ed. Beaumont Newhall (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1980) 185-88; 187. Originally published in American Amateur Photographer 16 (March 1904): 101-109. 6 Qtd. in Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964) 111. 7 Hartmann 188.

8 A. D. Coleman, "The Directorial Mode: Notes Toward a Definition," Photography in Print, ed. Vicki Goldberg (Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1990) 480-91; 482. 9 Coleman 489.

1U Miles Orvell, "Almost Nature: The Typology of Late Nineteenth-Century American Photog- raphy," Multiple Views: Logan Grant Essays on Photography 1983-1989, ed. Daniel P. Younger (Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1991) 139-63. See also Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imita- tion and Authenticity in American Culture 1880-1940 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1989).



Queer and Straight Photography 29

fined the art form as unique, as possessing a capacity for verisimilitude exceeding that of any other medium. "Photography cultivated the photographic," Andy Grundberg writes, "so that its legitimacy would not be questioned."11

Alan Trachtenberg has commented on the centrality of straight photography in American visual culture- Stieglitz, Strand, and Weston, its main practitioners, represented the highest possible purity of the medium, Beaumont Newhall's History of Pho- tography the accepted authority.12 Newhall's history devotes an entire chapter to straight photography, presenting the development of the concept as a turning point in its narrative. His work depicts the straight photographers as pioneers, describing the "force" of Stieglitz's work, Paul Strand's "discovery" of the "photographic beauty of precision machines," Edward Weston's "virtuosity," Ansel Adams's "technical excellence."13 "Straight" in Newhall's account represents the classic period of photography-a period in which technical excellence and mastery go hand in hand with out- standing artistic vision.

Paul Strand, Blind Woman, New York, 1916. Colin Westerbeck & Joel Meyerowitz, Bystand- er: A History of Street Photography (London: Thames & Hudson, 1994) 95. Copyright: Aper- ture Foundation, New York.

Paul Strand's Blind Woman, New York, 1916 might be read as the quintessential straight photograph. It represents the hard, technically perfect method used by this generation of artists. The photographer is doubly invisible- to the blind subject and to the viewer. The cold rhetoric of the image does not give his emotions away. Just as Flaubert, without comment, without mercy, shows Madame Bovary's blindness to real-

11 Andy Grundberg, "The Crisis of the Real: Photography and Postmodernism," Multiple Views, ed. Younger 363-85; 378-79. 12 Alan Trachtenberg, "Introduction," Multiple Views, ed. Younger 1-14; 6. 1J Newhall, History 113, 114, 124, 130.



30 Christoph Ribbat

ity, Strand's camera serves as an instrument of truth that knows more than the subjects it depicts.

Flaubert's aesthetic and Strand's photograph are cited as important influences by Walker Evans,14 whom Newhall, in 1964, does not include in the pantheon of straight photographers, and only briefly refers to in a chapter on documentary photography. Evans's programmatic statements on photography clarify how "straight" not only shaped the work of artists like Adams and Weston, who were primarily concerned with landscapes, nudes, and form. It also informed documentary photography, until, eventually, "straight" and "documentary" became synonyms.15

In 1966, Evans composed notes and suggestions for young photographers- largely technical advice on shutter speed and print drying. He also commented on the importance of camera availability, recommended to keep a camera "at the ready like a gun." Then he moved on to more general advice: "Work alone if you can," he sug- gested. "Girls are particularly distracting, and you want to concentrate; you have to. This is not anti-feminism; it is common sense."16

It does not exactly take a poststructuralist wizard to deconstruct these passages. Ob- viously, photography is defined as a boy's club here; an aggressive, masculinist subtext links cameras to weapons. This rhetoric ties into Susan Sontag's ground-breaking study of photography and Virilio's writings on war and the cinema.17 The equation of photography and violence seems almost natural now, and could well be attributed to the enormous influence of the "straight" vision. Evans's obviously chauvinistic atti- tude hides behind the mask of common sense.

