Vile bodies: photography & the crisis of looking

• Published in: Border crossings 1998, Vol.17 (3), p.73
• Main Authors: Townsend, Chris, Everett-Green, Robert
• Format: Review
• Language: English
• Subjects: Human body
• ISSN: 0831-2559

"She was afraid of all the Freaks, for it seemed to her that they had looked at her in a secret way and tried to connect their eyes with hers, as though to say: we know you." That thought, from Carson McCullers's 1946 novel The Member of the Wedding, seems to me to be one of the modem harbingers of work like [Joel-Peter Witkin]'s. Deluged as we are by images of "perfect" bodies (and the deluge itself certifies the perfection), we are all freakish to a degree. Witkin has said that all his portraits are in a sense self-portraits -- a comment which, given the dense allegorical nature of his imagery, carries implications about the inner reality as well. Freakishness becomes powerful when it is the sign of assertive deviation from impossible norms. Witkin's figures, like the monumental nude self-portraits of the elderly John Coplans or the sexually metamorphic photographs of Diana Thorneycroft, do not apologize; they vigorously resist the codes of normal beauty. A suffering deviant body is even more powerful. As Witkin's work often asks, who could be more deviant than a suffering man-god dying a partly self-willed death on the cross? A common theme of many of the images in this book is the revelation that is at once an act of masquerade. The carefully constructed social scenes of Jouka Lehtola, Collier Schorr and Sarah Jones, and the painterly phantasms of Witkin, expose their subjects and costume them in the same moment. One extreme version of this approach is represented by Nick Waplington's hyper-realistic photographs of murder victims who are in fact carefully posed and made-up models. These images expound the condition that makes photography an art: that the camera primarily records what is "out there," and only incidentally or indirectly what is real.