This photographer's written work can be highly ironic; one might need to take these notes with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, they can serve as excellent examples of the pervasive notion of straight photography as a quintessentially masculine craft. Evans describes a man standing before a hardware store window, "eyeing the tools behind the glass; his mouth will water," he writes, gazing at a "perfectly beautiful . . . polished wrench." In a photographic series called the "Beauties of the Common Tool" (published in Fortune), he produced the pornographic images satisfying this special kind of lust: exquisitely lit wrenches and hammers.18 "Straight," in Evans's work, stands for machine-like realism and sobriety: the camera possesses the same elegant hardness as the objects it portrays. This also surfaces in Evans's notes as he looks back on his Brook- lyn Bridge project. In the late 1920s, he had photographed the structure from spec-

14 "I think I incorporated Flaubert's method almost unconsciously," Evans writes. Flaubert's realism and his objectivity, "the non-appearance of the author" he defines as the most important notions, which seemed "literally applicable" to the way he used the camera (Evans 70). Alan Trachtenberg has commented on the "literariness" of Evans's photographs, linking their restraint and exactness to Hemingway's prose and William Carlos Williams's poetry (Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History. Mathew Brady to Walker Evans [New York: Hill & Wang, 1989] 241). 15 A 1997 introductory work on photography explains straight photography with the lines: "Emphasis upon direct documentary typical of the Modern period in American photography" (Liz Wells, ed., Photography: A Critical Introduction [London: Routledge, 1997] 297). 16 Walker Evans, Walker Evans at Work (New York: Harper and Row, 1982) 222. 17 Susan Sontag, On Photography (Harmonds worth: Penguin, 1978) 14; Paul Vinho, Krieg und Kino: Logistik der Wahrnehmung (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1998). 18 Evans, Walker Evans at Work 208.




tacular angles, emphasizing its dramatic architecture. In retrospect, he describes these photographs as "something I now consider romantic and would reject. I hadn't learned to be more straight about things."19 Straightness, like masculinity according to Norman Mailer, is not something given, but something one has to fight for to make his own.20 "Art must rise above personal emotions," was Flaubert's dictum that guided Evans's work. Romance had to be replaced by "pitiless method."21

Evans on Evans is not always consistent. In a 1947 interview for Time that was never used, the "pitiless" photographer stated: "My work is like making love .... It has to spring from the moment, from what I feel at the moment."22 Similarly, Edward Weston described the power of photography not just in terms of technical brilliance. In passages from his Daybooks, he states how in photography "the first fresh emotion ... is captured complete and for all time at the very moment it is seen and felt." The simultaneity of feeling and recording that Weston names as the great vitality in pure, unmanipulated photography23 makes him sound more like a 1990s Nan Goldin-style "emotionalist"24 than like a perfectionist master craftsman. A closer look at the rhetoric of impersonal objectivity reveals cracks in the surface of "straight."

Thus, to classify the straight photographers as machine-obsessed, phallocentric, un- compassionate masters of the darkroom would mean to ignore a host of inconsisten- cies in the programmatic statements and photographic œuvres of the major- male and female- representatives of the school. Nevertheless, it is important to point out the tremendous influence of the objectivist rhetoric of straight photography not only in art or documentary photography, but also- as photo journalism- in American popular culture.

Photography, at least until the rise of television in the 1950s, was seen as a medium whose authentic representation of reality could not be surpassed. Life magazine, the best-selling weekly in the United States during World War II and in the postwar era, defined photographs as its most important components. Life's photographers, especially its war correspondents, were constructed as heroic, tough adventurers portraying the most atrocious events with an unflinching eye. Margaret Bourke-White, one of the magazine's staff photo reporters, might be the most famous example. Recalling her ex- periences shortly after the liberation of Buchenwald, Bourke-White relates how the camera had served as a shield to protect her from the atrocious sights- how, behind the machine, becoming one with it, she had been able to merely record without re- flecting what she saw. Her Machine Age aesthetics, her interest in surface and form made it possible for her to endow the senseless chaos of German death camps with

19 Evans, Walker Evans at Work 42. zu Qtd. in Peter Schwenger, Phallic Critiques: Masculinity and Twentieth-Century Literature

(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984) 133. Z1 Colin Westerbeck and Joel Meyerowitz, Bystander: A History of Street Photography (London: Thames & Hudson, 1994) 282. 22 Qtd. in Margarett Loke, "Photographer Remains in the Shadows," New York Times 18 June 1999: E 2, 41, Coll.

23 Edward Weston, The Daybooks of Edward Weston, ed. Nancy Newhall (New York: Aperture 1990Ì 156. / - 24 On the centrality of emotions in the work of Goldin and David Armstrong, see Norman Bryson, "Boston School," Boston School ed. Lia Gangitano (Boston: ICA, 1995) 27-29.



32 Christoph Ribbat

order.25 The representation of atrocity scenes in 1945 took straight photography one step further: the process of producing the picture had always been described as an almost athletic ritual; now, the very act of looking at photographs became an exercise in toughness.26 And more than ever before, photography was believed to speak nothing but the truth.

Even in the television era, when photo journalism was gradually losing its position as the most accurate and fascinating medium, photography was still surrounded by a rhetoric of accuracy, authenticity, universality. "Straight" as a concept still echoes: the sober, simple, unretouched image seems to have retained its power. And yet something has changed in American photography since the days when Stieglitz, Strand, and Weston were revered, since Newhall was the unquestioned authority. Alan Trachten- berg sees the same process active in photography that has transformed the American humanities: an "oppositional thrust" based on the same theories, on social history, psy- choanalysis, ideological criticism, on activism in the realms of social identity and gender.27 After straight, here comes "queer photography."

Queer Photography?

Again, it seems impossible to use this label. "Queer" as a concept runs against all definitions, all fixed meaning, forever questioning, redeploying, twisting terms, texts and itself from conventional usage.28 Straight photography operated with fixed concepts of truth, accuracy, and artistic excellence. Discussing the photographers whose practices might be called queer, we investigate œuvres that deconstruct these concepts, destabilizing not only the world of camera work, but, while they are at it, identity, his- toriography, and epistemology as well.

However, a closer look at the discourse surrounding the queering of photography reveals that it is indeed possible to departmentalize the project. Just as straight photographic discourse, in which expressions like "excellency," "truth," and "perfection" abound, queer photographic criticism relies on certain key terms to legitimize artists and their art. "Undercutting notions of stable identity" is one of them. Abigail Solo- mon-Godeau praises Peter Hujar's work, as it "undercuts a viewing position that gen-

25 Christoph Ribbat, "Poland a la Montana: New Deal Photographers in Postwar Europe," Re- gional Images and Regional Realities, ed. Lothar Hönnighausen (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2000) 97-110; 103.

26 Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera's Eye (Chi- cago: U of Chicago P, 1998) 138. 27 Trachtenberg 6-7. See also photo-historian Lindsay Smith's work on nineteenth-century "politics of focus." Analyzing the work of photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, who, in Smith's eyes, by not using "sharp focus," manages to evade fetishism, denies the "phallocentricism of geometrical perspective," and "rewrites the contingency of depth as her subject" (Lindsay Smith, The Politics of Focus: Women,Children and Nineteenth-Century Photography [Manchester: Man- chester UP, 1998] 30-31). Smith's study revises the unified history of nineteenth-century photography as an instrument of control and surveillance, calling attention to areas that have been overlooked such as the photographic practices of Victorian women.

28 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993) 228.




erally affirms the spectator's . . . mastery," and moves on to reify Cindy Sherman's work, stressing how her pictures "undercut the notion of any fixed and stable identity."29 Caroline Evans and Lorraine Gamman commend Delia Grace's photographs because they "destabilize" subject positions, because they play with "binary opposi- tions," challenging "essential categories."30 And, to quote an example from outside photography: Peter Home and Reina Lewis stress how performance artists Lawrence Steger and Iris Moore challenge the "ownership of fixed meanings," and how their art can be read as an "intervention into hegemonic, often masculinist, representations of gender."31 The list could be continued.

These passages do not intend to ridicule the importance of undercutting stable notions, of challenging the hidden power relations in "normalcy"- as, for instance, het- eronormativity in traditional photographic discourse. In view of the prevalence of ho- mophobia, racism, and sexism, there rests great promise in queer theory, an epistemological and political project that, like postmodern architecture, "turns identity inside out, and displays its supports exoskeletally."32

However, the project of queering straight photography has become so influential and institutionalized in art and academia that it seems necessary to stop categorizing each act of questioning fixed meanings, bending gender, attacking binaries as a revolu- tionary, innovative performance in itself! Queer's rebellious rhetoric has to adapt to the fact that the queer project is consolidating. A recent volume such as Deborah Blight's The Passionate Camera: Photography and Bodies of Desire has a similar func- tion as Beaumont NewhalPs History of Photography. The 1998 book also establishes a pantheon of photographers: a canon. On its back cover, the volume is described as "a preeminent source on queer and sex-radical photography."33 Preeminent? Was not queering all about challenging such terms? If "queer" is forever twisted, forever rede- ployed, forever present and absent, here, there, nowhere, always in flux, how can there be a preeminent source on queer photography?

There can be, because queer photography has become an accepted school, comparable to straight photography in the first half of the twentieth century, even if the term "queer photography" is not used as frequently. Just as Adams and Weston experi- mented with gradation systems and darkroom chemicals to produce the perfect straight print, photographers like Delia Grace or Nan Goldin play with performance, gender, and desire to produce perfect queer images. At the same time, the project of queering art history seems to be less about epistemological troublemaking than about the construction of a usable past. Take Douglas Crimp's programmatic essay "Getting the Warhol We Deserve," and the Berliner Kollektiv's interviews with American artists representing sexual subcultures of the 60s and 70s: Juliane Rebentisch speaks of a re-

29 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Insti- tutions and Practices (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P 1991) 265-72; 266, 272. 30 Caroline Evans and Lorraine Gamman, "The Gaze Revisited, or Reviewing Queer View- ing," A Queer Romance: Lesbians, Gav Men and Popular Culture ( London: Routledee. 1995Ì 49.

31 Peter Home and Reina Lewis, eds., Outlooks: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities and Visual Cul- tures (London: Routledee, 1996) 1-9; 8. 32 Annamarie Jagose, "Queer Theory," Australian Humanities Review 4 (1996): online, http:// www.theory.org.uk (25 May 2000). 33 Bright n.p.



34 Christoph Ribbat

construction of secret histories by exploring the oral histories, the inner perspectives of heretofore marginalized subcultures.34 Crimp defines queer art as an act of resistance against the fiction of a coherent and stable sexual identity. That act of resistance, however, could well have become a coherent and stable concept itsel£ In his article, he calls for a rediscovery of forgotten histories, for a reinvestigation of the conventional narrative of art history. Crimp reminds his readers of the "entire historical rich- ness" of forefathers- like Warhol, like underground filmmaker Jack Smith.35

Certainly, these projects are important: we should get the Warhol we deserve. A collection like Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley, and José Esteban Muñoz's Pop Out: Queer Warhol proves the importance of re-examining territory in American art history that has long been desexualized, "degayed."36 From the perspective of the historian, however, some of these texts sound very much like programmatic statements which proponents of social history delivered in the 1970s. During that time, new perspectives and new methods were brought to the discipline: urban history, immigration history, and labor history. Instead of being blown to pieces, the discipline was expanded and enriched, and a new extension was added to the historiographical enterprise. At the moment, a comparable process seems to take place in art history.

A brief look at the discourse surrounding queer art seems to yield the same result as Rosalind Krauss's trenchant October piece on visual studies: the field "may not be as radical as it thinks."37 On the Internet, Generation Q: The First International Queer Youth Art Expo (1999), presented ten young "queer" artists and photographers. Steven Jenkins introduced this new generation as "young, adventurous, smart, sly ... and absolutely, positively queer, with no apologies to anyone, thank you very much!"38 At this point, queer art, queer photography, are about to create both: a usable past and a usable future.

Queer Photography

If "queer" came to gate-crash the art world's party, pull the carpet from under the feet of artists, critics, and historians alike, with hopes of shattering concepts of sex, gender, art, and representation, its own success may have weakened its thrust. It seems as if "queer" had joined the crowd, as if its destabilization of identity had become a staple of contemporary culture. "Gender surfing" has become an entry in the art

34 Juliane Rebentisch, "Geheimgeschichten: Interviews mit Mary Wonorov, Sebastian, Pamela des Barres und AA Bronson," Texte zur Kunst 35.9 (1999): 67-70; 70. 35 Douglas Crimp, "Getting the Warhol We Deserve," Texte zur Kunst 35.9 (1999): 44-65; 64. 3b Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley, and Jose Esteban Muñoz, Pop Out: Queer Warhol (Dur- ham, NC: Duke UP 1996) 2. See also Laura Auricchio, "Lifting the Veil: Robert Rauschenberg's Thirty-Four Drawings for Dante's Inferno and the Commercial Homoerotic Imagery of 1950s America," The Gay '90s: Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Formations in Queer Studies, ed. Thomas Foster et al. (New York: New York UP, 1997) 119-54.

37 Rosalind Krauss, "Welcome to the Cultural Revolution," October 11 (1996): 83-96; 96. Jö Steven Jenkins, "Ine Q. 1. on (generation U, generation {J 19W, online, nttp://www.queer- arts.org/archive/9906/gen_q/essay.html (25 May 2000).




world's glossary, on one level with "globalization," and "virtual reality."39 Measured against queer theory's challenge to academia (where the intention was to "mess up the desexualized spaces," to "reimagine the publics"40), it is easy to see that queer art's impact has certainly not shaken the foundations of the art world. That, however, only invalidates some of the high-strung rhetoric surrounding queer, not the artists' work. Nor does this make it less relevant to challenge straight photography and its cameras of common sense.

Examples from the work of Weegee, Lisette Model, and Diane Arbus reveal the legitimacy of queering the straight eye- and provide an illustration how, in the 1980s and 1990s, artists have developed what could be called a "queer gaze." Not that the photographers referred to were particularly close to the masters of "straight photography"- Weegee was probably too vulgar, Model too little interested in technical perfection (she had her prints made by the corner drugstore), Arbus too introverted. All of them were "straight" however, when it came to a favorite subject of American urban photographers: cross-dressers.

Weegee, in Naked City (1945), presents criminals dressing up as women luring men into dark alleys to rob them. One of them is caught by the flash in a police car, wait- ing to be taken away. Though many strange things happen in Weegee's world, this seems to be one of the strangest- and the camera represents "common sense." While Weegee frequently focuses on groups, thus allowing for a certain protective anonymity of his subjects, this man dressed as a woman is cornered, ridiculed in his drag, exposed in his queerness.41

Similarly, Lisette Model portrays men performing as women in a Bowery bar. Shooting them from unflattering angles, caricaturing the ugliness behind their made- up faces, Model lets the viewer look through the "scam" this seems to be. When Diane Arbus, Model's former student at the New School for Social Research, portrays cross- dressers, their poses seem similarly ridiculous, if not downright embarrassing. She calls her subjects "freaks," and even though we can sense a certain respect for them in her notes,42 her photographs do not give much of that respect away. They frame with enormous precision what seems to be the enormously erratic behavior of individuals cross- ing gender lines. In the representation of New Yorkers as transvestites, 'straight' means more than 'technically perfect, non-manipulated, honest, simple.' It also makes statements about sexual identity.

Flaubert comes to mind, in Walker Evans's version: the photographer and his art seem non-judgmental, neutral, exposing mercilessly the delusions of his or her subjects. In the images by Model, Weegee, and Arbus, the camera becomes the eye of rea-

39 See the glossary of Burkhard Riemschneider and Uta Grosenick, Art at the Turn of the Mil- lennium (Köln: Taschen, 1999) 566-69. 40 Michael Warner, "Introduction," Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993) xxvi. In academia as well, the institutionalization and commodification of queer studies calls for a reconceptualization of queer theory (see John Champagne and Elayn Tobin, "'She's Right behind You': Gossip, Innuendo, and Rumor in the Deformation of Gay and Lesbian Studies," The Gay '90s, ed. Thomas Foster et al. 51- 82). 41 Wegee, Naked City (New York: DaCapo, 1985). 4Z Arbus describes freaks as having already passed their test in life, as "aristocrats" (Diane Arbus [Frankfurt/Main: Zweitausendeins, 1984] 3).



36 Christoph Ribbat

son and normalcy. In this context, straight means straight. Photography is defined as the heterosexual eye. Lifestyles and sexualities that differ from this position are per- ceived as weird, grotesque, ridiculous. Straight photography- queer contortions.

Compare with this the work of Nan Goldin and Mark Morrisroe.43 Goldin's gaze of warmth, respect, and closeness does not expose weirdness. Instead, it celebrates beauty: Her images of cross-dressers respect their subjects' performances instead of trying to gaze at the truth behind the mask. They evoke Degas and his paintings of dancers behind the scenes. Similarly, Goldin is fascinated by the backstage perspective, not because her pictures should touch "the truth about trans vesti tes," but because this world is understood as an artistic challenge.44 The photographs explore the contrast between the athletic discipline of dance and the weak, unrehearsed moments of re- laxation. Like Degas- and Hopper-, Goldin often explores the distance between urban protagonists, their essential unrelatedness.45 Thus, backstage moments of intimacy seem all the more charged.

Mark Morrisroe, Untitled (Embrace). Emotions and Relations, ed. F. С. Gundlach (Köln: Taschen, 1998) 117. Copyright: Pat Hearn Gallery, New York.

Model and Arbus collected specimens. Urban flâneuses, they roamed city streets, examining the margins of society. Goldin insists that she does not photograph cross- dressers because of their spectacular identities. She claims to have a deeper relation- ship to them. Goldin describes photography as an act of touching someone. Photogra- phy in the American century has made a close alliance with a cold, hard perspective, exposing violence, poverty, and absurdity unflinchingly. Even beauty has often been presented with machine-like precision. Goldin argues that she photographs with a "warm eye." To her, representation does not mean exposing her subjects, but empow-

43 Though feminist critics have labeled Goldin's ballad of sexual dependency as too overtly heterosexual, her project- especially her later work documented in the 1997 retrospective, Г II Be Your Mirror- vehemently questions fixed concepts of sexual identity (cf. Max Kozloff, Lone Vi- sions, Crowded Frames [Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1994] 108; Bryson 25). 44 Ernst Gombrich, Die Geschichte der Kunst (Frankfurt/Main: Gutenberg, 1953) 432. 43 Sam Hunter, American Art of the 20th Century (New York: Abrams, 1У II) 133-34.




ering them.46 The warm colors of her pictures evoke the feel of family snap- shots-which, of course, they are not. Morrisroe's photographs also use domestic spaces to stage dramas of romance, passion, deception.

The AIDS epidemic framed both Goldin's and Morrisroe's œuvres, shaping them nolens volens as chronicles of subcultures in crisis. AIDS also clarified the problematic aspects of straight photography and photojournalism. Nicholas Nixon's 1988 MoMA photo exhibition of people with AIDS was accompanied by ACT-UP protests against the negativity implied in the straight pictures of suffering victims.47 The objectivity of the straight photographer, contrasted with the passivity of his subjects, seemed an in- adequate idiom in a crisis that called into question the very possibility of artistic ex- pression.

Much of Goldin's success, however, still rests on the promise of authenticity in her work. Often, her photographs, however playful, artificial, even abstract, are looked at with a hunger for the real thing: we see, we want to see, her lovers, her (suffering) friends, herself48 In contrast, the persona Mark Morrisroe presents in his photographic œuvre is less easily accessible, more deliberately masked. Morrisroe broke the ground rule of "straight" photography by infinitely meddling with, retouching, and repho- tographing the negative, opening "a space of manipulation and self-invention"49 that contradicts straight photography's rhetoric of authenticity. Even in the documentation of his own death Morrisroe chooses blur over focus, making his very own suffering seem elusive.50 He died of AIDS at the age of thirty in 1989.

If many of their images come across as blurred, one thing about Goldin's and Mor- risroe's œuvres is clear: these artists could be identified with a subculture: bohemian downtown Manhattan, the 1980s (or also the late 1970s, in Goldin's case). Today, in a new historical context, even the idea of belonging to a "scene" is called into question-as, for instance, in the first solo exhibition by Nikki S. Lee, a Korean- American photographer born in 1970. Dressing up in ever so many guises (as a Latino woman, a Japanese club kid, a lesbian, a yuppie's date, a senior citizen), Lee joins ever new subcultures, posing with their representatives. Of course, we see what we are used to see- ing since Cindy Sherman took center stage: identities as mere constructs. The humor that guides Lee's project, though, the insistence on making connections in photographic practice, and the intended technical imperfections make her œuvre queer straight as well as queer expectations.

While Lee, as a "ventriloquist of everyday life,"51 is interested in the multiplicity of guises, the recent work of Collier Schorr is concerned with one guise only: manhood. Her photographs explore the faces, bodies, and gestures of male teenage athletes.

46 Nan Goldin, I'll Be Your Mirror (Frankfurt/Main: Zweitausendeins, 1998) 452-53. 47 Robert Atkins, "AIDS: Making Art & Raising Hell," Queer Arts Resource 1999, online, http://www.queer-arts.org/archive/show4/forum/atkins/atkins.html (25 May 2000). 48 Liz Kotz, "Aesthetics of 'Intimacy,'" The Passionate Camera, ed. Bright 204-15. 49 David Joselit, "Mark Morrisroe's Photographic Masquerade," The Passionate Camera, ed. Bright 195-203; 197. 50 Joselit 202.

51 Jerry Saltz, "Decoy and Daydreamer: Girl Photographers Take On the World," Village Voice 28 Sept. 1999: 61.



38 Christoph Ribbat

Bruce Hainley calls her work an "obsessive study of masculinity."52 If adolescence was show business, Schorr writes, "then young guys would be Las Vegas."53 Over the course of her career, the photographer has played with and queered identity in vari- ous ways, issuing such statements as "I could do more with a cock than you do." What makes her pictures last is their vitality. The young athletes she portrays display their strength as well as their wounds; they seem both aggressive and exhausted. One thinks of the early Hemingway, of tough guys sleeping with the lights on because they are afraid of the dark. As Hainley writes, Schorr knows that identity, sexuality, and gender are "illusory," yet she also expresses that they are "felt to the bone's marrow."

Of course, photography frames the body, identifies it, and controls it- Schorr's look at male teenagers can also be read as a symbolic return of the male gaze. As in Whar- ton's novel, her straight observations represent some of their subjects' poses as "queer contortions." Here, too, the camera is an instrument in the struggles around power/knowledge, identity, and desire. But after all, photography is the only thing that allows these fragile young men to be seen at all.54

Collier Schorr, Ice Pack (1998). Copyright: 303 Gallery, New York.

In spite of all the power games that remain to be played, it is necessary to remem- ber that photography still gives us the "delight of illusion."55 The cold, straight gaze and its queer deconstruction are one thing: it is another thing to be charmed by the graceful gesture of a teenage athlete pressing an ice pack to his exasperated face.

The ice pack cooling this author's brow is Sedgwick's "Paranoid Reading and Re- parative Reading," a text that could be read as a polemic against the "X-ray gaze," the "infinitely doable and teachable protocols of unveiling" that have become rituals

52 Bruce Hainley, "Like a Man: The Photographs of Collier Schorr," Artforum (Nov. 1998): 96- 99.

53 Collier Schorr, Excuse Me While I Kiss the Sky, press release (New York: 303 Gallery, 1999). 54 Hainley 98. 55 Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy (Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1997)

187.




in Cultural Studies. Sedgwick issues a warning against the impoverishment of criticism when its practitioners are interested only in "suspicious archaeologies" that unearth hidden patterns of violence and control.56 Especially in the field of photography, the narrow focus on such issues as surveillance and power could have made critics blind to the images' infinite possibilities, histories, and ambiguities. And, yes, blind to their beauty.

56 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ed., Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997) 1-37.



"queer and straight photography" - christoph ribbat

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